ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the historical picture different from both the Russian and the Baltic narratives. Wedged between Russia, Belarus and the Baltic Sea and known by their common label ‘the Baltic States’, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania proclaimed their independence in 1918, during the countdown to the end of World War I or immediately afterward. In the Baltic Region, the Soviet initial efforts to wage the ‘people’s war’ against the Germans proved the least effective. The Baltic territories were too far from the main fighting theaters of the Red Army and thus irrelevant in terms of resource investment. The Red guerrillas clearly avoided painful skirmishes with the Germans and the local security forces–thus enabling a smooth evacuation of the Nazi occupying apparatus–and preferred instead the encounters with the rural self-defense militias and unarmed peasants. The Wehrmacht force remained trapped but undefeated in Courland until the Nazi Germany capitulation on 8 May 1945.
