The situation in the Baltic Provinces on the eve of the October Socialist Revolution differed greatly from that in the other national regions. Here a number of factors served to swing the masses towards Bolshevism very rapidly and facilitated the maturing of the revolutionary crisis. Nevertheless, certain difficulties were encountered which left their impress upon the course of the revolution up to and after October. These difficulties arose from the specific features of the development of the region under the tsarist regime.
Unlike the national regions in the eastern part of the Russian Empire, the Baltic provinces, i.e., Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania—which under the tsarist regime constituted the gubernias of Courland, Lifland, Estland, Kovno, Vilna and parts of other gubernias—were considerably industrialised and capitalist relations were highly developed there.
On the eve of the first World War, the Baltic provinces, primarily Latvia and Estonia, were two of the largest industrial regions of the country. In Latvia, in 1913, there were over 110,000 industrial workers out of a total population of about 2,000,000; in Estonia there were 70,000 industrial workers out of a total population of 1,000,000. But in Lithuania, the largest of the Baltic provinces, capitalist industry was scarcely developed at all, and the province bore the typical features of a backward agrarian country.
Riga was the principal industrial centre of Latvia, and Reval (Tallin) and Narva were the principal industrial centres of Estonia.
Outstanding among the large factories in Riga were industrial giants like the Provodnik Rubber Works with 12,000 employees, the Baltic Railway Car Works with 4,000 and the Phoenix Railway Car Works which employed 6,000 workers. The Baltic Shipyards in Reval employed 5,000 workers, and the Krengholm Textile Mills in Narva, one of the largest textile mills in pre-revolutionary Russia, employed 14,000 workers. The total number of industrial workers in Riga in 1914 was 90,000 and in Reval, 40,000. The foremost industry in Latvia was the metal industry, which employed over 25,000 workers.
In Estonia the textile industry, employing 19,000 workers, and the metal industry, employing 11,500 workers, predominated.
But beyond the working-class quarters of the large industrial centres of Estonia and Latvia stretched the backward Baltic countryside. In the towns there were modern, capitalist industrial enterprises, large plants equipped with the most up-to-date machinery and employing thousands of workers. Around them were the Lettish and Estonian rural districts, where the modern German feudal barons, the descendants of the Knights of the Teutonic Order or “cur knights” as Karl Marx called them, who invaded the Baltic countries 700 years ago, held undivided sway.
These German barons, enjoying exceptional privileges, kept the masses of the people of Latvia and Estonia in a state of utter slavery and ruthlessly exploited and oppressed them. They owned the great bulk of the land in the shape of vast estates, some of them of an area of tens of thousands of hectares. In Latvia there were 35 estates of over 10,000 hectares each. Baron Dundag owned over 66,000 hectares of land, Baron Popen owned over 46,000 hectares. The family of Baron von Wolf owned 36 estates of a total area of 165,227 hectares.
Barons Osten-Sacken, von Fredericks, von Rosen, von Rennenkampf and Meller-Zakomelsky were notorious as brutal butchers and tyrants who suppressed the freedom of the masses. It was they who drowned in blood the revolt of the workers and peasants in the Baltic provinces in 1905. Occupying high posts in the tsarist administration and in the army, and utilising their connections with the tsar’s court, the German barons, during the first World War, extensively engaged in espionage on behalf of Germany. The hearts of the working people of the Baltic countries burned with hatred for their age-long oppressors, the German barons.
To this inhuman feudal exploitation of the peasants was added the yoke of modern capitalist relations. From the beginning of the 20th century the process of differentiation among the rural population of Estonia and Latvia made great headway. The peasants had to bear on their backs not only the “black barons,” as they called the German landlords, but also the “grey barons,” i.e., the native capitalist farmers. The bulk of the peasantry in Estonia and Latvia were landless labourers and small holders. At the end of the 19th century no less than 66 per cent of the rural population of Latvia had no land.
If to this double yoke of capitalist and feudal exploitation we add the national oppression of the tsarist autocracy and the German barons, the exceptional acuteness of the class antagonisms in the rural districts of the Baltic provinces on the eve of 1917 will be clear.
The rapid growth of the revolutionary movement in the western border regions of Russia, and the successes achieved, in particular, by the Lettish Social-Democratic Party, which almost throughout its history maintained unbroken ties with the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, were, as Lenin had explained, due to the higher development of capitalism in these regions, to the clearer, sharper and more definite class antagonisms prevailing there, to the cruel national oppression, the high concentration of the population in the towns and the higher cultural standard of the urban population.
In 1905 the workers and peasants of the Baltic provinces were in the vanguard of the struggle against tsarism and landlordism. The revolt of almost the entire industrial proletariat and of the great bulk of the agricultural labourers in Latvia in 1905 was suppressed with frightful brutality. The young workers and peasants who experienced the horrors of the pacification and reaction became imbued with burning hatred for their oppressors, the tsarist autocracy and the German landlords, and they nursed this hatred right up to the October days of 1917.
The second specific feature of the development of the revolution in the Baltic provinces was that during the first World War they were the arena of intense military operations. In the autumn of 1915 Vilna fell, and with this Lithuania and Courland passed entirely into German hands. In August 1917 Kornilov and Kerensky treacherously surrendered Riga to the Germans. Thus, with the exception of Estonia and the northern part of Latvia, the Baltic provinces on the eve of the October Revolution were occupied by the forces of Kaiser Germany. The German conquerors despoiled the country and carried off all its treasures to Germany, inflicting untold suffering upon the Lettish and Lithuanian people. In Latvia, over one-fourth of the volosts were converted into a wilderness; over 200,000 buildings were destroyed, and 600,000 inhabitants were rendered homeless. A number of the large industrial enterprises in Latvia were evacuated to the interior of Russia, and from Riga 300,000 of the total pre-war population of 500,000 left the city. All this served still further to fan the hatred of the Baltic people for the German tyrants. The Lettish and Estonian peasants regarded the German invaders as the kinsmen of the hated oppressors whom they had been fighting for centuries.
The hardships of the war, which were far more severe in the war zone than in other parts of the country, naturally accelerated the process of revolutionisation in the Baltic provinces, particularly after the February bourgeois-democratic revolution.
And lastly, the third specific feature of the development of the revolution in the Baltic provinces was that, owing to the military operations conducted in Latvia, all three armies of the Northern Front, the Twelfth, the First and the Fifth, were, in the main, concentrated here. The most important of these was the Twelfth Army, which was stationed in the immediate vicinity of Petrograd. The preparations for the October battles in the unoccupied parts of Latvia and in Estonia were bound up with the course and development of the October Revolution on the Northern Front.
The attitude of the soldiers on the Northern Front was to a large degree determined by the course of the struggle in the capital. Of immense importance was the fact that the Lettish Rifle Regiments formed part of the Twelfth Army. These regiments had been formed in the summer of 1915 on the initiative of the Lettish bourgeoisie with the consent of the tsarist government. At the time of the February Revolution the Lettish Rifles, which in the main consisted of proletarians and semi-proletarians, constituted eight regiments, united in two brigades with a total strength ranging from 30,000 to 35,000 men and 1,000 officers. Thanks to the persevering work conducted among them by the Bolsheviks, the Lettish Rifle Regiments disappointed the hopes the Lettish bourgeoisie and the tsarist government had placed in them, and on the eve of the October Socialist Revolution constituted a mighty revolutionary armed force with the aid of which the Soviets in Latvia captured power.
A Bolshevik Party organisation was formed in the Lettish Rifle Regiment as early as March 1917, but at that time it had a membership of only 70. In June the membership had increased to 1,500, and in August to 3,000. An important factor in the work conducted among the soldiers of the Twelfth Army was the newspaper Okopnaya Pravda, which was published by the Bolshevik military organisation.
In May 1917 the United Soviet of the Lettish Rifle Regiments adopted a Bolshevik resolution, and from that time onwards the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Lettish Rifle Regiments served as a stronghold of Bolshevism in Riga.
Very rapid progress was made by the Bolshevik Party organisation in Reval, to which many of the sailors in the Reval Base of the Baltic Fleet belonged. In June it had a membership of 2,123, which by August had increased to 3,182.
After the Kornilov mutiny Bolshevik resolutions were adopted at meetings of nearly all the units of the Twelfth Army.
Meanwhile, the class struggle in the rural districts between the poor peasants and the kulaks, or capitalist farmers, increased in intensity. In August, during harvesting, a strike of agricultural labourers broke out in Latvia, led by the Soviet of Landless Peasants’ Deputies which had been formed already in April 1917.
Between August 13 and 15, a Conference of Landless Peasants was held in Reval, under Bolshevik leadership, at which 40,000 labourers, landless peasants and small holders were represented.
The extent to which the influence of revolutionary Social-Democracy was growing among the poorest sections of the rural population is shown by the returns of the Uyezd Rural Soviet elections held in September, in which the Social-Democrats polled 71 per cent of the total vote in the Valk Uyezd, 76 per cent in the Volmar Uyezd, and 74 per cent in the Venden Uyezd.
In that month, also, most of the other Soviets in Latvia and Estonia swung round to the Bolsheviks. The Narva Soviet was controlled by the Bolsheviks from the very moment of its inception. In August the Bolsheviks won the Riga Soviet. The Venden and Volmar Soviets were also Bolshevik.
Another index of the growing influence of the Bolshevik Party were the City Duma elections which were held in August 1917. In Riga the Bolsheviks won 49 seats out of a total of 120, and in Volmar 18 out of 28. In Reval the Bolsheviks polled one-third of the total vote in the centre of the city and 50 per cent in the suburbs. In Narva they polled 74 per cent of the total vote. Here, in 1917, Victor Kingisepp, one of the most prominent leaders of the Estonian proletariat and member of the Bolshevik Party since 1906, was active.
The City Duma election campaign coincided with the beginning of the German advance on Riga. On August 21 the Provisional Government surrendered Riga to the Germans. The Lettish Rifles had defended it with the utmost heroism, and the Russian units too had fought bravely. Even the Executive Committee of Soldiers’ Deputies of the Twelfth Army, which was controlled by Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, was obliged to pay tribute to the splendid spirit and revolutionary ardour of the masses of the soldiers in that difficult situation. After occupying the city the Germans proclaimed martial law and began to apply organised terror against the civil population, particularly against the Bolsheviks.
With the loss of Riga and the further advance of the German troops, the area of legal activity for the revolutionary Social-Democratic Party of Latvia was limited to three uyezds in the Lifland Gubernia, viz., Valk, Venden and Volmar.
On October 16, 1917, a Special Conference of the Social-Democratic Party of Latvia was held in Valk to discuss the current situation. After the discussion the Conference passed a resolution in which it whole-heartedly associated itself with Lenin’s historic resolution on armed insurrection which was adopted by the Central Committee of the Party on October 10. The resolution of the Conference stated:
“This Conference is of the opinion that the moment of final and decisive struggle has arrived when the fate, not only of the Russian, but of the world revolution, will be decided. . . . In preparing for the forthcoming battles, the proletariat of Latvia sets itself the object of maintaining the closest unity with the revolutionary workers of Petrograd and Moscow and of supporting the struggle of the Russian proletariat . . . for the conquest of political power with all its strength and resources.”[1]
At the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region in Petrograd the representative of the Lettish Rifles eloquently expressed the readiness of the army to support the insurrection when he said that the Lettish Regiments, numbering 40,000 men, were ready to render full support to Petrograd which was about to put into effect the slogan “All power to the Soviets!”
Immediately after the Congress preparations began to be made for armed insurrection. On the night of October 18, in accordance with the decision of the Party Conference, a secret Military Revolutionary Committee was formed in Venden, which established close communication between the Bolshevik organisations in the Twelfth Army. The Military Revolutionary Committee was instructed to occupy, as soon as the insurrection broke out in Petrograd, all the strategic points on the road to Petrograd and to neutralise the counter-revolutionary activities of the Staff of the Twelfth Army and of the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary Executive Committee of the Soviet of Lettish Rifle Regiments.
On October 20 a Congress of delegates of the Lettish Rifles was held at which a resolution proposed by the representative of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party calling for immediate preparations for an armed struggle to transfer power to the Soviets and to protect the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was carried unanimously without discussion.
The Congress also endorsed the formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee by the Lettish Party Conference.
On October 22, at a joint meeting of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of Estonia and of the Reval Soviet, a Military Revolutionary Committee of 40 was elected, which established control over the strategical and important points in the city and fortress zone.
The workers and peasants of Latvia and Estonia, headed by the Bolshevik Party, were thus ready for the decisive October battles.
[1] P. Dauge, The Baltic in 1917-1940. Istorik-Marksist, 1941, No. 1, p. 10.
Previous: In Byelorussia
Next: Transcaucasia