Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes

by Peggie Benton

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Appendix: The First World War and Latvian Independence

  Copyright information

  Latvia, as one of the Baltic States, existed for only twenty years. At the end of this book there is a brief account of the country’s historical background.

  For those who suffered and did not survive

  Introduction

  One of the saddest of the forgotten tragedies of our times was the destruction of the Baltic States. The peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had long and very complex histories behind them when they were brought under Russian rule in the course of the 18th century. (Lithuania had once been the strongest power in Eastern Europe.) But with the revolution in Russia and the defeat of Germany in 1918 they managed to break free, fighting off the Bolsheviks and proclaiming their independence.

  It was to last for just twenty years. In 1939 the fate of these small lands was decided by Hitler and Stalin as part of the deal which set off the attack on Poland and started the Second World War. In the summer of 1940 the Russians moved in, pretending that they had been invited. Behind the Red Army came the scavengers, for the NKVD (as the old CHEKA, now the KGB, was then called) followed up the Soviet army as the Gestapo followed up the Reichswehr; and the Communist party secretaries followed the NKVD as the Gauleiters followed the Gestapo. In no time at all the Baltic lands were Sovietized and Russianized, their living standards brought down, their free institutions abolished, the fabric of their lives in ruins. As far as is known some 170,000 of the best, most active and enterprising citizens were rounded up, arrested and sent off to Siberia.

  It was not until much later that the full extent of this vile operation was understood. It had been planned long in advance, its details laid down with bleak precision in the notorious Order No. 001223, signed in October 1939 by Beria’s right-hand man, Ivan Serov. Nobody knew much about this story at the time. The Russians struck, characteristically, when the attention of the world was focused on the desperate battle for Paris. After the fall of France our minds were on other things; and later still the revelation of Nazi wickedness on an almost unimaginable scale, coupled with our desire to give our new allies the benefit of the doubt, stood between us and the Russian reality. Post-war bullying and brutality, most blatantly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, have made it easier for people to credit Russian atrocities, such as the massacre in the Katyn Forest. But still all too little is known about the tragedy of the Baltic States, now treated as a constituent part of the Soviet Union and heavily settled by Russians.

  That is why I so welcome Mrs Benton’s book. She was there, in Riga, when the Russians came—and during all the time their coming was being prepared. She knew about foreign occupations because she had lived through the Nazi invasion of Austria—an invasion none the less real even though many countries welcomed it and worked for it: many did not. She had been in the Baltic region long enough to learn a good deal about the people and their history. She could identify herself with their hopes without idealizing them. And she could appreciate the cultural shock, as well as the human tragedy, of an occupation that soon became an outright annexation, and an annexation which entailed a revolution, but a revolution conducted by foreigners with guns. She writes simply and without pretence from her own experience and from what she learnt from her Baltic friends, as well as from her official work as an analyst of the Russian press. She brings home to the reader very vividly indeed, it seems to me, what it is like to be in a small country whose quiet ways, offensive to none, are wantonly trampled out of existence by a bully without scruple. There is a good deal to be learnt from her book, not only about the Baltic States in general and Latvia in particular, to which it is a memorial, but also about how people are likely to behave when confronted with a power which seems too strong to fight but which cannot be appeased.

  It is not, however, a solemn book. It is full of diverting incident, not least the journey home—an escape really, all across Russia to Vladivostok, through the only gap in the German encirclement.

  Edward Crankshaw

  Chapter 1

  Raindrops, sluggish with cold, slid down the outer panes of the double windows in the gathering dusk. From the high ceiling an unshaded bulb glared harshly on the faded group of armchairs, and the wooden partition which divided room No. 22 of the Hotel St Petersburg, Riga, and hid the massive Russian bed from the sight of visitors. Beside this stood a couple of suitcases—all that we were sure of possessing in the world.

  It was October 12th, 1938. Two months before, my husband’s chief, Tommy Kendrick, head of the Passport Control Office in Vienna, had been expelled from Austria on a charge of espionage, and when the Gestapo began to arrest his ‘accomplices’ we had been told by the Foreign Office to leave for Riga within twenty-four hours.

  But this was not so easy. Six months earlier, the Germans had without warning occupied Austria and now they were threatening Czechoslovakia. Our route to Riga lay through Prague, Warsaw and Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania. Already the land frontiers of Czechoslovakia were closed and most of the staff of our Prague Legation evacuated to London. Hungarian and Polish troops were mobilizing in order to snatch disputed strips of territory from their stricken neighbour. Trains to Prague were at a standstill and planes already over-booked. However, with the help of our Dutch colleagues we managed the two hops to Warsaw by KLM, and next day, the final stages of the journey, the aeroplanes becoming smaller and the days shorter as we progressed northwards.

  On our arrival in Riga, Kenneth went off to report for duty and I sat alone, bereft at one stroke of the home we had set up six months earlier (now impounded and sealed by the Gestapo), our friends, an interesting job and even, for the moment, of anything to read or do.

  A thermometer was fixed between the two windows and as I gazed at the congealing raindrops its crimson thread sank slowly towards freezing point.

  Only five years before, I had left Riga, resolved never to return.

  Chapter 2

  Next morning a watery sun gleamed on the puddles in the Castle Square. Kenneth set out for the Consulate. He had returned quite cheerful the evening before.

  ‘The building’s a bit old-fashioned. It faces a park which runs along the Canal. The Consular offices are in the front—quite imposing and must be pleasant in summer. The Passport Control Office is in the servants’ quarters and I should think our main office must have been the kitchen. There’s the usual counter and a row of hard chairs for the visa applicants, but the Iino stops short at our door, as well as the trimmings. The rest of our work goes on in a series of rooms leading from a long dark passage. One of them may have been the larder, or else the architect got his sums wrong and had a little bit of space left over, not that it matters, since no one works there.’

  ‘And what about the staff?’

  ‘The Consul, Henry Hobson, is a bluff sort of chap and seems to know what he’s doing. The senior Vice-Consul, Glyn Hall, has lived here for years and is thoroughly dug in. Apart from that there are
a couple of girls married to Latvians, a locally employed Vice-Consul and the usual solid, respectable Consular Messengers complete with basic English.’

  ‘And the P.C.O.?’

  ‘As you know, Nick in is charge. Ex-Black Watch with no family and no obvious cares, and the most incredibly polished shoes. Then there is Dorothy Corrie from one of the Anglo-Baltic families. She speaks fluent Russian, has lots of local knowledge and an unshakably British outlook.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Just Paul. His father and mother have lived here since the Baltic States gained their independence from Russia after the ’14–’18 war. When the family fled from Moscow at the time of the Revolution, poor Paul was somehow left behind with his nurse and it was months before they were picked up by some refugee organization and reunited with his parents. I don’t think he has ever quite got over it. Don’t underestimate him, though. He speaks the three local languages fluently and he has a photographic memory.’

  The days at the Hotel St Petersburg, or Peterpils Viesnica, to use the Latvian name painted over the door, passed slowly. There was no news of our luggage and, without a typewriter or wireless set, we had no home diversions but a writing pad, a pack of patience cards and a few books we had been able to borrow. It was no use looking for a flat until our furniture arrived, so we decided to move into the apartment of Madame Mossolova, widow of a White Russian general, who took in odd foreigners and ‘language officers’. Since the Soviet Union was closed to visits by members of our Armed Forces, British officers studying for a Russian interpretership were distributed between Riga, Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) and Helsinki. To learn in one year what their American counterparts were only expected to master in two, meant steady application, and as the young men were boarded out in respectable households they were denied the convenience of a ‘sleeping dictionary’.

  The flat in the Elizabetes iela, halfway between the Legation and the Consulate, was rambling, dark and filled with heavy drapes and furniture from Tsarist times. Olga Mossolova, a thin authoritative woman with the enduring quality of whipcord, chatted across the long table during meals, in Russian or French or slightly hesitant English, according to the nationality of the guest she was addressing. Between courses she drew impatiently at the long cardboard mouthpiece of her papirossi, discarding one after another until the crystal ash tray was overflowing. For every meal the table was laid with a starched damask cloth, cut glass and heavy Russian silver.

  ‘It is a pleasure to use such beautiful things, Madame,’ I said to her after we had been there a few days.

  ‘Ah this,’ she replied in her deep voice, ‘is nothing. My husband was governor of a province. We had a staff of seventeen indoor servants and a dozen house guests at a time. But, do you know, I never went inside the kitchen. I was not even sure where it was. You see, I was only a child when we married and my husband took care of everything. Now, I think I have become quite a good housekeeper. You will never find bought vodka in my home.’

  She pointed to three cut-glass decanters filled with yellow, gold and pale green liquid. A careful ménagère, madame told us, would never buy ready-made vodka but go to a chemist’s and get a bottle of pure alcohol. This was then warmed in a saucepan and the fusel oil burnt off with a lighted match. A measured quantity of distilled water was added and the whole brew flavoured with lemon or orange peel, or the Polish zubravka grass which gave a subtle flavour and a delicate green hue.

  ‘I offer small glasses, but in the old days ...’ Her eyes glowed with memories of the expansive life of Imperial Russia.

  She turned abruptly to Dorothy Corrie, who lived permanently in the flat. ‘Noble has passed his exam. I had a letter from him today.’

  ‘And what about Thurloe?’

  ‘Failed. And he with a Russian wife. I think she wanted too much to learn English.’ She crushed another papirossa into the ash tray. ‘And who will have a bath tonight?’

  It was the custom in the older blocks of Riga flats to provide the tenants with hot water from a central boiler once a week. Early in the morning the maids would start to wash the household linen, which was then hung in the basement to dry. Although a bath was available at any time, provided one had the patience to wait while the wood in the tall copper stove burnt through, Madame Mossolova naturally encouraged her guests to take advantage of the free hot water on washing day.

  We had always been impressed by the luxurious Hollywood image of a sunken bath. Here, for the first time, we were to enjoy one. The bathroom was large and drably tiled. The taps were of massive brass and the W.C. bore the name DREADNOUGHT, trade mark of an English manufacturer and a relic of the supremacy of the sanitation anglaise. The huge enamelled bath, perhaps owing to some misunderstanding on the part of the builder, was sunk right into the floor, its varicosed rim flush with the encaustic tiles. It was not until one lay in the steaming water and gazed upwards that the problem of accommodating the bath’s volume was explained. From the ceiling hung the naked cast-iron belly of the bath in the flat above, its runaway pipe snaking exposed down the wall. Lying in the bath one was enjoying space normally belonging to one’s neighbour below, whilst inside the bulge above one’s head the occupant of the flat above might even now be lying naked.

  Every morning after breakfast Kenneth walked to the office and I went back to our bedroom overlooking the blank brick wall of a narrow courtyard. Cars from a garage below tainted the air with the curious fumes of the local petrol, which was mixed with thirty per cent of the potato spirit used to make Latvian vodka.

  On fine days I would walk through the gardens on the banks of the canal which divided the original Hanseatic town from the nineteenth century city. The old town had been encircled by walls which were demolished in 1857, and the canal was the moat which once protected them. Originally, the houses of the Baltic German settlers were confined within these walls. The tall dwellings of the merchants, housing floor upon floor of store-rooms beneath tiled and gabled roofs, jostled patrician mansions with their stone portals and chevron-built shutters. Here and there, in a courtyard, a tree reached for the sun.

  On the river front below the castle, carts loaded with goods for shipment rattled over the cobbles behind horses with high wooden yokes over their necks. A small steam ferry plied between the castle and the industrial suburbs of Kipsala and Ilgeciems. Upriver, the road was carried over the Daugava by a pontoon bridge half a kilometre long, with the girder arches of the railway bridge rising beyond it.

  One day I followed the river downstream to the Export Harbour, where ships were loading with timber, hemp and dairy products, and bundles of king veitch, exported to Scotland for colouring whisky, now that the sherry casks from Spain were becoming so expensive. This quay held a special memory for me.

  Five years earlier I, with my small sons, had been asked to spend the summer on the estate of Baron Kruedener, the father of the man I was to marry. We arrived by sea in a small German coaster from Stettin. As we sailed up the Daugava to Riga three great churches dominated the skyline—St Peter’s with the tallest wooden spire in Europe, built tier upon tier; the Dom, its galleried tower swelling with the graceful lines of a Georgian silver teapot and St James’s spire, slender and hexagonal. All of them copper-sheathed, gleamed in the evening light. The air was warm and Jimmy, my future husband, was waiting on the quay.

  Even in early May it was still light when, after leaving the train at the country station of Tukums and driving for four hours through deep forest and rolling fields, we reached Rindseln. Life was exciting—a new door opening. The lovely summer days passed quickly, but beneath the surface lay financial worries. It seemed that Jimmy’s best hope of employment lay in Germany, where the Nazis were becoming increasingly aggressive, while the economic situation was depressing wages. There seemed no prospect of ever being able to send the boys to school in England. For all the Baron’s ingenious schemes and his wife’s thrift, Rindseln was bringing in barely enough to cover expenses.
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  ‘You know,’ Kruedener confided to me one day, ‘cards are my only source of ready cash. When I’m in Riga I play every evening at the Musse, the club where we Balts have been winning—and losing—money for the last two hundred years. It’s not that my bridge is so good. It’s just that I can stay awake longer than anyone else.’

  The situation was precarious and my brother, a medical student, was so concerned that he thumbed a passage in a Lithuanian freighter and came to Rindseln to persuade me to return. In those days there would have been no haven in England if Jimmy were without a job or our marriage went wrong. There was no Welfare State and no Health Service to ensure survival. My mother, for all her loyalty and initiative, could do little to help since her pension, as a general’s widow, was only £150 a year. As long as the boys were dependent, my alimony was a precious hedge against destitution.

  So, with great sadness, Jimmy and I agreed to part. A door had closed, I thought for ever.

  Now, it was as if a great pendulum had swung, reversing the past. I was beginning life in Latvia once more. This time our situation was secure, but winter loomed ahead like a long, dark tunnel.

  As my future home, Latvia and its history had interested me deeply, but I had absorbed, inevitably, the Baltic German point of view, which regarded the country from the standpoint of a colonizing power. Yet the Latvians had developed an indigenous culture and were trading fine weapons and ornaments forged of gold, silver and bronze with places as far afield as Rome, Baghdad, Basra and Isfahan when both we and the Germans were not yet civilized.

  Latvia’s natural wealth, added to excellent harbours, which were starting points for trade routes to Russia and the East, made it a tempting prey for Vikings, Danes, Hanseatic traders, the warlike knights of the Teutonic and Livonian Orders and, in their turn, the Poles. Even England was involved in the competition and in 1558 sent arms to Ivan the Terrible, who made use of them in a scorched earth campaign against Erik XIV of Sweden in the course of which he put the northern half of the country to the torch and the sword. Most of the towns were levelled and ‘over great stretches of the land no human voice could be heard, nor even the barking of a dog’.