Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes

by Peggie Benton

  Each knock on the door or footfall in the outer office made our hearts thump painfully. From time to time Dorothy brewed a great pot of tea which almost hissed as it went down.

  Towards seven o’clock, grimy and exhausted, we could rest at last. The outer office with its visa records presented an appearance of solid bona fides. Stationery cupboards and shelves of reference books stood neatly in the private offices, but the filing cabinets were empty.

  This had been a very different experience from the days spent clearing the Legation in Vienna before it was taken over by the Luftwaffe, who had bought it from the British Government. There were no stoves in the building and the boiler in the basement normally used for destroying confidential waste had proved quite inadequate for dealing with papers going back to the ‘80s, so we had dragged the garden incinerator beneath the window of my office and stirred the burning paper with a long pole while we dangled our legs in the spring sunshine as we sat on the sill. From time to time the Austrian Gestapo, who had moved into the building which formed the other side of the courtyard, amused themselves by leaning out of the windows and trying to snatch the charred papers as they floated up in a sudden breeze. When I tried to catch up on my press reading they followed my eyes backwards and forwards across the newspaper with the reflected light from a pocket mirror.

  Out in the streets of Riga the ordinary citizens hurried by apprehensively as crowds of rough-looking people swarmed into the centre of town. The Communist Party, being illegal, had gone underground, but now it was emerging with its banners and slogans from the industrial suburbs across the river.

  At the sight of a Russian tank, placed strategically to enfilade the pontoon bridge, the workers stopped and raised a loud cheer for the Red Army and their Communist comrades. Suddenly the hatch on top of the tank opened and a Russian soldier, dusty and drawn-looking, like the rest of the troops who had made the long haul from the frontier, climbed out. Quite deliberately he strode towards the cheer leader and knocked him down. ‘Shut your flaming traps,’ he shouted menacingly. ‘We want to get some sleep.’

  The unconscious workman was dragged aside and those behind, who had not seen the incident, pressed on, well satisfied with their first contact with the Red Army.

  As we approached the Town Hall Square the mood of the crowd was ugly. Men were prising up paving stones and throwing them at the police, two of whom stood at the corner, back to back, their faces grey, their revolvers swinging in a slow arc in an attempt to intimidate the crowd. But those behind pushed others forward and with the square jammed with people the policemen’s chances looked slim.

  At this moment a Russian tank rumbled up the street. A machine gun was mounted on the roof.

  As late comers we were at the back of the crowd, but being eager to see what was happening, we managed to clamber onto the steps of a building bordering the square, remembering guiltily my father’s warning that it was the curious outsider who caught the stray bullet.

  A soldier emerged from the turret of the tank and motioned to the policemen to step back. There was a moment’s hush, and then someone waved a red flag and the masses surged forward once more. With an angry rattle the gunner swung his weapon, sending a swathe of bullets into the densely-packed crowd. There was a moment of total silence and then screams as the onlookers struggled to push past the dead and dying and escape. The soldier watched dispassionately, his hand on the trigger. Within moments the square was empty but for the bodies on the ground, some still, some writhing. The policemen slipped their revolvers into the holsters. The turret of the tank closed as it drew off, and we hurried through the gathering dusk in the direction of home. As we reached our part of the town not a soul was to be seen on the streets.

  ‘I think the local Communists are in for a surprise,’ said Kenneth. ‘The Russian army isn’t going to stand disorder here any more than it would at home.’

  Next morning the newspapers informed the people of Latvia and Estonia that since their governments had failed to annul their pacts of mutual assistance, and had even sought to extend them to include Lithuania and Finland, they had violated the agreements each had signed with the Soviet Union in 1931. The USSR therefore demanded a change of government in both countries and unlimited entry for their troops.

  As we walked to the office next morning we saw that the Russians had roped off the vast Esplanade and turned it into a military camp with field kitchens and improvised washing arrangements round the hydrants. Rows of tanks and lorries were drawn up on the perimeter. All round the square people crowded to the ropes, watching the scene like visitors to a zoo. Although the men had apparently slept on the ground, most of them had washed off the white dust of the journey and brushed their uniforms.

  Each important crossroads in the town was commanded by a Russian tank and all buildings of importance were guarded by Russian sentries. Here and there a flag hung limply, but the streets were quiet. Not so our office, which spilled a queue of terrified applicants right through the Consulate and out onto the path. Stories of Russian anti-semitism had reached Riga.

  We hoped for some message from the Director of Latvian Army Intelligence, hitherto a useful source of information, but in vain. On the previous day his chimneys, like ours, had belched the telltale black smoke.

  During the morning the Latvian radio announced that President Ulmanis urged his countrymen to go about their business as usual, though no one knew how long he would be able to follow his own excellent advice. The papers headlined the news that Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, would be arriving in Riga next morning and would make a speech from the balcony of the Soviet Legation in the afternoon. As Chief Prosecutor during the 1936–8 show trials of the old Party members and Soviet Generals, Vyshinsky had called for such savage sentences that he became known as ‘the butcher’.

  The Latvian State Optical Works had recently produced the first of the miniature cameras, the Minox, which was being eagerly bought by representatives of all the foreign intelligence services in Riga, and is now being manufactured in the West. At London’s request we had sent a number of these home through the Bag for clandestine use, but we had not yet tested one. Here was an opportunity to tryout their efficacy in the field. It was decided that Glyn Hall, with his fluent Russian and untidy, bucolic appearance, would be the right person for the experiment. As a further qualification, he had no diplomatic status so, should there be trouble, the Legation could disclaim responsibility. I was to accompany him and add an air of casual sightseeing to our slightly perilous outing.

  With the help of Dorothy Corrie, Glyn fixed the Minox, which was little bigger than a Dunhill lighter, beneath the lapel of his jacket and I put on an old straw hat which might prove handy cover if we wished to change a film.

  A procession was streaming up the Elizabetes iela escorted by tanks decked with flowers. We soon found ourselves jammed in the crowd, all looking up expectantly at the flag-draped balcony where Vychinsky was to appear. As at all recent demonstrations the crowd was a rough one but, with Russian soldiers posted at frequent intervals along the route and tanks in the background, likely to be well behaved.

  Suddenly my hat was snatched from my head. I whipped round in alarm, but it was only an old peasant woman. ‘Better not wear a hat, my dear,’ she cautioned. ‘These Russians are not used to ladies and gentlemen.’

  Vyshinsky, a grey-haired man looking more like a bureaucrat than a butcher, acknowledged the cheers of the crowd and launched into a long speech, made even longer by regular pauses for applause. Over and over again he repeated ‘Za mir, za hleb, za svobodu naroda’—’Peace, bread and a free people’—the old battle cry of the Bolsheviks. To a population which, for the past twenty years, had enjoyed peace and a high standard of living, and free-est period of their whole history, this slogan, had they stopped to think, did not offer any unaccustomed benefits. It was even doubtful whether a large proportion of the crowd could hear what Vychinsky was saying, but this was a
day off—with the factories closed and the sun shining.

  There had been only one hundred and fifty registered members of the underground Communist Party in Latvia but as always, for every declared Communist there were scores of fellow travellers and hundreds ready to jump on the band waggon.

  Gradually we worked our way nearer the balcony. Furtively Glynn pressed the button on the little Minox. The scenes we were snapping would appear in the morning papers and the Russians should have no objection to their wider distribution. What we were trying to show, and what the Russians would certainly not approve, was that one could take adequate pictures of a given scene without being noticed.

  As the afternoon wore on and the enthusiasm of the crowd seemed inexhaustible, Vyshinsky gave up any effort to hand out the party line and shouted ‘Latvia, Latvia’. This went down well, but so did ‘Pretty girls’, ‘Happy days’, and various other encouraging inanities which he called out from time to time. Finally, to our astonishment, Vyshinsky and the Soviet Minister were doing a sort of double turn, addressing the crowd as ‘Latvian citizens’ and referring to the ‘independence of Latvia’. We could only think that lunch at the Soviet Legation must have been exceptionally good.

  When Vyshinsky’s performance came to an end the crowd moved off to the Ministry of War. Finding it heavily guarded, they surged on to the President’s palace and started to break the windows, demanding that the Red Flag be hoisted from the Castle Tower. However, hearing the rumble of tanks the crowd quickly dispersed.

  ‘We don’t have hooligans like that in Russia,’ one soldier remarked. ‘Hooligan’ had in fact become a popular Russian term of censure and when Phyllis MacKillop had tried to push her way onto a crowded tram in Moscow she was reproved by a would-be passenger for being a ‘guliganka’.

  Having dealt with the public relations side of his visit, Vyshinsky proceeded to dismiss President Ulmanis and all his ministers and set up a provisional administration, the purpose of which was to hold elections which would result in a Communist government. The date of the elections was fixed for July 14th.

  Meanwhile, in a few days the aspect of Riga was completely altered without any revolutionary changes having been carried out. The transformation was insidious, like the deterioration caused by a flock of chickens let loose in an orchard. Pavements were no longer swept and litter, fortunately rare in Latvia, lay where it fell. The old women disappeared from the parks and the flowers faded on their stalks in this hot June.

  Police had vanished from the streets, their place being taken by soldiers directing the traffic with small improvised red flags. Illuminated signs, advertisements for a capitalist economy, were turned off and had not yet been replaced by the giant red stars so beloved of the Russian administration. Shop windows, nearly empty now, were unlit. People who normally dressed smartly now wore their oldest clothes and there was a pervading drabness, and an almost tangible depression. Those who were not afraid of the future in a People’s Socialist Republic were nevertheless disappointed at the repressive discipline that they met at almost every turn.

  The Russians, in fact, were facing an awkward problem. Ever since the Revolution there had been an acute shortage of consumer goods in Soviet Russia and, as even today, dwelling space was strictly limited. The evidence of Latvian prosperity could not be eliminated overnight, but in the meantime the armed forces must be given some explanation why a small country under a ‘corrupt capitalist administration’ could achieve for its people a standard of living so much higher than in Russia.

  The story was put about, and apparently believed by the more naive members of the occupying forces, that Riga was part of a great exhibition and that the city would shortly return to normal.

  Chapter 16

  With the office work-load increasing every day and the situation so uncertain it was only possible to snatch an occasional night at the dacha, so Lotte returned to Riga, with her plants and Vufi crammed into an oilcloth bag.

  The moments of escape to the Strand were wonderfully peaceful and restoring. The train service had been severely reduced and the carriages were now crowded and no longer clean, so on arrival at the dacha we plunged into the river. After this, the men would chop wood for the kitchen stove or tackle some project in Dick’s workshop, while Kathleen and I chatted as she watered the rings of pansies round the fruit trees and the bright petunias she had planted in the window boxes of our small house.

  Kathleen’s family had lived for generations in St Petersburg and when young, she and her sister were known as the ‘beautiful Misses Gellibrand’. Dick, too, came from an Anglo-Russian family and he would amuse us with stories of his boyhood and how, when he was sent to boarding school in England, the boys insisted on calling him ‘Jomskikoff, and asking why there was no snow on his boots.

  After supper, as the light slowly faded, we would watch the rafts of pine logs drifting down the river, tied together to form a snake sometimes as much as half a kilometre long, guided round the bends by men with poles who jumped from one raft to another. Along the arc of the bridge navigation lights flashed as the sun dipped towards midnight, green for the boat channel and a red warning when the centre span swung out to allow the passage of a steamer.

  With the escape route to the UK virtually cut, the demand for British visas had eased but now, in spite of the threat of Arab violence, the unfortunate Jews were determined to use any means of getting to Palestine. Though the main immigration quota was full for months to come, there was one visa category still open to a number of people in Riga. Anyone who could prove that he owned £1,000 worth of property in Palestine, or a like sum deposited in a bank there, could have a so-called capitalist visa. This was meant to ensure that such immigrants would not become a charge on the limited resources of the territory then under British mandate.

  Most of the people with ‘capitalist’ qualifications had hitherto been comfortably established in Riga and unwilling to abandon their homes and businesses. Now, however, anything seemed better than to fall a victim to Russian anti-semitism, and applications for capitalist visas came flooding in. According to the rules such applications had to be sent to London and then forwarded to Palestine for authentification of the claims. If the reply was favourable, London authorized the visa. Even in peace time this procedure was slow but now, with communications disrupted, it was proving of little practical use. So we hit on a scheme by which we would send a reply-paid telegram to Barclay’s Bank in Tel Aviv or Haifa, briefly worded, for example ‘Abraham Heimann, 56 Hayarkon Street, Tel Aviv’ or ‘Israel Blaufeld, £1,500, Bank of the Middle East, Haifa’. Barclay’s would then check the ownership of the property or sum mentioned and wire back ‘Correct’—or sometimes not. Applicants were asked to deposit the approximate cost of the telegram and collect the change when the reply came in. In this way a visa for Palestine could be granted in a few days and perhaps a whole family saved. Customs and passport controls were still maintained at the former Russian frontier, and visas were required by Latvians to pass this point, but the Russians were happy to give transit visas for the long rail journey to the Black Sea and rid themselves of what they regarded as undesirable elements who would conveniently leave their wealth behind.

  The Jewish Agency and our contact there, Herr Schonberg, a kindly white-haired patriarch, worked indefatigably for these unhappy victims of so many political cross-currents. As we gained his confidence he would accept our assurance that everything possible had been done in a given case, and we gradually came to depend on him to give an honest assessment of the bona fides of an applicant.

  At the end of June the police were beginning to reappear in the streets of Riga. Russian officers, meticulously saluted by their men, walked about sedately in pairs like children who have had too strict a governess. Other ranks were beginning to fraternize with Latvian girls, though some were intimidated by their very simple make-up. ‘They are so painted they make our tanks shy,’ said one soldier. When not on duty the troops preferred to lo
ll comfortably, relaxing quite happily on the tarpaulin covering their lorry, unlike the German troops in Vienna, who seemed unable to shed their military personalities.

  As we were waiting to cross the Brivibas iela a lorry stopped beside us and a pedestrian ventured a little cautious teasing. ‘Can you get clothes in Russia?’ he called to the men on the truck. ‘As much as you like,’ one of them answered. ‘What about boots?’ ‘We have all the boots you want in Russia.’ ‘Then why didn’t you stay there?’ The only answer was a grin.

  The Russian-language newspaper Sevodnia had been replaced by the Russkaya Gazeta and Russian news films were now shown instead of Latvian. The National War Memorial, which commemorated inter alia the liberation of Latvia from the Russian invaders at the end of the First World War, was however heaped each day with fresh flowers. The sale of vodka was still banned, but the waiter at our usual lunchtime restaurant asked to our surprise if we would like water with our zakouski. ‘A little water does you good,’ he remarked, giving us each a small tumbler. (Vodka is the diminutive of voda, the Russian word for water.)

  ‘Just like the old dry days back home,’ commented Reinhardt, the American Vice-Consul who often lunched with us.

  On July 4th the British navy sank the French battleships in Oran harbour as they were leaving Algeria to join Admiral Darlan’s collaborationist fleet, and Petain broke off diplomatic relations with Great Britain. Now we should be deprived of contact with our French colleagues.

  News came that our Minister, Charles Orde, was transferred to Chile, and on the eighth we saw him off at the Moscow Station on the long route via Siberia, Dairen and the Pacific, having fulfilled our promise to Mrs Orde and collected all the small comforts we could find for his journey.

  Taking advantage of the night-long twilight of high summer to make a useful economy, the Russians had turned off the street lighting. Beneath the trees of the boulevards people moved, mysteriously quiet, in the rich soft dusk. But when the elections were only a week away, the lights were switched on again to give clear vision in case there should be the need to shoot. Everyone was perfectly free to vote as he pleased—for the single Communist list—but not to abstain, as an identity card without a stamp from the polling booth could lead to very serious trouble. Using the same methods as his Nazi allies, Stalin felt confident of a 98% majority.