Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (66 page)

The final blow to the partisan supply lines was the policy of collectivization of land, which effectively took agriculture out of the hands of individuals altogether. Once all farms were owned or controlled by the state, there were no longer any sympathetic individual farmers for the partisans to rely on. Collectivization in the Baltic States was even more rapid than in other countries in the Communist bloc. At the beginning of 1949 only 3.9 per cent of Lithuanian farms were collectivized, only 5.8 per cent of Estonian farms, and only about 8 per cent of Latvian farms. When the policy of collectivization was formally announced, many farmers resisted, but after large numbers of them were punished with deportation the remainder hurried to comply with the new ruling. By the end of the year 62 per cent of Lithuanian farms had been put under state control. In Estonia and Latvia, where the partisans were not so strong, and resistance less organized, the figures were 80 per cent and 93 per cent, respectively.
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With their homegrown support networks destroyed, the only possible salvation for the partisan cause was to get help from the West.
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In desperation they dispatched envoys westwards to drum up support. The best known of these was the Lithuanian partisan Juozas Lukša, who travelled on foot across the border with Poland, and finally ended up in Paris in early 1948. He carried with him letters to the Pope and to the United Nations describing the brutal deportations that were taking place in his country. But his attempts to win the West over to his cause came to nothing. Apart from a few half-hearted efforts by Western intelligence agencies, the Baltic partisans were largely left to fend for themselves.
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In 1950, when Lukša returned to Lithuania, the struggle had turned into a lost cause. The hordes of active partisans who had filled the forests between 1944 and 1947 – numbering up to 40,000 at their peak - had now fallen to just a couple of thousand. By the summer of 1952 there were probably only 500 left.
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Lukša’s return was treated as a major event by the Soviets. He was hunted down by literally thousands of NKVD troops, who combed the forests of Punia and Kazl
Ruda in search of him. In the end he was betrayed by someone he thought was a friend, lured into an ambush and shot.
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One by one, the same fate befell every other partisan leader in Lithuania. By 1956, twelve years after their struggle had begun, the last of the partisan groups in Lithuania was finally destroyed.
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Nations of Martyrs

Despite the terrifying efficiency of the Soviet security forces, the partisan cause was never entirely defeated. Even after the capture in 1956 of the last great partisan leader, Adolfas Ramanauskas – code-named Vanagas (‘Hawk’) — some forty-five partisans remained at large in the forests of Lithuania. As late as 1965 two Lithuanian guerrillas were surrounded by police: they shot themselves in order to avoid being taken prisoner. The last Lithuanian partisan, Stasys Guiga, was sheltered by a village woman for over thirty years, and managed to evade capture until his death in 1986.
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In Estonia two brothers, Hugo and Aksel Mõttus, were finally caught by the police in 1967. They had lived for twenty years in cold, damp forest bunkers, during which time they lost their father, their brother and their sister to hunger and sickness. They buried each of them in the forest. In the summer of 1974, the Soviet authorities shot the partisan Kalev Arro, whom they had stumbled upon in a village in Võrumaa. But the last Estonian partisan was not killed until four years later, in September 1978, when the KGB tried to arrest August Sabbe. Sabbe tried to escape from them by leaping into the Võhandu river, but drowned.
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During the height of the Cold War, when the Baltic States were firmly under the Soviet thumb, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that such men had wasted their lives. Like those forgotten Japanese soldiers who continued to hold out on remote Pacific islands until the 1970s, or the lonely figure of Manuel Cortés, a Spanish republican who hid from Franco until 1969, these last partisans had continued fighting a war long after the rest of the world had moved on.
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They had gambled on a new conflict starting up between America and the USSR, and paid the price for this misjudgement with their own lives and the imprisonment and deportation of their loved ones. For all their courage and patriotism, their resistance to Soviet authority ultimately seemed to have made no difference.
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And yet one cannot deny the influence that the partisan war had on later resistance movements. The Soviet handling of the partisans and their families, while brutally effective in the short term, served only to create a huge pool of people who were permanently disaffected. It was these people, who were excluded from normal participation in society, and whose children were denied proper jobs and access to higher education, who would later become some of the most active members of the Baltic dissident movement.
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Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s the people of the Baltic States continued to resist Soviet repression, and while they never again took up arms against the Soviets, they were still inspired by the memory of the partisan wars. Partisan stories were told and retold; partisan songs were sung in private, a practice later mirrored in the ‘singing revolution’ in Tallinn. Partisan memoirs were reproduced and distributed throughout the region, such as Juozas Lukša’s
Partizanai,
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which would become a runaway bestseller in Lithuania shortly after its declaration of independence in 1990. The partisan war so inspired one of Estonia’s first post-Soviet prime ministers that he too later wrote a book about it.
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The story of the Battle of Kalniškes, which I recounted at the beginning of this chapter, is a perfect example of how the partisan war inspired later generations, and continues to do so. In the years after the battle, the story passed into local folklore, and songs were written to commemorate the heroic last stand. Far from fading with time, the story actually gathered resonance. In the 1980s, former partisans returned and created a shrine to their fallen comrades, and ceremonies of remembrance were conducted on the battle’s anniversary. In 1989 this became a new source of tension with the Soviets. Soldiers stationed at the nearby Soviet garrison deliberately held practice firing sessions during the anniversary, and fired over the heads of the people gathered there. Later, during the night, soldiers tore down the shrine. After independence, however, a new monument was created, and the bodies of the partisans killed at Kalniškes were exhumed and given a proper burial. Today the battle is still commemorated in an annual ceremony attended by former partisans and their families, representatives of the Lithuanian government and army as well as local politicians and schoolchildren. The event has come to symbolize not only the heroism of Lithuania’s partisans, but the wider struggle for Lithuanian independence that lasted almost half a century.
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It is not so easy, now, to dismiss the struggle of the Forest Brothers as a pointless sacrifice. Their doomed uprising is no longer only a self-contained story with a tragic ending – since the early 1990s it has also become part of a much longer story that ends with the independence of all three Baltic States. In this context, the sacrifices made by the partisans and their communities have been at least partially vindicated. Despite the tens of thousands of deaths on all sides, the lives wasted in exile and the lives spent in hiding, the people of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia now look back on the deeds of the Forest Brothers as a worthwhile cause, and a source of national pride.

28

The Cold War Mirror

On 29 January 1948, as part of a mass programme of political suppression, a sixteen-year-old girl — who is still alive today but who wishes to remain anonymous – was arrested with her mother and sent into exile. After spending a year in a distant prison camp, she was transferred to a place called the ‘Special School for the Reeducation of Women’. Here, and in a subsequent prison camp, she was subjected to a brutal regime of indoctrination and torture until she eventually agreed to sign a declaration of repentance from her previous political beliefs. ‘That was one of the most tragic moments of my life,’ she told an interviewer decades later. ‘For one month I didn’t get out of bed … My nightgown was pink and it turned black. I did not even want to wash myself or change my clothes. I suffered a mental breakdown,’
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These events did not take place behind the Iron Curtain, but in Greece. The prison camps were not in Kazakhstan or Siberia, but in the Aegean Sea, on the islands of Ikaria, Trikeri and Makronisos – places dedicated not to Communist persecution but to the persecution of Communists. The girl in question was from a family known to have left-wing views, and as such was considered a danger to the Greek state.

There is an unpleasant symmetry between the way Communists were treated in some parts of western Europe and the way ‘capitalists’ were treated in the east. The mass arrests carried out by the Greek authorities in the aftermath of the Second World War were not dissimilar to the mass arrests that occurred in the Baltic States and western Ukraine, and were conducted for the same reasons – to break the back of the resistance. Greece, like many countries on the western side of the Iron Curtain, also deported tens of thousands of political suspects abroad – to the Middle East, care of the British, rather than to Siberia care of the Soviets. Government-backed militias subjected large sections of the population to waves of rape, looting and murder that were every bit as random and brutal as anything that happened in eastern Europe.

There are also parallels between the way in which the right seized power in Greece and the way the left seized power in the Eastern Bloc. Right-wing conservatives were not the dominant force in Greek politics, and yet they managed to sideline the much more popular Communists - just as the powerful traditional parties were sidelined in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The deliberate infiltration of the police for political gain was just as cynical on both sides. In Greece this led the Communists to resign from the cabinet in protest as early as December 1944 — an event which found its mirror image just over three years later when the traditional parties resigned from the Czech cabinet over the same issue. The Greek right, like the Communists in eastern Europe, used both the media and the courts to demonize and punish their political opponents. Neither were they above sabotaging the democratic process. The Greek elections in March 1946 were marred by abstentions and intimidation of the electorate, just as the elections in the Baltic States were; and the referendum on restoring the Greek monarchy later the same year was every bit as rigged as the elections in Romania.

In each case such behaviour was possible only because the dominant authority had the backing of a foreign superpower. Behind the Iron Curtain it was the Soviet Union who dictated the actions of the Communists, while in Greece it was the British, and later the Americans, who guaranteed the actions of the right. Without the intervention of outsiders it is difficult to see how the Communists would ever have gained power in most of eastern Europe — just as it is difficult to see how they could have failed to gain power in Greece. Little wonder that the people of both regions felt bitter about the meddling of foreigners. If the Romanians and Poles protested that they were being ensnared by ‘foreigners without God or country’, so too could some Greeks legitimately bemoan their ‘enslavement … by foreign imperialists’.
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It was not only in Greece that the behaviour of the ‘democratic’ government mirrored the behaviour of the Communist governments of eastern Europe. The trend for sidelining and demonizing political opponents was the same across the continent, even if it was not quite so extreme as it was in Greece. For example, the ejection of Communists from the governments of Italy, France, Belgium and Luxembourg in 1947 mirrored the ejection of traditional politicians from the eastern European governments. The consequences for democracy may not have been quite so disastrous, but the intentions were the same: to neutralize the opposition, and to curry favour with a superpower sponsor. It was these superpowers who held all the important cards, and their influence was just as strong in both halves of Europe. American attempts to direct policy in the West were just as meddlesome as Soviet attempts to control governments in the East. It was only the methods that were different: America used the ‘carrot’ of Marshall Aid while the Soviets used the ‘stick’ of military coercion.