Author: Dan Kaszeta
ISBN No: 9781787389397
Review date: 09/05/2024
No of pages: 272
Publisher: Hurst
Publisher URL:
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-forest-brotherhood/
Year of publication: 01/08/2023
Brief:
price
£25, hardback
The core of the book, of resisters to the Soviets after 1945 in the forests of the three Baltic republics is a little-known yet stirring story, that only starts a third into the book; understandably so, as the non-Balt reader has much background – history, geography – to take in.
The heart of the book is the three chapters on the resistance in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Exact experiences differed, depending for example on geography (Estonia had a handy link to free Finland a sea crossing away). While ‘much of the daily reality of the struggle was very similar across the region’, the author keeps stressing that the three states have separate stories (just as, we might add, the Scots, Welsh and Irish wouldn’t thank anyone for lumping them together). In all three, the ‘Soviet occupations were truly awful: torture, murder, deportation of innocent civilians, expropriation of property’ (page 242).
The Forest Brothers were a cross-section of society. “Being a Forest Brother (or Sister) meant living a cold, damp, harsh life in the forests and swamps through all four seasons and somehow not starving to death,” which suited people who were used to rural rather than city life. If you weren’t concealed in a bunker, because you preferred the (relative) comfort of a barn, the Soviets could more easily hunt you down.
Some of the resistance was symbolic, such as raising the national flag (page 104), an act punishable by the Soviets. The resisters faced a dilemma; it made sense to split into ever smaller groups to evade the authorities; yet that implied more demands on communications, or less impactful resistance. As with any political movement, the resisters had to decide whether to work for the short or long term, for fighting the Russians at once, or preparing for independence after the hoped-for third world war between Russia and what became NATO.
The author sees parallels between the resistance to the Vietnamese fighting the Americans later; I would add the Irish republicans in the civil war after 1918, if the British state had not come to terms in 1921. Conflict was ‘low-intensity’; ‘ambushes and raids have been a core tactic of irregular forces in asymmetric warfare’. Raids might not be so much to kill enemies as to gather necessary ‘food, arms, ammunition, medical supplies, money, documents, or supplies for printing operations’.
Earlier, in 1940 and then 1941 to 1944, back-to-back Soviet and Nazi occupations left the three Baltic republics ‘traumatised’ [page 81]. Most people were just trying to get by and were neither collaborators nor resisters [page 61]. “Some people even had a foot in both camps. Baltic resistance to German occupation was diverse but generally one of subterfuge and passive resistance rather than armed partisan units taking up armed struggle.”
While there was, indeed, a fair amount of organisation-building and much passive resistance, such as underground publishing and resistance to conscription, there was comparatively little armed partisan resistance against the Germans aside from the Jewish and Soviet partisans mentioned earlier. This has often been weaponised by those wishing to portray the Baltic states as collaborators”, although the author suggests that Baltic men fighting in Soviet armies might be regarded as collaborators also, with the Soviet Union, as neither the Soviets nor the Nazis ruled the Baltic states legitimately.
Why little armed resistance to the Nazis? The author explains that once the Germans were recruiting from among the occupied population, people understood that the occupier would hardly be handing out weapons ‘if it believed it was winning the war’. Hence better to wait and see; and await the presumed even more vicious Soviet comeback.
The author concludes by noting that much of Europe has a troubled 20th century history. I would add from my own reading sparked by this work that the Baltic lands had bandits during the First World War, when the Germans conquered the region from Czarist Russia (War Land on the Eastern Front, by the American historian ); and other Soviet-captured countries had resisters in the hinterlands, such as Romania (see Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the police state 1948-1965, also published by Hurst, in 1999).
Did any of it matter, if the resisters were outgunned and doomed? The author reminds us that the sacrifice of a ‘brave if ultimately futile partisan resistance’ has become part of Baltic national identities. Even at the time, I would suggest, the resisters had an element of self-consciousness, hence their posing for photographs, as on the cover. What they went through continues to have meaning if we choose it to.
