The Prokuratura (prosecutor's office) also had supervisory power. All laws were prepared and previously agreed on in corresponding Party committees and then unanimously adopted in the soviets of the republics.Ĭontrol over the economic and financial activities of all Estonian enterprises, institutions, and organizations was governed by the State Control Committee, the Council of Ministers, and the Audit Agency of the Ministry of Finance. Soviet laws trumped republican legislation, and the soviets of the individual republics lacked the power to adopt laws contrary to Soviet law. Legislative power, for its part, was vested in the USSR Supreme Soviet and in the constituent soviets of the republics. The penitentiary system was paramilitary in nature, centralized, and subordinated to the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. In reality, however, the only right vested in the republics of the Soviet Union was that of implementing the directives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, with very little attention paid to local conditions.Īlthough formally independent, in practice, courts were also beholden to the Party, since the judges, as Communist Party members, had to obey their corresponding committees. Similarly, the executive was organized in the form of executive committees ("workers councils") of administrative units. Nominal "people's power" was subordinated to Soviet policymaking bodies or Party committees. Upon seizing power, the USSR imposed a strict, centrally planned one-party rule. Soviet regime as the enforcer of law and order in the Baltic state. Concurrently, an Estonian territorial NKVD (Soviet secret police) was established by the Unlike the majority of other countries subjected to communism and totalitarianism, the forces that enveloped Estonia following World War II were not national in origin but, rather, occupying regimes forced upon Estonia under agreements signed by the Great Powers.Īfter Estonia's annexation by the USSR in 1940, the Soviet Union immediately demolished all of Estonia's legal systems and security structures.
In any event, the forced collectivisation of 1949 made it much harder for peasants to support the forest brethren.The path toward glasnost and perestroika introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, following years of stagnation under the successive administrations of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, spawned the beginning of Soviet collapse and spelled the end of the occupation of Estonia. These ranged from amnesties and the legalisation of the forest brethren to the deportation of potential supporters and the use of informers and assassins. The paper analyses Soviet strategies in the eventually successful fight against the partisans. The paper discusses the connection between the progressive reconciliation of the population with the Soviet regime and the decline of resistance as well as the way in which hopes of Western intervention or the breakdown of the Soviet order in Estonia proved to be unfounded. Only a minority actively participated in armed resistance. Most of those who were labelled as ‘forest brethren’ simply went into hiding to avoid possible arrest or mobilisation into the Soviet army. Sovietisation, economic exploitation and the politics of repression and outright terror led to armed resistance. The focus is, however, the post-war period. After a brief historical introduction the paper deals with the impact of the first year of Soviet rule 1940–1941, the armed resistance of summer 1941 and the German occupation of 1941–1944.