Germans take Narva

On the morning of 4 March 1918 German units entered Narva, a town on the Narva (Narova) river, about 150 kilometres from Petrograd. They did not have to fight. The Red defenders had left the town the previous evening, and the Germans, unaware of this, waited until morning. The day before, the Soviet delegation had signed the peace treaty at Brest, so the capture of Narva was the last step of Operation Faustschlag in the north and the Germans’ last move towards the Russian capital.

Narva was a border town in the literal sense. Until 1917 the town itself and Ivangorod on the opposite bank of the river belonged to the Governorate of St Petersburg, while the great spinning mills in the suburbs already belonged to the Governorate of Estonia. Russians and Estonians lived here in equal numbers, and thousands of workers were employed in the factories, among whom the Bolsheviks were strong. In 1917 the town authorities applied for Narva to be joined to the autonomous Governorate of Estonia. Lenin’s government agreed to this in November, and the inhabitants supported the change in a vote. In February 1918 the local Red Guard numbered about 1,200 men, according to Estonian studies.

After the capture of Reval on 25 February the Germans advanced east by rail. Estonian Red Guards from Rakvere, Jõhvi and Narva itself fought at Sompa station, at Jõhvi and at Vaivara, but fell back every day. According to Estonian sources the Germans hanged twelve Red Guard prisoners at Rakvere. The defence of Narva was organised at the last moment. It consisted of a Red Army detachment, a group of Hungarian internationalists with Béla Kun and about a thousand sailors of the Baltic Fleet under the People’s Commissar for Naval Affairs, Pavel Dybenko, who was appointed commandant of the town.

According to Russian researchers, Dybenko, against the advice of professional officers, led his sailors in a counter-attack along the railway on the morning of 3 March. After a clash between the stations of Vaivara and Korf, the detachment, threatened with being outflanked, fell back, and at about 3 p.m. the Germans reached the hills about five kilometres north-west of the town. In the evening the Reds, as a later report put it, fled Narva “without pressure from the Germans”. General Dmitry Parsky, sent from Petrograd, tried to rally them at Yamburg (Kingisepp) and even planned a counter-attack, but the sailors refused to go back and fled by train all the way to Gatchina. The Estonian Red Guards halted in the Yamburg area and there formed the first units of Estonian Red Riflemen. Dybenko’s detachment was disarmed at Gatchina on 6 March, and he himself was soon expelled from the party and stripped of his posts for the loss of Narva.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk made the Narva river the eastern border of Estonia, which was to be occupied by a German “police” until order was restored. The front line settled on the river and on Lake Peipus. The Germans remained in Narva until the end of November 1918. When they began to withdraw after the armistice, the Red Army attacked the town on 28 November, and the next day the Commune of the Working People of Estonia was proclaimed there. The Estonian War of Independence began with the fighting for Narva.