Germans take Reval and Pskov

On 25 February 1918, the eighth day of the German offensive in the east, two towns fell that opened the road to Petrograd. That day German troops entered Reval (Tallinn), capital of the Governorate of Estonia and the main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Earlier, at about 2 a.m., the Germans had taken Pskov, seat of the headquarters of the Russian Northern Front. The British chronology of the war also records under 25 February the capture of Pernau, but according to Estonian sources the Germans had entered it on 24 February, as they had Dorpat.

Reval

Reval was approached by units that had crossed to the mainland from the islands of the West Estonian Archipelago, taken in October 1917. According to Estonian sources they landed at Virtsu around 20 February and were at Haapsalu on 21 February. They were resisted only by a few detachments of the Estonian Red Guard, which clashed with the Germans near Keila on 23 February. The Bolsheviks hastily evacuated the town. Russian sailors blew up the coastal batteries on the islands of Naissaar and Aegna, and the last ships of the Baltic Fleet sailed for Helsinki. The submarine Yedinorog, under tow, sank on the way.

Into the gap between the departing Bolsheviks and the arriving Germans stepped the Estonian Salvation Committee. On 24 February it proclaimed in Tallinn the independence of the Republic of Estonia and set up a provisional government. When the Germans marched in the next day, they recognised neither the new state nor its government. The town was placed under military administration, and on 28 February General Adolf von Seckendorff, who had until then administered the islands, arrived in Tallinn.

Pskov

Before the German offensive Pskov had been the rear base of the Russian front. It was here, in a train at the station, that Tsar Nicholas II signed his act of abdication in March 1917. On 21 February 1918 the town was declared in a state of siege, but the Russian 12th Army covering it was by then capable only of flight. Its soldiers left the town in crowds along the road to Luga. The Germans were coming from Ostrov and from Walk in small detachments. In a train captured at Dvinsk, armoured with sandbags, and in armoured cars they advanced along the railway and the road. Boris Pozern of the Northern Front’s military leadership reported that the enemy numbered “probably barely companies”, but had artillery and cavalry. On the evening of 23 February, at a Bolshevik meeting in the local theatre, speakers listed how the workers did not want to defend Soviet power, the railwaymen were sabotaging the evacuation, and the guns were useless because the soldiers had thrown away their breechblocks.

The town was defended by a company of Pskov Red Guards, Latvian riflemen of the 2nd Riga Regiment, the volunteer 2nd Red Army regiment and a few smaller units. According to Pskov researchers the main clash, on the Cherekha river some ten or more kilometres from the town, took place on 24 February, and not on the evening of 23 February, as later Soviet memoirs had it. Looting began in the town, and the deputy chairman of the local soviet was killed by a group of plundering soldiers. On the evening of 24 February the Germans outflanked the defenders by side roads and at about 6 p.m. took the railway station. Around midnight the last fight with small groups of Red Guards took place in the streets leading to the station. By about 2 a.m. on 25 February the Germans held the whole town, although shooting was still going on in the suburbs. According to Soviet accounts, the retreating Red Guards blew up two wagons of explosives near the former pyroxylin stores just as a German battalion was passing, killing more than two hundred Germans. Independent sources do not confirm this figure. “The town was taken by small German forces”, Pozern reported to Petrograd on 26 February. “Our misfortune lies in the lack of preparation, and also in the fact that no orders can change a mood prepared in advance: not to wage war.”

Petrograd in danger

From Pskov to Petrograd it is about 280 kilometres, and on 25 February the Germans also set off from Estonia towards Narva. In the capital a Committee of Revolutionary Defence had been operating since 21 February, and volunteers for the Red Army began to be enlisted en masse. The government of Vladimir Lenin had already accepted the new German ultimatum, but the Germans announced that they would keep advancing until the peace was signed. On 25 February Lenin wrote in Pravda that the week from the capture of Dvinsk to the capture of Pskov, which according to a report then circulating had afterwards been retaken, had been a “bitter, humiliating, hard but necessary” lesson. The rumour that Pskov had been retaken proved false. The town remained in German hands until November 1918. On 26 February the Council of People’s Commissars decided to move the government to Moscow.

Later the fighting at Pskov became the basis of a legend. From 1938 Stalinist propaganda claimed that on 23 February 1918 the young Red Army had “repulsed” the Germans at Pskov and Narva, which is why the day was celebrated as its anniversary, today Defender of the Fatherland Day. In reality Pskov fell in the night of 24–25 February, and Narva was abandoned on the evening of 3 March, after a failed morning attack, by the sailors of Pavel Dybenko, even though the Germans were not pressing them at all. They fled all the way to Gatchina. The Germans entered Narva on the morning of 4 March, after the peace had already been signed at Brest.