Mobilisation in Estonia

On 16 November 1918 the Estonian Provisional Government in Tallinn decided to raise a People’s Army (Rahvavägi) to defend the independence and the democratic order of the republic. A British chronology of the war speaks of mobilisation, but it was a mobilisation only partly compulsory. Officers, doctors and military officials were called up compulsorily, and soldiers who had served in the Estonian national regiments in 1917 were summoned to units with the same numbers. All the rest were to join the army as volunteers. Estonians regard this day as the birthday of their armed forces and still celebrate it as their holiday.

The government had then been working for only a few days. After the declaration of independence in February its members had spent the whole period of German occupation in hiding or in camps. When revolution broke out in Germany, on 11 November the government resumed work under the deputy prime minister Jaan Poska, and over the following days the Germans handed over civil authority to it. The prime minister, Konstantin Päts, was still interned in a German camp in the Grodno region, from which he returned to Tallinn only on 20 November. On the same 11 November the volunteer Defence League (Kaitseliit) was formed to keep order in the towns and the countryside. On 12 November the government decided to create a regular army and entrusted military affairs to General Andres Larka.

There was a reason for the haste. On 13 November Lenin’s government annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and on 15 November in Petrograd the Estonian Bolsheviks set up a Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Estonia under Jaan Anvelt, which was to take power once the Germans had left. On 16 November, the day of the decision in Tallinn, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, Jukums Vācietis, ordered an advance behind the withdrawing German forces on a broad front from the Gulf of Finland to Ukraine, though without engaging them in battle.

On 17 November the newspapers published the resolution raising the People’s Army. The government hoped for 25,000 men aged from 21 to 35. According to Estonian accounts, however, only about 1,500 volunteers had come forward by the end of November. Estonian historians write that many people, weary after years of war, for a long time saw no need to create an army of their own. By the end of the month the Defence League numbered about 14,500 members, but they were armed with rifles of various types, with little ammunition and a few dozen machine guns. On 21 November the government formed the 1st Division under General Aleksander Tõnisson, with regiments in Tallinn, Tartu, Võru, Narva, Rakvere and Pärnu. On the same day the agreement signed in Riga with the German plenipotentiary August Winnig, which handed over authority in the country to the Estonians, came into force.

The volunteer army was still in its infancy when the test came. On 28 November the Red Army attacked Narva, and the Estonian War of Independence began. The next day the government declared martial law and compulsory mobilisation of the men born in 1893–1896, and in December it called up further age groups.