United Baltic diets

On 12 April 1918 the United Provincial Council of Livonia, Estonia, Riga and Ösel (Vereinigter Landesrat für Livland, Estland, Riga und Ösel) met in Riga. By a majority vote it asked Emperor Wilhelm II for Germany to go on defending the country and to support its separation from Russia, and to unite Livonia, Estonia, Riga and the island of Saaremaa into a single constitutional monarchy with a common constitution, joined by personal union to the Prussian crown. The council also asked for permission to form its own authorities and for a military, monetary and trade convention with the Reich. The British chronology of the war wrongly gives 13 April.

The initiative came from the Baltic Germans, for centuries the landowning and urban elite of these lands, and especially from the Knighthoods (Ritterschaften) of Estonia and Livonia. At the turn of 1917 and 1918 their assemblies had already proclaimed a break with Bolshevik Russia. The Germans had taken Riga as early as September 1917, and in February 1918 they occupied the rest of Livonia and the whole of Estonia, while the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk obliged Russia to evacuate these lands, which were to be guarded by a German “police”. Unlike Courland, which Russia had renounced and which the Emperor recognised in March as a separate state, the fate of Estonia and Livonia remained formally open. The German Supreme Army Command saw the local landed gentry as its only partner and did not want to deal with the Estonian or Latvian national movements.

The council grew out of two assemblies of the estates convened under German occupation: on 9 April in Tallinn for Estonia and on 10 April in Riga for Livonia. They included representatives of the Knighthoods, the estate owners, the clergy, the towns and the rural municipalities, as well as the University of Dorpat. The proportions bore no relation to the make-up of the population. According to Latvian and English-language studies, the council had 35 Germans, 13 Estonians and 11 Latvians, although Germans made up only a few per cent of the inhabitants. The council sent a telegram of thanks to the Emperor and chose a delegation headed by the leader of the Estonian Knighthood, Baron Eduard von Dellingshausen. On 21 April Chancellor Georg von Hertling received it in Berlin, but beyond polite promises gave it nothing concrete.

Estonian and Latvian national activists did not recognise the council. The Estonians had declared independence on 24 February, and the Latvian national council had come out in favour of an independent Latvia as early as January. At the Livonian assembly in Riga on 10 April the elder of the Vana-Antsla rural municipality, Peeter Koemets, read out a statement by the municipal elders of southern Estonia, prepared by the underground provisional government of Konstantin Päts: the Estonians protested against the arbitrary rule of the occupiers, wanted to unite with neither Germany nor Russia, and recognised their own provisional government as the only legitimate authority. At the end of April Soviet Russia also formally protested against the Riga resolutions, disputing the right of the Baltic Germans to speak on behalf of Latvians and Estonians.

Berlin hesitated for a long time. Only when Russia, in the supplementary treaty of August 1918, renounced sovereignty over Estonia and Livonia did the Emperor recognise their independence on 22 September, and on 5 November the Baltic Germans proclaimed the United Baltic Duchy in Riga. A few days later Germany lost the war; the state never began to function, and in its place arose independent Estonia and Latvia.