Paul Goble and his unfortunate misinformation about Estonia´s
silenced hero Endel Lippmaa
/Feud and lies, including from Toomas H. Ilves date back to 1990
August 18, 2015
By Anneli Reigas (Anneli Rõigas)
The story written, tweeted and shared in some English language sites since 1 August 2015 by Paul Goble, former US State Department Baltic desk officer immediately after the Baltic freedom hero Endel Lippmaa perished on 30 July 2015 contains factual errors, depicts Lippmaa weirdly and is fueling up again old feud and lies that needs to be clarified.
“If you conduct your life on the basis of truth and honesty, it gives you a sense of satisfaction and self-confidence”, Dalai Lama tweeted in summer three years ago in 2012. Golden words. This is also what the life of Estonia´s battle for freedom hero - who is also known as one of the very few worldowned Estonian scientists - Endel Lippmaa (15 September 1930 – 30 July 2015) was about.
I really would like not to write this all. But I have no choice. Before I left Estonian media in late 90s and then returned to write for Finnish News Agency and later to Agence France Presse for a decade I published myself dozens of articles by Paul Goble in Estonian dailies, always trusting that claims and facts were correct (Lennart Meri often faxed them to me).
Endel Lippmaa was and will remain one of my closest friends, my brother in arms during our battle for Baltic independence 1989-1991. We knew we were risking a lot. We took that risk. What we did not knew was that we will be hunted even decades later.
Paul Goble depicts Endel Lippmaa in a way leaving false impression that the aim of Lippmaa´s actions in autumn 1990 was (as Goble put it) „to isolate me from my friend Toomas Hendrik Ilves and cause some problems for me at my workplace with more than a little trepidation.“
There is no truth in that Goble´s claim: Endel Lippmaa never did anything to isolate Goble and Ilves and he did nothing to cause any problems at workplace for Goble. The real story behind 1990 events is as follows.
The feud against Endel Lippmaa started almost immediately after out great victory in Kremlin in December 1989 when we managed to force Soviet Congress to admit that before Baltic states became part of Soviet Union and were occupied Hitler and Stalin had made a secret deal on that. Lippmaa´s role and activities that lead to this victory on 24 December 1989 in Kremlin was crucial. Gorbachev´s deputy Jakovlev later said that it was turning point for USSR - after that day it was not whether but when Soviet Union will fall apart.
After our battle and victory in Kremlin in 1989 that I attended as journalist Endel Lippmaa tried to use all means to get Western states to really back our freedom fight – and not just in empty words but in real actions.
Ever since 1990 we felt there were people not just in Moscow but also some in West who worked against us, and did a lot to harm us and destroy our attempts to get broader support to our wish to restore the independence of the Baltic States. One of the silly but also rather dangerous steps in that feud road was when we were labelled as „CIA agents“ in autumn 1990 during the events that put clear frontline between us and people like Toomas H. Ilves who worked at Radio Free Europe that time.
Paul Goble´s 1 August 2015 story recalls that time so let me recall what caused that feud against Lippmaa in autumn 1990. We had tried to gain international support for our goals at some international conferences (including CSCE in Copenhagen in June 1990, then CSCE in Vienna, and CSCE in New York in autumn 1990) but not many statemen were bold enough to really speak out. One of the few states on our side was Island and its Foreign Minister Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson. Since I had been recruited in addition to my work in Estonian daily in spring 1989 also by one of the Western news agencies – Finnish News Agency I started to use my earnings to attend those conferences as journalist. When Lippmaa learned about my trip plan to go to CSCE Copenhagen he asked me to take with me and to distribute also the materials he had prepared for all delegations. He used every mean he could to get West to act and not just to watch and wait until Soviet tanks might end that all.
The position of US government these years was rather shameful – empty words, clear unwritten message that nothing should jeopradize Gorbachev. We started to feel that some important decisions might be taken on Baltic expense. In 1990 Endel Lippmaa was worried and for good reason that the decision about unification of Germany might have hidden price – us: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
When in autumn 1990 the ratification of the so called Two-Plus-For Treaty on unification of Germany was on table I had travelled to US to attend CSCE New York meeting and to seek the National Forum Foundation internship as a journalist in Washington, in my naive hope I can set up as close ties with US Media as I had managed to set up with Finnish News Agency. Lippmaa had absolutely nothing to do with my 1990 autumn trip to US but when he learned I am in Washington and stay for longer he contacted me and sent a fax about his concerns regarding Two-Plus-For Treaty.
The same concerns were also written into statement by Baltic leaders Arnold Rüütel, Vytautas Landsbergis and Anatolijis Gorbunovs and sent to Congress. On 26 September 1990 six senators, including Paul Simon and Bill Bradley sent a letter to the White House to President Bush. They outlined concerns of (still under Soviet rule) Baltic state leaders and asked President Bush for assurance „prior to Senate action that ratification of the Two-Plus-Four Treaty is fully consistent with our long-standing policy towards the Baltic states“.
I myself attended one debate about these discussions at the Congress and wrote about our concerns in Estonian daily in late September 1990. On 6 October 1990 Endel Lippmaa who himself was in Tallinn wrote much bigger article by his own about these concerns and also managed to publish the letter of US senators to President.
To our big surprise that all caused anger by some people, including Toomas H. Ilves who lived in west Germany that time and worked for US government financed Radio Free Europe. Both Toomas H. Ilves and his colleague Riina Kionka then spread misinformation. To our great surprise it turned out Radio Free Europe where they worked aired claim that relations between states should be made between governments only, etc etc. All was done to show that Baltic freedom fight leader Endel Lippmaa had no credentials to act. And on top of it both me and two other Estonian´s who were that time in Washington were labelled as people „linked to CIA“.
The fact that also US State Department Baltic desk officer Paul Goble was linked to this confusion who has right and who not to do what, as emerged from his 1 August 2015 story was a surprise to me. I thought we had only friends at the US State Department but it certainly did not look so.
Part of the anger fueled by the fact that Endel Lippmaa used in 1990 all means to get Baltic interests not to be ignored fall also to President Arnold Rüütel, and our longtime consul in New York during occupation Ernst Jaakson who completely supported Endel Lippmaa´s actions. Lippmaa felt and for good reason that the that time Soviet Estonian Foreign Ministry did not enough and he acted upon his heart and wisdom that foreign ministry (where even some KGB related people had been hired) lacked.
Thus there was nothing personal in Endel Lippmaa´s 1990 actions, he was never the man who would have wasted his time and energy to do something so meaningless as Paul Goble falsely claimed.
The decisions taken about Toomas H. Ilves by Radio Free Europe in autumn 1990 were taken by Radio Free Europe and not by Endel Lippmaa. I myself attended one of those official meetings in autumn 1990 where Ilves personality was discussed. We had no power to ban anyone from his work and all we wished was that false claims, feud and misinformation will end. The empty scandal against us was fuled at the newspaper by two of my new fellow journalists, both good friends to Ilves, including Toomas H. Liiv, serial pedophile and currenty in jail again.
Unfortunately that feud against Endel Lippmaa never ended and in only seemed to grow each time Lippmaa outlined some another weird step or plan that could jeopardize Estonia´s security and other interests – including the 90s plan (the plan was supported by Ilves) to sell away Estonia´s energy plants that Lippmaa managed to block, he stood against Gazprom 2007 ambitions to build pipeline partly to Estonia and often stood up as real president when Estonian leaders seemed to step to stupid decisions or kept their mouth shut (in case of Mistrals) etc etc. That kept the old feud against him just alive.
But contrary to Paul Goble depiction he always stood up for sometihing for a reason and not just against somebody.
There are also some factual errors in Paul Goble story.
Paul Goble claims: „President Meri, of course, had his own special relationship with Lippmaa: Meri’s family took in Endel at one point after members of the future academician’s family were killed, and Lippmaa was among thos who accused Meri of working with the Soviet security agencies.“
This claim by Paul Goble is completely untrue and I wonder from whom Goble got it. After Endel Lippmaa who was 12 that time, lost his family on 27 January 1943 during the Red Army bombing of Tartu (he lived in Tartu Botanic Garden), Estonia´s second biggest town he stayed in Tartu for few more days and nights in the family of Tartu University rector who was good friend to his scientist parents Teodor Lippmaa and Hilja Lippmaa. After memorial service hold at the Tartu University church the young boy then travelled to Tallinn where funeral was hold on 2 February 1943 and he stayed with her mom´s sister Juta Mändmets at Nomme district, in the home of Estonian writer and journalist Jakob Mändmets who himself had died when Endel Lippmaa was just few months old.
Thus contrary to Goble´s claim in his 1 August 2015 article at no point at all did Endel Lippmaa stay with Meri family.
I am one of the few persons whom Lennart Meri called hundreds of times when he was a President in 90s and I do appreciate a lot lot all good things he did to Estonia, Lennart Meri made made post-Soviet Estonia look bigger and nobler than it is but there is no doubt Endel Lippmaa had good reasons to warn about his classmate´s family KGB ties.
Lennart Meri knew the truth about his family ties the best and I never heard him complaining about Lippmaa for outlining his worries about his classmate´s family alleged KGB ties. The reason why Endel Lippmaa did not outline these ties when Lennart Meri became first time president in 1992 and he came out with this claim during 1996 presidential elections was related to the decision taken by his friend and classmate Lennart Meri in summer 1994 when Meri signed treaties in Kremlin that enabled thousands of Russian former army personnel to remain in Estonia.
I wish to believe Meri had good reasons for that (if that was only way to get most of Soviet army out by the end of summer 1994), but I do also understand Lippmaa´s concerns. Unfortunately, recent history of Estonia has shown that KGB and Soviet elite managed to cement themselves into most important insitutions in Estonia (dozens KGB officers were taken even to Est Security police and several have turned out in last years as working also for FSB etc.
Endel Lippmaa always judged people by their actions. He never asked glory for himself. He is one of the few worldowned Estonian scientists and someone who committed himself completely for the Baltic freedom struggle and always spoke out and took actions when he felt its his duty.
I kindly ask Paul Goble who tweeted and shared his misleading story in English language media, including in his Windows on Eurasia, FB site and Twitter to fix the factual errors and at least in his heart to apologize.
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cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/43/News Articles/1299927?ln=en
www.telegraph.co.uk/…/11801251/Endel-Lippmaa-physicist-obit…
https://www.facebook.com/anneli.reigas/posts/10204627544072773:0
scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/pt.5.6165
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// Estonian scientist Endel Lippmaa is the man who forced Kremlin in 1989 to admit that before Baltic States were occupied by Stalin´s Red army Hitler and Stalin had made a secret deal who gets what in Europe. We recalled those events - the long battle to force Kremlin to admit that secret deal existed (blowing up the Kremlin free-will 1940 revolutions claims that came as shock to many in USSR) in our joint book in 2009. That was second and amended print of the book written 2 decades earlier by Estonian lawyer H. Lindpere who asked us for the new book to submit also our memories. Lippmaa was against the idea first because he did not like that first book but I managed to change his mind. He had asked me why dont we just write our own book but I thought we should use every chance to recall those events and our 1989 victory in Kremlin. The full book compiled by H. Lindpere "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: Challening Soviet history", including my own article about our battle in Moscow in 1989 and Lippmaa´s crucial role is here: http://www.evi.ee/old/lib/MRP_ENG.pdf. Remarkable man.
I was 26 and a journalist at national daily when he proposed me to start joint fight against Soviet military factory in Sillamäe and its nuclear waste storage in 1989 winter, that was then followed by fight for Baltic freedom in summer and autumn 1989 in Moscow to force Kemlin to admit and nullify the Hitler-Stalin secret pact from 1939. These joint efforts developed quickly into friendship, one of the most special friendship I have had this lifetime.
He had gone through hell in his childhood when he had lost his family - mom, dad and sister during Red army bombing of the Tartu Botanic Gardens where he lived with his scientist dad, mom and sister. But he had warm heart. But cold heart for those he didnt like - liars, traitors. Super smart mind. Great sense of humour. Man with a mission. He became the person his mom and dad and sister could be always proud.
We both knew that year 1989 we were put into the most hated person´s list by anti-Baltic officials from Soviet Defence Ministry and Putin and his kind of people during that battle. We nailed that position with incident before the decisive debate and voting at the Congress session in Kremlin in Christmas1989 - when we managed to block the attempt of Soviet Defence Ministry to put up a massive exibition they had prepared with false facts about Baltic States history that was aimed to convince the minds of nearly 2000 Soviet deputies, so they would not support decision to publicly admit that Hitler Stalin secret protocol really existed. Endel Lippmaa described those events in a book, released in August 2009 as follows:
"At that time, the interests of two powerful administrations clashed – the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs.
The Ministry of Defence had played its trump card earlier. Shortly before Yakovlev’s speech on December 23rd, the political administration of the Ministry of Defence attempted to erect a large display in the foyer of the Palace of Congresses about the “unanimous” decision of the Baltic States to be embraced by Josef Vissarionovich Stalin and the happy family of Soviet nations.
When some of our people began to question whether the display had been approved, the stands were reversed, to be unveiled during the break. I was attending the session when the journalist Anneli Reigas, who had been covering the MRP aff air in a long and comprehensive series of articles in Noorte Hääl, notifi ed me of the incident. Using a public microphone I asked Gorbachev whether this was a new way of working in the Soviet Congress. My microphone was switched off . Since there was no way of interrupting me or the session, Gorbachev eventually gave Lukyanov the order to remove the display."
p.s. I will add full article by Endel Lippmaa from 2009 book:
On the history of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and my work for the commission by Endel Lippmaa.
"The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23rd 1939 has an interesting history. By 1939, Europe had become a playground for two superpowers that each wanted to rule the world. They soon understood that it was easier to expand by taking over territories of other countries than by attacking each other. In the spring and summer of 1939 they began the approaches towards each other that would lead to the beginning of there-division of their world. In World War I Germany had lost all its colonies plus the territories in the East linked to the Polish corridor. Russia had lost all its western territories, including all four Baltic States from Finland to Lithuania, the whole of Poland including Warsaw, and Bessarabia. As always, the losers were dreaming of revenge and looking for allies. The Soviet Union’s efforts to form an alliance with Great Britain and France failed when they refused to allow the USSR to deploy its forces in the Baltic States, Poland and Romania. On August 15th 1939, the same day that British and French representatives had left Moscow, the two dictators began a dialogue between two ideologies of world domination, one based on class and the other on race. On August 17th 1939 the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and the ambassador of the Germany state held detailed negotiations in Moscow over the new cooperation treaty that had been transcribed by V. Pavlov (Appendix 1). The partners discussed economic, financial, military and territorial policy issues and the non-aggression treaty, but the issue of deployment of forces in the Baltic States was taken up on the initiative of the Soviet government. Molotov insisted that the territorial policy issues raised by the Germans on August 15th must not be written in the public text of the non-aggression treaty, but in its separate secret protocol instead. Molotov also said that the position of the USSR had been approved personally by comrade Stalin. Ambassador Schulenburg stressed that the German party had major problems with the secret protocol demanded by the Soviet government, since the Germans had no information about its specifi c contents, and asked the Soviets to submit at least a rough draft of the protocol.
In screening the victims of future aggression, German officials preferred to have oral agreements, while the ever-suspicious Soviet leaders insisted on laying it down in writing in secret protocols. The two partners even developed new diplomatic terms to denominate the would-be annexation areas, naming them spheres of interest, spheres of infl uence or march-through zones. Shortly afterwards, the two developed a joint image of a plutocratic enemy, caricatured as a fat spatterdashed Jewish banker from London.
Moscow had already completed the upgrading of the 1926 neutrality treaty into a five item non-aggression pact by August 19th 1939. The telegram sent to Berlin in that regard contained a postscript with a demand to also sign a separate top-secret additional protocol to the pact concerning the foreign policy aims of both states (Appendix 2). In his response by telegram to Stalin, Hitler emphasized that all issues raised by the Soviet government in connection with the secret protocol could be resolved without delay by the plenipotentiary of Germany in the Moscow negotiations. He asked that the representative of the German Reich be received either on Tuesday, August 22nd or at the latest on Wednesday August 23rd. Stalin responded to Hitler’s proposal at once by a return telegram in which he expressed satisfaction concerning the breakthrough in German-Soviet relations and agreed to meet Mr. Ribbentrop on August 23rd.
With the secret protocols signed on August 23rd 1939 and on later dates, the aggressors divided the whole of Eastern Europe from the Black Sea to the North Sea. The secret protocol from September 28th re-divided Poland, while under the secret protocol signed on January 10th 1941 the USSR purchased from Germany the Marijampole district and town of the pre-war Republic of Lithuania. In the earlier division, Germany had retained the area as an elk-hunting ground for Ribbentrop, but the Red Army occupied it shortly after Lithuania and the USSR had signed a pact of mutual assistance on October 10th 1939.
On November 25th 1940, Molotov proposed another five secret protocols to the Germans. In the first of them the Soviets demanded the area between Batumi, Baku and the Persian Gulf (Kuwait), in the second – the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, in the third – again and finally Finland, and in the fifth – Bulgaria. The fourth protocol was not related to territorial demands. These proposals were rejected by Mussolini and ended the potential expansion of the Tripartite Pact.
The protocols were actually not so secret at all. German Ambassador Schulenburg
had already revealed the contents of the secret protocol to his second secretary Hans-Heinrich (Johnnie) Herwarth von Bittenfeld on the morning of August 24th 1939 when von Ribbentrop was still asleep. As a devoted anti-imperialist, von Bittenfeld promptly passed this information to the ambassadors of the United States and several other countries. The governments of the Baltic States already knew the text of the protocol by the end of August 1939. The New York Times wrote about it on August 28th and September 15th, The Times on October 11th and on September 24th the Journal American even published the entire plan for the division of Europe, including an accurate map in which all four Baltic States were shown in the Soviet zone. Official enquiries made by the Baltic States were answered with diplomatic lies by aggressors who intended to keep their cruel plans secret and avoid public panic, which in Estonia’s case lasted until June 18th 1940.
As always, keeping the public unaware was to lead to greatly increased fatalities in the future. After World War II, Soviet-Nazi secret protocols were mentioned in the April 1st 1946 session of the Nuremburg trial. Seidl, who was defending Hess, asked questions and von Ribbentrop gave depositions on all of the Soviet-Nazi secret protocols that had been signed or proposed. He emphasized that if the division of Europe between the USSR and Germany was an act of aggression then both parties were equally guilty. The Soviet prosecutor General Rudenko rejected these claims by the defence, saying “We are here not to investigate the problems related to the policies of the Allies, but the charges against German war criminals”.
It was agreed that there was no mandate, the murderers who had lost the war were hung and the issue was buried. By the way, for security, this conversation was not translated and has never been published among the Russian-language materials of the Nuremburg trial.
All of the Soviet-Nazi secret protocols were published by the French already in 1946
and two years later by the Estonians (A. Rei) and the Americans. The Soviets responded by categorically denying them and claimed that they had been falsified. Valentin Falin denied the existence of the secret protocols at the Novosti press conference on August 16th 1988; Felix Kovalyov and Oleg Ržeševski, who later became experts for the MRP committee, made a denial in Pravda on September 1st 1988; and the Soviet Minister of Foreign Aff airs Gromyko did so in the magazine Der Spiegel in April 1989. (The Tripartite Pact was a treaty signed on September 27th 1940 by Germany, Italy and Japan and established the Axis powers. The Soviet Union had hoped to participate.)
However, there was more positive news. At a reception held in the USSR’s embassy in Washington D.C. in 1969, the Estonian Liberation Legion distributed a brochure on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that contained the text of all the secret protocols. On August 1986 the first Black Ribbon Day took place in Germany and a year later, on August 18th 1987, US Senator Donald. W. Riegle wrote a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, urging him to annul the secret protocols. A similar letter was sent out on June 29th 1988 by Dun Ritter and Dennis Hertel, members of the US House of Representatives. In 1987, MRP-AEG held its first rally in Hirvepark in Estonia to raise awareness of the secret documents among the general public.
The MRP-AEG protest held in the following year was already much bigger and it was clear that it was now time for action. However, the Soviet leaders had no intention of admitting the existence of the secret protocols, nor of the territorial changes that resulted from them.
A suitable moment for action came at the Congress of People’s Deputies held in Moscow at the end of May 1989. At that time it was becoming increasingly apparent that the country’s top leaders were directly linked to the Tbilisi bloodbath.
Estonian delegates –J. Aare, H. Aasmäe, G. Golubkov, I. Gräzin, A. Haug, S. Kallas, T. Käbin, T. Laak, M. Lauristin, E. Lippmaa, V. Palm, V. Pohla, I. Raig, I. Raud. V. Saar, E. Savisaar, E. Tamberg and G. Tõnspoeg – had prepared a draft resolution for setting up a committee of seventeen members with the objective of disclosing the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Treaty and the secret protocols and providing a legal assessment of the protocols.
Since I had been elected to the Presidium of the Congress of People’s Deputies as the representative of Estonia, I was able to begin negotiations with Gorbachev on this issue right away. Right there, from the Presidium’s desk, I told him how setting up the commission could be of benefi t to him in such politically tough times. To add credibility I gave him the text of the secret protocol – not the text of the actual signed protocol that had been published in the West, but of the authentic rough draft, written in fl uent Russian, that was prepared in Moscow for the negotiations with von Ribbentrop. The documents also included the Soviet-Polish pact from July 30th 1941 concerning the annulment of all 1939 Soviet-German agreements about the re-division of the Polish territory. It worked. Gorbachev fi rst discussed it with Shevardnadze and then Gorbachev, Yakovlev and I discussed it beside the assorted imported delicacies served in the softly lit second-fl oor restaurant of the Palace of Congresses. The proposal was simply too good to be rejected, so Gorbachev agreed and I presented the draft proposal for setting up the commission to the delegates.
This immediately got a reaction from V. Yarovoi who said, quite correctly, that this would make him a colonial occupier. Later, Gräzin read aloud the Russian text of the secret protocol. This impressed the delegates and later also the editors of the transcript of the session, since what was published in the bulletin No. 8, Part I, on June 1st 1989 was not the Russian draft that Gräzin had read aloud nor was it the text of the actual protocol – each of the original words was everywhere replaced with a synonym in the publication. In my opinion that fact proved once again that our texts were both authentic and important.
The statement of Mikhail Gorbachev summed up the situation. He repeated his skepticism about the existence of the secret protocols and made his famous “argument” that it was difficult to believe that Molotov had signed a document in “German letters”. He also denied any connection between the secret protocols, the occupation of the Baltic States, and their annexation by the USSR. He proposed the nomination of Yakovlev as chairman of the would-be commission and also proposed to include former ambassador Falin, as a specialist, and representatives of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. I finalized the list of commission members there at the Presidium’s desk. The list of twenty-six members was approved on June 2nd 1989. The breakdown of members was favourable for us: four from Estonia, four from Lithuania, three from Latvia, two from Moldova, two from Ukraine, one from Belarus, one from Armenia, one from Kyrgyz, four Russian democrats and, of course, four representatives of the Kremlin.
The commission’s sessions began on June 8th under the chairmanship of Yakovlev.
Four workgroups were set up: for documentation – Y. Afanasyev; legal assessment of documents – I. Gräzin; witness enquiry – K. Motieka; and research of historic background – E. Lippmaa. Falin, who had been appointed by Yakovlev as his deputy, was ordered to detail group tasks, membership and functions and to organize working facilities for the commission.Afanasyev and E. Savisaar were also elected deputies to Yakovlev. The next session was scheduled for July 5th, in the meantime Falin was asked to supply the commission with all the necessary historic documents. Falin did so by sending everyone large piles of largely irrelevant documents from the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs of the USSR, which, of course, contained no secret protocols. At the July 5th session, Savisaar proposed to prepare two draft documents for the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (but not to the Congress of People’s Deputies which was authorized to amend the resolutions of the Supreme Soviet) by August 23rd. These two documents, drafted by Gräzin, were the declaration on the 50th anniversary of the secret protocol and the resolution acknowledging the existence of the secret protocol, giving a legal assessment and declaring it invalid from the moment of signing.
However, it was clear from the outset that we would never prove our position with the kind of documents in our possession. The opposition held all the trump cards – i.e. the offi cially verifi ed documents – while we had only newspaper articles, enthusiastic speeches, and copies of books whose authenticity had not been verifi ed. This was the context in which I traveled to the United States to attend the Gordon conference on radio spectroscopy. After the conference had ended I spent two days in Washington D.C. and gathered from the US national archives, or more precisely from its department of WWII war crimes, altogether thrity-nine verifi ed documents, including all the secret protocols, treaties, agreements and their offi cial comments, the published memoirs of German statesmen, materials from the Nuremburg trial, books on the Baltic States, Soviet-German treaties and international law, in addition to abstracts from the complete sets of US and German diplomatic documents from 1939 to 1941. At the end of July, I attended a hightemperature superconductivity conference in Stanford University in the US and gathered documents from the archives in the Hoover Tower where I happened to work side by side with former US Secretary of State Schultz and the then Soviet Marshal Akhromeyev.
Now we had suffi cient ammunition to act. On July 11th and 12th there was a major conference at the Estonian representation in Moscow where we defended our positions against the Kremlin’s falsifiers of history, namely V. Falin, head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, F. Kovaljov, head of the Historical-Diplomatic Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and a number of doctors of law including A.Orlov from the Institute of History of War, O. Ržeševski from the Institute of General History, V. Sipols from the Institute of History of the USSR, A. Chubarjan – head of the Institute of General History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, as well as L. Bezymenski – political observer of Novoje Vremja magazine and V. Alexandrov – consultant of the International Department of the CPSU’s Central Committee. Among the Kremlin’s experts was also R. Müllerson, head of the international law unit of the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who did not show up. The attendance list contains a note: “(Conditionally) absent”.
/.../
Things progressed and we were able to start drafting the final document. The majority of the committee had agreed that the secret protocols existed, that it should be annulled and that Poland and the Baltic States had been divided and occupied according to the same secret protocol of August 23rd 1939. The division of the spheres of interest was so accurate that later the USSR had to pay the Germans millions (in current prices, hundreds of millions) of gold dollars for just a few thousand square kilometers of Lithuanian land. This repudiated all counterclaims from the Kremlin.
The decisive meeting was held a week later, on July 19th, in Yakovlev’s offi ce in the huge building of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He had prepared both a shorter and a longer argument of the draft resolution, which did not even declare the secret protocols invalid, but only condemned them morally. Moreover, it said nothing about the ultimatums and military pressure imposed on the Baltic States. There were also several competing drafts that had been prepared by the Russian democrats and us, including one by Lindpere and myself, one from Gräzin and Vassili Kulish, and some others. A group headed by Afanasyev was then set up to draft the fi nal resolution. This task was completed by the end of the meeting, but it was then found to be too loose and it was decided almost unanimously to finalize it the next morning. I and Falin, who himself had in the meantime converted to belief in the documents, redrafted this text on the morning of July 20th. The final text was satisfactory.
It contained everything that we needed, including the recognition of the validity of the Tartu Peace Treaty: it treated all secret and confi dential Soviet-German protocols signed in 1939-1941 as a single set of documents; declared that it violated international law; and, most importantly, it denounced all the protocols retroactively as invalid from the moment of signing. It also mentioned that the protocols had been used for issuing ultimatums and for exerting force against the relevant countries. This final provision, including the reference to the 1941 protocols, was an important victory, though Yakovlev fought against it to the very end. The reason for the signifi cance of the provision was that only the January 10th 1941 secret protocol provided documentary evidence that “spheres of infl uence” was a code for areas to be annexed in the future and which could be bought and sold by their new owners.
The July 20th draft text was superscribed with the signatures of all fi ve authors, namely V. Falin, E. Lippmaa, J. Afanasyev, M. Lauristin and I. Gräzin. Yakovlev agreed to the contents of the document, but said that without the personal permission of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Politburo he could not sign or even superscribe anything. Of course, no such permission was granted. It was a setback, but fortunately not a decisive one. In addition, the fax that I sent to Gorbachev on August 9th 1989 requesting on behalf of the commission that he implement the resolution before August 23rd received no response. It was obvious that the Centre (Moscow) was reluctant to do anything that would speed up the ongoing transformation of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, there was no longer any great hurry because the ill-advised plan to put the document to a vote in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had been shelved. First, the Supreme Council was far more conservative than the Congress of People’s Deputies and, second, the latter was able to amend resolutions adopted by the Supreme Council, but not vice versa. The Congress of People’s Deputies was expected to take place only at the end of the year.
Keen not to lose valuable time and to avoid diminishing the eff ect of such a favourable document, on August 9th I sent the draft resolution signed by fi ve members to all members of the commission, and asked them to sign it and return it to me at the Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics at the Estonian Academy of Sciences in Tallinn. By September 22nd we had collected twenty-one signed copies, which was over 75% of the commission’s membership. Such a qualifi ed majority was more than enough for the Congress of People’s Deputies. The commission was not an advisory body to its chairman but made its decisions with majority voting, so the agreement or opposition of the chairman was necessarily relevant. The commission’s work was now eff ectively complete, so the resolution was published in media channels (Vaba Maa, issue 14, August 1989; and Argumentõ i Faktõ, issue 32, 1989) and at the press conference held on September 29th at the State Institute of History and Archives in Moscow on the initiative of the institute’s head Afanasyev.
Of course, the impact of the press conference was small in comparison with the impact of the Baltic Way human chain, but it was important to keep the issue alive for the world community and in order to prepare for the voting at the Congress of People’s Deputies at the end of the year. Signifi cantly, Falin had already given an interview to a West German television station on April 23rd 1989, in which he confi rmed the existence of the secret protocols. Therefore, the situation from July to December 1989 was not at all hopeless.
If we had rushed ahead with a semi-offi cial approval of the resolution in the Baltic States and had begun to take the next steps, then the adoption of the draft resolution may have been blocked at the Congress of People’s Deputies. For us, the approval of the Congress was much more important than the personal approval of Gorbachev.
It should be emphasized that the secret protocols themselves have never been the key issue. The main issue both in 1989 and today is whether the Baltic States had become part of the USSR by the will of their ethnic nations, or whether they were occupied by force as a result of the 1939 secret protocols. In that regard, all state authorities of the USSR since 1940 have maintained the same position – that there was no connection between the protocols and entry into the USSR. The 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23rd 1989 saw no change to this attitude.
The lack of any connection between the secret protocols and the entry of the Baltic States into the USSR was also colorfully expressed by R. Müllerson, former deputy Minister of Foreign Aff airs of Estonia, in his article published in the magazine Sovetskoye Gosudarstvo i Pravo (issue 9, 1989) and in the interview he gave Postimees on June 19th 1991. In his report to the MRP commission dated October 14th 1989, Müllerson said that any claim that the incorporation of the three Baltic States into the USSR was linked to the secret protocols was legally illiterate, and he added that this wasn’t only the position of the then Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Estonia. These were exactly the same words that E. Shevardnadze, Soviet Minister of Foreign Aff airs, had written to the MRP commission on July 10th 1989, and that he repeated on December 14th 1989, ten days before the vote at the Congress. Before that, a similar claim had made by G. Arbatov, academician and head of the Institute of United States and Canada of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. On August 18th 1989, Pravda wrote that Yakovlev, chairman of the commission, had expressed the same principle in a debate with members of the German parliament on June 20th 1989. On October 23rd 1989, A. Talalayev, professor of international law at Moscow State University, published a dangerously competent report which was fortunately too long to attract attention and which attacked the July 20th resolution as incompatible with the mandate issued by the Congress of People’s Deputies. It would have been a major defeat if the secret protocol signed in 1941 had been excluded from the draft resolution because of a lack of mandate. Talalayev renewed his attempt on November 9th together with Professor N. Uschakov from the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The critics of the July 20th resolution were also joined on November 2nd and 4th 1989 by Professor J. Ussenko, later a merited
scientist of the Russian Federation. They all had the same objective as Müllerson, to deny the connection between the secret protocols and the present circumstances – especially where it might concern attempts by the Baltic States to regain independence.
On 11th December 1989, shortly before the end of year session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Falin sent copies of the draft resolutions that had been adopted at the December 6th session to all members of the commission. There were two versions, the shorter one of four pages and a longer one of eight pages. The contents of both documents were the same and in all main points repeated the resolution that had been superscribed on July 20th, while the shorter text was more specifi c and more favourable for us. The new resolutions were adopted at the December 4th session in the Kremlin and the whole committee signed them in the spirit of unity. Before the fi nal vote, the shorter text underwent some last-minute stylistic and linguistic modifi cations that did not change its contents in any way.
Yakovlev submitted the fi nal approved draft text of the commission’s resolution to the Congress of People’s Delegates on December 23rd 1989, but it was rejected at the fi rst vote. The reason, of course, was the unpleasant nature of the whole truth and, secondly, the nagging suspicion that the secret protocols may turn out to be falsifi cations after all. What the delegates did not know was that the chairman of the session had refused to give Kovalyov from the Foreign Ministry of USSR an opportunity to speak. This was the same Kovalyov who, on July 10th 1989, had given Falin the documents about Soviet-German relations in the autumn of 1939, documents which had been received from the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany. Neither Kovalyov nor Yakovlev told the Congress of People’s Deputies on December 23rd that, in addition to these documents, the archive of Molotov’s secretariat contained File No. 600-700. That fi le had been opened on August 23rd 1939 and closed on April 20th 1949 and included among other things all copies of Soviet-German,Soviet-Finnish and Soviet-US secret protocols from 1939-1941 and documents related to them, together with their transfer report from April 20th 1949.
According to the transfer report, originals of eight Soviet-German secret documents, including the secret protocols dated August 23rd 1939, September 28th 1939 and January 10th 1941 and verifi ed copies, were delivered by D. Smirnov, deputy head of Molotov’s secretariat, to B. Podtserob, senior assistant to the foreign minister, for deposit in the special archive of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR.
After the December 23rd session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the MPR committee held its fi nal and perhaps its most important meeting just before midnight, right there in the Kremlin hall of sessions. There were only a few members present. In addition to Yakovlev and myself, there was Kovalyov, who had brought with him the documents from Molotov’s archive. The decision was simple: the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs of the USSR was going to take this seriously and lay its trump card on the table. Nothing would stop the disclosure of the document that proved the existence of the secret protocols.
As had been planned, Yakovlev announced the existence of this revealing document the next day. The disclosure of the document from Molotov’s archive proved decisive and by 12.45pm the Congress of People’s Deputies had approved the committee’s resolution without any amendment. Of the 1,948 delegates in attendance, 1,432 delegates voted in favour, 252 were against and 264 abstained. It’s worth considering that this was Christmas Eve and most of the Lithuanian delegation had gone home, nor were there very many Estonians and Latvians still in Moscow. The most important precondition required for regaining independence had now been achieved.
The way in which we were able to achieve our objective was very enlightening as it showed the whole world the present situation in the Soviet leadership. A superpower needs both military strength and an untarnished international image, though it may sometimes requires making seemingly impossible compromises. At that time, the interests of two powerful administrations clashed – the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs. The Ministry of Defence had played its trump card earlier. Shortly before Yakovlev’s speech on December 23rd, the political administration of the Ministry of Defence attempted to erect a large display in the foyer of the Palace of Congresses about the “unanimous” decision of the Baltic States to be embraced by Josef Vissarionovich Stalin and the happy family of Soviet nations.
When some of our people began to question whether the display had been approved, the stands were reversed, to be unveiled during the break. I was attending the session when the journalist Anneli Reigas, who had been covering the MRP aff air in a long and comprehensive series of articles in Noorte Hääl, notifi ed me of the incident. Using a public microphone I asked Gorbachev whether this was a new way of working in the Soviet Congress. My microphone was switched off . Since there was no way of interrupting me or the session, Gorbachev eventually gave Lukyanov the order to remove the display.
In this way we prevented an attempt to brainwash the People’s Deputies with propaganda. Both the booklet “Legal-political assessment of the Soviet-German pacts of 1939-1941” that I had prepared and that was distributed by the pan-Baltic group of delegates, and the book “1940 in Estonia” prepared by our Supreme Council, made an important contribution. The media campaign and the Baltic Way human chain also had a positive effect.
The trick was not so much in winning over the opponents; rather it was in raising the awareness of hesitant delegates, in carefully timing the actions and in the skillful manipulation of confl icts between the large power bases. In autumn 1989 the Soviet leadership was very determined. It was the period when the USSR had begun to implement its new policy for Europe, and so the denunciation of the secret MRP protocols was almost inevitable in the end. Tactical objectives were sacrifi ced for strategic ones. Large-scale strategies often require tactical retreats and the subordination of administrative interests to national interests. The Congress of the People’s Deputies adopted the resolution not out of respect for the Baltic States intention to regain independence, but regardless of it. The Baltic independence declarations that followed were the price that the Soviet leadership had to pay for maintaining its image abroad and for the credibility of its foreign policy. It was neither realistic nor necessary to expect the resolution to contain more than it did.
The denunciation of the secret protocols was a major achievement and, although it had significantly weakened the enemy, it had not yet brought independence for Estonia. It was no accident that the authenticated documents that I had brought back from the US came from the archive of World War II war crimes, because war crimes have no statute of limitations. Next came a truly surreal phase in the actual attainment of independence, when the Baltic States were doing everything imaginable to regain independence while the Soviet Union was doing everything imaginable to stop them. On March 11th, the Supreme Council of the Lithuanian SSR adopted a resolution to restore Lithuania’s independence on the basis of the pre-occupation era Constitution. Two days later, on March 13th, Gorbachev declared that document legally invalid, refused to enter negotiations and announced an economic blockade against Lithuania. On March 30th 1990, the Supreme Council of the Estonian SSR declared the Soviet state power in Estonia illegal on the grounds that it was established against the will of the people, and announced the restoration of the independence of the Republic of Estonia and bodies of constitutional state power by restitution.
At the same time Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the USSR, began to draft a new Union Treaty by signifi cantly extending the powers of the KGB, the armed forces and the Ministry of Interior Aff airs. Then, in his November 7th speech to the Supreme Council of the USSR, he emphasized that the use of force against the “fascists” operating in the Baltic States was inevitable. This led to the bloody confl icts in Vilnius and Riga in January 1991, but it failed. The Soviet Union and Lithuania then opened somewhat surreal and meaningless political negotiations.
The resolutions adopted by Vilnius and Tallinn were productive, but not suffi cient to
restore independence. To give these resolutions more clout, the Supreme Council of the
Estonian SSR adopted a resolution on the relations between the Republic of Estonia and
the Soviet Union and set up a negotiating delegation consisting of Ü. Nugis, M. Lauristin,
E. Lippmaa, I. Toome and J. Raidla. The newly-elected president of the USSR unconditionally
condemned this initiative already on August 12th. In order to gather more allies I promptly
drafted the Interstate Agreement between the Russian SFSR (Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic) and the Republic of Estonia, which supported the June 12th 1990 resolution of
the Russian SFSR. Together with M. Lauristin, we and members of Boris Yeltsin’s delegation
superscribed it in the White House in Moscow on September 27th. The agreement was
structured in such a way that the Russian SFSR would have to be a fully independent state
in order to meet its obligations. The agreement was signed in Tallinn on January 13th 1991
and prevented the imminent onset of bloodshed. On the downside, because the Soviet
delegation only had a mandate to discuss the Union Treaty that was being drafted at that
time, the agreement stalled negotiations with the Soviet Union. From its side, the Supreme
Council of the Republic of Estonia decided on September 7th 1990 that legal representatives
of the Republic of Estonia were not authorized to participate in the preparation of the
new Union Treaty. This paralysis in relations reached its climax at an apparently innocent
meeting of the Soviet Peace Defence Committee (SPDC) on June 19th-21st 1991 in Moscow
in the SPDC building. In addition to representatives of the SPDC and Baltic States, the meet79
ing was attended unexpectedly by representatives from the Soviet Ministry of Defence (J.
I. Nauman), the Soviet Navy (E. V. Obydenninov), the KGB (A. A. Rumyantsev), the Internal
Forces of the Soviet Ministry of Interior (V. P. Voroztsov), the Supreme Council of the USSR
(G. I. Petrov) and the International Security Department (A. V. Kortunov) and a large number
of army and security services officers.
Obviously intending to intimidate the Baltic nations, Soviet army offi cers even began
talking about preparations for a worldwide confl ict. By now the total preparedness deadline
had long passed. While such fear-mongering had only a limited impact upon us, accustomed
as we were to the Soviet realities, it became clear that in addition to the greater
risks there were also greater opportunities. The tension peaked on June 18th 1991, when Gorbachev,
determined to preserve the Soviet Union at any cost, submitted the new draft Union
Treaty to the Supreme Council of the USSR for its approval. His solution to the problem was
the use of armed force – this got a kick start on August 17th when Prime Minister V. Pavlov
and the Presidium of the Government Cabinet of the USSR issued a decree on entry into the
force of the new Union Treaty and KGB chairman V. Kryuchkov approved the list of members
for the State Emergency Committee of the USSR. The Centre was sending soothing signals
to the outside world, while becoming increasingly belligerent at home. The bluff was called
already by August 19th, followed by the brief period of dual power of Yeltsin and Gorbachev
in Moscow. On August 20th 1991 the Supreme Council of the Republic of Estonia, acting
on its resolution from March 30th 1990, adopted a declaration on the independence of the
Republic of Estonia and urged foreign countries to restore diplomatic relations with the Republic
of Estonia. However, this was not enough. For independence to be fi nal and secure
it must also be recognized in a signed document by the opposing side and this required
from us a major diplomatic eff ort from us in Moscow. Finally, on September 6th 1991 the
State Council of the USSR, the highest body of Soviet state power at that time, approved the
independence of the Republic of Estonia as a truly and fully independent state. Gorbachev
did not support us nor did he sign the document. Our supporters included the president
of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Boris Yeltsin, who controlled the votes of several
republics and with whom Hardo Aasmäe and I enjoyed a lengthy dinner meeting featuring
a main course of buried sheep’s head accompanied by plenty of French wine. Our work was
done. The September 6th resolution of the State Council had restored historical truth, wiping
out the outcome of the 1939-1941 deals between Stalin and Hitler and the might of the
Soviet Union. Later that autumn, the USSR itself disintegrated.
By Endel Lippmaa,
12 May 2009
Back to full blog HERE
/Feud and lies, including from Toomas H. Ilves date back to 1990
August 18, 2015
By Anneli Reigas (Anneli Rõigas)
The story written, tweeted and shared in some English language sites since 1 August 2015 by Paul Goble, former US State Department Baltic desk officer immediately after the Baltic freedom hero Endel Lippmaa perished on 30 July 2015 contains factual errors, depicts Lippmaa weirdly and is fueling up again old feud and lies that needs to be clarified.
“If you conduct your life on the basis of truth and honesty, it gives you a sense of satisfaction and self-confidence”, Dalai Lama tweeted in summer three years ago in 2012. Golden words. This is also what the life of Estonia´s battle for freedom hero - who is also known as one of the very few worldowned Estonian scientists - Endel Lippmaa (15 September 1930 – 30 July 2015) was about.
I really would like not to write this all. But I have no choice. Before I left Estonian media in late 90s and then returned to write for Finnish News Agency and later to Agence France Presse for a decade I published myself dozens of articles by Paul Goble in Estonian dailies, always trusting that claims and facts were correct (Lennart Meri often faxed them to me).
Endel Lippmaa was and will remain one of my closest friends, my brother in arms during our battle for Baltic independence 1989-1991. We knew we were risking a lot. We took that risk. What we did not knew was that we will be hunted even decades later.
Reasons behind Goble and Ilves feud against Endel Lippmaa date back to 1990
Paul Goble depicts Endel Lippmaa in a way leaving false impression that the aim of Lippmaa´s actions in autumn 1990 was (as Goble put it) „to isolate me from my friend Toomas Hendrik Ilves and cause some problems for me at my workplace with more than a little trepidation.“
There is no truth in that Goble´s claim: Endel Lippmaa never did anything to isolate Goble and Ilves and he did nothing to cause any problems at workplace for Goble. The real story behind 1990 events is as follows.
The feud against Endel Lippmaa started almost immediately after out great victory in Kremlin in December 1989 when we managed to force Soviet Congress to admit that before Baltic states became part of Soviet Union and were occupied Hitler and Stalin had made a secret deal on that. Lippmaa´s role and activities that lead to this victory on 24 December 1989 in Kremlin was crucial. Gorbachev´s deputy Jakovlev later said that it was turning point for USSR - after that day it was not whether but when Soviet Union will fall apart.
After our battle and victory in Kremlin in 1989 that I attended as journalist Endel Lippmaa tried to use all means to get Western states to really back our freedom fight – and not just in empty words but in real actions.
Ever since 1990 we felt there were people not just in Moscow but also some in West who worked against us, and did a lot to harm us and destroy our attempts to get broader support to our wish to restore the independence of the Baltic States. One of the silly but also rather dangerous steps in that feud road was when we were labelled as „CIA agents“ in autumn 1990 during the events that put clear frontline between us and people like Toomas H. Ilves who worked at Radio Free Europe that time.
Paul Goble´s 1 August 2015 story recalls that time so let me recall what caused that feud against Lippmaa in autumn 1990. We had tried to gain international support for our goals at some international conferences (including CSCE in Copenhagen in June 1990, then CSCE in Vienna, and CSCE in New York in autumn 1990) but not many statemen were bold enough to really speak out. One of the few states on our side was Island and its Foreign Minister Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson. Since I had been recruited in addition to my work in Estonian daily in spring 1989 also by one of the Western news agencies – Finnish News Agency I started to use my earnings to attend those conferences as journalist. When Lippmaa learned about my trip plan to go to CSCE Copenhagen he asked me to take with me and to distribute also the materials he had prepared for all delegations. He used every mean he could to get West to act and not just to watch and wait until Soviet tanks might end that all.
The position of US government these years was rather shameful – empty words, clear unwritten message that nothing should jeopradize Gorbachev. We started to feel that some important decisions might be taken on Baltic expense. In 1990 Endel Lippmaa was worried and for good reason that the decision about unification of Germany might have hidden price – us: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
When in autumn 1990 the ratification of the so called Two-Plus-For Treaty on unification of Germany was on table I had travelled to US to attend CSCE New York meeting and to seek the National Forum Foundation internship as a journalist in Washington, in my naive hope I can set up as close ties with US Media as I had managed to set up with Finnish News Agency. Lippmaa had absolutely nothing to do with my 1990 autumn trip to US but when he learned I am in Washington and stay for longer he contacted me and sent a fax about his concerns regarding Two-Plus-For Treaty.
The same concerns were also written into statement by Baltic leaders Arnold Rüütel, Vytautas Landsbergis and Anatolijis Gorbunovs and sent to Congress. On 26 September 1990 six senators, including Paul Simon and Bill Bradley sent a letter to the White House to President Bush. They outlined concerns of (still under Soviet rule) Baltic state leaders and asked President Bush for assurance „prior to Senate action that ratification of the Two-Plus-Four Treaty is fully consistent with our long-standing policy towards the Baltic states“.
I myself attended one debate about these discussions at the Congress and wrote about our concerns in Estonian daily in late September 1990. On 6 October 1990 Endel Lippmaa who himself was in Tallinn wrote much bigger article by his own about these concerns and also managed to publish the letter of US senators to President.
To our big surprise that all caused anger by some people, including Toomas H. Ilves who lived in west Germany that time and worked for US government financed Radio Free Europe. Both Toomas H. Ilves and his colleague Riina Kionka then spread misinformation. To our great surprise it turned out Radio Free Europe where they worked aired claim that relations between states should be made between governments only, etc etc. All was done to show that Baltic freedom fight leader Endel Lippmaa had no credentials to act. And on top of it both me and two other Estonian´s who were that time in Washington were labelled as people „linked to CIA“.
The fact that also US State Department Baltic desk officer Paul Goble was linked to this confusion who has right and who not to do what, as emerged from his 1 August 2015 story was a surprise to me. I thought we had only friends at the US State Department but it certainly did not look so.
Part of the anger fueled by the fact that Endel Lippmaa used in 1990 all means to get Baltic interests not to be ignored fall also to President Arnold Rüütel, and our longtime consul in New York during occupation Ernst Jaakson who completely supported Endel Lippmaa´s actions. Lippmaa felt and for good reason that the that time Soviet Estonian Foreign Ministry did not enough and he acted upon his heart and wisdom that foreign ministry (where even some KGB related people had been hired) lacked.
Thus there was nothing personal in Endel Lippmaa´s 1990 actions, he was never the man who would have wasted his time and energy to do something so meaningless as Paul Goble falsely claimed.
The decisions taken about Toomas H. Ilves by Radio Free Europe in autumn 1990 were taken by Radio Free Europe and not by Endel Lippmaa. I myself attended one of those official meetings in autumn 1990 where Ilves personality was discussed. We had no power to ban anyone from his work and all we wished was that false claims, feud and misinformation will end. The empty scandal against us was fuled at the newspaper by two of my new fellow journalists, both good friends to Ilves, including Toomas H. Liiv, serial pedophile and currenty in jail again.
Unfortunately that feud against Endel Lippmaa never ended and in only seemed to grow each time Lippmaa outlined some another weird step or plan that could jeopardize Estonia´s security and other interests – including the 90s plan (the plan was supported by Ilves) to sell away Estonia´s energy plants that Lippmaa managed to block, he stood against Gazprom 2007 ambitions to build pipeline partly to Estonia and often stood up as real president when Estonian leaders seemed to step to stupid decisions or kept their mouth shut (in case of Mistrals) etc etc. That kept the old feud against him just alive.
But contrary to Paul Goble depiction he always stood up for sometihing for a reason and not just against somebody.
The factual errors in Paul Goble article
There are also some factual errors in Paul Goble story.
Paul Goble claims: „President Meri, of course, had his own special relationship with Lippmaa: Meri’s family took in Endel at one point after members of the future academician’s family were killed, and Lippmaa was among thos who accused Meri of working with the Soviet security agencies.“
This claim by Paul Goble is completely untrue and I wonder from whom Goble got it. After Endel Lippmaa who was 12 that time, lost his family on 27 January 1943 during the Red Army bombing of Tartu (he lived in Tartu Botanic Garden), Estonia´s second biggest town he stayed in Tartu for few more days and nights in the family of Tartu University rector who was good friend to his scientist parents Teodor Lippmaa and Hilja Lippmaa. After memorial service hold at the Tartu University church the young boy then travelled to Tallinn where funeral was hold on 2 February 1943 and he stayed with her mom´s sister Juta Mändmets at Nomme district, in the home of Estonian writer and journalist Jakob Mändmets who himself had died when Endel Lippmaa was just few months old.
Thus contrary to Goble´s claim in his 1 August 2015 article at no point at all did Endel Lippmaa stay with Meri family.
I am one of the few persons whom Lennart Meri called hundreds of times when he was a President in 90s and I do appreciate a lot lot all good things he did to Estonia, Lennart Meri made made post-Soviet Estonia look bigger and nobler than it is but there is no doubt Endel Lippmaa had good reasons to warn about his classmate´s family KGB ties.
Lennart Meri knew the truth about his family ties the best and I never heard him complaining about Lippmaa for outlining his worries about his classmate´s family alleged KGB ties. The reason why Endel Lippmaa did not outline these ties when Lennart Meri became first time president in 1992 and he came out with this claim during 1996 presidential elections was related to the decision taken by his friend and classmate Lennart Meri in summer 1994 when Meri signed treaties in Kremlin that enabled thousands of Russian former army personnel to remain in Estonia.
I wish to believe Meri had good reasons for that (if that was only way to get most of Soviet army out by the end of summer 1994), but I do also understand Lippmaa´s concerns. Unfortunately, recent history of Estonia has shown that KGB and Soviet elite managed to cement themselves into most important insitutions in Estonia (dozens KGB officers were taken even to Est Security police and several have turned out in last years as working also for FSB etc.
Endel Lippmaa always judged people by their actions. He never asked glory for himself. He is one of the few worldowned Estonian scientists and someone who committed himself completely for the Baltic freedom struggle and always spoke out and took actions when he felt its his duty.
I kindly ask Paul Goble who tweeted and shared his misleading story in English language media, including in his Windows on Eurasia, FB site and Twitter to fix the factual errors and at least in his heart to apologize.
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cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/43/News Articles/1299927?ln=en
www.telegraph.co.uk/…/11801251/Endel-Lippmaa-physicist-obit…
https://www.facebook.com/anneli.reigas/posts/10204627544072773:0
scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/pt.5.6165
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// Estonian scientist Endel Lippmaa is the man who forced Kremlin in 1989 to admit that before Baltic States were occupied by Stalin´s Red army Hitler and Stalin had made a secret deal who gets what in Europe. We recalled those events - the long battle to force Kremlin to admit that secret deal existed (blowing up the Kremlin free-will 1940 revolutions claims that came as shock to many in USSR) in our joint book in 2009. That was second and amended print of the book written 2 decades earlier by Estonian lawyer H. Lindpere who asked us for the new book to submit also our memories. Lippmaa was against the idea first because he did not like that first book but I managed to change his mind. He had asked me why dont we just write our own book but I thought we should use every chance to recall those events and our 1989 victory in Kremlin. The full book compiled by H. Lindpere "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: Challening Soviet history", including my own article about our battle in Moscow in 1989 and Lippmaa´s crucial role is here: http://www.evi.ee/old/lib/MRP_ENG.pdf. Remarkable man.
I was 26 and a journalist at national daily when he proposed me to start joint fight against Soviet military factory in Sillamäe and its nuclear waste storage in 1989 winter, that was then followed by fight for Baltic freedom in summer and autumn 1989 in Moscow to force Kemlin to admit and nullify the Hitler-Stalin secret pact from 1939. These joint efforts developed quickly into friendship, one of the most special friendship I have had this lifetime.
He had gone through hell in his childhood when he had lost his family - mom, dad and sister during Red army bombing of the Tartu Botanic Gardens where he lived with his scientist dad, mom and sister. But he had warm heart. But cold heart for those he didnt like - liars, traitors. Super smart mind. Great sense of humour. Man with a mission. He became the person his mom and dad and sister could be always proud.
We both knew that year 1989 we were put into the most hated person´s list by anti-Baltic officials from Soviet Defence Ministry and Putin and his kind of people during that battle. We nailed that position with incident before the decisive debate and voting at the Congress session in Kremlin in Christmas1989 - when we managed to block the attempt of Soviet Defence Ministry to put up a massive exibition they had prepared with false facts about Baltic States history that was aimed to convince the minds of nearly 2000 Soviet deputies, so they would not support decision to publicly admit that Hitler Stalin secret protocol really existed. Endel Lippmaa described those events in a book, released in August 2009 as follows:
"At that time, the interests of two powerful administrations clashed – the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs.
The Ministry of Defence had played its trump card earlier. Shortly before Yakovlev’s speech on December 23rd, the political administration of the Ministry of Defence attempted to erect a large display in the foyer of the Palace of Congresses about the “unanimous” decision of the Baltic States to be embraced by Josef Vissarionovich Stalin and the happy family of Soviet nations.
When some of our people began to question whether the display had been approved, the stands were reversed, to be unveiled during the break. I was attending the session when the journalist Anneli Reigas, who had been covering the MRP aff air in a long and comprehensive series of articles in Noorte Hääl, notifi ed me of the incident. Using a public microphone I asked Gorbachev whether this was a new way of working in the Soviet Congress. My microphone was switched off . Since there was no way of interrupting me or the session, Gorbachev eventually gave Lukyanov the order to remove the display."
p.s. I will add full article by Endel Lippmaa from 2009 book:
On the history of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and my work for the commission by Endel Lippmaa.
"The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23rd 1939 has an interesting history. By 1939, Europe had become a playground for two superpowers that each wanted to rule the world. They soon understood that it was easier to expand by taking over territories of other countries than by attacking each other. In the spring and summer of 1939 they began the approaches towards each other that would lead to the beginning of there-division of their world. In World War I Germany had lost all its colonies plus the territories in the East linked to the Polish corridor. Russia had lost all its western territories, including all four Baltic States from Finland to Lithuania, the whole of Poland including Warsaw, and Bessarabia. As always, the losers were dreaming of revenge and looking for allies. The Soviet Union’s efforts to form an alliance with Great Britain and France failed when they refused to allow the USSR to deploy its forces in the Baltic States, Poland and Romania. On August 15th 1939, the same day that British and French representatives had left Moscow, the two dictators began a dialogue between two ideologies of world domination, one based on class and the other on race. On August 17th 1939 the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and the ambassador of the Germany state held detailed negotiations in Moscow over the new cooperation treaty that had been transcribed by V. Pavlov (Appendix 1). The partners discussed economic, financial, military and territorial policy issues and the non-aggression treaty, but the issue of deployment of forces in the Baltic States was taken up on the initiative of the Soviet government. Molotov insisted that the territorial policy issues raised by the Germans on August 15th must not be written in the public text of the non-aggression treaty, but in its separate secret protocol instead. Molotov also said that the position of the USSR had been approved personally by comrade Stalin. Ambassador Schulenburg stressed that the German party had major problems with the secret protocol demanded by the Soviet government, since the Germans had no information about its specifi c contents, and asked the Soviets to submit at least a rough draft of the protocol.
In screening the victims of future aggression, German officials preferred to have oral agreements, while the ever-suspicious Soviet leaders insisted on laying it down in writing in secret protocols. The two partners even developed new diplomatic terms to denominate the would-be annexation areas, naming them spheres of interest, spheres of infl uence or march-through zones. Shortly afterwards, the two developed a joint image of a plutocratic enemy, caricatured as a fat spatterdashed Jewish banker from London.
Moscow had already completed the upgrading of the 1926 neutrality treaty into a five item non-aggression pact by August 19th 1939. The telegram sent to Berlin in that regard contained a postscript with a demand to also sign a separate top-secret additional protocol to the pact concerning the foreign policy aims of both states (Appendix 2). In his response by telegram to Stalin, Hitler emphasized that all issues raised by the Soviet government in connection with the secret protocol could be resolved without delay by the plenipotentiary of Germany in the Moscow negotiations. He asked that the representative of the German Reich be received either on Tuesday, August 22nd or at the latest on Wednesday August 23rd. Stalin responded to Hitler’s proposal at once by a return telegram in which he expressed satisfaction concerning the breakthrough in German-Soviet relations and agreed to meet Mr. Ribbentrop on August 23rd.
With the secret protocols signed on August 23rd 1939 and on later dates, the aggressors divided the whole of Eastern Europe from the Black Sea to the North Sea. The secret protocol from September 28th re-divided Poland, while under the secret protocol signed on January 10th 1941 the USSR purchased from Germany the Marijampole district and town of the pre-war Republic of Lithuania. In the earlier division, Germany had retained the area as an elk-hunting ground for Ribbentrop, but the Red Army occupied it shortly after Lithuania and the USSR had signed a pact of mutual assistance on October 10th 1939.
On November 25th 1940, Molotov proposed another five secret protocols to the Germans. In the first of them the Soviets demanded the area between Batumi, Baku and the Persian Gulf (Kuwait), in the second – the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, in the third – again and finally Finland, and in the fifth – Bulgaria. The fourth protocol was not related to territorial demands. These proposals were rejected by Mussolini and ended the potential expansion of the Tripartite Pact.
The protocols were actually not so secret at all. German Ambassador Schulenburg
had already revealed the contents of the secret protocol to his second secretary Hans-Heinrich (Johnnie) Herwarth von Bittenfeld on the morning of August 24th 1939 when von Ribbentrop was still asleep. As a devoted anti-imperialist, von Bittenfeld promptly passed this information to the ambassadors of the United States and several other countries. The governments of the Baltic States already knew the text of the protocol by the end of August 1939. The New York Times wrote about it on August 28th and September 15th, The Times on October 11th and on September 24th the Journal American even published the entire plan for the division of Europe, including an accurate map in which all four Baltic States were shown in the Soviet zone. Official enquiries made by the Baltic States were answered with diplomatic lies by aggressors who intended to keep their cruel plans secret and avoid public panic, which in Estonia’s case lasted until June 18th 1940.
As always, keeping the public unaware was to lead to greatly increased fatalities in the future. After World War II, Soviet-Nazi secret protocols were mentioned in the April 1st 1946 session of the Nuremburg trial. Seidl, who was defending Hess, asked questions and von Ribbentrop gave depositions on all of the Soviet-Nazi secret protocols that had been signed or proposed. He emphasized that if the division of Europe between the USSR and Germany was an act of aggression then both parties were equally guilty. The Soviet prosecutor General Rudenko rejected these claims by the defence, saying “We are here not to investigate the problems related to the policies of the Allies, but the charges against German war criminals”.
It was agreed that there was no mandate, the murderers who had lost the war were hung and the issue was buried. By the way, for security, this conversation was not translated and has never been published among the Russian-language materials of the Nuremburg trial.
All of the Soviet-Nazi secret protocols were published by the French already in 1946
and two years later by the Estonians (A. Rei) and the Americans. The Soviets responded by categorically denying them and claimed that they had been falsified. Valentin Falin denied the existence of the secret protocols at the Novosti press conference on August 16th 1988; Felix Kovalyov and Oleg Ržeševski, who later became experts for the MRP committee, made a denial in Pravda on September 1st 1988; and the Soviet Minister of Foreign Aff airs Gromyko did so in the magazine Der Spiegel in April 1989. (The Tripartite Pact was a treaty signed on September 27th 1940 by Germany, Italy and Japan and established the Axis powers. The Soviet Union had hoped to participate.)
However, there was more positive news. At a reception held in the USSR’s embassy in Washington D.C. in 1969, the Estonian Liberation Legion distributed a brochure on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that contained the text of all the secret protocols. On August 1986 the first Black Ribbon Day took place in Germany and a year later, on August 18th 1987, US Senator Donald. W. Riegle wrote a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, urging him to annul the secret protocols. A similar letter was sent out on June 29th 1988 by Dun Ritter and Dennis Hertel, members of the US House of Representatives. In 1987, MRP-AEG held its first rally in Hirvepark in Estonia to raise awareness of the secret documents among the general public.
The MRP-AEG protest held in the following year was already much bigger and it was clear that it was now time for action. However, the Soviet leaders had no intention of admitting the existence of the secret protocols, nor of the territorial changes that resulted from them.
A suitable moment for action came at the Congress of People’s Deputies held in Moscow at the end of May 1989. At that time it was becoming increasingly apparent that the country’s top leaders were directly linked to the Tbilisi bloodbath.
Estonian delegates –J. Aare, H. Aasmäe, G. Golubkov, I. Gräzin, A. Haug, S. Kallas, T. Käbin, T. Laak, M. Lauristin, E. Lippmaa, V. Palm, V. Pohla, I. Raig, I. Raud. V. Saar, E. Savisaar, E. Tamberg and G. Tõnspoeg – had prepared a draft resolution for setting up a committee of seventeen members with the objective of disclosing the 1939 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Treaty and the secret protocols and providing a legal assessment of the protocols.
Since I had been elected to the Presidium of the Congress of People’s Deputies as the representative of Estonia, I was able to begin negotiations with Gorbachev on this issue right away. Right there, from the Presidium’s desk, I told him how setting up the commission could be of benefi t to him in such politically tough times. To add credibility I gave him the text of the secret protocol – not the text of the actual signed protocol that had been published in the West, but of the authentic rough draft, written in fl uent Russian, that was prepared in Moscow for the negotiations with von Ribbentrop. The documents also included the Soviet-Polish pact from July 30th 1941 concerning the annulment of all 1939 Soviet-German agreements about the re-division of the Polish territory. It worked. Gorbachev fi rst discussed it with Shevardnadze and then Gorbachev, Yakovlev and I discussed it beside the assorted imported delicacies served in the softly lit second-fl oor restaurant of the Palace of Congresses. The proposal was simply too good to be rejected, so Gorbachev agreed and I presented the draft proposal for setting up the commission to the delegates.
This immediately got a reaction from V. Yarovoi who said, quite correctly, that this would make him a colonial occupier. Later, Gräzin read aloud the Russian text of the secret protocol. This impressed the delegates and later also the editors of the transcript of the session, since what was published in the bulletin No. 8, Part I, on June 1st 1989 was not the Russian draft that Gräzin had read aloud nor was it the text of the actual protocol – each of the original words was everywhere replaced with a synonym in the publication. In my opinion that fact proved once again that our texts were both authentic and important.
The statement of Mikhail Gorbachev summed up the situation. He repeated his skepticism about the existence of the secret protocols and made his famous “argument” that it was difficult to believe that Molotov had signed a document in “German letters”. He also denied any connection between the secret protocols, the occupation of the Baltic States, and their annexation by the USSR. He proposed the nomination of Yakovlev as chairman of the would-be commission and also proposed to include former ambassador Falin, as a specialist, and representatives of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. I finalized the list of commission members there at the Presidium’s desk. The list of twenty-six members was approved on June 2nd 1989. The breakdown of members was favourable for us: four from Estonia, four from Lithuania, three from Latvia, two from Moldova, two from Ukraine, one from Belarus, one from Armenia, one from Kyrgyz, four Russian democrats and, of course, four representatives of the Kremlin.
The commission’s sessions began on June 8th under the chairmanship of Yakovlev.
Four workgroups were set up: for documentation – Y. Afanasyev; legal assessment of documents – I. Gräzin; witness enquiry – K. Motieka; and research of historic background – E. Lippmaa. Falin, who had been appointed by Yakovlev as his deputy, was ordered to detail group tasks, membership and functions and to organize working facilities for the commission.Afanasyev and E. Savisaar were also elected deputies to Yakovlev. The next session was scheduled for July 5th, in the meantime Falin was asked to supply the commission with all the necessary historic documents. Falin did so by sending everyone large piles of largely irrelevant documents from the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs of the USSR, which, of course, contained no secret protocols. At the July 5th session, Savisaar proposed to prepare two draft documents for the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (but not to the Congress of People’s Deputies which was authorized to amend the resolutions of the Supreme Soviet) by August 23rd. These two documents, drafted by Gräzin, were the declaration on the 50th anniversary of the secret protocol and the resolution acknowledging the existence of the secret protocol, giving a legal assessment and declaring it invalid from the moment of signing.
However, it was clear from the outset that we would never prove our position with the kind of documents in our possession. The opposition held all the trump cards – i.e. the offi cially verifi ed documents – while we had only newspaper articles, enthusiastic speeches, and copies of books whose authenticity had not been verifi ed. This was the context in which I traveled to the United States to attend the Gordon conference on radio spectroscopy. After the conference had ended I spent two days in Washington D.C. and gathered from the US national archives, or more precisely from its department of WWII war crimes, altogether thrity-nine verifi ed documents, including all the secret protocols, treaties, agreements and their offi cial comments, the published memoirs of German statesmen, materials from the Nuremburg trial, books on the Baltic States, Soviet-German treaties and international law, in addition to abstracts from the complete sets of US and German diplomatic documents from 1939 to 1941. At the end of July, I attended a hightemperature superconductivity conference in Stanford University in the US and gathered documents from the archives in the Hoover Tower where I happened to work side by side with former US Secretary of State Schultz and the then Soviet Marshal Akhromeyev.
Now we had suffi cient ammunition to act. On July 11th and 12th there was a major conference at the Estonian representation in Moscow where we defended our positions against the Kremlin’s falsifiers of history, namely V. Falin, head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, F. Kovaljov, head of the Historical-Diplomatic Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and a number of doctors of law including A.Orlov from the Institute of History of War, O. Ržeševski from the Institute of General History, V. Sipols from the Institute of History of the USSR, A. Chubarjan – head of the Institute of General History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, as well as L. Bezymenski – political observer of Novoje Vremja magazine and V. Alexandrov – consultant of the International Department of the CPSU’s Central Committee. Among the Kremlin’s experts was also R. Müllerson, head of the international law unit of the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who did not show up. The attendance list contains a note: “(Conditionally) absent”.
/.../
Things progressed and we were able to start drafting the final document. The majority of the committee had agreed that the secret protocols existed, that it should be annulled and that Poland and the Baltic States had been divided and occupied according to the same secret protocol of August 23rd 1939. The division of the spheres of interest was so accurate that later the USSR had to pay the Germans millions (in current prices, hundreds of millions) of gold dollars for just a few thousand square kilometers of Lithuanian land. This repudiated all counterclaims from the Kremlin.
The decisive meeting was held a week later, on July 19th, in Yakovlev’s offi ce in the huge building of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He had prepared both a shorter and a longer argument of the draft resolution, which did not even declare the secret protocols invalid, but only condemned them morally. Moreover, it said nothing about the ultimatums and military pressure imposed on the Baltic States. There were also several competing drafts that had been prepared by the Russian democrats and us, including one by Lindpere and myself, one from Gräzin and Vassili Kulish, and some others. A group headed by Afanasyev was then set up to draft the fi nal resolution. This task was completed by the end of the meeting, but it was then found to be too loose and it was decided almost unanimously to finalize it the next morning. I and Falin, who himself had in the meantime converted to belief in the documents, redrafted this text on the morning of July 20th. The final text was satisfactory.
It contained everything that we needed, including the recognition of the validity of the Tartu Peace Treaty: it treated all secret and confi dential Soviet-German protocols signed in 1939-1941 as a single set of documents; declared that it violated international law; and, most importantly, it denounced all the protocols retroactively as invalid from the moment of signing. It also mentioned that the protocols had been used for issuing ultimatums and for exerting force against the relevant countries. This final provision, including the reference to the 1941 protocols, was an important victory, though Yakovlev fought against it to the very end. The reason for the signifi cance of the provision was that only the January 10th 1941 secret protocol provided documentary evidence that “spheres of infl uence” was a code for areas to be annexed in the future and which could be bought and sold by their new owners.
The July 20th draft text was superscribed with the signatures of all fi ve authors, namely V. Falin, E. Lippmaa, J. Afanasyev, M. Lauristin and I. Gräzin. Yakovlev agreed to the contents of the document, but said that without the personal permission of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Politburo he could not sign or even superscribe anything. Of course, no such permission was granted. It was a setback, but fortunately not a decisive one. In addition, the fax that I sent to Gorbachev on August 9th 1989 requesting on behalf of the commission that he implement the resolution before August 23rd received no response. It was obvious that the Centre (Moscow) was reluctant to do anything that would speed up the ongoing transformation of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, there was no longer any great hurry because the ill-advised plan to put the document to a vote in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had been shelved. First, the Supreme Council was far more conservative than the Congress of People’s Deputies and, second, the latter was able to amend resolutions adopted by the Supreme Council, but not vice versa. The Congress of People’s Deputies was expected to take place only at the end of the year.
Keen not to lose valuable time and to avoid diminishing the eff ect of such a favourable document, on August 9th I sent the draft resolution signed by fi ve members to all members of the commission, and asked them to sign it and return it to me at the Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics at the Estonian Academy of Sciences in Tallinn. By September 22nd we had collected twenty-one signed copies, which was over 75% of the commission’s membership. Such a qualifi ed majority was more than enough for the Congress of People’s Deputies. The commission was not an advisory body to its chairman but made its decisions with majority voting, so the agreement or opposition of the chairman was necessarily relevant. The commission’s work was now eff ectively complete, so the resolution was published in media channels (Vaba Maa, issue 14, August 1989; and Argumentõ i Faktõ, issue 32, 1989) and at the press conference held on September 29th at the State Institute of History and Archives in Moscow on the initiative of the institute’s head Afanasyev.
Of course, the impact of the press conference was small in comparison with the impact of the Baltic Way human chain, but it was important to keep the issue alive for the world community and in order to prepare for the voting at the Congress of People’s Deputies at the end of the year. Signifi cantly, Falin had already given an interview to a West German television station on April 23rd 1989, in which he confi rmed the existence of the secret protocols. Therefore, the situation from July to December 1989 was not at all hopeless.
If we had rushed ahead with a semi-offi cial approval of the resolution in the Baltic States and had begun to take the next steps, then the adoption of the draft resolution may have been blocked at the Congress of People’s Deputies. For us, the approval of the Congress was much more important than the personal approval of Gorbachev.
It should be emphasized that the secret protocols themselves have never been the key issue. The main issue both in 1989 and today is whether the Baltic States had become part of the USSR by the will of their ethnic nations, or whether they were occupied by force as a result of the 1939 secret protocols. In that regard, all state authorities of the USSR since 1940 have maintained the same position – that there was no connection between the protocols and entry into the USSR. The 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23rd 1989 saw no change to this attitude.
The lack of any connection between the secret protocols and the entry of the Baltic States into the USSR was also colorfully expressed by R. Müllerson, former deputy Minister of Foreign Aff airs of Estonia, in his article published in the magazine Sovetskoye Gosudarstvo i Pravo (issue 9, 1989) and in the interview he gave Postimees on June 19th 1991. In his report to the MRP commission dated October 14th 1989, Müllerson said that any claim that the incorporation of the three Baltic States into the USSR was linked to the secret protocols was legally illiterate, and he added that this wasn’t only the position of the then Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Estonia. These were exactly the same words that E. Shevardnadze, Soviet Minister of Foreign Aff airs, had written to the MRP commission on July 10th 1989, and that he repeated on December 14th 1989, ten days before the vote at the Congress. Before that, a similar claim had made by G. Arbatov, academician and head of the Institute of United States and Canada of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. On August 18th 1989, Pravda wrote that Yakovlev, chairman of the commission, had expressed the same principle in a debate with members of the German parliament on June 20th 1989. On October 23rd 1989, A. Talalayev, professor of international law at Moscow State University, published a dangerously competent report which was fortunately too long to attract attention and which attacked the July 20th resolution as incompatible with the mandate issued by the Congress of People’s Deputies. It would have been a major defeat if the secret protocol signed in 1941 had been excluded from the draft resolution because of a lack of mandate. Talalayev renewed his attempt on November 9th together with Professor N. Uschakov from the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The critics of the July 20th resolution were also joined on November 2nd and 4th 1989 by Professor J. Ussenko, later a merited
scientist of the Russian Federation. They all had the same objective as Müllerson, to deny the connection between the secret protocols and the present circumstances – especially where it might concern attempts by the Baltic States to regain independence.
On 11th December 1989, shortly before the end of year session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Falin sent copies of the draft resolutions that had been adopted at the December 6th session to all members of the commission. There were two versions, the shorter one of four pages and a longer one of eight pages. The contents of both documents were the same and in all main points repeated the resolution that had been superscribed on July 20th, while the shorter text was more specifi c and more favourable for us. The new resolutions were adopted at the December 4th session in the Kremlin and the whole committee signed them in the spirit of unity. Before the fi nal vote, the shorter text underwent some last-minute stylistic and linguistic modifi cations that did not change its contents in any way.
Yakovlev submitted the fi nal approved draft text of the commission’s resolution to the Congress of People’s Delegates on December 23rd 1989, but it was rejected at the fi rst vote. The reason, of course, was the unpleasant nature of the whole truth and, secondly, the nagging suspicion that the secret protocols may turn out to be falsifi cations after all. What the delegates did not know was that the chairman of the session had refused to give Kovalyov from the Foreign Ministry of USSR an opportunity to speak. This was the same Kovalyov who, on July 10th 1989, had given Falin the documents about Soviet-German relations in the autumn of 1939, documents which had been received from the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany. Neither Kovalyov nor Yakovlev told the Congress of People’s Deputies on December 23rd that, in addition to these documents, the archive of Molotov’s secretariat contained File No. 600-700. That fi le had been opened on August 23rd 1939 and closed on April 20th 1949 and included among other things all copies of Soviet-German,Soviet-Finnish and Soviet-US secret protocols from 1939-1941 and documents related to them, together with their transfer report from April 20th 1949.
According to the transfer report, originals of eight Soviet-German secret documents, including the secret protocols dated August 23rd 1939, September 28th 1939 and January 10th 1941 and verifi ed copies, were delivered by D. Smirnov, deputy head of Molotov’s secretariat, to B. Podtserob, senior assistant to the foreign minister, for deposit in the special archive of the Foreign Ministry of the USSR.
After the December 23rd session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the MPR committee held its fi nal and perhaps its most important meeting just before midnight, right there in the Kremlin hall of sessions. There were only a few members present. In addition to Yakovlev and myself, there was Kovalyov, who had brought with him the documents from Molotov’s archive. The decision was simple: the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs of the USSR was going to take this seriously and lay its trump card on the table. Nothing would stop the disclosure of the document that proved the existence of the secret protocols.
As had been planned, Yakovlev announced the existence of this revealing document the next day. The disclosure of the document from Molotov’s archive proved decisive and by 12.45pm the Congress of People’s Deputies had approved the committee’s resolution without any amendment. Of the 1,948 delegates in attendance, 1,432 delegates voted in favour, 252 were against and 264 abstained. It’s worth considering that this was Christmas Eve and most of the Lithuanian delegation had gone home, nor were there very many Estonians and Latvians still in Moscow. The most important precondition required for regaining independence had now been achieved.
The way in which we were able to achieve our objective was very enlightening as it showed the whole world the present situation in the Soviet leadership. A superpower needs both military strength and an untarnished international image, though it may sometimes requires making seemingly impossible compromises. At that time, the interests of two powerful administrations clashed – the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs. The Ministry of Defence had played its trump card earlier. Shortly before Yakovlev’s speech on December 23rd, the political administration of the Ministry of Defence attempted to erect a large display in the foyer of the Palace of Congresses about the “unanimous” decision of the Baltic States to be embraced by Josef Vissarionovich Stalin and the happy family of Soviet nations.
When some of our people began to question whether the display had been approved, the stands were reversed, to be unveiled during the break. I was attending the session when the journalist Anneli Reigas, who had been covering the MRP aff air in a long and comprehensive series of articles in Noorte Hääl, notifi ed me of the incident. Using a public microphone I asked Gorbachev whether this was a new way of working in the Soviet Congress. My microphone was switched off . Since there was no way of interrupting me or the session, Gorbachev eventually gave Lukyanov the order to remove the display.
In this way we prevented an attempt to brainwash the People’s Deputies with propaganda. Both the booklet “Legal-political assessment of the Soviet-German pacts of 1939-1941” that I had prepared and that was distributed by the pan-Baltic group of delegates, and the book “1940 in Estonia” prepared by our Supreme Council, made an important contribution. The media campaign and the Baltic Way human chain also had a positive effect.
The trick was not so much in winning over the opponents; rather it was in raising the awareness of hesitant delegates, in carefully timing the actions and in the skillful manipulation of confl icts between the large power bases. In autumn 1989 the Soviet leadership was very determined. It was the period when the USSR had begun to implement its new policy for Europe, and so the denunciation of the secret MRP protocols was almost inevitable in the end. Tactical objectives were sacrifi ced for strategic ones. Large-scale strategies often require tactical retreats and the subordination of administrative interests to national interests. The Congress of the People’s Deputies adopted the resolution not out of respect for the Baltic States intention to regain independence, but regardless of it. The Baltic independence declarations that followed were the price that the Soviet leadership had to pay for maintaining its image abroad and for the credibility of its foreign policy. It was neither realistic nor necessary to expect the resolution to contain more than it did.
The denunciation of the secret protocols was a major achievement and, although it had significantly weakened the enemy, it had not yet brought independence for Estonia. It was no accident that the authenticated documents that I had brought back from the US came from the archive of World War II war crimes, because war crimes have no statute of limitations. Next came a truly surreal phase in the actual attainment of independence, when the Baltic States were doing everything imaginable to regain independence while the Soviet Union was doing everything imaginable to stop them. On March 11th, the Supreme Council of the Lithuanian SSR adopted a resolution to restore Lithuania’s independence on the basis of the pre-occupation era Constitution. Two days later, on March 13th, Gorbachev declared that document legally invalid, refused to enter negotiations and announced an economic blockade against Lithuania. On March 30th 1990, the Supreme Council of the Estonian SSR declared the Soviet state power in Estonia illegal on the grounds that it was established against the will of the people, and announced the restoration of the independence of the Republic of Estonia and bodies of constitutional state power by restitution.
At the same time Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the USSR, began to draft a new Union Treaty by signifi cantly extending the powers of the KGB, the armed forces and the Ministry of Interior Aff airs. Then, in his November 7th speech to the Supreme Council of the USSR, he emphasized that the use of force against the “fascists” operating in the Baltic States was inevitable. This led to the bloody confl icts in Vilnius and Riga in January 1991, but it failed. The Soviet Union and Lithuania then opened somewhat surreal and meaningless political negotiations.
The resolutions adopted by Vilnius and Tallinn were productive, but not suffi cient to
restore independence. To give these resolutions more clout, the Supreme Council of the
Estonian SSR adopted a resolution on the relations between the Republic of Estonia and
the Soviet Union and set up a negotiating delegation consisting of Ü. Nugis, M. Lauristin,
E. Lippmaa, I. Toome and J. Raidla. The newly-elected president of the USSR unconditionally
condemned this initiative already on August 12th. In order to gather more allies I promptly
drafted the Interstate Agreement between the Russian SFSR (Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic) and the Republic of Estonia, which supported the June 12th 1990 resolution of
the Russian SFSR. Together with M. Lauristin, we and members of Boris Yeltsin’s delegation
superscribed it in the White House in Moscow on September 27th. The agreement was
structured in such a way that the Russian SFSR would have to be a fully independent state
in order to meet its obligations. The agreement was signed in Tallinn on January 13th 1991
and prevented the imminent onset of bloodshed. On the downside, because the Soviet
delegation only had a mandate to discuss the Union Treaty that was being drafted at that
time, the agreement stalled negotiations with the Soviet Union. From its side, the Supreme
Council of the Republic of Estonia decided on September 7th 1990 that legal representatives
of the Republic of Estonia were not authorized to participate in the preparation of the
new Union Treaty. This paralysis in relations reached its climax at an apparently innocent
meeting of the Soviet Peace Defence Committee (SPDC) on June 19th-21st 1991 in Moscow
in the SPDC building. In addition to representatives of the SPDC and Baltic States, the meet79
ing was attended unexpectedly by representatives from the Soviet Ministry of Defence (J.
I. Nauman), the Soviet Navy (E. V. Obydenninov), the KGB (A. A. Rumyantsev), the Internal
Forces of the Soviet Ministry of Interior (V. P. Voroztsov), the Supreme Council of the USSR
(G. I. Petrov) and the International Security Department (A. V. Kortunov) and a large number
of army and security services officers.
Obviously intending to intimidate the Baltic nations, Soviet army offi cers even began
talking about preparations for a worldwide confl ict. By now the total preparedness deadline
had long passed. While such fear-mongering had only a limited impact upon us, accustomed
as we were to the Soviet realities, it became clear that in addition to the greater
risks there were also greater opportunities. The tension peaked on June 18th 1991, when Gorbachev,
determined to preserve the Soviet Union at any cost, submitted the new draft Union
Treaty to the Supreme Council of the USSR for its approval. His solution to the problem was
the use of armed force – this got a kick start on August 17th when Prime Minister V. Pavlov
and the Presidium of the Government Cabinet of the USSR issued a decree on entry into the
force of the new Union Treaty and KGB chairman V. Kryuchkov approved the list of members
for the State Emergency Committee of the USSR. The Centre was sending soothing signals
to the outside world, while becoming increasingly belligerent at home. The bluff was called
already by August 19th, followed by the brief period of dual power of Yeltsin and Gorbachev
in Moscow. On August 20th 1991 the Supreme Council of the Republic of Estonia, acting
on its resolution from March 30th 1990, adopted a declaration on the independence of the
Republic of Estonia and urged foreign countries to restore diplomatic relations with the Republic
of Estonia. However, this was not enough. For independence to be fi nal and secure
it must also be recognized in a signed document by the opposing side and this required
from us a major diplomatic eff ort from us in Moscow. Finally, on September 6th 1991 the
State Council of the USSR, the highest body of Soviet state power at that time, approved the
independence of the Republic of Estonia as a truly and fully independent state. Gorbachev
did not support us nor did he sign the document. Our supporters included the president
of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Boris Yeltsin, who controlled the votes of several
republics and with whom Hardo Aasmäe and I enjoyed a lengthy dinner meeting featuring
a main course of buried sheep’s head accompanied by plenty of French wine. Our work was
done. The September 6th resolution of the State Council had restored historical truth, wiping
out the outcome of the 1939-1941 deals between Stalin and Hitler and the might of the
Soviet Union. Later that autumn, the USSR itself disintegrated.
By Endel Lippmaa,
12 May 2009
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