“Foreign Rule” during the Estonian War of Independence 1918–1920: The Bolshevik Experiment of the “Estonian Worker's Commune”

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between the national and Bolshevik solutions to the national question during the Estonian War of Independence of 1918–20. Specifically, it examines the failure of the Estonian Workers' Commune, starting from the assumption that as late as November 1918 the fate of the country was still up for grabs, and that the Bolshevik alternative was attractive to all those for whom a social revolution promised a “new life.” The concept of “foreign rule” is important here since, on the one hand, the Moscow-dependent Estonian Bolsheviks were soon seen to have abrogated national solidarity with their calls for class warfare and came to be perceived as foreign. The elections to the constitutional assembly in April 1919, on the other hand, demonstrated the victory of the “bourgeois,” nation state alternative. The victory of Social Democrats over the more conservative Provisional Government serves to demonstrate the lingering attractiveness of social revolution within the national framework, however.