Under the sponsorship of Soviet Russia, on December 17, 1918, the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic led by Latvian communist Pēteris Stučka, was set up as a regime to rival the Latvian nationalist provisional government of Kārlis Ulmanis that had been formed one month earlier. Two Latvian governments now vied for legitimacy during the Latvian War of Independence.
(Taken from Latvian War of Independence – Wars of the 20th Century – Vol. 4)
Background By the mid-19th century, as a result of the French Revolution (1789-1799), a wave of nationalism swept across Europe, a phenomenon that touched into Latvia as well. The Latvian nationalist movement was led by the “Young Latvians”, a nationalist movement of the 1850s to 1880s that promoted Latvian identity and consciousness (as opposed to the prevailing Germanic viewpoint that predominated society) expressed in Latvian art, culture, language, and writing. The Baltic German nobility used its political and economic domination of society to suppress this emerging Latvian nationalistic sentiment. The Russian government’s attempt at “Russification” (cultural and linguistic assimilation into the Russian state) was rejected by Latvians. The Latvian national identity also was accelerated by other factors: the abolition of serfdom in Courland in 1817 and Livonia in 1819, the growth of industrialization and workers’ organizations, increasing prosperity among Latvians who had acquired lands, and the formation of Latvian political movements.
The Russian Empire opposed these nationalist sentiments and enforced measures to suppress them. Then in January 1905, the social and political unrest that gripped Russia (the Russian Revolution of 1905) produced major reverberations in Latvia, starting in January 1905, when mass protests in Riga were met with Russian soldiers opening fire on the demonstrators, killing and wounding scores of people. Local subversive elements took advantage of the revolutionary atmosphere to carry out a reign of terror in the countryside, particularly targeting the Baltic German nobility, torching houses and looting properties, and inciting peasants to rise up against the ethnic German landowners. In November 1905, Russian authorities declared martial law and brought in security forces that violently quelled the uprising, executing over 1,000 dissidents and sending thousands of others into exile in Siberia.
Then in July 1914, World War I broke out in Europe, with Russia allied with other major powers Britain and France as the Triple Entente, against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire that comprised the major Central Powers. In 1915, the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary made military gains in the northern sector of the Eastern Front; by May of that year, German units had seized sections of Latvian Courland and Livonian Governorates. A tenacious defense put up by the newly formed Latvian Riflemen of the Imperial Russian Army held off the German advance into Riga for two years, but the capital finally fell in September 1917.
The Bolsheviks, on coming to power in the October Revolution, issued the “Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia” (on November 15, 1917), which granted all non-Russian peoples of the former Russian Empire the right to secede from Russia and establish their own separate states. Eventually, the Bolsheviks would renege on this edict and suppress secession from the Russian state (now known as Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, or RSFSR). The Bolshevik revolution also had succeeded partly on the communists promising a war-weary citizenry that Russia would withdraw from World War I; thereafter, the Russian government declared its pacifist intentions to the Central Powers. A ceasefire agreement was signed on December 15, 1917 and peace talks began a few days later in Brest-Litovsk (present-day Brest, in Belarus).
However, the Central Powers imposed territorial demands that the Russian government deemed excessive. On February 17, 1918, the Central Powers repudiated the ceasefire agreement, and the following day, Germany and Austria-Hungary restarted hostilities, launching a massive offensive with one million troops in 53 divisions along three fronts that swept through western Russia and captured Ukraine Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. German forces also entered Finland, assisting the non-socialist paramilitary group known as the “White Guards” in defeating the socialist militia known as “Red Guards” in the Finnish Civil War. Eleven days into the offensive, the northern front of the German advance was some 85 miles from the Russian capital of Petrograd.
On February 23, 1918, or five days into the offensive, peace talks were restarted at Brest-Litovsk, with the Central Powers demanding even greater territorial and military concessions on Russia than in the December 1917 negotiations. After heated debates among members of the Council of People’s Commissars (the highest Russian governmental body) who were undecided whether to continue or end the war, at the urging of its Chairman, Vladimir Lenin, the Russian government acquiesced to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On March 3, 1918, Russian and Central Powers representatives signed the treaty, whose major stipulations included the following: peace was restored between Russia and the Central Powers; Russia relinquished possession of Finland (which was engaged in a civil war), Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic territories of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – Germany and Austria-Hungary were to determine the future of these territories; and Russia also agreed on some territorial concessions to the Ottoman Empire.
German forces occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland, establishing semi-autonomous governments in these territories that were subordinate to the authority of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The German occupation of the region allowed the realization of the Germanic vision of “Mitteleuropa”, an expansionist ambition aimed at unifying all Germanic and non-Germanic peoples of Central Europe into a greatly enlarged and powerful German Empire. In support of Mitteleuropa, in the Baltic region, the Baltic German nobility proposed to set up the United Baltic Duchy, a semi-autonomous political entity consisting of present-day Latvia and Estonia that would be voluntarily integrated into the German Empire. The proposal was not implemented, but German military authorities set up local civil governments under the authority of the Baltic German nobility or ethnic Germans.
Although the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 ended Russia’s participation in World War I, the war was still ongoing in other fronts – most notably on the Western Front, where for four years, German forces were bogged down in inconclusive warfare against the British, French and other Allied Armies. After transferring substantial numbers of now freed troops from the Russian front to the Western Front, in March 1918, Germany launched the Spring Offensive, a major attack into France and Belgium in an effort to bring the war to an end. After four months of fighting, by July 1918, despite achieving some territorial gains, the German offensive had ground to a halt.
The Allied Powers then counterattacked with newly developed battle tactics and weapons and gradually pushed back the now spent and demoralized German Army all across the line into German territory. The entry of the United States into the war on the Allied side was decisive, as increasing numbers of arriving American troops with the backing of the U.S. weapons-producing industrial power contrasted sharply with the greatly depleted war resources of both the Entente and Central Powers. The imminent collapse of the German Army was greatly exacerbated by the outbreak of political and social unrest at the home front (the German Revolution of 1918-1919), leading to the sudden end of the German monarchy with the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II on November 9, 1918 and the establishment of an interim government (under moderate socialist Friedrich Ebert), which quickly signed an armistice with the Allied Powers on November 11, 1918 that ended the combat phase of World War I.
As the armistice agreement required that Germany demobilize the bulk of its armed forces as well as withdraw the same to the confines of the German borders within 30 days, the German government ordered its forces to abandon the occupied territories that had been won in the Eastern Front. After Germany’s capitulation, Russia repudiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and made plans to seize back the European territories it previously had lost to the Central Powers. An even far more reaching objective was for the Bolshevik government to spread the communist revolution to Europe, first by linking up with German communists who were at the forefront of the unrest that currently was gripping Germany. Russian military planners intended the offensive to merely follow in the heels of the German withdrawal from Eastern Europe (i.e. to not directly engage the Germans in combat) and then seize as much territory before the various local ethnic nationalist groups in these territories could establish a civilian government.
Germany’s defeat in World War I and the subsequent withdrawal of German forces from the Baltic region produced a political void that local nationalist leaders rapidly filled. In Latvia, on November 17, 1918, independence-seeking political leaders established a “People’s Council” (Latvian: Tautas padome), an interim legislative assembly, which in turn formed a provisional government under Prime Minister Kārlis Ulmanis. The next day, November 18, the Latvian government declared independence as the Republic of Latvia.
Starting on November 28, 1918, in the action known as the Soviet westward offensive of 1918-1919, Soviet forces consisting of hundreds of thousands of troops advanced in a multi-pronged offensive with the objective of recapturing the Baltic region, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine.
The northern front of the Soviet offensive was directed at Latvia and Estonia. In Latvia, the Red Army, as Soviet forces were called and which included the Red Latvian Riflemen (formerly the Latvian Riflemen of the Imperial Russian Army who had shifted their allegiance to Bolshevik Russia), made rapid progress and easily gained control of most of Latvian territory, including Valka, Valmiera, Rēzekne, Daugavpils, and the capital Riga, which was taken in April 1919. The newly formed Latvian Army and pro-Latvia German militias retreated in disarray. Under the sponsorship of Soviet Russia, on December 17, 1918, the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic led by Latvian communist Pēteris Stučka, was set up as a regime to rival the Ulmanis Latvian nationalist provisional government that had been formed one month earlier.