Estonia — Päts Facing the Ultimatum

Konstantin Päts, sixty-five, has led Estonia since 1934, the year of the constitutional coup that installed a semi-authoritarian regime far removed from the original parliamentarism; he was elected president in 1938 under the new Constitution. The country has 1.1 million inhabitants and an army of 16,000 men in active service, and proclaimed its neutrality on 1 September 1939.

The crisis breaks with the escape of the ORP Orzel, which slips out of Tallinn during the night of 17-18 September 1939. Moscow at once accuses Estonia of "defective neutrality" for having let a Polish belligerent submarine go. On 24 September the Estonian Foreign Minister Karl Selter is summoned urgently to the Kremlin, where Molotov presents an ultimatum: sign a treaty of mutual assistance opening Soviet military bases in Estonia, failing which the 160,000 men of the Baltic Military District Army, already massed at the frontier, will invade.

Selter returns to Tallinn on 25 September, and the Council of State gathered around Päts measures the impasse. Military resistance is impossible — sixteen thousand men against a hundred and sixty thousand; London has let it be known sotto voce that it cannot intervene in the Baltic; Helsinki has not the means for a military intervention; and any German protection is ruled out, Berlin having already ceded the Baltic states to Moscow by the pact of 23 August.

Päts must take his decision on 26 September.