Estonian soldiers and the others in World War One: imagining and encountering friends and foes

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring World War I, around 80,000 Estonian soldiers were mobilized into the Russian Army. The warfare and the composition of the Russian Army presented the Estonians with plentiful opportunities to experience and encounter many others. By relying on Estonian soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, this article takes a look at how the experiences of imagining and encountering others – the enemies (mostly the Germans) and the Estonians’ fellow soldiers in the Russian Army (mainly the Russians) – evolved during the war and contributed to Estonians’ war experiences as well as to their rising national consciousness on the eve of the collapse of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the nation-states.As this case study of Estonian soldiers shows, the images of others were dynamic and were affected by numerous factors, such as propaganda, patriotism (or lack thereof), and direct encounters. The minorities of the Russian Army who often struggled with making sense of the war and with experiencing camaraderie in the multi-ethnic army, could at times perceive enemy others more positively than they perceived their fellow soldiers. While the Estonians mainly pictured the Germans as the enemy, they could also imagine German soldiers as fellow sufferers, or the German Army as a liberator who would free the Estonians from the Bolshevik regime in 1918. Encountering fellow soldiers – mainly the Russians – did rarely generate camaraderie and feelings of shared identity but rather revealed differences between the Estonians and other soldiers, and ultimately resulted in growing separatist and nationalistic fervour among the Estonians.