greatest tank battles battle of the baltics

3 Even earlier, in 1949, a legal scholar from Lithuania, Juozas Repečka, submitted an interesting thesis with a substantive historical part on this matter. 2 In particular, later researchers of the legal aspects of the Baltic question have relied on the findings in Krystyna Marek’s and Boris Meissner’s classic studies. The story of the annexation of the Baltic republics by the Soviet Union in 1940 has been told repeatedly in various studies of law and history. The problem of the (il)legality of the Soviet annexation lies at the heart of the debate over the legal status of the Baltic republics.Ī The Soviet Occupation and Annexation of the Baltic States in 1940: Facts Therefore, we need to examine carefully the legal aspects of the events that occurred in the Baltic States in 1939/1940. In different forms, this proposition has been contested by Soviet and later Russian diplomacy and doubted by some Western scholars. The Baltic republics have based their claims of State continuity primarily on the illegality of the Soviet annexation. 1 However, notwithstanding all the effectivité of prolonged Soviet rule, far from all States and legal scholars considered the Baltic States extinct as legal subjects. Therefore, it is no surprise that several highly respected voices in the legal literature accepted the extinction of the Baltic States as a fait accompli. With Soviet rule in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the independent ‘bourgeois’ Baltic States clearly no longer existed. Indeed, from the point of view of the pure three-elements theory, the realistic basis of which cannot be denied, it would have seemed peculiar to argue after the end of World War II that the Baltic republics continued to exist as subjects of international law. From the point of view of other States, this claim could be supported, if not by the legitimacy of the socialist revolutions taking place-according to Soviet claims-in the Baltic States in 1940, then at least by the lasting effectiveness of Soviet rule in the Baltics. According to the Soviet view, the independent ‘bourgeois’ Baltic States had become extinct and the new, Baltic Soviet republics their successor States within the USSR. During that period (with the exception of the German occupation from 1941–1944), the Soviet Socialist Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania operated on the territories of the former independent Baltic States. For some fifty years, the independent Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were effectively-it has been argued-incorporated into the USSR.

Greatest tank battles battle of the baltics