The War That Made Estonia

In November 1918, Soviet forces crossed Estonia's eastern border and advanced to within thirty-four kilometers of the capital. The state they were attacking had existed for less than a year. Its army was schoolboys with rifles. Its government had spent the previous nine months meeting in secret apartments under German occupation. The odds were catastrophic.

What followed was one of the most remarkable military and political achievements of the twentieth century: a small people, with almost nothing, stopping an empire cold.

The War That Made Estonia traces the Estonian War of Independence from its desperate opening weeks through the campaigns that drove Soviet forces from Estonian soil, defeated a German-backed coup in Latvia, and secured the Treaty of Tartu - the legal birth certificate of a democratic republic that would endure for twenty years, be destroyed by Soviet occupation, and be restored in 1991 on the same legal foundation its founders had laid in 1920.

This is the story of armored trains racing through winter darkness, of partisans crossing open fields under machine-gun fire, of diplomats negotiating under military pressure, and of a generation that built a state with their hands and defended it with their lives. It is a story the world needs to remember.