The Russian-German Crisis of 1934, also commonly referred to as the Lake Lubahn Crisis (German: Zwischenfall am Lubahnsee) or the Baltic Crisis, was a multinational diplomatic incident that primarily embroiled the German Empire and the Russian Republic and to a lesser degree the German-aligned Eastern European client states in late 1934 following skirmishes between the Baltic Defence Force and Latvian partisans - so-called Forest Brothers - on Baltic territory near the Russian border.
Likely the most momentous confrontation between Russia and Germany on the global stage since the end of the Great War, the Lake Lubahn Crisis was fuelled to a strong degree by rampant Russophobia within the German bloc in the wake of geopolitical power shifts following the election of Russian President Boris Savinkov in June 1934. Fearful of the Savinkovists' expansionist rhetoric, foreign-political hawks in Germany and Eastern Europe had frantically tried to justify a hypothetical preemptive strike on Russia throughout the summer of 1934 in an effort to nip Russian expansion fantasies in the bud before the point of no return; the incident at Lake Lubahn in September 1934 would become the perfect opportunity to put their plans into practice.
Although the escalation did not occur in the end, particularly due to the reluctance of the civilian government in Berlin, and a German-Russian agreement in October sealed the status quo, the crisis had far-reaching consequences particularly at the domestic level. In the German General Staff, the old guard had to make way for younger and far more pragmatic figures, while the liberal Chancellor Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff was replaced by the expert on Eastern European affairs and conservative loyalist Herbert von Dirksen, a desperate move by the imperial family to increase its influence on politics again. Meanwhile in Russia,
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Background[]
June 1934: Election of President Savinkov[]
President Boris Viktorovich Savinkov briefly after his election, summer 1934
The results of the Russian Duma elections of late 1934 sent shock waves through the German-aligned bloc. With the election of President Boris Viktorovich Savinkov's and Prime Minister Alexander Dikgoff-Derental's openly revanchist Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom (SZRZ), a party that had long capitalised on widespread anti-German notions within the Russian electorate, Germany’s foreign political strategy in the East was suddenly at stake. The Eastern Department of the German Foreign Office under Richard Meyer von Achenbach, a renowned expert on political affairs in the Eastern Hemisphere, soon began to draw up a hypothetical worst-case scenario in which Germany found itself encircled by enemies on all sides - not only in Europe, but also in the Far East. Consequently, the old pre-war German angst of hostile geopolitical “Einkreisung” (Encirclement) made a grand return to German politics. By silently accepting the political status quo in Moscow, Berlin might have to face dire consequences in the future, in the worst case yet another two-front war within just a matter of years.
Achenbach's warnings attracted especially the attention of the German General Staff. In absolute secrecy, plans for a hypothetical preemptive strike against Russia were drawn up in Germany's highest military echelons, in close cooperation with military representatives from Germany's Eastern European client states. Especially the governments in Kyiv, Minsk, and Riga showed enormous concern about Savinkov's rise to power, with certain political and army leaders urging their counterparts in Berlin to act decisively and quickly by launching direct military action against Russia in an effort drastically weaken Savinkov before the point of no return. Primarily for domestic political reasons, however, the German General Staff's hand was still tied at that time; without the open support of the civilian government, for whom a declaration of war without clear justification would have been political suicide, the plans remained confined to the back rooms of the General Staff.
September 1934: Lake Lubahn Incident[]
The summer of 1934 passed by without any major foreign-political incidents between Russia and the German-aligned bloc. This would change in late September 1934. Disappointed by Germany's lack of decisive action earlier that year, war hawks and preemptive strike proponents in the Baltics decided to take the matter into their own hands, with the deliberate intention to actively provoke an escalation along the border to enforce a direct German intervention. The Baltic Defence Force (Landeswehr) under Rüdiger von der Goltz began to massively increase military presence along the Livonian-Latgalian border, something that was bound to result in open violence with one of the many Latvian partisan detachments that had roamed the forested frontier along the Baltic-Russian border for years at that point.
The rural east of Livonia had long been a hotbed of Latvian partisan activity against the ruling Baltic German elite, mostly by means of assassination attempts, sabotage and occasional skirmishes, and many of these partisan detachments were based out of the neighboring Dvinsk Commissarial Governorate (Russian Latgale), a limited autonomy zone for Latvians within the Russian Republic and thus a convenient place for resistance figures to organise their operations and retreat to in case of emergency. For most of the 1920s, the existence of this autonomous zone had been a regretable annoyance for the Germans, but not something Moscow could be held accountable for per se as previous Russian governments had no official ties to the Latvian resistance and therefore had no sway on the latters’ actions on Baltic territory. Under the Presidency of Savinkov, this changed massively. Latvian independence fighters from the era of the Russian Civil War suddenly occupied high-ranking positions within the government, for example the popular general Kārlis Goppers, a long-time political companion of Savinkov since their days during the anti-Bolshevik campaign in Northern Russia, widely-known as a confidant of high-profile Latvian partisan leader Jānis Kurelis.
In late September 1934, a badly-timed minor clash between a Landeswehr detachment and a local Russian-equipped band of Latvian partisans broke out in a woodland near Lake Lubahn, only a few hundred metres behind the border. The confrontation delivered the long-anticipated final escalation hawks all over Eastern Europe and in Berlin had prepared for for months. The liberal Bernstorff administration in Berlin, however, got caught on the wrong foot as the German print media was rocked by sensational and exaggerated headlines about “clandestine Russian army deployment along the border to the German-aligned bloc”; intervention in the East, albeit undesired, seemed unavoidable. A major international crisis was imminent, much to the delight of the clandestine back room strategists that had deliberately fuelled tensions.