It was their ambition that both would be governed in personal union with the Kingdom of Prussia, thus effectively becoming protectorates of the German Empire. Using the power vacuum towards the end of World War I, Baltic Germans proclaimed the independence of a Baltic Duchy and a Duchy of Courland. Stepan Petrichenko, the leader of the sailors, fled to Kronstadt, where in 1921 he would play a role in the unsuccessful Rebellion against the Bolsheviks. After two months, German forces chased them away. The sailors set up a government and started collecting taxes from the locals. In December 1917, the fortress on the Estonian island of Naissaar was commandeered by a few dozen Russian sailors, who proclaimed a ‘Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress-Builders’, surely the only time the latter nomenclature was used for a socialist republic (typically said to be composed of ‘soldiers, workers and farmers’). The mapmaker put several other short-lived Soviet republics on the map, but “since they all have the same all-red flag and pretty much the same story (Bolsheviks rose up, got overturned again), I focused on (ephemeral countries) with more colourful stories”. All North Ingrians were later deported to Central Asia.įinland itself, or parts of it at least, saw the short-lived Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic – a.k.a. By October 1920, both movements – each donned with a flag sporting the distinctive Nordic Cross – had been crushed. Let’s turn first to the northwestern corner of the former Empire, where the Republics of Uhtua and North Ingria were proclaimed by ethnic Finns hoping to join Finland, itself newly independent from Russia. This is about the nations most people haven’t heard of”. As map creator /u/pisseguri82 says: “I specifically omitted (states) that are still around – various Red, White, monarchist and others, or incarnations of them anyway (1). All were eventually absorbed into the U.S.S.R. Some lasted only weeks, other several years.
Those circumstances gave rise to dozens of ephemeral states, mostly at the former Empire’s fraying edges.
The reality was a lot more complex, covering a panoply of secessions, rebellions, counter-revolutions and foreign invasions. What happened in the rest of the country is conveniently termed a civil war between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’, with the former eventually crushing the latter. Only part of the vast land mass stretching from Polish border to the shores of the Pacific was under the effective control of the fledgling Communist regime (coloured darker pink on this map). After the Bolshevik party took power, the former Russian Empire descended into anarchy. The collapse of the Soviet Union was chaotic? You should have seen the start.
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