The Russians defeat the Swedes at the Battle of Oravais.

At the beginning of the war, Swedish forces had retreated to Oulu. They had then managed to repel the Russians and reach Savonia despite the capitulation of the fortress of Sveaborg by the end of summer 1808. Russia recuperated quickly, and by the end of August the Swedish army was again retreating northwards along the coastal road. To avoid being encircled, Colonel Georg Carl von Döbeln was sent in advance to Nykarleby with a brigade. The threat of encirclement was exaggerated, but the Swedish army was at this point showing signs of panic and collapse. On 13 September the army left for Oravais and it halted to await news from von Döbeln, who was fighting the Russians at Jutas. The sound of a cannon was heard in Oravais, and a brigade was sent to reinforce von Döbeln.

The Russian main army had marched from Vasa in furious pursuit of the Swedish forces. The night before 14 September was spent in bivouacs along the road between Vörå and Oravais. The impulsive General-Major Yakov Kulnev’s troops had taken the lead and were the first to make contact with the Swedes.

At dawn the first shots were exchanged between Kulnev’s troops and a Swedish outpost by a bridge in the forest. Firing intensified, the Swedish position was reinforced continuously while the remainder of the Russian forces behind Kulnev arrived. Fighting continued with heavy losses on both sides until the situation became untenable for the Swedes, who retreated to their defensive positions at 10 a.m. The retreat was covered by a single artillery piece commanded by the fifteen-year-old sublieutenant Wilhelm von Schwerin.

The Swedish main position was deployed along a ridge which was protected to the north (on the Swedish right wing) by an inlet from the Baltic, and the Fjärdså stream with its south to north flow provided added defensive potential. The forest in front of the ridge had been cleared to afford the artillery a better view of the arriving Russians, who were regrouping at the edge of the forest.

Artillery bombardment then began between the two forces, and continued for an hour until the Russians mounted a frontal assault against the Swedish positions. Kulnev, on the Russian left wing, struck the Swedish right, but was repelled when his force became bogged down in the Fjärdså stream. The Russians now reinforced their right wing, under Nikolay Demidov, and another assault was made. It was also repelled, but this time the Swedish unexplainably left their positions and counterattacked; Adlercreutz had issued no order to that effect. The Swedish counterattack met overpowering fire and was forced to withdraw with heavy losses.

At 2 p.m. the battle was far from decided. The Russians made a second attempt at turning the Swedish left flank. This thinned the Russian center, and Adlercreutz ordered a forceful attack to exploit the weakness. Despite the intensive Russian fire, the attack proceeded swiftly, and the whole Swedish line was carried along by the movement. The entire Russian line was forced to retire back into the forest where the battle had begun earlier in the morning.

However, dwindling of ammunition frustrated Adlercreutz’s attempted decisive stroke. As Russian reinforcements arrived, the spent Swedish army retired to their defensive positions again. At this point the battle was still undecided, but General Kamensky ordered Demidov’s right wing to make yet another attempt on the weak Swedish left wing. When this maneuver started night had fallen and the battle had raged for fourteen hours; it became too much for the Swedish army, which hastily retreated to the north.

King Louis 16th of France accepts the new constitution.

On June 20th 1789 the newly formed National Assembly gathered in a Versailles tennis court and pledged not to disband until France had a working constitution. Their desire for a constitution was a product of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. The deputies of the Third Estate believed that any reforms to the Ancien Régime must be outlined in and guaranteed by a written framework. A constitution would define the authority, structure and powers of the new government. This would prevent or limit the abuses and injustices of the old order. The National Assembly set about drafting a national constitution almost immediately. The process was a long and difficult one, hampered by differences of opinion, growing radicalism and the events of 1789-91. Their deliberations eventually produced the Constitution of 1791, which was ratified in September that year. This document established a constitutional monarchy and incorporated several political ideas from the Enlightenment. The fate of the 1791 Constitution, however, hinged on the attitude and actions of King Louis XVI.

Fascination with constitutions and constitutional government was a creature of the Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, monarchical and absolutist governments acted without any form of written constitution. The structures and power of government were shaped and limited by internal forces and events – if they were limited at all. Britain had no written constitution, however, the power of the British monarchy had been constrained by Britain’s nobility, its parliament, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution and other factors. Over time, the British system developed a balance of power between the monarch, the parliament, the aristocracy and the judiciary. But the idea that political power would sort itself out over time was not acceptable to Enlightenment philosophers. Men like John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu and Thomas Paine believed that government must be founded on rational principles and organised in a way that best serves the people. The best device for ensuring this was a written constitution, a foundation law that defines the structures and powers of government, as well as rules and instructions for its operation.

constitution of 1791
This image shows the Three Estates working together to construct a constitution
The French revolutionaries had before them a working model of a national constitution. The United States Constitution was drafted in 1787 and ratified by the American states the following year. The American constitution embraced and codified several Enlightenment ideas, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s popular sovereignty and Montesquieu’s separation of powers. There was one significant difference: the American constitution established a republican political system with an elected president as its chief executive. In France, however, the National Constituent Assembly remained wedded to the idea of a constitutional monarchy. The Assembly wanted to retain the king but to ensure that his executive power was subordinate to both the law and the public good. This presented the Assembly with two concerns. First, they had to find a constitutional role for the king and determine what political powers, if any, he should retain. Second, a constitutional monarchy would be entirely dependent on having a king loyal to the constitution. In the years that followed, both caused problems for the national government.

The preparation and drafting of the constitution began on July 6th 1789, when the National Constituent Assembly appointed a preliminary constitutional committee. This committee was made permanent and expanded to 12 men on July 14th, the day of the Bastille raid. Among the members of the constitutional committee were Charles de Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun; the radical Bretonist Isaac le Chapelier; the conservative lawyer Jean-Joseph Mounier; and Emmanuel Sieyès, author of What is the Third Estate? Almost immediately, the constitutional committee cleaved into two factions. One faction favoured a bicameral legislature and the retention of strong executive powers for the king, including an absolute veto. This group, which included Mounier and the Marquis de Lafayette, was dubbed the Monarchiens or ‘English faction’. A second group wanted a strong unicameral legislature and a monarchy with very limited power. This group, led by Sieyès and Talleyrand, won the day in the National Constituent Assembly.

1791 constitution
Louis XVI takes an oath to uphold and respect the Constitution of 1791
By October 1789, the committee was wrestling with the question of exactly who would elect the government. They decided to separate the population into two classes: ‘active citizens’ and ‘passive citizens’. ‘Active citizens’ were males over the age of 25 who paid annual taxes equivalent to at least three days’ wages. This was, in effect, a property qualification on voting rights. In today’s world, where universal suffrage is the norm, this seems grossly unfair – however, property restrictions on voting were quite common in 18th century Europe. Voting was not a natural right conferred on all: it was a privilege available to those who owned property and paid tax. By way of comparison, England in 1780 was a nation of around eight million people, yet only 214,000 people were eligible to vote. The National Constituent Assembly’s property qualifications were considerably more generous than that. They would have extended voting rights to around 4.3 million Frenchmen. Despite this, radicals in the political clubs and sections demanded that voting rights be granted to all men, regardless of earnings or property.

The other feature of the Constitution of 1791 was the revised role of the king. The constitution amended Louis XVI’s title from “King of France” to “King of the French”. This implied that the king’s power emanated from the people and the law, not from divine right or national sovereignty. The king was granted a civil list of 25 million livres, a reduction of around 20 million livres on his spending before the revolution. In terms of executive power, the king retained the right to form a cabinet, to select and appoint ministers. A more pressing question was whether he would have the power to block laws passed by the legislature. Again, this was resolved with debate and compromise. The Monarchiens, most notably Honore Mirabeau, argued for the king to be granted an absolute veto, the executive right to block any legislation. Democratic deputies argued for a more limited veto and some for no veto at all. It was eventually decided to give the king a suspensive veto. He could deny assent to bills and withhold this assent for up to five years. After this time, if assent had not been granted by the king, the Assembly could enact the bill without his approval.

Even as the constitution was being finalised, it was being overtaken by the events of the revolution. In June 1791 the king and his family stole away from the Tuileries and fled Paris; they were detained at Varennes the following morning. The king’s attempt to escape Paris and the revolution brought anti-royalist and republican sentiment to the boil. The National Constituent Assembly tried riding out the storm by claiming the royal family had been abducted and reinstating the king – but the Cordeliers, the radical Jacobins and the sans culottes of Paris were not buying it. The Constitution of 1791 was passed in September but was already fatally compromised by the king’s betrayal. France now had a constitutional monarchy but the monarch, by his actions, had shown no faith in the constitution. In a conversation with the conservative politician Bertrand de Molleville, Louis XVI suggested that he would bring about change by making the new constitution unworkable:

Cave paintings are discovered in Lascaux, France.

On this day in 12 September 1940, near Montignac, France, a collection of prehistoric cave paintings are discovered by four teenagers who stumbled upon the ancient artwork after following their dog down a narrow entrance into a cavern. The 15,000 to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of animal representations, are among the finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic period. First studied by the French archaeologist Henri-Édouard-Prosper Breuil, the Lascaux grotto consists of a main cavern 66 feet wide and 16 feet high. The walls of the cavern are decorated with some 600 painted and drawn animals and symbols and nearly 1,500 engravings.

The pictures depict in excellent detail numerous types of animals, including horses, red deer, stags, bovines, felines, and what appear to be mythical creatures. There is only one human figure depicted in the cave: a bird-headed man with an erect phallus. Archaeologists believe that the cave was used over a long period of time as a centre for hunting and religious rites. The Lascaux grotto was opened to the public in 1948 but was closed in 1963 because artificial lights had faded the vivid colors of the paintings and caused algae to grow over some of them. A replica of the Lascaux cave was opened nearby in 1983 and receives tens of thousands of visitors annually.

A major Channel Tunnel fire breaks out on a freight train, resulting in the closure of part of the tunnel for six months.

When a fire closed the Channel Tunnel in 11 September 2008, the struggling operator Eurotunnel no doubt consoled itself with one thought: its insurers would pay up. More than two years and a half years later, however, Eurotunnel remains embroiled in a legal battle with the train operators that use its infrastructure between Britain and the Continent.

Consequently, like any punter kept waiting for their car or contents insurer to pay out, Eurotunnel – the operator of the 30-mile road and rail link – is feeling the financial pain of a delay in receiving one of the biggest ever corporate insurance payouts. Yesterday, the rail operator swung to a €57m loss for 2010, compared with a profit of €7m the previous year, and it blamed its woes firmly on the “freezing of €59m of indemnities”, although it was paid €11m of this in February.

However, what makes the dispute more colourful is that this freezing is the result of the rail operators who use the tunnel, Eurostar and SNCF, lodging a claim in 2009 against the same insurance claim lodged by Eurotunnel itself, instead of seeking indemnities through their own insurers. In simple terms, Eurostar and SNCF sought compensation from an insurance policy that they were not even paying for.

While Eurostar declined to comment on the matter, an extract from Eurotunnel’s 2009 accounts suggests that it and SNCF felt that because the fire resulted in disruption to their businesses from an incident outside the remit of their own insurance policies, they should lodge a claim for compensation with Eurotunnel’s insurers.

In the report, the tunnel operator said: “Eurotunnel’s insurers have received from the railways a claim for compensation relating to the fire on 11 September 2008 in respect of their own operating losses, as the railways consider that Eurotunnel’s insurers should also compensate them for their operating losses following the fire.”

Certainly, it is fair to say that Eurotunnel probably did not expect to be facing a legal battle so long after the fire in September 2008, which led to it closing one-sixth of the tunnel for about five months. Eurotunnel has put the total cost of the damage caused by the fire at about €290m, including the rebuilding of the affected tunnel, compensation for the loss of an entire freight train, and its operating losses.

After Eurostar lodged its claim in May 2009 at a commercial court in Paris, the French court froze the part of the process relating to the outstanding indemnity of €48m. Jacques Gounon, the chairman of Eurotunnel, said: “The delay in payment of the insurance indemnities has impacted heavily on our net result but the group is working to rectify this situation.”

Eurotunnel said the €57m loss in 2010 was due to the absence of insurance payouts, as well as €4.5m linked to the reconditioning of a shuttle.

Aside from the insurance dispute, Eurotunnel said its revenues rose by 26 per cent to €737m last year. Stripping out the financial impact of its insurance battles, it expects to break even this year. The number of Eurostar passengers grew by 3 per cent to 9.5m in 2010.

Eurotunnel’s path to reinvention has been long and tortuous, with the trouble starting almost as soon as the company was formed in 1986.

Delays and disputes with contractors pushed the tunnel’s opening date back from May 1993 to November 1994, and the cost ballooned from £4.7bn to £9.5bn, of which an eye-watering £8bn was debt.

Simón Bolívar is named President of Peru.

He was called El Liberator by the natives of Peru, Venzeula and Colombia, who followed his military leadership to independence. Sympathetic Americans drew parallels with their own struggle for independence, and called Simon Bolivar the “George Washington of South America.” Indeed, Simon Bolivar was the most important political and military figure in South American history, liberating Bolivia, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela from Spain, and organizing them into self-sustaining nations — mostly under his leadership.

On this day, September 10, in 1823, after liberating Colombia and adding to its territory, Simon Bolivar returned to Peru to take charge of the military and government.

After the Upper Peru region became a separate nation, with Bolivar’s blessing, their government asked Bolivar to become their president. Bolivar declined, but did appoint one of his top aides, General Antonio José de Sucre, to the post. The country decided to name themselves after Bolivar: like Rome named after Romulus, from Bolivar would come Bolivia.

The Hanapepe massacre occurs on Kauai, Hawaii.

The Hanap?p? Massacre also called the Battle of Hanap?p? since both sides were armed happened on September 9, 1924. Toward the end of a long-lasting strike of Filipino sugar workers on Kaua?i, Hawai?i, local police shot dead nine strikers and fatally wounded seven, strikers shot and stabbed three sheriffs to death and fatally wounded one; a total of 20 people died. The massacre brought an end to armed protests in Hawaii.

By the 1920s, the sugarcane plantation owners in Hawai?i had become disillusioned with both Japanese and Filipino workers. They spent the next few years trying to get the U.S. Congress to relax the Chinese Exclusion Act so that they could bring in new Chinese workers. Congress prevented the importation of Chinese labor.

But organized labor in the 1920s’ U.S. mainland supported the Congress in this action, so that for a while it looked as though militant unionism on the sugarcane plantations was dead. To oppose organized labor, the Hawaiian Territorial Legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Law of 1919, Anarchistic Publications law of 1921, and the Anti-Picketing Law of 1923.

These laws, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison, increased the discontent of the workers. The Filipinos, who were rapidly becoming the dominant plantation labor force, had deep-seated grievances: as the latest immigrants they were treated most poorly. Although the planters had claimed there was a labor shortage and they were actively recruiting workers from the Philippines, they wanted only illiterate workers and turned back any arrivals who could read or write, as many as one in six.

By 1922 Filipino labor activist Pablo Manlapit had organized a new Filipino Higher Wage Movement which numbered some 13,000 members. In April 1924, it called for a strike on the island of Kaua?i, demanding $2 a day in wages and reduction of the workday to 8 hours. As they had previously, the plantation owners used armed forces, the National Guard, and strike breakers paid a higher wage than the strikers demanded. Again workers were turned out of their homes. Propaganda was distributed to whip up racism. Spying and infiltration of the strikers’ ranks was acknowledged by Jack Butler, executive head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association.

Strike leaders were arrested in attempts to disrupt workers’ solidarity, and people were bribed to testify against them. On September 9, 1924, outraged strikers seized two strike breakers at Hanap?p? and prevented them from going to work. The police, armed with clubs and guns, came to union headquarters to rescue them. Filipino strikers were armed only with homemade weapons and knives.

The Associated Press flashed the story of what followed across the United States in the following words: Honolulu. – Twenty persons dead, unnumbered injured lying in hospital, officers under orders to shoot strikers as they approached, distracted widows with children tracking from jails to hospitals and morgues in search of missing strikers – this was the aftermath of a clash between cane strikers and workers on the McBryde plantation, Tuesday at Hanapepe, island of Kauai. The dead included sixteen Filipinos and four policemen.

After the massacre police rounded up all male protesters they could find, and a total of 101 Filipino men were arrested. 76 were brought to trial, and of these 60 received four-year jail sentences. Pablo Manlapit was charged with subornation of perjury and was sentenced to two to ten years in prison. The Hawai?i Hochi claimed that he had been railroaded into prison, a victim of framed-up evidence, perjured testimony, racial prejudice and class hatred. Shortly thereafter, he was paroled on condition that he leave Hawai?i. After eight months the strike disintegrated.

The Federationist, the official publication of the American Federation of Labor, reported that in 1924 the ten leading sugar companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange paid dividends averaging 17 percent. From 1913 to 1923, the eleven leading sugar companies paid cash dividends of 172.45 percent, and most of them issued large stock dividends.

After the 1924 strike, the labor movement in Hawai?i dwindled, but did not die, and discontent among the workers rarely surfaced again. Pablo Manlapit, who had been imprisoned and exiled, returned to the islands in 1932 and started a new labor organization, this time hoping to include other ethnic groups. But the time was not ripe in the Depression years. There were small nuisance strikes in 1933 that made no headway and involved mostly Filipinos. Protests since the massacre have discouraged carrying guns at demonstrations.

A referendum abolishes the monarchy in Bulgaria.

A referendum on becoming a republic was held in Bulgaria on 8 September 1946. The result was 95.6% in favour of the change, with voter turnout reported to be 91.7%. Following the referendum, a republican constitution was introduced the following year.

The Berlin Victory Parade of 1945 is held.

he Berlin Victory Parade of 1945 was held by the Allies of World War II on 7 September 1945 in Berlin, the capital of the defeated Nazi Germany, shortly after the end of World War II. The four participating countries were the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

The parade was proposed by the Soviet Union, following the June Moscow Victory Parade of 1945. July in Berlin also saw a British parade the 1945 British Berlin Victory Parade. The September parade took place near the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate.

Senior officers present at the parade were Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov from the USSR, General George S. Patton from the United States, General Brian Robertson, from the United Kingdom, and General Marie-Pierre Kœnig from France. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery declined the invitations shortly before the parade, and sent Patton and Robertson as their representatives. About 5,000 troops from the USSR, USA, UK and France took part in the parade. The parade was opened by marching troops, followed by the armour. Units present included the Soviet 248th Infantry Division, the French 2nd Infantry Division, the British 131st Infantry Brigade, and the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division; the forces present came primarily from the local garrisons. The armoured contingent came from the British 7th Armoured Division, French 1st Armored Division, and U.S. 16th Mechanized Cavalry Group. The Red Army used this occasion for the first public display of the IS-3 heavy tank, with 52 tanks from the 2nd Guards Tank Army participating.

Russian sources refer to this parade as a “forgotten parade”, as it was mentioned in only a few Western sources. The downplaying of the parade in the West can be seen as one of the early signs of the Cold War. The forces of four Allies also participated in another Berlin parade a year later, on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, in front of the Brandenburg Gate, on the first anniversary of the German surrender on 8 May 1946, in the Berlin Victory Parade of 1946. This parade was connected to the inauguration of the Soviet War Memorial at Tiergarten. Soviet troops would not be present at the much more widely known in the West London Victory Celebrations of 1946.

The England Parliament bans public stage-plays.

The major closing was the banning of theatre at the start of the English Civil War. On September 6, 1642, by an act of Parliament, all theatres in England were closed. This meant specifically that the great playhouses and theatrical companies of London, many of which had survived since the Elizabethan age, ceased operations for good. The stated reason behind the ordinance was that attending theatre was “unseemly” during such turbulent times. The real reason, of course, was that the playhouses had become meeting places for scheming Royalists. Their Puritan rivals, who controlled Parliament, simply couldn’t have that. So theatre was banned. Within a few years most of the grand old structures, now abandoned, had decayed beyond use or were dismantled altogether–leaving no visible trace of the playhouses of Shakespeare’s day. Theatre would remain illegal until the end of the Interregnum in 1660, when the Puritans lost power and the monarchy was restored. Almost immediately, playhouses reopened and theatrical entertainments resumed. Theatre returned full force with the Restoration leading to a revival of English drama and performance that paved the way for the great age of acting and wit during the 18th century.

Coincidentally, it was also on this day that theatres reopened. On September 6, 1919, the great Equity Strike came to an end at 3 o’clock in the morning when Broadway producers finally reached an agreement with the upstart actors’ union. The strike lasted a month and closed nearly 40 major productions across the city, with revenue loses in excess of $3 million. The two sides reached a five-year deal that finally recognized Equity as the professional actors’ union. Over the next few years working conditions improved and Broadway flourished. The good times lasted only until the 1928 season when there was a noticeable dip in attendance and profits, a decline that some historians attribute to the rise of “talkies.” Of course, the next year things hit the skids big time as the stock market crash in October put Broadway in a tailspin and reset the commercial theatre’s entire economic picture for the next several decades. In many ways the professional stage never fully recovered. But Actors’ Equity remains, still setting the standard for professional theatre across the country.

Estonia is occupied by Nazi Germany.

Early on the morning of August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression pact, called the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. Most notably, the pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany’s defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet “spheres of influence”. In the north, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere.[10] Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its “political rearrangement”—the areas east of the Narev, Vistula and San Rivers going to the Soviet Union while Germany would occupy the west. Lithuania, adjacent to East Prussia, would be in the German sphere of influence, although a second secret protocol agreed in September 1939 assigned the majority of Lithuania to the USSR.

Most Estonians greeted the Germans with relatively open arms and hoped for restoration of independence. In Southern Estonia pro-independence administrations were set up, led by Jüri Uluots, and a co-ordinating council was set up in Tartu as soon as the Soviet regime retreated and before German troops arrived. The Forest Brothers who drove the Red Army from Tartu made this possible. This was all for nothing since the Germans disbanded the provisional government and Estonia became a part of the German-occupied Reichskommissariat Ostland. A Sicherheitspolizei was established for internal security under the leadership of Ain-Ervin Mere.

In April 1941, on the eve on the German invasion, Alfred Rosenberg, Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern territories, a Baltic German, born and raised in Tallinn, Estonia, laid out his plans for the East. According to Rosenberg a future policy was created:

Germanization of the “racially suitable” elements.
Colonization by Germanic peoples.
Exile, deportations of undesirable elements.
Rosenberg felt that the “Estonians were the most Germanic out of the people living in the Baltic area, having already reached 50 percent of Germanization through Danish, Swedish and German influence”. Non-suitable Estonians were to be moved to a region that Rosenberg called “Peipusland” to make room for German colonists. The removal of 50% of Estonians was in accordance with the Generalplan Ost, however the plan did not envisage just their relocation, the majority would be worked and starved to death.

The initial enthusiasm that accompanied the liberation from Soviet occupation quickly waned as a result and the Germans had limited success in recruiting volunteers. The draft was introduced in 1942, resulting in some 3400 men fleeing to Finland to fight in the Finnish Army rather than join the Germans. Finnish Infantry Regiment 200 was formed out of Estonian volunteers who had fled the 1943–1944 forced mobilization into the German forces in Estonia. The unit fought the Red Army on the Karelian Front. In June 1942, political leaders of Estonia who had survived Soviet repressions held a meeting hidden from the occupying powers in Estonia where the formation of an underground Estonian government and the options for preserving continuity of the republic were discussed. On January 6, 1943, a meeting was held at the Estonian foreign delegation in Stockholm. In order to preserve the legal continuation of the Republic of Estonia, it was decided that the last constitutional prime minister, Jüri Uluots, had to continue to fulfill his responsibilities as prime minister. In June 1944, the elector’s assembly of the Republic of Estonia gathered in secrecy from the occupying powers in Tallinn and appointed Jüri Uluots as the prime minister with responsibilities of the President. On June 21 Jüri Uluots appointed Otto Tief as deputy prime minister. With the Allied victory over Germany becoming certain in 1944, the only option to save Estonia’s independence was to stave off a new Soviet invasion of Estonia until Germany’s capitulation. By supporting the German conscription call Uluots hoped to restore the Estonian Army and the country’s independence.