In this 1961 letter to his daughter, the Estonian politician and former revolutionary Aleksander Kesküla (1882–1963) outlines his political aims during the First World War, and briefly comments on the various steps that he took trying to further them. Published here in translation from the original German to Estonian, it is a source that adds to our knowledge about the activities of this man, who has remained a largely mysterious, misunderstood figure in Estonian and European history.

The impetus behind the letter was the fact that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Western historiography had started mentioning Kesküla’s name as one of the most prominent go-betweens between Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks on the one hand, and between the Imperial German civilian and military authorities on the other. This widely publicised revelation, which built on previously unreleased First World War-era archival documents from the German Foreign Office, left Kesküla personally dismayed. He wanted to set the record straight: while he was happy to accept credit for ‘launching Lenin’s career’ in Germany, he resolutely protested the claim that he had given Lenin any ‘German money’. More broadly, Kesküla saw ‘the Lenin episode’ as merely one chapter in his much wider wartime programme of geopolitical reconfiguration in the Baltic Sea region and in Europe as a whole, insisting that his contacts with Lenin and Imperial Germany should be seen strictly in this wider context. The letter consists mostly of Kesküla’s elucidation of the main features of this broader programme: the destruction of the military might of the Russian Empire, the creation of a new Nordic Great Power (led by Sweden, and including Finland and Estonia) in Northern Europe, some form of statehood for other Russian borderlands, and revolutionisation of the rest of Russia through Lenin.

In my introduction to Kesküla’s letter and in the added footnotes, I have tried to provide the contextual information needed to understand why the letter was written, what sort of contemporary discourse on Lenin and Germany it responded to, and, perhaps most crucially, how the reader should interpret the various clues and allusions found in the text that Kesküla leaves unexplained. Given to hyperbole and conspiracy theories, particularly towards the end of his life, Kesküla is certainly a witness of his time who should be read with a critical eye. Nevertheless, his reflections on his activities during the First World War are an important source that can help us to understand both his thinking at the time, and its longer-term reverberations.