The Estonian Soviet Writers’ Union was founded in Moscow in 1943. This was yet another step in establishing Soviet ideology in the new union republics that had been annexed in 1940. The ESSR artists’, composers’, and architects’ unions were also founded in the Soviet rear area in the years 1943 and 1944.

Johannes Vares-Barbarus, a poet and physician who had become the chairman of the Presidium of the ESSR Supreme Soviet after Estonia’s legitimate government had been overthrown in June of 1940, was elected head of the new writers’ union. When the Soviet Army invaded Estonia once again in September of 1944, Johannes Vares once again became the nominal head of state of the ESSR. The productive prose writer August Jakobson, who had headed the working group that had organised the Soviet-oriented writers’ union before and during the war, started heading the Writers’ Union.
The Writers’ Union had operated in Tartu before the war. Now it moved to Tallinn. The Association of Estonian Writers had 53 members in March of 1940. Now some of them were deceased and others (a total of 14 writers) had fled across the sea into exile. The question of which of the writers who had stayed in Estonia during the war could thereafter belong to the ESSR Writers’ Union was so complicated for the Communist Party’s new ideology guardians that it took more than a year to solve the problem. The membership of the Writers’ Union was not approved until the end of December, 1945. The writers who had been in the rear area in the Soviet Union were full members of the Writers’ Union while most of the writers who had at the same time remained in their Estonian homeland were accepted as candidate members. Although the Writers’ Union statute did not prescribe this kind of member status, the Writers’ Union copied the practice of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union [C(B)PSU] over the following ten years, where candidate status preceded member status. At the same time, some new people were accepted as members right away. This did not in any way depend on their literary merits.

The first congress of the Estonian Soviet Writers’ Union was held in Tallinn in 1946. The well-known pre-war intellectual Johannes Semper was elected chairman of the Writers’ Union. Writers who had been in Estonia during the war were also elected to the Board of the Writers’ Union. At the same time, a campaign for exposing ‘bourgeois nationalists’ gathered steam. In 1949 and 1950, some ten writers were expelled from the Writers’ Union, primarily those who had been active in pre-war Estonian literary life.

Some researchers have also referred to the years 1944–1949 as the ‘bizarre period of Estonian statehood’ or the ‘post-period of Estonian statehood’, where the rules for the new Soviet ordering of the affairs of life were still taking shape and a power struggle very noticeably existed among the ESSR’s ruling elite on the background of the new organisation’s labour pains.