The Tsarist Empire - and its control over the Baltic States - collapsed as a result of the chaos of World War I and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. However Estonia’s path to independence was not easy: by 1918 the country was occupied by German troops, and invaded by Russian Bolsheviks from the East. Estonian forces had driven both of these adversaries out of the country by late 1919; the following year’s Treaty of Tartu confirmed the newly independent country’s borders.

Following the parliamentary elections of April 1919 Estonia appeared to be a stable democracy. The economy recovered from wartime chaos; Estonia’s agricultural products were exported all over Europe.

However the emergence of right and left-wing extremes in the early 1920s, and the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, led to a coup carried out by moderate-conservative head of state Konstantin Päts in 1934. Political parties were banned and a new movement called the Fatherland Front was formed to provide the new authoritarian regime with an organizational backbone.