Dictators usually seem to have to use a pretext to committ some act of aggression against another country, Hitler for example used a phony attack on a radio station as the reason he invaded Poland. Stalin, who had the same mindset as Hitler, felt he needed an excuse to invade the Baltic States, so on September 26, 1929 he sacrificed the Russian steamer Metallist and five of her crew.

While he needed no such pretext (dictators do what they want regardless of public opinion) to move against them, he had a submarine and a torpedo boat locate the steamer and send her to the bottom. He then claimed that the ship had been attacked by the Polish submarine Orzel with the help of the Estonians. Orzel had been interned at Tallinin, Estonia following her escape from Gdynia after the German invasion, but she escaped on Sept. 18 and headed for Britain.

The Soviets claimed that the Estonians had repaired the boat at a secret submarine base and allowed the boat to escape, they even claimed that the Poles had taken two guards prisoner and later killed them. The only truth in their statement was that Orzel had escaped. There was no secret base and the guards were released on the Swedish coast unharmed, nevertheless the Russian dictator used the incident to pressure Estonia into a mutual assistance pact.

Estonia's fate had been decided before the "incident" by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which allowed for Russia to occupy the Baltic States. In reality the treaties were little more than a show horse, they meant nothing. The Nazis had no intention of allowing Russia to remain in Poland, the Baltic or even in Russia for that matter. The German invasion of Russia, which had been planned since before the beginning of the war, was supposed to defeat the Russians and give Germany "Lebensraum" (living space) for the greater German Reich.

Stalin of course always had the intention of occupying the Baltic and every other nation he could reach so no piece of paper would be an obstacle to Russian aggression. Why these evil people believe that they need an "incident" to start a war is beyond me since usually nobody opposes them, and everyone knows that they lied. In any case the "incident" is almost never the cause of the war.