 Born into the families of native Estonians in Russia, the latter had obtained their Red education in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist repressions at the end of the 1930s.Many of them had fought in the Red Army (in the Estonian Rifle Corps), and few of them had mastered the Estonian language.Although the United States and the United Kingdom, the allies of the USSR against Germany during World War II, recognized the occupation of the Republic of Estonia by the USSR at the Yalta Conference in 1945 "de facto", the governments of the rest of the western democracies did not recognize the seizure of Estonia by the USSR in 1940 and in 1944 "de jure" according to the Sumner Welles' declaration of July 23, 1940.