Johannes Vares (pen name Barbarus or Vares-Barbarus – 29 November 1946) was an Estonian and Soviet poet, medical doctor, and politician. Vares was born in a farmer family in the village of Kiisa, near Viljandi, Estonia. He received secondary education at Pärnu Gymnasium, and in 1910–1914 studied medicine at the University of Kyiv. Vares served as a military physician in World War I, and after that as a military physician for the Estonian Army during the Estonian War of Independence (1918–1920). He was awarded the Estonian Cross of Liberty for the participation. In the 1920s, Vares started working as a medical doctor in Pärnu. He subsequently became a well-known poet as well as a radical socialist, using the pen name Johannes Barbarus. During World War II, after the Stalinist Soviet Union invaded and occupied Estonia in June 1940, Andrei Zhdanov, leader of the Soviet agression, forced the Estonian president Konstantin Päts to appoint Vares as prime minister of a communist-dominated puppet government. Päts resigned in July 1940, and Vares formally took over most presidential duties. The puppet government declared Estonia a "Soviet Socialist Republic" (SSR), and Vares remained nominal head of state for a few weeks more as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR. He headed the delegation to Moscow on 6 August 1940 that petitioned to Stalin and the Soviet central government to incorporate Estonia into the Soviet Union — an act that has tainted Vares as a traitor to the majority of Estonian people. On 12 September 1940, Vares became member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia, soon after the party had been merged into the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) of the USSR. Following the German invasion of Estonia in 1941, Vares fled to Soviet Russia, where he lived in exile from 1941 to 1944, until the Soviets reconquered Estonia. On 20 April 1944, the Electoral Committee of the Republic of Estonia (the institution specified in the Constitution for electing the Acting President of the Republic) held a clandestine meeting in Tallinn. The participants included Jüri Uluots, the last Prime Minister of Estonia before the Soviet occupation, the substitute for Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Johan Holberg, the chairman of the Chamber of Deputies Otto Pukk, the second deputy vice-chairman of the National Council Alfred Maurer, and State judge Mihkel Klaassen. The Committee declared Päts' appointment of Vares as Prime Minister