Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (123 page)

Travel to Estonia is easy, either by air to Tallinn, by ferry from Helsinki, or by rail from Riga or St Petersburg. The country has become something of a Mecca for the adventurous traveller who wants to explore unfamiliar places that until recently were completely out of bounds. The tourist brochures recommend a combination of sightseeing in Tallinn and Tartu and of communing with nature in the many forests, lakes and islands. The Toompea castle, the Toomkirik church and the medieval ramparts top the sightseeing list in Tallinn. The summer Estonian Song Festival is a big draw to Tartu, which is also a university town. The Lahemaa National Park lies only 30 miles east of Tallinn along the coast. Bear, moose, boar and wolves roam the woods. Fishing for northern pike or eel, or bird-watching along the expansive shore of Lake Peipus, offer unusual experiences. Beach-walking at Pirita or Pärnu can be exhilarating.
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The walk up Cathedral Hill in Tallinn reveals many layers of history. Once the northernmost member of the Hanseatic League, the city passed through phases of rule by Denmark, the Teutonic Order, Sweden and, from 1721, the Russian Empire. The sixty-six towers of the heavily fortified walls indicate how successive governors valued their prize. The slender spire of St Olav’s, once the tallest in Europe, belongs to the late medieval period before the arrival of Lutheranism. Yet it is striking that the prime location at the top of the hill continues to be dominated by the Russian Orthodox church of St Alexander Nevsky, which overshadows the Lutheran cathedral and which was completed in the last years of tsarist rule. A plan in the 1920s to demolish this exuberant symbol of foreign power was not carried out by Estonia’s first independent government; in the 1990s, following Estonia’s second independence, it has been meticulously restored.

As an ex-Soviet state, Estonia naturally takes pride in its multi-party parliamentary democracy introduced after the constitutional referendum of 1992, and in its free-market economy. The present prime minister, Andrus Ansip (b. 1956), head of the Reform Party and a former mayor of Tartu, has run a coalition government since 2005. The president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves (b. 1953), born in Sweden and educated in the United States, a former foreign minister, was elected in 2006. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index places Estonia first out of fifteen ‘post-Soviet states’ in its final, weighted average for all-round political, economic and social performance.
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Controversies arise, as in any democracy. In March 2010 several newspapers printed blank pages in protest against a government bill requiring journalists to disclose their sources of information in certain well-defined areas.
Pravda
in Moscow regarded the bill as outrageous and Estonian democracy ‘a profanation’. ‘The level of democracy there is similar to that of ancient Athens,’
Pravda
’s correspondent commented; ‘it’s democracy for the privileged.’
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This view may be compared with that of the Press Freedom Global Rankings (2009). Estonia with a status of ‘Free’ comes 6th out of 175, higher than both the United Kingdom and the United States; Russia with a status of ‘Not Free’ comes 153rd.
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Surprisingly perhaps, the aspect of life in Estonia which many choose to praise is not democracy, sightseeing or communing with nature, but the electronic revolution. Tallinn, the home of Kazaa and Skype, is publicized as the ‘super-connected capital’ and the ‘champion of the digital age’:

Estonia has broken free from its Eastern bloc shackles to emerge anew as European champion of the digital age… In Tallinn free internet access is taken for granted and the acceptance of digital ID cards has opened up a world of mobile phone-enabled e-commerce. Not only do Estonians buy lottery tickets, annual travel passes, and beer at a concert via SMS, they also carry out the majority of their banking transactions electronically…

Practising what they preach, the country’s leaders have also embraced wireless technology; documents are reviewed from internet terminals and laptops provided in parliament. Laws are filed electronically… The public can access draft laws and minutes from parliamentary debates online… Estonia became the first nation to allow electronic voting for parliamentary elections in 2007…

It’s little wonder, then, that the world’s most talented young IT professionals have flocked to Estonia’s capital to establish e-businesses. It’s quite a transformation… ‘Back in 1991, Estonia wanted to be the best in something, and it seized the opportunity with IT.’
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In January 2009 Tallinn was named as one of the world’s top seven ‘Intelligent Communities’.
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Nevertheless, visitors to Estonia will soon encounter the strong attachment to folk culture, and to the feeling that land and people are one. A nation which lived for centuries on the edge of civilization and which had no name for itself other than
maarahvas
, meaning ‘locals’, has been deeply impressed by the age-old struggle for survival and identity. Before the nineteenth century, there was little written literature, and, exactly as in Finland, the movement of national awakening was launched by writers who collected oral legends and transposed them into modern imitations of what they imagined to be ancient poetry. In Finland, the task was undertaken by Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), author of the world-famous
Kalevala
, and in Estonia by his exact contemporary, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–82), author of the
Kalevipoeg
or
Kalevide
(1853), the ‘Son of Kalev’. Both men were country physicians, and neither, despite their German names, was German. Kreutzwald’s parents had been serfs. He himself had been a village schoolteacher before qualifying in medicine. He only took up the challenge of reconstructing the tales of Kalev and Linda after his colleague, Dr Faehlmann, the original pioneer, died young.

Kreuzwald’s
Kalevipoeg
is universally regarded in Estonia as the national epic. It recounts the adventures of the giant Soini in 19,000 verses arranged in twenty cantos, which to outsiders are written in pure gobbledegook:

Sõua, laulik, lausa  suuga,

Sõua  laululaevakesta,

Pajataja  paadikesta –

Sõua  neid  senna  kaldale,

Kuhu  kotkad  kuldasõnu,

Kaarnad  hõbekuulutusi,

Luiked vaskseid luaastusi

Vanast  ajast  varistanud,

Muiste  päivist  pillutanud…
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According to tradition, Kalev and his spouse Linda were regarded as the protoplasts of the modern nation; and their story is told to every Estonian child:

Kalev foretold the glory and greatness of [their] last son to Linda, indicating [Soini], still unborn, as his heir, and shortly after fell dangerously sick.

Then Linda took her brooch, and spun it round on a thread, while she sent forth the Alder-Beetle… to beseech the aid of the Moon. But the Moon only gazed on him sorrowfully…

Again Linda spun the brooch and sent forth the beetle… as far as the Gold Mountain, till he encountered the Evening Star, but he also refused him to answer.

Next time, the beetle took a different route, over wide heaths and thick fir-woods till he met… the rising sun. [And], on a fourth journey, [he] encountered the Wind-Magician, the old Soothsayer from Suomi, the great Necromancer himself. But they replied with one voice that… what the moonlight had blanched… could never bloom again. And before the beetle returned from his fruitless journey, the mighty Kalev had expired.

Linda sat weeping by his bedside without food or drink for seven days and seven nights, and then began to prepare [him] for burial. First she bathed him with her tears, then with salt water from the sea, rain water from the clouds, and lastly water from the spring. Then she smoothed his hair with her fingers, and brushed it with a silver brush, and combed it with a golden comb… She drew on him a silken shirt, a satin shroud, and a robe confined with a silver girdle. She dug his grave herself, thirty ells beneath the sod, and grass and flowers soon sprang from it.

From the grave the grasses sprouted,

And the herbage from the hillock;

From the dead man dewy grasses,

From his cheeks grew ruddy flowers,

From his eyes there sprang the harebells,

Golden flowerets from the eyelids…

Linda mourned Kalev for three months and more… / She heaped a cairn of stones over his tomb, / which formed the hill where / the Cathedral of [Tallinn] now stands… The Upper Lake, on Tallinn’s inland side, was said to be formed from Linda’s tears.
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If Balto-Finnic folk legends occupy the most distant part of Estonia’s timeline, the most recent period is taken up with the Soviet years of 1940–91. Many foreign observers will find much to admire in current efforts to cope with the Soviet legacy. The Russian Federation, a fellow post-Soviet state, is 358 times Estonia’s size, and to keep an even keel in the turbulent wake of the giant neighbour demands great skill and nerve.

The strategy of the Estonian government is based on membership of two international organizations, the European Union and NATO, which provide a measure of political, economic and military security that Estonia on its own could not dream of. Many people in the West are not always aware that Russia still upholds the concept of the ‘near-abroad’, that is, an extraterritorial sphere of influence in which Moscow feels entitled to interfere.

The Museum of Occupations, opened in 2003, is the product of an information policy that is calmly undermining the shibboleths of the Soviet era. The name says it all. Estonia in the Second World War suffered invasions both by the Nazis and by the Soviets, and large numbers of citizens were killed by each set of invaders. It is a vital service to historical truth, therefore, that the word ‘occupation’, with all the terrible things it implies, be employed in its plural form. To the Soviet mind-set, as to the present-day Kremlin, this simple rectification of the historical record is anathema. In Soviet usage, as in that of many Britons and Americans, the negative word ‘occupation’ is applied exclusively to the misdeeds of the Nazis, while all actions of the anti-fascist alliance are referred to as ‘liberation’.
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Rectifying the history books is equally necessary. In 1998 the Estonian president convened an International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, which has produced a huge volume of 1,337 pages chronicling the basic facts of the wartime experience.
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The book’s cover shows a Nazi swastika and a Soviet Red Star both dripping blood. Difficult issues, such as the reasons why different groups of Estonians fought either on the German or on the Soviet side, are confronted. In the realm of film, an Estonian-Canadian has produced an award-winning documentary entitled
Gulag
113
(2005), the name of a Soviet concentration camp near Kotlas in the Arctic, based on personal testimonies.
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The ‘War of Symbols’ has its roots in the baleful legacy of Soviet fictions which modern Estonia constantly seeks to counter. After the Red Army’s triumph in 1944–5, like all other ‘liberated countries’, Estonia was covered by a rash of grandiose monuments hailing Soviet achievements. One of the largest, the
Monument Sovietskiy
, stands by the seaside at Pirita, where a Soviet submarine base once functioned. Another, the nearby
Maarjamäe
Memorial, is a concrete and iron complex surrounding a tall obelisk. An extra spire was added in 1960 to mark Russian soldiers killed in 1918. A third monument, known as the
Pronkssödur
, or
Bronze Soldier
, stood in the centre of Tallinn until 2007.

It needs to be borne in mind that while the Soviet authorities expended considerable money and energy restoring monuments with Soviet or Russian connections, including the Palace of Catherine the Great at Kadriorg, they forcibly suppressed all memory sites associated with Estonia’s own independent history. As a result, the Soviet memorials, which were viewed by Russians as symbols of pride, were viewed by Estonians as symbols of oppression. What is more, having no places to pay respect to their own dead, Estonians were forced to improvise. The pre-war Linda Monument, for example, which depicts the legendary heroine mourning Kalev, took on new connotations during the Cold War. Standing on a street in the Lower City, it became the unofficial site for remembrance of the post-war Stalinist terror. People leaving flowers there risked arrest. Nowadays, a modern plaque reads: ‘TO REMEMBER THE PEOPLE WHO WERE TAKEN AWAY’.
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