Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (124 page)

In the continuing climate of recrimination, the decision of the Estonian government to relocate the
Bronze Soldier
is variously judged either highly offensive or perfectly reasonable. By Soviet standards, the memorial was a modest one. A six-foot-tall statue, modelled on the figure of a pre-war Olympic wrestler, stood in a thoughtful pose, with bowed head, in front of a simple wall of dolomite stone. The problem lay in its prime location and in the inscription: ‘TO THE LIBERATORS OF TALLINN’, which the great majority of citizens felt inappropriate. So in April 2007 it was relocated to the war cemetery, to join the Soviet war graves. It was not destroyed or blown up, as some reports insisted, or defaced or banished out of sight.
¹⁶
Yet the resultant outburst was immediate and violent. Thousands of ethnic Russians marched on downtown Tallinn, waving Russian flags and shouting anti-Estonian slogans. Rioting raged for two days. Shops were looted and windows smashed; 300 disturbers of the peace were detained.
¹⁷

Not content with the strength of this reaction, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, used the occasion of the annual Red Square parade on 9 May to fuel the fire: ‘Those who are trying today to desecrate memorials to war heroes are insulting their own people and sowing enmity and new distrust,’ he told thousands of veterans and soldiers.
¹⁸
Kremlin sources accused Estonia of ‘blasphemy’ and of ‘indulging neo-fascists’. Members of a Kremlin-backed youth movement barricaded the Estonian embassy in Moscow.

Such was the context of the mysterious ‘cyber war’. The basic facts are not in dispute. The websites of Estonian government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks and businesses were disabled by tens of thousands of simultaneous electronic ‘hits’. Their servers were swamped, and a domino-style sequence of Distributed Denial of Service (DDS) was triggered: in other words, paralysis. The attacks came in three waves: one starting on 27 April, just after the relocation of the
Bronze Soldier
; a second on 9 May, after Putin’s speech; the third a week later. They were on a scale that could only be achieved by mobilizing a worldwide network of up to a million co-ordinated computers which had either been hijacked or rented through the so-called ‘botnet’ system. Fortunately, as a member of the EU and NATO, Estonia could draw on international assistance, and, with the help of the Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA), was successful in ending the emergency.
¹⁹

The outstanding question is who was responsible. In talking to the Russian authorities, EU and NATO officials were careful to avoid direct accusations, and Kremlin officials were quick to deny them, suggesting instead that sophisticated Estonian computer specialists had masterminded a cyber offensive against their own government. Many things are possible, but some possibilities are more probable than others, and there are certain similarities between these and other mysterious events such as the murder in London of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006 by radioactive polonium 210. Very few countries, companies or individuals possess the resources to launch sting operations at $200 million a shot. The cyber offensive against Estonia does not fit into the same category as other known episodes, such as Moonlight Maze (1999), when unidentified hackers penetrated the Pentagon, or Titan Rain (2003), which apparently came out of China, both of which are classed as simple info-gathering, ‘phishing’ exercises. According to one expert, the sole purpose of repeatedly using a vast stream of ten Mbit/s for ten hours, as occurred in Estonia, is to cripple the victim’s infrastructure.
²⁰

International law was not very helpful. As things stood in 2007, an attack on a member state’s communications centre by bombs or missiles would automatically have invoked Article V of the NATO Treaty as an act of war, but an anonymous ‘botnet’ attack fell into a grey area. It may just be a coincidence that during the attack on Estonia attack the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), ‘the first line of defence against cyber-terrorism’, happened to be holding a conference in Seattle.
²¹
It may be irrelevant that some attackers could be traced to Internet addresses in Moscow. And it may be true, as one Finnish expert commented, that ‘the Kremlin could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to’. Yet someone, somewhere, was going to extraordinary lengths to send a message.

The Estonian government’s determination to press ahead and join the Eurozone as planned on 1 January 2011 can only be seen in the light of the cyber-experience. Sceptical commentators said that it had bought ‘the last ticket to the
Titanic
’. The previous year, 2010, had witnessed a major sovereign debt crisis in which the future of the euro was repeatedly called into question. Two countries in the zone, Greece and Ireland, had been forced to accept painful bail-outs, and several others were thought to be teetering on the same brink. It was not a moment of confidence in the euro, yet Estonia did not falter. It had recovered from the global recession, returning to GDP growth at +2.4 per cent after 12 months of headlong fall in 2009 of -13.9 per cent. On New Year’s Day, therefore, it became the seventeenth member of the Eurozone; the
kroon
ceased to circulate, being exchanged for euros at the rate of 1E = 15.6466
krooni. ‘
Estonia is too small’, said the finance minister, ‘to allow itself the luxury of full independence.’
²²
The flea, it seemed, was seeking safety in numbers against the unwelcome attentions of the bear.

II

Many myths and misunderstandings persist about Soviet history. As often as not, textbooks state quite inaccurately that the Soviet Union was founded in 1917 by the Bolshevik Revolution. They imply that Lenin’s party had been the principal revolutionary force in the Russian Empire and overthrew the tsar, and that the Soviet Union was just a further stage in the seamless continuum of Russia and the Russians. The so-called ‘Russian Civil War’ is usually presented as a domestic affair, fought out between Russian ‘Whites’ and Russian ‘Reds’. In more recent times, the Russian Federation of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin is frequently presented not as one of the fifteen post-Soviet states, but rather as the product of a mere change of government, as just the latest variant on the unchanging Russian theme. Some may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the Soviet Union was created on 1 January 1924 and dissolved on 31 December 1991.
²³

In formal terms, the Tsarist Empire of ‘all the Russias’, which reached its end in February 1917, had been created by Peter the Great in 1721. But Peter’s empire prolonged and expanded the political and territorial complex that had been assembled earlier by the grand dukes or ‘tsars’ of Muscovy. ‘The gathering of the lands’, a long process whereby Moscow aimed to take control of all the East Slavs, had been proclaimed in the fifteenth century. Expansion across the Urals into Siberia and Central Asia, the largest demographic vacuum on the globe, was launched at the end of the sixteenth century; the conquest of lands in the west and north-west possessed by Sweden and Poland began in the mid-seventeenth. The pace of expansion was relentless. Between 1683 and 1914 it averaged 53 square miles per day, and may be characterized as a case of
bulimia politica
. Despite some regurgitations, the result by the early twentieth century was an imperial domain of unparalleled dimensions in which ethnic Russians represented barely half of the population.
²⁴

If the Russians constituted the largest of the seventy or so nationalities in the Tsarist Empire, the Estonians were one of the smallest. Like the Finns, they had spent most of modern history within the political sphere of Sweden. Much of their homeland lay within the historic Swedish province of Ingria, or in Livonia; the Russian connection did not impinge until the Russo-Polish and Russo-Swedish wars of relatively recent times. Russia’s imperial capital, St Petersburg, was founded in 1703 in a Swedish-Estonian-Finnish district without the slightest reference either to international law or to the local inhabitants. Russia’s possession of Estonia was confirmed by the Treaty of Nystadt (1721) at the close of the Great Northern War.

After the emancipation of their serfs under Alexander I – earlier than in Russia as a whole – Estonians rapidly acquired a strong sense of their national identity. As Protestants, they were devoted to education in their own language, and resisted the imposition of Russian. Yet demands for an independent Estonian state only found expression at the turn of the twentieth century, and with very meagre chances of realization. In order to succeed, a very diminutive David would somehow have to challenge a super-colossal Goliath.

To compound these problems, Estonian society had its own internal divisions. The Estonian-speaking majority were mainly rural peasants. The administration was controlled by Russians, while commercial and landowning interests were largely in the hands of Baltic Germans and of a small Jewish community. The main port, Reval (Tallinn), was especially lacking in Estonian flavour. The whole country was garrisoned by a large Russian army.

The condition of the Estonians in the early twentieth century was conveyed to the world by the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in bilious tones:

The Esths, Ehsts, or Esthonians, who call themselves Tallopoeg and Maamees, are known to the Russians as Chukhni or Chukhontsi, to the Letts as Iggauni, and to the Finns as Virolaiset. They belong to the Finnish family, and consequently to the Ural-Altaic division of the human race. Altogether they number close upon one million, and are thus distributed: 365,959 in Esthonia (in 1897), 518,594 in Livonia, 64,116 in the government of St. Petersburg, 25,458 in that of Pskov, and 12,855 [elsewhere]. As a race they exhibit manifest evidences of their Ural-Altaic or Mongolic descent in their short stature, absence of beard, oblique eyes, broad face, low forehead and small mouth. In addition, they are an under-sized, ill-thriven people, with long arms and thin, short legs. They cling tenaciously to their native language, which is closely allied to the Finnish… Since 1873 the cultivation of their mother tongue has been sedulously promoted by an Esthonian Literary Society (
Eesti Korjameeste Selts
), which publishes
Toimetused
, or ‘Instructions’ on all sorts of subjects. They have a decided love of poetry, and exhibit great facility in improvising verses and poems on all occasions, and they sing, everywhere, from morning to night…

One can easily imagine a Victorian empire-builder describing the Welsh or the Irish in similarly dismissive style. Astonishingly, the author goes on to express the opinion that Estonia’s lot had improved through Russification:

Since 1878, however, a vast change for the better has been effected in their economic position… The determining feature of their recent history has been the attempt made by the Russian government (since 1881) and the Orthodox Greek Church (since 1883) to russify and convert the inhabitants of the province… by enforcing the use of Russian in the schools and by harsh and repressive measures aimed at their native language.
²⁵

In all probability, these words reflect the views of a Russian contributor, Prince Piotr Kropotkin.

The encyclopedia’s account of Estonia’s capital puts a heavy accent on its Russian and German connections:

REVAL, or REVEL (Russ.
Revel
, formerly
Kolyvañ
; Esthonian,
Tallina
and
Tannilin
), a fortified seaport town of Russia… situated on… the gulf of Finland, 230 m. W. of St. Petersburg by rail. Pop by nail. (1900) 66,292, of whom half were Esthonians and 30% Germans. The city consists of two parts – the Domberg or Dom, which occupies a hill, and the lower town on the beach. The Dom contains the castle (first built in the 13th century…), where the provincial administration has its seat, and an [Orthodox] cathedral (1894–1900) with five gilded domes… The church of St. Nicholas, built in 1317, contains many antiquities… and old German paintings. The Dom church contains… the graves of the circumnavigator Baron A. J. von Krusenstern (1770–1846), of the Swedish soldiers Pontus de la Gardie (d. 1585) and Carl Horn (d. 1601), and of the Bohemian Protestant leader Count Matthias von Thurn (1580–1640)…

The oldest church is the Esthonian, built in 1219. The public institutions include a good provincial museum of antiquities; an imperial palace, Katharinenthal, built by Peter the Great in 1719; and very valuable archives, preserved in the town hall (14th century). The pleasant situation of the town attracts thousands of people for seabathing. It is the seat of a branch board of the Russian admiralty and of the administration of the Baltic lighthouses. Its port… freezes nearly every winter.
²⁶

*

The break-up of the Tsarist Empire began during the First World War, two years before the Russian revolutions of 1917. In the summer of 1915, German forces broke through Russian lines on the Eastern Front, and occupied large swathes of imperial territory, from Poland and Lithuania in the north to Ukraine in the south. Russian counter-offensives failed, arousing much anger. In February 1917 the tsar was overthrown and imprisoned by his own courtiers, and his autocratic regime replaced by constitutionalists who formed a provisional government. But in November 1917
*
the provisional government, headed by the socialist Alexander Kerensky, was overthrown by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, a smaller but more ruthless socialist faction, in what was effectively a
coup d’état
. Constitutional socialists were replaced by totalitarian socialists (and to add extra irony, Kerensky’s father had once been Lenin’s headmaster). In their origins, the Bolsheviks had been part of the clandestine Russian Social Democratic Party, but after seizing power they broke with all their former comrades, like the Mensheviks, and treated them with the same absolute disdain that characterized their dealings with all opponents.
*
In March 1918, at Brest-Litovsk, they were forced to make peace with Germany, and to abandon most of the territory which the Germans had occupied since the outbreak of war. (see p.
378
above).