Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (128 page)

Indeed, each of the assertions in the extract above needs a gloss. The influx of Russians, for example, was not just a happenstance, but part of a systematic policy aimed at strengthening Moscow’s influence and weakening Estonian identity. The city of Narva illustrates the point. Completely destroyed during the war, it was placed out of bounds to Estonians after 1945. The large-scale presence of the Soviet military had the same effect. Several Estonian garrison towns, like Paldiski, were closed to civilians for decades.

In the socio-economic sphere, it is true that Soviet planning promoted industrialization and urbanization, yet one can hardly refer to the subject without discussing the harsh, exploitative methods and their baleful consequences. The unrestrained exploitation of Estonia’s oil-shale beds for the benefit of Leningrad, for example, has ruined the town of Kohtla-Järve, which is now overshadowed by towering slag heaps. The nearby town of Ailamae was blessed with a Soviet nuclear processing plant, and has been left with a hopelessly polluted man-made lake that was used as a dump for dangerous waste. In Tallinn, the suburb of Lasnamäe, once touted as a workers’ paradise, is stranded as a museum for the maltreatment of the proletariat.

Culturally, the Soviet authorities sponsored purposeful activities, some of which were undoubtedly beneficial. State education ensured almost universal literacy, and Estonian remained the main language of instruction in most schools. In literature, despite official promotion of the great Russian classics, some local writers were able to flourish. The sentimental and uncontroversial Oskar Luts (1887–1953), author of
Kevade
(
The Spring
, 1913) had started to publish in tsarist times and remained popular. The historical novelist Jaan Kroos (1920–2007) established himself as a ‘State Artist of the ESSR’ after his return from the Gulag; his favourite theme, which pitted Estonian peasants against Baltic German barons, suited Soviet political interests but could also be read as a surreptitious metaphor for the contemporary scene. The arts were encouraged, especially film, music, dance and opera, and imposing state-sponsored venues were provided. The bass-baritone Georg Ots (1920–75), one of the Soviet Union’s most thunderous opera-singers, contrived to include Estonian songs and productions in his repertoire.
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But the overall balance-sheet is not easily assessed. Russification intensified in the 1970s as the Estonian proportion of the population shrank; religious observance was decimated; the Estonian Lutheran Church and the Russian Orthodox Church were sorely harassed, and ubiquitous state censorship enforced whatever it regarded as the Soviet norm. The cultural environment, therefore, could be stifling, and leading figures, like the conductor Neeme Järvi (b. 1937), fled abroad; taking his wife and family to Sweden in 1980, he settled for many years in Gothenburg. He was soon followed by his contemporary, Arvo Pärt, the modern minimalist composer, who chose Vienna. Emigration, which was illegal, was often the only option for creative people, who wanted to further their careers unhindered.
⁶⁹

Estonia would be a good place, in fact, to study the consequences of the Soviet Union’s deeply ambiguous cultural policies in detail. Soviet cultural planners aimed to achieve the impossible: to encourage national and linguistic diversity and at the same time to mould people in the image of their ideal
Homo sovieticus
, ‘national in form, but socialist in content’. What they meant was that Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Uzbeks and all the others would be allowed to speak their national languages but not to express any independent ideas; and they failed to publicize the ultimate goal, which was a generalized Communist-inspired culture plus Russification. This was the approach to all branches of cultural activity: a superficial variety was tolerated, but only as part of a far-reaching conformity.
⁷⁰
The author of the strategy, Joseph Stalin, who was not a native Russian, made no bones about the ultimate purpose, which was ‘the fusion [of cultures] into one General Culture, socialist in both form and content and expressed in one general language’.
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Russian, the language of the imperial capital, was the only possible candidate for promotion as the universal lingua franca. In practice, it was taught rigorously in all Estonian schools of the ESSR as a compulsory second language, though of course no serious effort was made to teach Estonian to Russians, even those living in Estonia.

Looking back on Soviet cultural policy, which had such a critical impact on Estonian national identity, some Estonians may conclude that it was an improvement on the openly Russificatory, pre-Revolution schemes. Most, however, will have their doubts, and will probably realize how lucky Estonia was to have been exposed to Soviet social engineering for only two or three generations. There was no support for genuine bilingualism, and all the non-linguistic aspects of culture were subordinated to foreign priorities. One need look no further than the Kreutzwald State Library of the ESSR (now the National Library) in Tallinn. Housed in a gigantic concrete bunker-building never completed in Soviet times, its first priority after 1945 was to expand its Russian collection; and throughout its existence, large numbers of Estonian, pre-Soviet or foreign books were held under lock and key in a special section of prohibita closed to ordinary readers.
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Given the vigilance of the KGB, no opposition movement could expect to operate in Soviet Estonia for long. But games of cat and mouse were played incessantly, and relays of groups and individuals constantly gave new life to dissident impulses. The armed opposition of ‘Forest Brothers’ stayed at large until the mid-1950s, supported by agents of Western intelligence; and a small number of ‘lone rangers’ until the 1970s. Various forms of civilian protest surfaced from time to time. In 1946 a group of schoolgirls blew up a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn. After 1975, the Helsinki Agreement, which encouraged so-called ‘legal opposition’, and the so-called Baltic Appeal of 1979, which demanded publication of the Nazi–Soviet Pact’s protocols, made world headlines;
⁷³
in 1980 youth riots were reported. Reprisals were severe, but nonconformism never dried up.

Throughout those long decades, it was illegal to wave the Estonian colours of blue, white and black; it was illegal to sing the pre-war national anthem; and it was treasonable to talk in public about independence. Above all, it was unwise to dream.

When the young, dynamic and affable Mikhail Gorbachev stepped onto the world scene in March 1985 as the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, no one thought that the Soviet Union’s funeral was approaching. Gorbachev came to save the USSR, not to bury it. Western politicians, and the Western public, were enchanted by him. His determination to end the Cold War naturally played well, while the slogans of
glasnost
(often taken, wrongly, to mean ‘openness’) and
perestroika
(‘reconstruction’) were universally applauded. Few outsiders could understand why Gorbachev was so heartily distrusted among many of his own people.
⁷⁴

In retrospect, one can see that Gorbachev was poorly suited to act as the Soviet Union’s saviour, partly because he was poorly informed, notably about the history and make-up of the mammoth state which he dismantled by mistake. He failed to realize that the USSR had been assembled from a collection of captured nationalities held together by coercion. As soon as the coercion was removed, almost all the non-Russian republics prepared to leave, exactly as they had in 1918. In only a few cases did the Russian-dominated elites of Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan hesitate. When Gorbachev let it be known that East Germany could not count on the Soviet army to intervene, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, all the Communist leaders of the satellite states (except Ceaus˛escu in Romania) saw the game was up, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Berlin Wall collapsed. Similarly in August 1991, when Gorbachev attempted to relax the terms of the Union Treaty (which defined the role of the USSR’s constituent republics), his own colleagues launched an abortive coup against him. His political credit was exhausted. Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), led a movement to recognize the independence of the fifteen Soviet republics, and in effect to terminate the Soviet story.

When Gorbachev first appeared, no one in Estonia, or in the other Soviet republics, had been thinking about national independence. The new general secretary had not been shaped by the Stalinist era, but all the talk concerned the reform of the Soviet system, not its replacement. In any case Gorbachev was slow to show his hand. When he did, his main concerns centred on foreign policy, not on the internal structures of the Soviet State. In 1987, the eightieth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution were staged with all the usual Soviet bombast, and everyone assumed that similar anniversaries would continue into the foreseeable future. Even when
glasnost
and
perestroika
got under way, they were presented as the twin pillars of a controlled experiment, aiming for a degree of welcome relaxation, not for radical change.

Yet Estonians by then could receive Finnish television, so they knew that their Finnish cousins across the water enjoyed a far higher standard of living, and much greater freedoms. But they were not inclined to raise their hopes. Twice in the twentieth century they had escaped from the Soviet grasp, only to be twice recaptured. In the early 1980s they had watched the Solidarity episode in Poland intensely, and had seen the movement crushed.

Nineteen eighty-seven was the year when Soviet-watchers noticed that Moscow’s grip on the Soviet republics was slipping. When a local war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the remote enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Gorbachev took no active steps to stifle it. Communist leaders in each of the republics, including Estonia, realized that their room for manoeuvre was widening.
Glasnost
, too, was getting out of hand. Contrary to Western belief, the Russian word means ‘publicity’,
⁷⁵
and was initially used by Gorbachev to encourage Party activists to stand up for his policies against hostile criticism. Yet once unleashed the slogan soon spread into areas of previously taboo subjects. In Estonia, it gave rise to uninhibited historical discussions and to an unparalleled tide of national reawakening.

The first buds of the coming ‘Baltic spring’ had appeared in October 1986 with the foundation of the harmless-sounding Estonian Heritage Society. This was soon followed by public protests, apparently unconnected, against phosphorite mining. But history and ecology were joining hands. What they had in common was a determination to resist Moscow’s dictatorial habits.

Mass demonstrations began in 1987. They were entirely peaceful, but unauthorized. One, on 23 August, was held in the Hirvepark in Tallinn to mark the anniversary of the Nazi–Soviet Pact – hitherto an unmentionable event. Another, in October, gathered in Võru to remember the War of Independence. This was the first occasion for forty-seven years when the Estonian flag flew freely in public. A third meeting, in February 1988, was called to mark the Tartu Treaty of 1920 and faced police with dogs and riot shields. From then on the ferment gathered pace in the guise of the ‘Singing Revolution’. Ever-greater crowds would assemble spontaneously to sing forbidden patriotic songs and to wave flags. Emotions rose inexorably. Finally, on 11 September 1988 at the Tallinn Song Festival, the leader of the Heritage Society demanded the restoration of Estonia’s independence.

Defiance of Soviet authority was now out in the open. Gorbachev’s reaction was to replace the ruling Party’s first secretary in Estonia, while promoting constitutional reform and the creation of a National (Soviet) Delegates Congress. His position weakened, however, when people across the USSR sensed that he was unwilling to sanction the use of force. As a result, the Supreme Council of the ESSR decided of its own accord on 16 November 1988 to issue a declaration of Estonian sovereignty. Soviet laws were only to be regarded as valid when ratified in Tallinn. Moscow protested, but no one was disciplined. The outside world was still largely oblivious to the implications.
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In 1989 Estonian politics followed two paths. One group, headed by Estonian Communists, participated in Gorbachev’s Moscow-centred reform movement. The other, based in Tallinn, pressed for autonomy and, increasingly, for independence. The climate was changing rapidly. In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the ‘Baltic Chain’, which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage.

In 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did. In February 1990 elections to a Congress of Estonia turned into a de facto referendum on national statehood. The Congress then announced ‘a period of transition awaiting developments’. Pro-Moscow elements staged impotent counter-demonstrations. Violent events occurred in Lithuania and Latvia, where in January 1991 Soviet special forces attempted and failed to suppress the ‘separatists’. Gorbachev’s one and only resort to force produced, from his viewpoint, far too little and was much too late. Even so, an Estonian referendum on 3 March produced a 77 per cent majority in favour of independence. The three Baltic republics then seceded, regardless of the consequences. On 17 September 1991 the flags of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were flown at the UN building in New York. They had been recognized by Iceland, by the UN and by Yeltsin’s Russia even while the USSR was theoretically still intact.
⁷⁸
Estonia soared into free flight as the Soviet Union slumped onto its deathbed. On 31 December 1991 ‘Lenin’s only child’ finally succumbed.