Remembering the Soviet Union
Tallin, Estonia.
The first odd thing you notice in the museum is the collection of ancient suitcases neatly lined up near the main entrance. What are they doing there? Then it hits you. This is not a museum of the history of the travel business, but a history of occupation; Soviet occupation. The suitcases were brought to the museum by hundreds of Estonians who were fortunate enough to have survived deportation to Siberia in the 1940s and who wanted to testify to what happened in their lives when Estonia belonged to the Soviet Union. Tourists on cruise-ships that stop at Baltic ports all the way to St. Petersburg can visit the museum on excursions often called, “Life in Soviet Estonia.” Participation in such a tour is an eerie and eye-opening glimpse into a terrifying past.
Estonia isn’t on the average person’s list of places to know about. A country slightly larger than Switzerland, it has a population of only 1.3 million, making it one of the smallest members of the European Union and of NATO, both of which it joined in 2004. But if you want to know what it was like to be a small country sucked into the vortex of Soviet power, Estonia is a good place to start.
But first, a little history. Estonia escaped from the Russian Empire for the first time in 1918, when Estonians declared independence in the early months after the Russian monarchy collapsed and it wasn’t clear who would rule Russia. Estonia remained independent until 1940, when the cynical Stalin-Hitler agreement—which enabled Hitler to control part of Eastern Europe and Stalin to control the other part—enabled the Soviets to mass troops on the Estonian border, to invade, and to set up a puppet government that “asked” to be incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. The first mass deportations of Estonians to the Siberian gulag started in June 1941.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union briefly interrupted the process, but not for long. Anti-Soviet partisans who fought against Soviet power for a few years after World War II in the Estonian forests were ruthlessly hunted down, arrested, and deported, or summarily shot. A further wave of deportations began in 1949 and, according to the Estonians, affected at least 17 percent of the entire population. Half of the deportees died in the camps and the other half were not permitted to return to Estonia until the 1960s. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians were brought into the three Baltic republics (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) to solidify Soviet control and vast tracts of coastland became closed Soviet military areas.
Gorbachev’s liberalization of Soviet life in the 1980s unleashed a wave of nationalist yearning in the Baltic republics, but Estonia and the others didn’t gain real independence until the abortive Soviet military coup of August 1991 had been faced down by Boris Yeltsin. Even then, it took a further three years of negotiations to get the last Russian soldiers out of the country. “The officers,” said an Estonian tour-guide with a shrug, “never left. They simply changed into civilian clothes and vanished into the Russian civilian population.”
The Museum of Occupation, where the suitcases are located, has photographs of Estonian national leaders who were executed at Stalin’s orders or—in the case of Estonian prime minister Konstantin Pats (pronounced pates)—first deported for a decade and a half and then consigned to a psychiatric institution in Russia, where he died. An illustrated booklet in English speaks of an Estonian government commission tasked with investigating “crimes against humanity” when Estonia was under Soviet occupation. It is a grim story.
In the first wave of Soviet repression, in 1941, a large proportion of the intellectual and leadership cadre of the country was singled out—even student leaders and people who had studied Esperanto—driven in trucks to cattle-wagons, and shipped off by rail to Siberia. During the Soviet years, the Soviet secret police occupied two buildings in the center of historical Talinn, and many Estonians committed suicide rather than face arrest, and possibly torture there. Today, the buildings are pointed out to cruise-ship tourists. “Nobody wants to buy those buildings now,” says an Estonian guide drily.
An Estonian woman, Lagle Parek, who was invited to tell her story to tourists at the Museum of Occupation, spoke of her own imprisonment by the KGB and the reproduction of forbidden Western books that led to it. “We heard lies from morning until night,” she said with a laugh. “Today, if the Russians say something, we check whether it’s true or not.”
Not surprisingly, the Russia of Vladimir Putin refuses to accept the notion that it ever “occupied” Estonia, arguing that “occupation” can occur only in wartime and that in 1940 there was no combat in Estonia. As for the Soviet annexation in 1940, the Russian Foreign Ministry says with a straight face that it was requested by the Estonians themselves. Besides, say the Russians, we “liberated” Estonia from the Nazis. Why aren’t the Estonians grateful?
The 26 percent of residents of Estonia who are ethnic Russians tend to agree, living in insulated Russian-only communities where they need minimal contact with ethnic Estonians. In the year 2007, hundreds of them rioted in protest at an Estonian government decision to relocate a WWII Soviet war memorial, the so-called “Bronze Soldier.” Asked about the troubles, an Estonian woman claimed that several of them, when apprehended, admitted belonging to Nashi, Vladimir Putin’s youth movement, and said they had been paid to take part in the demonstrations.
Back in St. Petersburg a charming Russian tour-guide called Natasha complained how difficult it was for Russians to travel to the Baltic republics. “It used to be so easy when they were part of the Soviet Union,” she said, not quite realizing the significance of her words. “Now we have to wait weeks for a visa. I think they are angry because their young men had to serve in the army.”
Well, yes; in the Soviet army, the same one that had taken over their entire nation. As for the word “occupation,” that’s what the Germans did when they invaded the Soviet Union in World War II.
“What we want to tell the Russians today,” said Lagle Parek, “is that we wish them well. It’s just that we don’t want them back.” As for Natasha, she might learn a thing or two by contemplating those suitcases.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Provocations, Global Culture, Fri 25 Jul 2008
