What Every American Should Know About Europe
Page 41
News you can understand: The City Paper covers all three Baltic States in English: www.BalticsWorldwide.com
Also newsy: The Baltic Times: www.baltictimes.com
20. ESTONIA
(Eesti)
The Elder Sister
FAST FACTS
Country: Republic of Estonia; Eesti Vabariik
Capital: Tallinn
Government: Parliamentary republic
Independence: August 20, 1991 (from Soviet Union)
Population: 1,325,000 (2006)
Head of State: President Arnold Rüütel (2001)
Head of Government: Prime Minister Andrus Ansip (2005)
Elections: President elected by parliament to five-year term; prime minister nominated by president, approved by parliament
Name of Parliament: Riigikogu
Ethnicity: 65.3% Estonian; 28.1% Russian; 2.5% Ukrainian; 1.5% Belarussian; 1% Finn; 1.6% other
Religion: 65% unspecified or unaffiliated; 14% Evangelical Lutheran; 13% Russian Orthodox; 2% other Christian; 6% none
Language: Estonian (official); also Russian, Ukrainian, Finnish
Literacy: 99% (2003)
Famous Exports: Supermodel Carmen Kaas (best known for J’Adore)
Economic Big Boy: Hansabank (banking); 2003 revenue: €360 million (about $450 million)1
Per Capita GDP: $16,400 (2003)
Unemployment: 6.2% (January 2006 Eurostat figure)
EU Status: Entered May 2004
Currency: Estonian kroon
Quick Tour
Eesti seems to have shaken loose from a different century. With a skyline of green domes and orange tiled roofs, capital Tallinn holds a hauntingly beautiful medieval quarter of candlelit cafés and restaurants where menus of old style calligraphy are written on parchment, the staff dress in period clothes, and one downs medieval feasts at the slabs of wood tables—the fare includes bear. Tiny churches that comfortably hold about three dot the countryside, windblown islands beckon bicyclists and hikers, and witches are believed to inhabit the mist-tangled primordial bogs.
The pagan practices of Estonia’s past are still celebrated. The dead are believed to return and wander about freely every August, and June 23 is a mystical night when Estonians prance through fields by moonlight, seeking out a rare fern believed to imbue magical powers upon those who pluck it.2
A FEW QUIRKS
China she’s not, but whatever you do, don’t call Estonia “tiny,” a description that really rankles Estonians. The country, they will point out, is bigger than Denmark, Iceland, or the Netherlands; she’s downright gigantic when compared with fellow EU member Malta.3 Estonians also get hot and bothered when the country is called “a former Soviet Republic.” Sensitive former foreign minister Toomas Ilves suggested that a better description of Estonia before 2004 would be “Pre-EU.”4
Land of fair maidens, rugged coast, and villages lost in dense forests, Estonia is the smallest, least populated, and most northerly of the Baltic States. Despite having a population of only 1.4 million, Estonia often boasts the region’s flashiest politicians, who fluently spell out Estonia’s charms in half a dozen languages. The country sparkles with a vibrant economy, and Estonians have the highest per capita income of the trio (well, that’s not saying much).
The late Lennart Meri, Estonia’s brainy second president, spoke five languages, made documentary films, knew something about everything, and should have qualified for a Guinness world record when he outdrank Boris Yeltsin5 while discussing the withdrawal of Soviet troops (which finally took place in 1994).
Now known as one of the most Internet-savvy places on the planet, with a third of the population online at home, Estonia was always the most tuned-in of the Soviet republics. Estonian TV could pick up Western channels—shows such as Peyton Place were popular in the 1960s—and Western music kept an underground spirit alive as clandestine bands smuggled in bootlegs of King Crimson and The Who, inspiring some to write their own rock operas.
FEISTY ESTONIANS
When the Soviet system was forced into place, Estonians were the Balts least likely to adopt Russian. When someone said something in Russian, Estonians often replied in their native tongue. Estonian dissidents also SOSed the Western world. In 1976, a group of Estonians sent a formal complaint about the Soviet occupation to the United States Congress, and, shortly thereafter, letters were flying to the Russian press and politicians. Before perestroika was even in effect, groups of intellectuals were defying Soviet law by forming secret societies and researching Estonian history. Mart Laar, a future prime minister, put together the Society of Estonian Heritage and headed off into farming villages to research the history of the Forest Brothers.
The Estonian government is a revolving door, where prime ministers blow out one year only to return the next; with her small population, say Estonians, anybody who wants to can probably have a chance ruling the country. Recently, leaders have been hammering Russia—the government considers Soviet “a terrorist regime”—to compensate Estonians for damages and loss of life under the Soviets. In the so-called White Book released in 2004, the Estonian government spells out the effects of Russian occupations, including the loss of 180,000 Estonian lives during the Second World War. Environmental damage inflicted by the Soviet army will cost about $4 billion to clean up, according to the White Book, the result of twelve years of research. The Estonian government demanded compensation of $250,000 for each person killed and $77,000 for each person who worked in the Soviet system. Given the huge total, the government added, Estonia would be happy to accept a timber-rich corner of Siberia instead of money. The reply from Russia’s foreign ministry: no way.
According to the Estonian government, 60,000 Estonians were killed or deported during the first month of Soviet occupation in 1940.
Estonia was the first Baltic state to put an intellectual face to the world—and the lobbying of Estonian politicians helped to pry open the EU door. But she isn’t as goody-goody as it sounds. Intravenous drug use is rising; some point to young Russians as the reason. The United Nations shocked the country when it announced that Estonia’s HIV rate is one of the world’s highest—although it was unclear whether that was due to IV drug use or rampant prostitution. The government is starting up condom campaigns, but promoting protected sex runs counter to one of the country’s new goals: boosting the birth rate.
Hot Spots
Tallinn: Like Estonians themselves, Tallinn is striking, her cityscape punctuated by ornate Russian Orthodox domes and by medieval buildings spilling down from atop the city’s main hill. Spend a few hours in her romantic Old Town, and you can really feel like you’ve fallen into the past. But modern problems pop up: never mind that Finland has helped Estonia with her border security—plenty of contraband still slips out from Tallinn to Helsinki, and Finland exports her rowdy “vodka tourists” here.
Old town Tallinn: Fall back into Hanseatic times
Estonian saying: There’s really no summer, just three bad months for skiing.
HEAVENLY INFERNO
Estonia’s dearest friend, Finland, whose capital Helsinki lies a mere forty miles from Tallinn, shares with Estonians the adoration of the sauna. Although Estonia is now nominally Lutheran, early attempts to Christianize the pagan masses flopped. Part of the reason: preachers kept threatening that the fires of hell awaited those who didn’t convert. In that frosty part of the world, however, inferno-like temperatures sounded cozy. Estonians are known for their 120°F saunas, finished off by jumping through ice holes into glacially cold lakes.
Like the Finns, Estonians hold wife-carrying contests.
Saaremaa: Rugged bluffs, eagles, and thirteenth-century castles are part of the draw to Estonia’s largest island, home to 40,000.
Pärnu: Bright cottages, mud baths, and white sand beaches await at Estonia’s most popular summer resort.
Soomaa National Park: Pocked with peat bogs, which are believed to be mystical places and are traversed by canoe.
Hotshots
Arnold Rüütel: President, 2001–present. Former Communist leader who helped push for Estonian independence in the late 1980s, he’s an agronomist by formal training. Helped get Estonia into the EU, but at age seventy-eight, he’s seen as a bit daft for the post.
Andrus Ansip: Prime Minister, 2005–present. Former chemist Ansip scored high in approval as mayor of Tartu, and is now preparing the country for the conversion to the euro.
Ken Marti, who became justice minister in 2003 at age twenty-eight, tried to resign soon thereafter. The reason: he’d been caught speeding in a residential neighborhood. The prime minister refused his resignation.6
Mart Laar: Prime Minister, 1992–1996 and 1999–2002; presently Estonian VIP-at-large in Brussels. Only thirty-two years old when he took over as prime minister, multilingual historian Laar bolstered Estonia’s flimsy economy by easing business taxes and pushing through a flat 26 percent income tax. Has lots of ideas about how to promote Estonia, including selling ethnically pure Estonian genes to scientists studying disease. Wrote War in the Woods about the Forest Brothers.
Former PM Mart Laar publicized the Forest Brothers’ lost history
Estonia was the world’s first country to establish a flat tax—now 26 percent.
21. LATVIA
(Latvija)
The Middle Child
FAST FACTS
Country: Republic of Latvia; Latvijas Republika
Capital: Riga
Government: Parliamentary democracy
Independence: August 21, 1991 (from Soviet Union)
Population: 2,275,000 (2006 estimate)
Head of State: President Vaira Vike-Freiberga (1999)
Head of Government: Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis (2004)
Elections: President elected by parliament for four-year period; prime minister appointed by president, approved by parliament
Name of Parliament: Saiema
Ethnicity: 57.7% Latvian; 29.6% Russian; 4.1% Belarussian; 2.7% Ukrainian; 2.5% Polish; 1.4% Lithuanian; 2% other (2002 estimate)
Religion: Lutheran; Roman Catholic; Russian Orthodox
Language: 58% Latvian (official); 38% Russian; 4% Lithuanian
Literacy: 99% (2003 estimate)
Famous Exports: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Minox spy radios, Laima chocolates
Economic Big Boy: Latvenergo (energy generation); 2003 revenues: €312 million (about $380 million)1
Per Capita GDP: $13,200 (2005)
Unemployment: 8.2% (January 2006 Eurostat figure)
EU Status: Entered May 2004
Currency: Latvian lat
Quick Tour
Amber tosses up on secluded shores like gifts from sea gods, and marshy fields where rockets once pointed at Europe are now nature preserves thick with storks. Wild horses still run through her valleys, sand caves wind around her coast, and Latvija loves historical exhibits, with everything from a museum of old bibles to one devoted just to bread. Latvia has always been the region’s crown jewel to everyone who showed up here—including Teutonic knights, who believed that whoever held the capital Riga held the key to the Baltic Sea. Plenty vied for that key, and from German merchants to Scandinavian traders, they all left their mark, starting with the knights—whose rook-like castles litter this land thick with legends of wicked gnomes, caves with healing waters, and trees that turn those who chant magic words into werewolves during the full moon.
Even well-educated Latvians say oak trees, worshipped by their pagan ancestors, have curative powers. Many Latvians keep “gray stones,” found near oaks, in their homes and hold them when they want to feel grounded.
Wedged between Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south, Latvia is the Baltic country most loudly blipping on world radar. That’s partly a result of brainy polyglot president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who’s become well known to the big boy heads of state during her seven-year presidency. In the country that blew through four currencies in fifteen years, and where prime ministers change annually, Vike-Freiberga is an anchor, helping Latvia cut a striking international presence.
But what is mostly making Latvia rise and shine is capital Riga, a beautiful jumble of architectural styles. Turrets rise next to S-shaped Dutch-style gables, shuttered fourteenth-century chalets nudge gilded sixteenth-century mansions, and the skyline of slender church towers, steeply pitched roofs, and domes in dusty pinks and daisy yellows tumbles down like a Picasso painting. Cut off from the West under Soviet rule, Riga was previously a travel magnet. Seventeenth-century writers lavished praise on this opulent trade city of operas, oyster restaurants, silk stores, and beautiful houses cascading with ornate baroque designs. The riches of the city, the third largest in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, were most stylishly showcased in a flurry of construction from 1880 to 1910, when fantastical art-nouveau designs—here called by the German name Jurgenstil—made artwork of buildings: architects carved swirling-haired beauties and tumbling flowers into facades alongside busts of Zeus and space-age knights. With a third of the city decorated in Jurgenstil, Riga boasts the highest concentration of art-nouveau architecture in the world.
A NIGHT ON THE TOWN
In the Soviet days, Riga had only five restaurants, and most Latvians who went out spent the night waiting in lines. Now the hopping city of designer hotels is filled with chic restaurants (where you might order roe deer carpaccio, caviar-filled blini, ostrich steak, or kid goat) and cozy eateries, heavy with wooden barrels and iron pots, serve thick Latvian stews and chewy black bread with hemp butter. Strolling under brick arches and through medieval squares, you can find polka-dot-happy Zup Zup, (soup restaurant by day, dance club by night), upscale fish restaurant Skonto (where an indoor waterfall cascades into pools thick with swimming trout), the Eastern Front (a theater bar of Soviet cages, memorabilia, and busts of Stalin), and Balzams Bar (wrapped in oversize sepia photos of the eighteenth-century pharmacist who invented viscous liqueur Riga Black Balzams, served here dozens of ways). Music floats from all corners. At the stunning opera hall, Demons—a haunting opera in Russian—unfolds on three tiers; a few blocks away, hundreds sway to reggae at the Colonel, go-go girls prance on tables at Martini, and at Thank God It’s Friday—a palm-tree-filled tropical watering hole—locals hop up on the bar to dance. “There’s this wild energy here in Riga,” says artist Andris Vitolins, a twenty-eight-year-old painter with tousled sandy brown hair. “Everything’s growing and mixing so fast, you don’t know what will happen next.”2 Reminders of the Soviet occupation, including bullet-riddled buildings and the solemn Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, are still scattered across the city. In Stabu, Riga’s fashionable new quarter, where people lounge on tatami mats for Zen’s tea ceremony or slouch in booths at red-glowing artists’ bars, you’ll find Corner House, a soulless concrete building marked with a plaque; it was a Soviet torture chamber that still gives Latvians the chills. The medieval quarter also holds powerful memories for Latvians; hundreds of thousands congregated here in January 1990 to prevent Soviet tanks from taking government buildings and the TV station.
“The whole country came to Old Town—some driving their tractors. Everybody made barricades of mattresses, garbage, cars—anything that would keep the tanks from entering—and people kept watch all night. And everybody was singing.”3—Painter Andris Vitolins recalling January 1991, when Latvians feared that Soviet forces, after destroying the TV tower in Vilnius (see page 338), would also take over the communication center in Old Town
Riga was the Soviets’ darling, loved for her painters, sculptors, and clothes designers. Handed private apartments (a luxury) and studios, and kept stocked in supplies, Soviet-approved artists “were the golden eggs in the nest,” says creamy-skinned Asnate Smeltere, a former top Soviet model, who once strode on West European runways (while KGB guards kept watch).4 She now designs flowing painted
silk skirts and beaded lace dresses that seem to float across her boutique, Salons A, where Scandinavians are snatching clothes off the racks. The city’s many artists are now part of the free market whirlwind; chocolate factories and gypsum factories are being transformed into lofts, and nineteen galleries have recently thrown open doors: the city just started a citywide gallery walk. One hot spot: the five-story Artists’ Union, where Soviet artists previously painted nationalist themes. Once a month, it’s an open gallery where you can wander past odd installations (man suspended in cocoon, woman with lipstick-filled Mexican gun sling) and creative types working at looms or printing presses, while videos of horned dancers in balls flash on the walls.
Eat your heart out, Russia. The town that Soviets loved for her creativity now shows all signs of becoming the next Berlin.
Latvian joke: An American, a German, and a Latvian are in a field when an elephant runs out of the forest. The American thinks, “If I could harness that great animal’s strength, I would be very powerful.” The German thinks, “If I could sell the animal’s meat, I would be very rich.” The Latvian thinks, “I wonder what that elephant thinks of me?”