In the summer of 1944 the pendulum of war swung again. The Siege of Leningrad was lifted, the Red Army returned and the German Army Group North pulled out successfully into Latvia in ‘Operation Aster’. The Estonian population was left to cope with the aftermath. The NKVD set to work again with a vengeance, and another wave of Estonians was consigned to the Gulag or to mass graves. The second Soviet ‘liberation’ rendered the topic of Estonian independence impossible to mention. This time, the Soviets let it be known that they intended to stay for ever.
Nonetheless, in the brief interval between the German retreat and the Soviets’ return, a small group of Estonian politicians attempted to organize an independent government in Tallinn. Jüri Uluots (1890–1945), who had been both the last pre-war prime minister and chairman of a German-sponsored National Committee, issued a declaration of Estonian neutrality. On 18 September 1944, acting in his capacity as the sole legal representative of the pre-war republic still at liberty, he appointed a government headed by a lawyer, Otto Tief. The blue-black-and-white flag flew on the Pikk Hermann tower for two days. A party of German marines, sent from evacuation duties in the port to crush the ‘mutiny’, was repulsed. But on the 22nd, Soviet tanks drove in, and the flag was hauled down. The government fled to Pogari, whence they hoped to escape to Finland. Scattered resistance briefly slowed the Red Army down. Tief and most of his ministers were arrested and sent to the Gulag. Uluots and a small company reached Stockholm, where an Estonian government-in-exile was formed. Their principled action was doomed to failure, but, like the contemporaneous Warsaw Rising, had enormous symbolic resonance.59
The reimposition of Soviet rule in 1944–5 sparked a repeat performance of all the horrors and ordeals of 1940–41. A Communist government, handpicked in Moscow, arrived on the coat-tails of the Red Army. Its most prominent figure, Johannes Vares Barbarus (d. 1946), a doctor and poet, had briefly served in similar circumstances in 1940. The Estonian Communist Party was reinstated, intent on wreaking revenge on its compatriots. Estonian territory east of Narva and much of the Petseri eastern district were arbitrarily annexed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the Soviet republics.
On 2–3 July 1945 a military court of the Supreme Soviet held a show trial to condemn the ministers of the last Estonian government. Uluots was condemned in absentia (and died – unusually – of natural causes). His minister of defence, Jaan Maide, was shot. Others were imprisoned. The Great Terror raged once again. In 1944–53, c. 30,000 Estonians were consigned to prison camps. Tens of thousands more were arrested, interrogated, tortured, raped, ‘disappeared’ or executed. The largest single deportation, involving 76,000 individuals from all three Baltic States, was carried out in March 1949. Their destination was eastern Siberia. The re-deportation of children who had been taken to Siberia in 1941 and who had somehow found their way home was peculiarly sadistic. Soviet citizens repatriated from Germany and returning prisoners of war could expect no mercy. Low-level armed resistance continued for years.60
One small footnote raises a wry smile. One of Otto Tief’s ministers, Arnold Susi, who fell into the clutches of the NKVD in 1944, made friends in the Gulag with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both men were eventually released; it was at Susi’s country home in Estonia that Solzhenitsyn would later hole up in secret to write The Gulag Archipelago, the book which would do so much to undermine belief in the Soviet system.61 The pre-war Estonian president, Konstantin Päts, like General Laidoner, was not so lucky. He spent sixteen years in a Soviet camp before dying there in 1956. The exiled Estonian government, sheltered in Stockholm, carried the baton of legality from 1940 to 1992.
In the eyes of the Western Powers, the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940 had been judged illegal; no retraction was ever issued to change the official opinion. The 4221st Estonian Guard Company, formed by the US army from selected prisoners of war in 1946, saw duty at the Nuremberg War Tribunal, wearing American uniforms.62 Yet nothing practical was done to challenge Estonia’s captivity.
For forty years after the war, the Soviet Union strove to compete with the United States in all fields, and to prove the vaunted superiority of its system. In 1952 it introduced a model, but totally bogus and irrelevant constitution, and changed the ruling party’s name to the ‘Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, KPSS or, in English, CPSU. Despite such window dressing, it remained not just a ‘one-party state’ but a complicated amalgamation of union and autonomous republics, shackled at every level by the parallel structures of the Party dictatorship. Throughout the Cold War it held its own. Not only was it the largest country in the world territorially; it possessed the world’s most numerous nuclear arsenal, and a vast array of naval, air, ground and rocket forces. For a time after the launch of the Sputnik spaceship in 1957 it seemed to be gaining an edge in science and technology too. It looked completely invincible.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the crimes of the early Soviet era were selectively denounced, and a limited ‘thaw’ under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev removed the worst excesses. Yet the essence of latter-day Soviet Communism was immobility. There was no serious modification of Marxism-Leninism, no retreat from a command economy, no lowering of the censorship and no real margin of freedom. In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev, a permanent state of international impasse was reached under the name of ‘détente’.63 Neither the United States nor the USSR was winning the arms race. The Soviets’ former pupil, Communist China, was brought to the fore in the international arena in 1972 by an American diplomatic manoeuvre following the Sino-Soviet split.64 In the 1980s the Soviet leadership grew more rigid in response to the challenge from US President Ronald Reagan, who spoke openly of the ‘evil empire’. Poland’s Solidarity movement was crushed, as previous acts of defiance in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been. The Soviet bloc appeared to be gripped in the same vice that had gripped the Soviet Union for three generations.65
Throughout the post-war era the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) was the smallest of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics. Its territory was essentially the same as that of pre-war Estonia, but its population was somewhat different. The Jews (exterminated) and Germans (expelled or killed) had gone, and their absence was more than made up by a massive influx of Russian settlers. Estonia was governed by the standard dual Party-State system imposed on all the Soviet republics. State institutions were largely run by locals, especially by Estonian nationals born elsewhere in the USSR. The Estonian branch of the Soviet Communist Party was also largely in Estonian hands but it was directly subordinated to Moscow, which charged it with keeping all state organs in line. In reality, therefore, the country was locked into a Russian-run collective dictatorship. Elections were held for councils and assemblies. But since all candidates were appointed by Party-run electoral commissioners, voters were given no meaningful choice.
The history of the Estonian Communist Party, especially in the last phase of Stalinism from 1945 to 1953, makes for sorry reading. One chairman, Barbarus, committed suicide little more than a year after his appointment. A successor, Nikolai Karotamm, was purged in 1950, charged with ‘bourgeois nationalism’. A third, Johannes Käbin, emerged as the Party’s strongman for twenty years. Yet personalities held only secondary importance. All factions in the Party competed to win Moscow’s approval, and all were ultimately dependent on the presence of the Red Army and the KGB, the Soviet Security Service.
Stalinist repression was followed by the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’ and then by the long era of Brezhnevian stagnation. During the ‘thaw’, Käbin’s close links with Khrushchev bore fruit in the shape of reduced food requisitions and improved economic conditions. Under Brezhnev, however, Russification gathered pace once again. Käbin was succeeded by a Russified Estonian, Karl Vaino, who had been born in Tomsk and could not speak his mother-tongue fluently. The official policy of bilingualism did not apply to Russians, laying the seeds of a later conflict. Bureaucratic centralization had the effect that �
��the recipes of all cakes baked in Estonia were drawn up in Moscow’.66
Information in the West about Soviet-era Estonia in this period was peculiarly inadequate. An encyclopedia of Russia published in London in 1961, for example, was not so much factually inaccurate as incapable of distinguishing the wood from the trees:
Estonia (Estonian Eesti or Eestimaa), Union Republic of the U.S.S.R, bordering on the Gulf of Finland, Latvia, the Baltic Sea and Lake Chudskoye in the east; it is mainly lowland plain, partially forested, with many lakes and marshes and a soft, almost maritime climate; Area 17,800 sq. m.; population (1959) 1,197,000 (56 per cent urban), mostly Estonians (73 per cent), also Russians (22 per cent), before the war also Germans. There are oil-shale extraction and processing, electrical engineering, textile, wood-processing and food (bacon and butter) industries; dairy farming and pig raising are carried on, and grain, potatoes, vegetables and flax cultivated. Principal towns: Tallinn (capital), Tartu, Pärnu, Narva, Kohtla-Järve… During the period of Estonian independence (1919–40) the country’s industry declined, being cut off from the Russian market, but agriculture flourished with the export of butter and bacon to Britain and Germany. At first independent Estonia was a democratic republic, but in 1934 a dictatorship was established under President Päts… though a kind of representative assembly with limited powers was introduced. A Communist uprising in Tallinn was suppressed in 1924.67
This entry could easily have been written by the propaganda department of the Soviet embassy. It concentrates on economic issues, avoids controversial historical matters, says nothing of the Second World War, and gives the impression that the pre-war Estonian Republic (but not Stalin’s Soviet Union) deserved the label of a dictatorship. It omits the important fact that both Britain and the United States regarded Estonia’s incorporation into the USSR as illegal.
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.68
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’.71 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.72
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.
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