The Soviet occupation of Estonia came out of World War Two. At the end of the war, the armies of the Soviet Union moved across the Baltic States, leering across the Gulf of Finland. The Estonians thought they had been betrayed. They had watched through World War Two, as the Germans and the Russians sparred over their lands; they had been drawn into the fighting. Stalin wanted the Baltic States after World War Two, and neither Churchill nor Roosevelt did much to stop him. For nearly fifty years, the countries along the Baltic coast sank into Soviet grey; the people kept within the confines of the Communist Empire, though a few thousand escaped to Sweden. Fifty years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the soldiers went back to Russia, but they left debris scattered across the country—hidden military bases, nuclear submarine training centres, the decaying vestiges of collective farms. They left the shabby medieval streets of Tallinn, semi-decayed rows of Hanseatic mansions, alleys covered in ferocious graffiti, wizened gardens of dying plants. They left a nation nervously enjoying its independence, looking over its shoulder at the eastern border, wondering how long the peace would last.
In the tourist idyll of the old town, the shops sold Estonian knits and amber beads. I walked past the tourist bars and the crowded patisseries, where old Estonians waited at tables for coffee and cream cakes. I passed up a series of cloistered passageways to Toompea, the second tier of the old town, at the top of a low hill. The Orthodox domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a remnant of Russian control in the region, were surrounded by touts. As I walked along, a young Russian approached me and offered to take a photograph of me in front of the cathedral. When I shook my head, his face fell and he moved quickly away. A series of winding streets led towards the edge of the hill, where I stood on a viewing platform, looking out at the industrial sprawl of the harbour, the long dull rows of cheap housing, the intertwined railway tracks. A man was selling CDs of his own music—a tall lumbering man with a blond ponytail and a donkey jacket, talking in fast clipped English to tourists who moved steadily away from him, trying to look at the view. An Estonian TV station was filming, the presenter broadcasting with the city as a backdrop, talking loudly to the camera. Graffiti had been splashed across some of the darker passages in Toompea, in the areas away from the Parliament buildings. Yet the renovation was happening fast, the place was full of newly painted apartment blocks, and the old town looked as though its last rough edges, its few remaining shady corners, would soon be gentrified.
In Tallinn old town prices were so high that ordinary Estonians went out to the cheaper places beyond the city walls, to the shabby supermarkets with their semi-empty rows, to the cramped cafés smelling of mould. The old town was a bizarre playground for visitors and affluent locals, its architecture preserved because the Soviets never redeveloped the ageing Hanseatic squares. The buildings fell into squalor, but they survived, saved from reconstruction in Stalinist toilet tile. The cafés were opulent, full of young Estonians who had found a fast-track in the new system. In the renovated mansions they ate international cuisine and talked about the future. At an old town restaurant called the Bonaparte, they were flying the tricolour and serving fine French cuisine. The restaurant was in an imposing Hanseatic building which had been restored in recent years. A well-dressed crowd was reading papers, smoking and buying croissants to take home. There was a low hum of conversation.
Mart and Karin were angled self-consciously against the table, dressed in casual clothes. Karin had long blond hair, her skin had been smoked to leather, and her hands trembled when she grabbed her coffee. On the phone, they had told me they could introduce me to former President Meri, but when I arrived they seemed elusive, slightly nervous, shying away from my questions about him. Instead, Karin said: ‘I am a part-owner of a bar. We model ourselves on Notting Hill. We have bare walls except for photos of heroin chic. It’s what people want to see.’ Mart was outlandish, talking about his yachts and his luxuries; he had been made a millionaire by the last decade, though he wore his wealth nervously. He spoke an arrestingly beautiful English, without any trace of an Estonian accent; it was so notable I kept asking him how he had learnt it, while he talked about ski trips and the stock exchange and all the money he had made.
He said: ‘Why don’t you come with me to a Russian bar? We will drink shots of vodka. I have a boat; we could all go sailing. It’s moored close to here. I have a beautiful country house. Do you like to ski? We can organize the most extraordinary, the most superlative skiing trips, though generally such snowy activities require a significant tolerance of sub-zero temperatures, far worse than your lukewarm European winters.’
‘But your English,’ I said again, ‘how did you learn such good English?’
He laughed and said: ‘It is superfluous these days. Extraneous, you might say. So I may as well enlighten you. I was trained in what we shall call, for lack of a better term, spy school. The Russians plucked me from my local school, and sent me there. We were taught a variation on the ordinary syllabus, with a greater emphasis on language acquisition, colloquialisms, and international knowledge. I have a rather encyclopaedic knowledge of English and American institutions, for example. I know enormous amounts about Ivy League universities and the English “Old Boys’ network.” If you invited me to a black-tie dinner, I would of course know exactly the outfit required. I am losing some of the fineries of my speech. But we were made to blend in,’ he said.
He said he was created to slide into the professional elite in the USA or the UK, made as an establishment figure, designed to meet the right people, to mingle at exclusive gatherings. I didn’t entirely believe him, though later when he caught me looking thoughtful, he said: ‘Don’t be such a Byronic malcontent,’ and the phrase was such an unlikely one that I doubted my own scepticism.
Karin was saying, ‘There is so much happening in Tallinn, it’s a great city. I would like to travel, to go to the USA. I present TV programmes in Estonia. I am still able to do that, though I am no longer young. The young people who didn’t come through the system understand nothing. They are spoilt already. We, the older generation, are the people who really understand how lucky we all are now.’
Karin and Mart were both thirty-something, and had grown up in Soviet Estonia; they had still been students when Communism collapsed. The generation that had prospered during Communism seemed irrelevant to Karin, so her sense of age was foreshortened. In Karin’s gleaming new world order, half the population had been cast out, as the weary dregs of the Soviet system. Thirty was a fine age to become prime minister; fifty was too old, she said.
‘Come to the Russian drinking pit,’ said Mart. ‘I will buy us some vodka and blinis. We have to support our impoverished minority, the Russians, brought to a sorry state now their empire is over. We Estonians pity the individuals of course, but we find it rather appropriate that the Russians should now be marginalized in the town they tried to ruin.’
We crossed the main square, ducking into a bar called Troika, where the waiters were dripping vodka into glasses arranged in rows on the tables. The bar was already filling up for the evening, large tables of people toasting each other and emptying their glasses.
‘Let me tell you about the history of my poor nation,’ said Mart, clinking his glass against mine, while Karin lit a cigarette.
Tallinn was built by invading armies, bellicose knights and rapacious merchants. Crusaders began arriving in the country in the thirteenth century, baptizing the natives, declaring northern Estonia a Danish province. The Teutonic Knights made an early appearance, and then the Hanseatic merchants came, sailing their ships to Tallinn, building mansions. There were peasant revolts, but the German Knights hung on, until greedy neighbours arrived—the Swedes, the Russians. The Swedes pacified the peasantry by selective acts of strategic benevolence; Gustav Adolf founded a university south of Tallinn, in Tartu. For all the superficial altruism, Estonia was governed by an oligarchy of Swedish and German nobles, who used the people as serfs. Estonia became a seat of German b
arons, bishops and burghers, a Protestant nation. The Baltic barons remained locally powerful, even after Russia sent in armies in the early eighteenth century. Later, after a deal between these Balts and the Russians, the region became the property of the tsar, with the Balts remaining as administrators and owners of vast tracts of land. Tallinn became a place of vicious social divisions: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie held entirely distinct, making their money from trade, and the Estonian serfs, wearing their ankle-length black coats, with sandals and long fair hair.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Estonia was recognized as a free state. The Soviet Union renounced all rights of sovereignty, only to decide twenty years later that the treaty had been far from binding.
‘You can understand,’ said Mart, finishing his drink, pouring himself another, pouring me another, though I tried to refuse, ‘that we are still a little worried about our border with Russia. And you may also comprehend why we have a strange sense of history. We were occupied by both the Nazis and the Communists, our country was entirely obliterated by their wars. They are both equally evil, I think, both equally reprehensible. You should talk to our recent prime minister, he’s a close personal friend of mine, I’ll put you in touch. His wife’s grandfather was killed by the Nazis; his own grandfather was killed by the Communists. It gives you a particular perspective on these dogmas.’ And he started fumbling with his latest-model mobile phone.
‘Awful times,’ said Karin, puffing smoke everywhere. ‘We all know Russian, but no one wants to speak it. We try to forget. Though it is useful sometimes for business.’
‘I can give you a collection of numbers,’ said Mart. ‘I know everyone, everyone you need to know. If you meet someone, ask them if they are acquainted with me. If they’re not, then ignore them.’
Finally Mart gave me a piece of paper. The address he had scrawled out, Meri’s house, was a short distance outside the old town, on a peninsula with a view back to the capital.
‘I’ll arrange you an appointment,’ he said, as they waved me into the night outside the hotel.
The following day I drove beyond the city walls into new Tallinn, where the streets became grey and the Soviet housing blocks loomed above the dirty houses. The trolley buses juddered along rough tracks, jolting the inhabitants into the suburbs, where the buildings degenerated into cramped wooden rows. The streets were lined with architectural horrors, Stalinist attempts at a hybrid style, superfluous columns stranded halfway up the sides of barren blocks, a sense of mournful ugliness to the whole. There were fleets of dusty archaic cars parked in the gutters, and signs to cheap hotels hanging from grey façades. There were sullen buildings housing technical colleges, and schools. Smoke rose from brick chimneys.
The city lay under dim sunshine. The sea shone in the pale light. I drove out of Tallinn, through the marshes into a countryside richly forested in places, and starkly devastated in others, littered with sunken debris, wreckage from the past. The land was a brilliant orange; the low shrubs and bracken shimmered in the afternoon sunshine, which poured across the flat lands. The branches of the juniper trees hung over the roadsides. The countryside threw out jarring but resonant objects—among the forests there appeared the ugly breezeblocks and decaying steel girders of an abandoned collective farm. After an hour I reached Keila-Joa, pausing briefly to look at a waterfall, which thundered down a sheer rock face. There was a café selling herring sandwiches, a suspension bridge which shuddered as I crossed it, and a path winding alongside the river. I walked through the empty forests, a thunderstorm erupted, the trees bucked in a sudden wind, and clouds of rain turned the path to mud. Soaked, I ran through the trees until the forest came to an end at a grey beach. A glassy white sea stretched away; there were swans bobbing incongruously on the waves.
In 1991, Keila-Joa had been covered with remnants from the Soviet occupation. It was the site of a Soviet Army missile base, a patch of polluted ground, with liquid rocket fuel in the soil and groundwater. It had all been cleaned, a woman in the café told me, as I sat by the fire trying to dry my clothes. The polluted soil had been taken away, the water purified. But the collapsing military bases and decaying industrial plants remained, spread across the marshlands, bleakly symbolic of the Communist appropriation of the countryside, the state of enforced inertia, the enforced ignorance of the Estonians. The Estonians had no knowledge of what was happening within the barriers and fences; they had no control over what happened outside them.
Later, I arrived at Viimsi Peninsula; an Estonian flag fluttered from a pole. There was a security gate, but a thickset guard waved me through. President Lennart Meri had a fine view of the sea. Everything was silent, except for the sound of a dog barking. His house was an elegant Scandinavian-style place, with white walls. I brought the car to a halt by the door, as the dog began a staccato symphony. The wind blustered along the beach. The windows were dark, reflecting the ragged beach and the fluttering flag.
I was expecting an assistant to meet me at the door, but there was a sturdy old man bowing towards me. For a bizarre moment I thought he was Nansen, and my speechless amazement was hardly the right way to open. The hall was dark, he came out of the gloom; on an icy plain he might have passed at a distance for the old explorer stumbling across the snow. But he was reminiscent of Nansen even when we moved into the light, with his height and his fixed, brilliant eyes. He was wearing an immaculate suit, smiling bleakly at the silence outside. He gripped my hand firmly, and then he beckoned me into the house.
‘Take your coat and put it over there. I am Lennart Meri. This is my assistant,’ he said, pointing towards a young man with a clipboard. ‘He’ll be with us today.’ And the man followed us as we walked, politely keeping a distance behind the former president.
Meri gently pushed away his dog and threw open a door into a library. He was supremely smart and upright and his library was equally meticulous, arranged into taut rows. We paused for a moment in the library, looking across the bay, out to sea.
‘Here I remember my travels,’ he said.
‘It’s a fine view,’ I said.
We passed into a quiet study, books covering the walls, and he sat down heavily in a chair and then hoisted himself straight. He spoke slowly, sonorously. ‘These shelves are filled with all the books I have to read, before I start my book. I hope I have time.’ He nodded, at his shelves. He seemed to be joking; there was a trace of a smile on his lips. ‘Yes, we can talk about Thule,’ said Meri. ‘I can even tell you where Thule is, as I understand it. But first I have to tell you a few things. This is a small country; no one knows much about it. You should understand a little of our country, if you want to hear what I mean about Thule. You should know that here, in this land, we are very much aware of our stones. We are very much aware of our marshes and beautiful lakes, and our islands and our lovely coast. We have been living here for around five hundred centuries. It has an effect on the way of thinking. You have the same feeling as being married for five hundred centuries.
‘There are trees in this country which have been here for thousands of years,’ the old president said, looking through the window, at the flag drooping on the pole outside, at the white glare from the sun.
‘I remember before the Germans and Soviets came,’ he said. ‘I remember my childhood in the 1930s very vividly, my very elementary feelings. I remember that we did not have to lock our doors. I remember the very simple things which were so common. We had been away on holiday to France and we returned in our car—it was not very usual—on a hot day, and we asked to drink something in a village in Estonia, and I still remember that we were given milk, and nobody wanted milk. And I remember the feelings, that the farmer’s wife was furious that we preferred water to her milk—that we would not take her hospitality. Everyone was very proud of their work. World War Two destroyed everything—it brought a tragic sense of understanding about history. Despite everything, events materialized in a way we did not expect.’
The Germans and the Ru
ssians fought in Estonia, and with the collapse of Hitler’s armies the USSR gained control. The Estonian writer Jaan Kross saw it as consummate betrayal; he said it felt like a blow to the head with a club, a blow which made the Estonians feel that all resistance was futile. The scene was grotesque for the Estonians to imagine, Kross had written: Stalin and Roosevelt talking together in 1945, with Stalin smiling, speaking in sing-song Georgian tones, and the interpreter presenting the case—there was really no need for international observers in the Baltic States, no need between old war allies—as Roosevelt sat, wheelchair-bound, taking painkillers. Kross had imagined that Roosevelt had a terrible headache, he was in constant agony and he couldn’t apply his mind to the problem. So he told Stalin to go ahead with elections.
Thousands of Estonians fled; by 1945 there were thousands of Estonian refugees in Sweden. They hid on boats crossing the Baltic Sea; they rowed themselves across the sea. The purges soon began—most of those who had served in the Home Guard during the war or had been conscripted into the German Army were arrested and deported.
‘The Soviet soldiers appeared with their bayonets, and the KGB men in plain clothes,’ said Meri, casting a side-glance towards me. ‘There had been a certain very primitive hope that the Germans would restore Estonian independence. This did not happen, and things became worse still after the Soviets returned. The Estonians lost more people during the first years of the Soviet occupation than during the German occupation. The Estonians lost more Jews during the Soviet times than during the German occupation. The Jews were lawyers, doctors, teachers; the Soviets thought they were class enemies and so they were deported,’ he said, slowly.
Apart from his low, slow voice, the house was silent. During the hours we spoke, the silence was occasionally broken: by the jarring ring of the phone, by the grind of a car’s tyres on the gravel outside. Mostly it lay heavily upon the room, a thick blanket of silence, threatening to overwhelm the place. He tried to talk against it, but it fell thickly into his pauses, and he often paused, as if exhausted by the effort of speaking into the dense silence. Into the silence Meri spoke, and before each word came a pause, a brief moment of surrender. When the word came it was perfectly placed, his voice strong and deep, his English studiously accurate, littered with unusual words, collected like curios. He held his head in his hands and stared onto the table.
The Ice Museum Page 22