Some twenty-five years ago, when the West still imagined Russia to be an honest and responsible partner, Lennart Meri, the first president of post-Soviet Estonia (whose books Kristjan had read from his grandmother’s secret shelf), had warned of Moscow’s enduring imperialist appetite.
In a prophetic speech he’d pointed out that Solzhenitsyn’s call for Russians ‘to bid farewell to the empire and… solve their own economic, social and also intellectual problems’ had been ignored. He’d drawn attention to the Kremlin’s declaration that Russia had a ‘special role’ as primus inter pares – the first among equals – in the lands of the former Soviet empire. He’d reminded his audience of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ belligerent assertion that the ‘protection’ of ethnic Russian groups in neighbouring countries ‘could not be solved by diplomatic means alone’.
‘Because we are a people belonging to Western European society and since, unfortunately, we live in a land which is geo-strategically very vulnerable, we have developed a stronger instinct than many a European for discerning the problems and threats that loom in our vicinity,’ Meri had said, warning of ‘forces in Russia’ who believe ‘they can solve their country’s immense problems by outward expansion and by threatening their neighbours’.
‘Whoever really wants to help Russia and the Russian people today must make it emphatically clear to the Russian leadership that another imperialist expansion will not stand a chance,’ Meri had concluded. ‘Whoever fails to do so will actually help the enemies of democracy in Russia and other post-communist states.’
Too few in the West listened to him.
19
Soviet Secret Barbecue Society
I decided to linger in Estonia, writing up notes, gathering thoughts, walking where Danish knights, Dominican friars and Danzig merchants had walked. On Tallinn’s zigzagging medieval lanes I tried to picture them alongside the capital’s more recent residents: Skype geeks, Ukrainian sex workers and party people heading off to DM Baar, ‘the world’s Number One Depeche Mode-themed nightclub’ (are there any others?). In my mind’s eye fur traders from Novgorod strode beside high-booted tsarist cavalrymen. War widows fled with their children beneath the devil’s masks on the portals of St Catherine’s friary. I watched starving men resist the call to serve ‘under the flag of fame’ in Hitler’s Wehrmacht and then – after Red Army tanks retook the city – to follow Stalin’s ‘true path’. I heard tailgates slam shut, and pictured crammed military trucks driving away beneath the lime trees and onion domes. Some 30 per cent of Estonians exiled to Siberia in the 1940s were less than sixteen years old. On Castle Square, in the Danish King’s Garden and along the Lower Town battlements, their voices still hung in the air. On two dozen afternoons, after my writing mornings, I moved among them and across the centuries, stretching my legs and imagination, listening to their laughter, their cries, the barked orders and gunshots.
Tallinn was built on salt, say the locals, on salt and tears. Trade made the vassal city rich while war and pestilence racked it. In 1343 ethnic Estonians rose up against the then ruling Teutonic Order, burning a Cistercian abbey and slaying dozens of monks as well as ‘virgins, women, servants, maidservants, noblemen and commoners, young and old; all who were of German blood’. In retaliation, the Aryan overlords hacked to death the country’s last pagan chiefs at Paide Castle. Later, half of the Estonian population perished in the two-generation-long Livonian War. Eight plagues next ravaged the city. Then at the end of the seventeenth century, famine killed off 80,000 more citizens in two years.
Yet for centuries Tallinn thrived as part of the Hanseatic League, contributing men and money to the thousand-ship trading union. Its German guilds and merchants sent herring, hops, cloth and salt to Russia, brought furs, beeswax and seal fat to the West. In the Old Town they built themselves noble meeting halls and elegant high-gabled houses with ochre and peach facades, encircling them with formidable walls and more than five dozen defence towers. Their St Olaf’s church, with its slender Gothic spire, was once the tallest building in the world.
Come the nineteeth century, after the collapse of the League and the first Russian invasion (nine of Ivan the Terrible’s cannonballs remain embedded in the walls of the Kiek in de Kök fortress), Tallinn dozed as ‘a quiet provincial town, a piece of petrified Middle Ages… pure and genuine’, according to traveller Eduard von Ungern-Sternberg. On Sunday mornings in the twenty-first century it seemed to sleep on, the chimes of church bells ringing back and forth across the pitched terracotta roofs as if in casual conversation. Atop craggy Toompea hill, the resting place of a mythical giant, taxi tyres thrummed on cobblestones, waitresses skipped puddles on their way to work and big-boned Viking tourists yawned over coffee. Gangs of English lads nursed hangovers after all-night bachelor parties while more sober holidaymakers filed between St Mary’s Lutheran Cathedral – girdled with the coats of arms of banished Teutonic families – and its nemesis, the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral, a symbol of Russian oppression.
My plan was to head south, arcing through the borderlands that Moscow continued to claim as its own, but before leaving the relaxed and open city I needed to make a pilgrimage – to a traffic island.
In the last months of the Second World War, the remains of a dozen Soviet soldiers had been buried at Tõnismägi. The Russian occupiers renamed the gravesite Liberators’ Square and built on it a one-metre-high wooden pyramid crowned with a tinny red star. Two Estonian girls – fourteen-year-old Aili Jürgenson and fifteen-year-old Ageeda Paavel – then destroyed it.
‘How long should we watch this red star, a memorial for Russian looters, at the time when all our statues are being destroyed?’ asked Jürgenson later. ‘We just couldn’t get our heads around it. We decided that if such robbers are raging in Estonia, they should see how one of their memorials gets blown up. We could have just doused the wooden thing with petrol and set fire to it, but we wanted it to go with a bang!’
Over the previous months, Soviet occupation forces – in another effort to rewrite history – had indeed smashed hundreds of Estonian monuments. A communist committee in Võrumaa reported: ‘In order to carry out demolition works, fifteen Party activists and 275 persons from the Destruction Battalion must be mobilised. Fifteen workers are needed for the execution of each demolition and ten people are needed for protection… as well as 225 kg of TNT, 150 metres of fuse and 100 primers plus eleven lorries to carry away the ruins.’ The Russians had set about eradicating all memory of the earlier, anti-Soviet Estonian War of Independence. In their fervour, they’d even torn up Estonian military gravestones and buried their own dead on top of fallen locals.
‘There was nothing really difficult about it,’ recalled schoolgirl Paavel. ‘The important thing was that the fuse was long enough to give us a safe distance for running away. We put in place the materials for the blast. We had no supporters. The fact that a militia officer who was on duty was flirting with a girl at a distance and did not notice us made it easier for us. Although this girl did not belong to our group, she was also later arrested.’
After the blast Jürgenson and Paavel were branded as ‘juvenile terrorists’ and deported to the gulag. The Soviets then replaced the wooden pyramid with a bronze statue of a Red Army soldier, adding later an eternal flame.
To most Estonians the memorial remained another symbol of Russian repression and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government decided to move the Bronze Soldier and the human remains to Tallinn’s military cemetery. But for the many Russians who’d been settled in Estonia after the war, in a concerted effort to dilute its ethnic homogeneity, the statue symbolised their claim on the republic. Local agitators were paid by persons unknown to inflame emotions, sparking two nights of rioting. A so-called ‘Army of Russian Resistance’ circulated a declaration calling for ‘all Russian men living in Estonia’ to take up arms against the government. A Russian State Duma delegation flew into town, warning that moving the statue would be a grave offence to history and ‘disastrous for Estonians’.