Moscow’s tactics were nothing new, as Kristjan had told me. As Russia TV cameramen waited in vain for Estonian troops to emerge from their barracks, hoping to film military intervention, the police plucked from the crowd the key agitators, each of whom had a crisp €500 note in his pocket. They drove them far out into the countryside and dumped them unharmed by the roadside. The statue’s removal went ahead as planned and the Russian delegation – which had demanded the whole government’s resignation – was asked politely to desist from intervening in Estonia’s internal affairs.
Within hours of the so-called 2007 Bronze Night riots, Russia launched its first vengeful cyber attack, shutting down the websites of the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters.
In the cool afternoon sunshine I walked around the Tõnismägi traffic island, thinking of Jürgenson and Paavel, of the destroyed lives and desecrated graves. On a park bench a young mother watched her toddler playing in the huge flowerbed that spread over the former site of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. We fell into conversation and I asked her if she knew the history of Tõnismägi. She looked at me as if I were mad.
‘Every Estonian knows it,’ she said. ‘But we prefer to enjoy the flowers instead.’
Estonians revere their land, as I’d learned on Kristjan’s seemingly haphazard tour. On Saaremaa I’d seen coins deposited on the mysterious offertory stone. He’d spoken of ancient ‘energy paths’ that linked megaliths, ridge tops and river fords. I’d read about magic springs, holy lakes and sacred groves where trees were wrapped in ribbons. So it was no surprise that Nature – or at least the threat to it – had emboldened Estonians to stand up against Russia.
In 1986, before the fall of the Wall, Moscow had hatched a plan to dig a vast, open-pit phosphorite mine in the Virumaa region south-east of the capital. The intended excavation would unearth radioactive materials near to the source of the Emajõgi, literally Mother River, and so risked contaminating up to 40 per cent of the country’s water supply. Estonians also feared that the mine would spur another wave of Russian migrants.
In response, students at Tartu University paraded through the streets holding hands and wearing yellow ‘Phosphorite – No Thanks’ T-shirts. Copycat protests ignited across the country and a ‘fact-finding’ mission arrived from Moscow’s Ministry of Fertiliser Industries to push through the plan. But in an ingenious piece of theatre, the Russians were encouraged to pick up lumps of the unearthed mineral from a test hole. Once exposed to the air, rock phosphate warms to the touch and the Russians – fearing radioactive contamination – dropped the stones like hot potatoes.
‘Now you are dead,’ the Estonian geologists coolly told them.
Two weeks later Moscow cancelled the Virumaa project.
The success of the protest became a catalyst for further anti-Soviet action. In 1989 over two million people joined hands to create a 420-mile human chain across all three Baltic states. Two years later Estonians again joined hands to form human shields around their parliament and TV towers, stopping Soviet tanks and paratroopers from seizing them.
As Estonians had occupied the same tract of land for more than five millennia, Kristjan suggested that I occupy it too, although for a somewhat shorter period of time. He sent me south to Lake Võrtsjärv, the source of the ‘Mother River’. Around it, the forest smelt of resin and blueberry leaves. Tapering trunks glowed luminous red in the evening light. Fresh breezes whispered through the treetops, tracing audible paths through the pines, while underfoot billowy green hummocks of sphagnum moss cushioned the forest floor.
Over the next week I walked through dappled light and around copses of slender silver birch. Again and again I paused beside a stream or peaty pond to catch a moment in notes, or to map my journey as the long shadows mapped the pine-needle earth. On Võrtsjärv’s northern shore I even stood by a mystical healing stone beneath which music was said to be heard at night.
Once again I wasn’t alone, both because the Forest Brothers had survived in these woods and because Kristjan – from whom I’d parted in Tallinn – had instructed the locals to look after me. Every evening I was invited to eat with neighbours, to drink beside bonfires on pebbled beaches, to sweat like a swine in their saunas. And it was there, at 175°F, that I came to meet the captain of the Soviet Secret Barbecue Society.
Jaan Habicht was sixty-two years old. Or seventy-two. As a young man growing up in Soviet Estonia he had been told that he could never travel abroad because his father had been a banker. Or a property developer. He had been found guilty by association, he told me, but had refused to accept ‘state-sponsored incarceration’. Instead at Turku University he’d trained as a molecular biologist so that he could – somehow – live a travelling life.
‘I was stuck like the proverbial pig in a sty,’ he told me as he poured water on the hot stones. ‘Until I heard about Ireland.’
In 1989 Jaan learned that the Irish Peace Institute sponsored Estonians to visit the republic. To land himself an invitation, he went to Moscow with two large bottles of Old Tallinn, a high-octane rum-based liqueur said to be so powerful that, in a cocktail called the Hammer and Sickle, it hits the head and cuts off the legs. At the Irish embassy, Jaan proceeded to intoxicate a senior diplomat (or junior attaché) to such an extent that his name was added to the official list. Both a visa and a ticket were issued on the spot and, before Soviet officialdom spotted the offence, Jaan was en route to Dublin. Or Limerick. Or so he said.
To be honest the facts seemed shaky, perhaps because of the sauna’s heat, or the dark Põhjala beer, or simply because Jaan was a storyteller par excellence. When he’d opened the spruce door and waved me inside – a high-spirited, rotund figure with bushy eyebrows, ruffled blond hair and not a stitch of clothing – the flames flared around the stove and the temperature jumped at least ten degrees.
‘Ireland was my epiphany,’ he declared with a sweep of his plump arms, stirring both the aromatic alder-wood smoke and the excitement inside his head. ‘It made me the barbecue king of Estonia.’
The Irish Peace Institute had been founded to promote peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. With the easing of the Troubles, it had widened its focus to offer international courses on conflict resolution. For some unfathomable reason, Jaan’s course included a cookery competition.
‘None of the other Estonians realised that we had to create a dish,’ recalled Jaan, pointing out that the IPI’s chairman Pat O’Sullivan had been a leading spirit in the Irish Barbecue Association. ‘I stepped forward and changed my life.’
Jaan claimed that his success was due to his biochemical knowledge, and sprats. To save money while abroad, he had brought with him to Ireland tins of the silvery, herring-like Baltic fish. In a flash of inspiration – and scientific ingenuity – he’d barbecued them on a schnitzel, and won second prize.