Remembering Estonia’s tragic history

Estonia is often depicted as a place of quirky and tech-savvy coolness and the country has, for the most part, earned its hip reputation. But as fun as it may be to write or blog about the country’s cheap booze, pretty women, ever-expanding wireless hotspots, wife-carrying domination, etc., we shouldn’t forget that Estonia’s experience for much of the 20th century was pretty rotten.

The first modern era of independence (1918 – 1940) is usually remembered as a rose-tinted idyll, but it was darkened by the global economic depression and tragically cut short by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which opened the door to Soviet occupation the following year. But then Nazi Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, and before long they had driven the Soviets out of Estonia, replacing the Communist occupation with a fascist occupation that lasted three years. Then the Soviets drove out the Nazis, won the war, and kept Estonia for themselves.

As I write in chapters 6 and 15 of my book, the Estonians caught up in this nightmare faced deportation, execution, or, if they were lucky, some very unpalatable choices. These choices were articulated starkly by Baltic scholar Anu Mai Köll in a recent talk at Stanford University:

[T]he procedure of deporting Estonians was similar in nature to deportations in other Soviet-occupied countries. What differentiated Estonia and the Baltic states was the legacy of the German occupation during the war …. Anyone thought to be a Nazi sympathizer was automatically subject to interrogations and arrests …. The Nazis became “the enemy of my enemy,” to borrow the old proverb. Brutalized by the Soviets, and caught between the voracious appetites of Hitler and Stalin, it would seem that the Estonians viewed Germans as the lesser of two evils.

You can read more about Professor Köll’s presentation here, and read about her research here. And this is a good place to begin a more thorough exploration of Estonian history.