Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Remember August 23, 1939
Marianne Mikko
When the Prague Spring happened, I was six years old. My world
was free of unpleasantness and summer was spent in the idyllic
Estonian countryside. The focus of my attention was an extraordinarily
big bag of sugar kept in the pantry. As a consequence of my
curiosity I ended up in some serious conversations with the adults
that left me with a distinct sense of uneasiness. I was given no valid
reason why 50 kilograms of sugar should remain untouched and
thought that was strange enough but there was something else:
the way the grown-ups talked and the stockpile of matches, salt
and candles next to the infamous bag of sugar.
It was some years before I realised that these were the supplies
people put aside in case of disaster. In 1968, many people in
Estonia expected war to break out. We knew that the Soviet Communist
Party would not accept the Prague Spring. Less than
thirteen years earlier, the Budapest revolution had resulted in death
sentences for its revolutionary leaders, the deaths of 2,500 freedom
fighters and 200,000 refugees. In the German Democratic
Republic, over hundred people involved in the 1953 uprising were
executed.
Of course the Stalinist apparatus was doing everything possible to
prevent this sort of information spreading. The USSR tried to avoid
sending conscripts from the occupied territories to suppress the
Budapest uprising and the Prague Spring, but the information
spread nevertheless.
These were the issues we were dealing with, when, in the West, the
German Wirtschaftswunder was in full bloom. On one side of the
Iron Curtain there was abundance, on the other side scarcity. In the
West there was confidence, in the East fear. In Paris, students were
demonstrating against capitalism; their contemporaries in the
occupied Baltic States had witnessed the deportation in unheated
cattle carriages of ten per cent of the population to Siberian labour
camps and Arctic settlements.
215 Marianne Mikko is a Member of the European Parliament.