Estonia: Almost extinguished, successfully reborn

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ESTONIA: Almost extinguished, successfully reborn destroyed newly-erected Communist symbols and monuments. Most of them were exposed and their members sentenced to the Gulag. The Khrushchev era presented the Estonians with a new dilemma: to persist in grim mental opposition or to accommodate themselves to Communist society. As living standards began to improve, people were able to concentrate more on their family lives. The failure of Western democracies to provide any tangible assistance to the Hungarians in 1956 slammed shut the gates of hope for the future. It became clear that Soviet rule was there to stay. This ushered in a painful period of accommodation and collaboration. However, accommodation was mixed with growing fears about the future of national identity, culture and language. As a result of Moscow-promoted industrialization and the massive influx of labour from Russia, an internal alarm clock started to tick in the minds of most Estonians, warning about the impending moment when the indigenous people would become a minority in their native land. On this background, even many Soviet careerists remained internally split between official ideology and their endangered nationality. As is clear now, the price paid for some economic progress and more individual liberty resulting from accommodation with the system was a long-lasting deformation of the moral fabric of the nation. After the suppression of the Prague spring in 1968 the resistance movement emerged again. In 1972 two underground Estonian groups addressed an appeal to 32
ESTONIA: Almost extinguished, successfully reborn the UN. Stressing the legal continuity of the Estonian Republic, they asked for UN help to withdraw the occupation forces and to organize free elections. Five of the suspected authors of the appeal were sentenced in 1975 for “slandering” the Soviet Union. However, the goal was achieved – to draw attention to the most vulnerable aspect of the Soviet rule – its illegal nature. The first Helsinki conference of 1975 encouraged the opposition to stand up more openly for human rights and democratic freedoms. With human rights defenders being harassed and arrested in blatant disregard of the Helsinki principles, prisoners of conscience became known by name in the free world and were given increasing support and sympathy by human rights organizations. The major battlefront became the preservation of true history, language and culture and through them, the Western way of thinking. Russification was intensified in 1978, provoking more articulate and wide spread resistance. New underground magazines, among them “Addenda to the Free Circulation of Ideas and News in Estonia” were published underground, petitions were sent abroad. The Polish “Solidarity” movement was followed with great interest. In 1979, on the 40 th anniversary of the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, forty-five Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian freedom fighters signed the “Baltic Appeal”, asking the international community to rectify the consequences of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet deal. In 1983, the European Parliament became the first international institution to react positively to that appeal. 33
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Estonia: Almost extinguished, successfully reborn

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