TALLINN, Estonia — I was lost en route to Tallinn’s harrowing
Museum of Occupation, ironically enough, when I stumbled upon the
gathering storm of protest at the Soviet war memorial. Within hours
this statue of a Red Army regular (dubbed the Bronze Soldier) would
become the
site of violence, pandemonium, extensive looting and even a
death. The beauty of the city and the hospitality of its people
make the destruction — most of it, no doubt, motivated more by
alcohol, greed, and bad manners than politics — particularly
lamentable. When I first arrived on the scene, however, there were
only piles of flowers and milling throngs of teenagers and
twenty-somethings.
The Estonian government, calling the memorial a painful reminder
of Red Terror and occupation, had decided to relocate it and the
Soviet soldiers buried nearby to a military cemetery outside of
town. (A massive war memorial built in typical harsh, but grandiose
Soviet style already lies on the outskirts of the city.) New
protesters — mostly from the nation’s 30 percent ethnic Russian
minority — arrived continuously. Older Estonians stood along the
periphery staring at the spectacle with gaping mouths, some shaking
their heads slowly. When I attempted to engage one particularly
nervous police officer about the situation, he begged off,
explaining he had been bused in from a small village and was still
getting his own bearings. This inexperience would soon prove
disastrous.
The protesters were not nearly so reticent. “This is a late
victory for fascists,” one teenage girl declared when I put out an
open call for any English-speaking protesters. She stabbed a finger
at the statue. “Without this soldier, Hitler would have won the war
and ruled Europe until he died.” This rhetoric was actually fairly
mild compared to that of Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail
Kamynin, who called Estonia’s decision “sacrilegious and inhuman.”
Later Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov promised his country
would “take serious steps” against Estonia, a threat the Russians
have considerable experience carrying out.
As promising as it is to see that Russia and its apologists have
finally added the concepts of “sacrilege” and “inhumanity” to their
official lexicon, unless you are willfully ignorant or blinded by
ethnic loyalty it is difficult to make heroes out of the Red Army
in Tallinn. Walk a quarter mile from the site where the Bronze
Soldier stood, through the winding cobblestone streets of Old Town
Tallinn, and you will find a large dirty building with its lower
windows bricked up. This masonry job came courtesy of the Red Army
and was designed to muffle the screams emitted from their KGB
brethren’s endlessly overflowing basement interrogation cells.
YES, THE RED ARMY lost a far greater number of soldiers in World
War II to the Wehrmacht than any other nation. And
certainly it was fortuitous for the Allies that Hitler decided to
turn on his Soviet ally and open the disastrous second front,
driving a desperate Stalin into the arms of Churchill and
Roosevelt. Nevertheless, trading one oppressive, murderous police
state for another was no bargain in the life of the Estonian
nation.
After its Liberation War, Estonia should have had little to fear
from the Red Army. Lenin had reluctantly agreed to the Tartu Peace
Treaty recognizing Estonia’s sovereignty in 1920. The Soviet Union
was a member of the League of Nations, which prohibited
international aggression and bullying, and had acceded to the
Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 essentially banning war. Non-aggression
pacts between Russia and all three Baltic States had been signed
between 1926 and 1932.
Alas, in a
secret 1928 paper drafted by the Red Army, “The Future War,”
the official Soviet policy on the Baltic States was laid out: “From
the economical point of view, the independent existence of those
dwarf states is not justified.”
The eventual dismantlement of the first independent Estonian
state a decade later was done not in defiance of fascism, but in
collusion with it. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the
Soviet Union and Nazi Germany placed the Baltic States in the
former’s “sphere of influence” and greenlit Hitler’s conquest of
Poland. The “mutual assistance” demanded of the small nations,
however, was not so mutual or forthcoming. By early 1940 Stalin had
issued a saber-rattling proclamation — “The activity of the Red
Army is of relevance also to the world revolution.”
On June 16, 1940 at 2 p.m. the Soviets gave each of the Baltic
States the same ultimatum: Agree to open the borders for “basing
rights” to an unspecified number of Red Army troops by 11 p.m. or
face the consequences. More than 435,000 Red Army soldiers, 3,000
tanks and 8,000 artillery pieces awaited the answer on the other
side of the border. Three days earlier they had been ordered to
prepare to “isolate” and “annihilate” the Latvian and Estonian
armies. The Baltic States capitulated. Internally, the Soviets
defined “mutual assistance” with a Central Committee of the
Communist Party document entitled, “Measures for Cleansing the
Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian SSRs of Anti-Soviet and Socially
Dangerous Elements.” In August 1940 Estonia was annexed by the
Soviet Union.
Eight of the young Estonia republic’s ten former presidents were
quickly arrested. Most were shot down in dirty makeshift Soviet
prison yards. One committed suicide rather than answer a Communist
Party summons. Forty-seven former Estonian ministers were arrested.
None survived. Can you imagine a monument in Washington, D.C. to a
government that murdered eight of our ten first presidents?
During the year of what would become the first
phase of Soviet occupation — Germany’s Operation Barbarossa
launched a year later on June 22, 1941, drove the Russians out of
Estonia by June 26 — eleven-thousand “kulaks and their families,
families of bandits, [and] nationalists in hiding” were deported or
sent to labor camps where more than half would perish. Eight
thousand Estonians were imprisoned, 7,500 more were “executed or
died as a result of torture,” and 1,101 disappeared. On June 8,
1941 alone, 193 Estonians were put
to death in Tartu. Nearly 35,000 Estonians were conscripted
into the Red Army, 21,470 of whom would die in battle.
Then came the Germans and the cattle cars started heading West
to labor and concentration camps. Again, the fortunes of war
turned. As the Germans retreated the Estonian flag
flew again for two glorious days on September 21 and 22, 1944,
before the Soviet “liberators” returned to tear it down again. That
flag was banned for the next 51 years. Seventy thousand Estonians
fled for the Allies’ lines rather than go another round with the
champions of the working class. Some 2,000 stayed to die fighting
the impossible fight. Thirty thousand more Estonians were arrested
before Stalin’s death. Further depravations and hardships were
visited upon the country. By 1950, 92 percent of farms in Estonia
were forcibly collectivized. The shortages, hardships, and deaths
typically associated with such a policy abounded. Farmers who
resisted were rounded up and sent to Siberia.
SO, IN SHORT, HOWEVER terrible the Nazis he helped vanquish, the
Soviet fighting man the Bronze Soldier represents was
never a liberator of the Estonian. His fight may have
helped loosen the fascist grip on Western Europe, but in the East
he was the deliverer of privation, violence, deportation,
repression: the guarantor of state violence.
The removal of this relic of a terrible age is not only
justified, but probably long overdue. Moving the statue to a
graveyard rather than destroying it shows the Estonian government’s
great restraint. That any Russian official has the gall to bemoan
it says more about the delusions he has about his own country’s
past than it does about the Estonians.
