ESTONIA

Adrift on Land
At the time of writing it is ten weeks since Ruth and I started living in a home made not of bricks, as wisely chosen by the third Little Pig, but one of plastic, wood, metal, glass and rubber. In those weeks we and our motorhome pal have swallowed over 3500 miles and tasted 12 countries. As we’ve said, we really didn’t know what to expect. However, with about 17 % of our anticipated distance covered (although I’m not at all confident of my prediction and, worse still, I have doubts about the recording of our mileage so far) and 20% of the allowed time expended, some learning points are beginning to emerge.
Ruth and I decided that our 12-month post-retirement voyage was not a holiday. That means that we do not spend our time or money eating in restaurants, seeing every sight in the books or personally checking out what the newspaper travel-writers have said we should experience before every Tom, Dirk or Henriette has been there and ruined it. At the same time we do have several kilograms of guide- and historical-type books with us and are visiting some of the locations mentioned, together with some which it has always excited our curiosity to see, if we should ever have the opportunity. This has led us to a number of places where, over the centuries, cultivated, stupid, mad and well-intentioned Europeans like you and me have inflicted massive atrocities upon other cultivated, stupid, mad and well-intentioned Europeans like you and me.
One thing which an island-dwelling nation such as the British, or continent-dwelling nations such as Americans, Canadians or Australians do not appreciate is the mutability of frontiers. Practically everywhere we have been so far has at some time been somewhere else. And not just onewhere else but several other wheres else. At the time of writing this, among other countries, we have spent time in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. The boundaries of all these countries have changed a number of times in the last century and a half. Or the country didn’t exist. We have been in places which, having formed part of one or other empire for decades, were occupied by both Germany and Russia in the First World War, had 20 years of independence (in the case of Latvia and Estonia for the only time till then in their histories) then, in the case of the latter two, were occupied successively by Communist Russia, then by Nazi Germany and then again by the Soviets. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were killed, deported or dispossessed for temporarily being of the wrong race, nationality, political persuasion or having the wrong sense of humour or history. Given that a person of moderate political views could have been deliberately or haphazardly killed by Communists or Nazis, traps were laid for people of any political persuasion or none. Estonia was occupied by Russia from 1710 to 1918, by Germany in 1918, independent for the first time from 1920 to 1940, invaded by the USSR in 1940, by Germany in 1941 and again by the USSR in 1944. Tallinn, the capital, was occupied by Russia and Germany between them, 7 times in the 20th. Century.
There is a dinner party game of “What would you have done if you had lived in Nazi Germany?” I’m afraid that my truthful answer would have been not to have played the heroic role I might have wished in the resistance, but to have kept my head down and pretend not to have noticed. But you can never tell. Some of the stories we have heard or read about in our travels suggest that many “ordinary” people have performed apparently heroic actions or acts of perfidy, cowardice or oppression for no better reason than that it seemed to be right at the time. So it’s not just frontiers of land which are mutable. It is also the frontiers of language, culture, law and morality which change. And, somehow, people have to live through that. That’s why, sometimes, even though the perpetrators are still among us (such as the KGB operatives who were active in Warsaw in the 90’s, whose execution cells we saw in Warsaw) and unpunished, we have to forgive and remember.
Let’s consider hypothetical examples:-
Estonian No.1. A patriot. He is active in the movement which achieves independence for Estonia at the fall of the Russian Empire in 1918. He is a supporter of the Estonian Government until, under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin Pact; the Soviet Union invades Estonia in 1940. He is arrested and dies in the Ukraine in 1943.
Estonian No.2. Another patriot. She is active in the movement which achieves independence for Estonia at the fall of the Russian Empire in 1918. She is a supporter of the Estonian Government until, breaking the Hitler-Stalin Pact; Nazi Germany replaces the Soviet Union as the occupying power. She is sent to a concentration camp in Siberia as an “unreliable” element where she dies in 1945.
Estonian No. 3. Patriot. Was in the Estonian army combating the Soviet invasion. When the Germans invade in 1941, he joins one of the German-led Estonian battalions as a way of opposing the Soviet occupation. When the Germans retreat before the Red Army, he is captured, placed in a POW camp and executed by the Russians.
Estonian No. 4. Communist patriot. She welcomes the Soviet invasion in 1940, but with the German occupation in 1941, she flees to Moscow. When the Communist regime is set up in 1945, she becomes an under-secretary at an embassy in Western Europe where she falls under suspicion as being too friendly with the West. She is recalled, interrogated and executed in 1951.
Estonian No.5. A worker. Makes a joke about Stalin in 1952. Detained and shot.
Estonian No.6. A worker. Born 1934. Lives through Russian occupation, German occupation and second Russian occupation. Welcomes second Estonian independence 1990. Dies of natural causes in 2004, aged 70, a citizen of the European Union.
So it may be that, if I were asked what I had done in the War, Daddy, the most defensible answer would have been “Nothing”. But you can never tell.