A boy is riding a bicycle next to the rail track, in the outskirts of the Estonian town of Elva, chasing smoke-belching steam-engines and waving to the engine drivers.
That boy is me in the mid-1960s, when my parents and grandparents used to take me to Estonia on holidays (from Kharkiv in the Soviet Ukraine, where we lived). They took me there every year, so often in fact that I now regard the country as my First Life’s second motherland.
Estonia was then the closest ordinary Soviet citizens could come to the west, which was still firmly out of their reach. While still a child, I couldn’t help noticing how the small, occupied nation was clinging to her identity, language and culture. Estonians surprised visitors from elsewhere in the USSR with their higher living standards, civility and style, which they managed to preserve despite the country’s annexation in 1939, in the aftermath of the disgraceful Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
It was in Estonia, in the late 60s, that I had my first experience of a self-service “supermarket”—an establishment then unheard of in the rest of the Soviet Union. The thing that baffled me most was a separate shopping basket for every customer. “How come the baskets don’t get stolen?” I kept wondering.
Among few other western-looking products, they sold jam in tubes. And although the jam, when squeezed (or, in my case, sucked) out the tube, had a distinct taste of lead, I could not have enough of it and kept walking around—and even cycling—with the tube protruding from my mouth, cigar-like.
When on holidays in Soviet Estonia, we often found ourselves on the receiving end of the so-called “passive protest”—the only way the natives of the Baltic republics of the USSR could voice their angst at what they rightly perceived as occupation: the locals used to totally ignore Russian speakers in a public place, be it a café, a theatre or a shop. The staff would simply look through you, as if you were an empty space, which was unnerving.
As a keen fisherman, or fisherboy to be more exact, for I was just 11 or 12 then, I used to spend long hours on the edge of a small pond in a thick pine forest near Elva where I was once approached by a small unit of “forest brothers”—partisans still fighting for Estonia’s liberation from the Soviets in the 1960s. They were armed and looked scary, but they proved harmless, and refused my generous (or frightened) offer to given them my day’s catch of three small carp...
Childhood memories came flooding back during my visit in July. Instead of an impoverished former “Soviet Republic”, I saw a thriving western country, proud, secure and so digitally advanced that it was often referred to as e-Estonia. According to the recently published book Baltic: The Future of Europe, by Oliver Moody, Estonia has raised its nominal GDP per capita by an astounding 2,500 per cent since its restored independence in 1991, overtaking Greece, Portugal and Poland. It now equals France in life expectancy, income and education.
That incredible country is also now quietly preparing for war.
“We are ready to fight,” Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s youngish foreign minister, told me calmly, almost matter-of-factly. “If Putin attacks, we’ll bring the war back to him.”
We were talking over a pizza in a small restaurant in Pirita, a seaside suburb of Tallinn, another former holiday haunt of my family’s. We used to rent a room in a nice western-style cottage, and I remember watching the 1966 World Cup there on an antediluvian black-and-white TV...
The foreign minister was in a hurry: together with the British ambassador to Estonia, he was about to join a 40,000-strong choir, performing from an open-air stage outside Tallinn for a 100,000-strong audience. This was part of the Laulupidu—a traditional song and dance festival, held regularly since 1869 in defiance of wars, invasions and foreign rule. Many of my Estonian friends believe that they have actually “sung” their way to freedom!
I was listening to the perfectly synchronised choir, singing tirelessly under the rain, from which my flimsy hoodie was no protection. Both the performers and the audience were ignoring the downpour, as if bracing themselves subconsciously for the trials to come. Citizens of a relatively small European country, they were clearly enjoying seeing so many Estonians in one place. From the soaked festival programme booklet, I gleaned that one of the songs was called “Solemn Estonia” and another, “Going to War”.
Back in Tallinn, sodden Ukrainian flags were ubiquitous, drooping from their poles almost mournfully, next to the Estonian blue-black-and-white sinimustvalge. On the telly in my hotel room, they were talking about bridge reinforcements, air-raid training and new fortifications around the town of Narva on the Russian border.
I hoped that Estonians wouldn’t have to fight for their country again, that they would keep enjoying their long-awaited freedom, to which they had sung themselves so beautifully and so bravely.
