Baltic Dawn

Sigrid Rausing: Everything is Wonderful - Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

The Weekly Standard, November 10, 2014

Tallinn-Narva road, February 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

I first visited Estonia—or more specifically, its capital, Tallinn—in August 1993, two years after the small Baltic state regained its independence after nearly half-a-century of Soviet occupation. Tallinn was in the process of uneasy, edgy transformation. The Soviet past was not yet cleanly past. It was still lurking in the dwindling Russian military bases. It was still visible in the general shabbiness, in the rhythms of everyday life, and, above all, in the presence of the large Russian settler population, a minority that Vladimir Putin now eyes hopefully, if not necessarily realistically, for its troublemaking potential.

Totalitarian colonial rule had been replaced by a national democracy, the ruble had been succeeded by the kroon, and free-market reformers were at the helm; but the new government was operating in the rubble of the command economy. There was no spare cash to smooth the transition to capitalism. Inflation had exceeded 1,000 percent during the course of the previous year, savings had been wiped out, the old Soviet enterprises were dying, and the welfare net was fraying.

Yet in Tallinn there was a discernible sense of purpose, buttressed by memories of the prosperous nation prewar Estonia had been. What people wanted, I was told, was a “normal life.” That was a phrase that could be heard all over the former Eastern Bloc in those days, a phrase that damned the Soviet experience as an unwanted, unnatural interruption and resonated with dreams of that elusive Western future. Life was tough in Tallinn, but there were hints of better times to come. If the country was to be rebuilt, this was where the turnaround was taking shape.

But Sigrid Rausing went somewhere else in 1993, to a place far from the hub of national reconstruction, a place where the inhabitants had little idea of what could or should come next, a bleak place—poor, even by the demanding standards of post-Soviet Estonia—where nationhood was misty and visions of the future were still obscured by the wreckage of an alien utopia. Rausing, a scion of one of Sweden’s richest families, was a doctoral student in social anthropology. To gather material for her thesis, she spent a year on the former V. I. Lenin collective farm on Noarootsi, a remote peninsula on the western Estonian coast.

Noarootsi had once been inhabited by members of the country’s tiny Swedish minority, most of whom had been evacuated to the safety of their ancestral homeland by Estonia’s German occupiers shortly before the Red Army returned in 1944. The final minutes before their departure were caught on film: the exiles-to-be assembled on a beach, Red Cross representatives mingling with smiling SS officers. Baltic history is rarely straightforward.

Rausing’s thesis formed the basis of her History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm, an academic work published by Oxford University Press 10 years ago. This was never a book destined to top the bestseller lists, but for anyone able to weather the clouds of jargon that drift by—“the effect was to emphasize the experience of oppositions in the form of a homology”—it offers a sharp, intriguing, and unexpectedly wry portrait of what Rausing refers to as the “particular post-Soviet culture of 1993-94, the culture of transition and reconstruction,” a culture that no longer exists.

Rausing has now reworked the topic of her time in Noarootsi into Everything Is Wonderful, a personal, intimate account of that year in which she largely dispenses with academic analysis—indeed, there are moments when she pokes gentle fun at its absurdities—and gives her considerable lyrical gifts free rein. Graduate-school prose now finds itself transformed into passages of austere beauty. They describe a landscape that reminds her of Sweden, only “deeper, vaster, and sadder”; more than that, they portray a people adrift. There is something of dreaming in her writing, images that haunt. Spring returns, and

the children were outside again, playing and shouting in the long twilight, until there was an almost deafening din echoing between the blocks of flats. One day someone burnt the old brown grass strewn with rubbish between the blocks, and the children kept up their own private fires deep into the night.

There is a subplot too, tense and awkward, sometimes expressed in not much more than a hint, that surrounds the position of Rausing herself, an attractive thirty-something Swedish heiress inserted into this exhausted husk of a community and, for a while, lodging with the heavy-drinking, possibly/probably lecherous Toivo and his long-suffering wife, Inna. Ingmar Bergman, your agent is on the line.

That’s not to say that Rausing neglects the broad themes of her academic research. As she notes, the two books “overlap to some degree,” and they have to. Without repeating some of the background covered in the first volume, isolated, depopulated Noarootsi—with its Soviet dereliction, abandoned watch-towers (the peninsula had been in a restricted border zone), emptied homesteads, and taciturn, enigmatic inhabitants scarred by alcoholism and worse and speaking a language of a complexity Rausing struggled to grasp—would have seemed like nothing so much as the setting for a piece of post-apocalyptic gothic. So Rausing provides a brief, neatly crafted, and necessary guide to Estonia’s difficult and troubled history, neglecting neither the obvious horrors nor the subtler atrocities, such as the attempted cultural annihilation represented by the wholesale destruction of Estonian literature. Tallinn Central Library lost its entire collection of books—some 150,000 of them—between 1946 and 1950.

Sometimes, traces of that history—forbidden for so long—come crashing through the silence. Ruth, 76, a Seventh-Day Adventist, tipped by tyranny into something more unhinged than eccentricity, hands Rausing a handwritten retelling of her life: “Devilish age, sad age. Schoolchildren also spies .  .  . life as leprosy.” But Everything Is Wonderful is a book in which the story lies mainly beneath the surface. Old ways linger on amid new realities. There is a new cooperative store, but the old Soviet shop hangs on, “selling household stuff as well as some food, pots and pans, exercise books, shoes if they got a consignment, and ancient Russian jars of jams and pickles with rusty lids and falling-off labels.”

Throughout the brutal winter, heating is intermittent. Heating bills are no longer subsidized, but the majority of villagers “patiently” pay them nonetheless. New habits creep in. Empty Western bottles and other packaging are displayed in apartments, demonstrations of “a connection with the West, a way of expressing the new normal”—that word again, that “normal” in which most had yet to find their feet. Meanwhile, Swedes bring hand-me-down help and the suspicion that they might be looking to reclaim a long-lost family home.

Rausing is a participant in this drama. We learn of her fears, her loneliness, of her wondering what she is doing in this distant Baltic corner, and of her small pleasures, too (“the tipsy sweet happiness of strawberry liqueur”). But she is a spectator as well, and a perceptive one, not least when it comes to the profoundly uncomfortable relationship between Estonians and the Russian minority. The latter are resented as colonists, yet caricatured in terms that remind Rausing of the “natives” of the “colonial imagination: happy-go-lucky, hospitable people lacking industry, application, and predictability.” She dines in a restaurant in a nearby town, where “the atmosphere was a little strained between a Russian group of guests and the few Estonians in the room.” Later, Rausing learns that the “only” Russians living in the “comfortable Estonian part of town” are deaf and dumb; they are “outside language,” as she puts it, and thus able (she theorizes) to “assimilate .  .  . through muteness.”

That sounds extreme, but the scars of the past were still very raw back then. Sometime in the mid-1990s, I watched a senior member of the Estonian government bluntly explain the facts of Estonia’s (to borrow a Canadian phrase) twin solitudes to a delegation of Swedish investors. There was, he said, little overt trouble between ethnic Estonians and the country’s Russians, but there was little contact either: “We don’t get on.”

Rausing’s tone is quiet, often wistful, marred only by interludes of limousine liberalism—apparently there was something “liberating” in the way the locals didn’t care too much about their possessions, which is easy enough, I imagine, when those possessions were, for the most part, Soviet junk—including an element of disdain for the market reforms that were to work so well for Estonia. The prim pieties of Western feminism also make an unwelcome appearance. Watching a pole dancer in a rundown resort town summons up concerns over “objectification,” but Rausing’s response to reports of a topless car wash in Tallinn is endearingly puzzled and—so Swedish—practical: “Really strange, particularly given the Estonian climate.”

But this should not detract from Rausing’s wider achievement. Her book is the last harvest yielded up by that old collective farm, and the finest.

Testing The Limits

The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2014

Brāļu Kapi, Riga, March 1994 © Andrew Stuttaford

“I don’t think it’s 1940,” the woman in Riga told me in June, referring to the year the Soviets brought their own variety of hell to Latvia. “But then, I wouldn’t have expected 1940 in 1940 either.” And then she laughed, nervously. With Russia’s ambitions spilling across the borders that the breakup of the Soviet Union left behind, and talk from Vladimir Putin of a broader Russian World (Russkiy Mir), in which the Kremlin has the right to intervene to “protect” ethnic Russian “compatriots” in former Soviet republics, the once bright line that had cut the Baltic states off from the horrors of their past now seems fuzzy.

And in a more literal sense the borders that separated the Baltics from their old oppressor have lately appeared more vulnerable than once believed. Moscow has been pressing and provoking in the Pribaltika for years​—​some subversion here, some denial of history there. There have been maliciously random trade bans (Lithuanian cheese, Latvian sprats, and quite a bit more besides) and carefully planned cyberattacks. But the bullying has been stepped up sharply this year. The saber-rattling has evolved from menacing “training exercises,” such as last year’s Zapad-13 (70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops war-gaming their way through a fight against “Baltic terrorists”), to include too many flights by Russian fighters near or even in Baltic airspace to be anything other than part of a significantly more aggressive strategy.

On September 3, Barack Obama traveled to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to reaffirm NATO’s commitment to the three Baltic states, all of which have been members of the alliance since 2004. Two days later Eston Kohver, an Estonian intelligence officer investigating smuggling across Estonia’s remote and poorly defended southeastern frontier, was, claims Tallinn, grabbed by a group of gunmen and dragged across the border into Russia. His support team at the Luhamaa frontier post nearby were distracted and disoriented by flash grenades and their communications were jammed: They were in no position to help.

Shortly afterwards, Kohver turned up in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. According to Russia’s rather different version of events, the Estonian was captured while on a mission on the Russian side of the border. Kohver faces espionage charges that could mean decades behind bars. He has “decided” to drop the lawyer that the Estonian government had arranged for him. Court-appointed lawyers will fill the gap. The stage is being set for a show trial, complete, I would imagine, with confession.

After a year of Russian lies over Ukraine, I’m inclined to believe democratic Estonia over Putin’s Russia. The timing was just too good. Barack Obama descends on Tallinn with fine words and a welcome promise of increased support, and Russia promptly trumps that with a move clearly designed to demonstrate who really rules the Baltic roost. In the immediate aftermath of Kohver’s kidnapping the Estonians signaled that they were prepared to treat the whole incident as an unfortunate misunderstanding. No deal. The power play stands, made all the more pointed by the way that it breaks the conventions of Spy vs. Spy, a breach that comes with the implication that Estonia is not enough of a country to merit such courtesies.

If anything could make this outrage worse, it is the historical resonances that come with it. There are the obvious ones, the memories of half a century of brutal Soviet occupation, the slaughter, the deportations, the Gulag, and all the rest. But there are also the echoes of a prelude to that: the kidnapping of a number of Estonians in the border region by the Soviets in the days of the country’s interwar independence, intelligence-gathering operations of the crudest type. These days Russia prefers more sophisticated techniques: Earlier this year, it polled people in largely Russian-speaking eastern Latvia for their views of a potential Crimean-type operation there (as it happens, they weren’t too keen).

But whatever the (pretended) ambiguities of the Kohver case, there were none about what came next. Moscow reopened decades-old criminal cases against Lithuanians who acted on their government’s instructions and declined to serve in the Red Army after Lithuania’s unilateral declaration of independence in March 1990. That government may not have won international recognition at that time, but recognition​—​including from Moscow​—​followed within 18 months. To attempt to overturn now what it approved in the interim comes very close to questioning the legitimacy of Lithuanian independence today.

This could turn out to be more than merely symbolic harassment. The Lithuanian government has advised any of its citizens theoretically at risk of Russian prosecution on these grounds not to travel beyond EU or NATO countries. That’s not as paranoid as it sounds​—​Russia has been known to abuse Interpol’s procedures in ways that can make for trying times at the airport for those it regards as its opponents.

As if that was not enough, injury has since been added to insult: A week or so later, Russia detained a Lithuanian fishing boat in waters that are international but within Russia’s exclusive economic zone. Lithuania acknowledges that’s where the vessel was, but argues that it had every right to be there. Russia maintained that the boat had been illegally fishing for crab, and took it back to Murmansk. Such disputes blow up from time to time, but once again the timing is, well .  .  .

And of course these actions are unfolding against a background not only of Russian aggression in Ukraine, but heightened verbal violence against the Baltics. We can be confident that when (as it seems he did) Putin boasted to Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, last month that Russian troops could be in the Baltic capitals (and, for good measure, Kiev, Bucharest, and Warsaw) “within two days,” he did so safe in the knowledge that his threatening braggadocio would be passed on.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian foreign ministry’s Special Representative for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (yes, really), obviously didn’t want to rely on third parties to get the message out: He went straight to Riga to deliver the message that Russia “would not tolerate the creeping offensive against the Russian language that we are seeing in the Baltics.” He pledged Russia’s “most serious” support to its purportedly embattled “compatriots.” No matter that they are, in reality, considerably freer (and generally better off) than Russians in Russia itself.

To be sure, Balts have heard this sort of talk before, but it’s hard not to suspect that this time something wicked might be on its way. A direct assault remains highly unlikely. This is not 1940. But the probing, the baiting, and the bullying will intensify, and so will efforts to foment trouble among the large Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia. The October 4 election in Latvia passed peacefully, but the fact that “Russian” parties took about a quarter of the vote nationally (out of an electorate that excludes 300,000 mainly Russian “noncitizens”) and over 40 percent in Latgale in eastern Latvia will not, to put it mildly, have been overlooked in Moscow.

As to what Putin might want out of the Baltics in the end, it’s hard to say. If he succeeds in proving that NATO’s shield is nothing more than bluff (with all the consequences elsewhere that such an unmasking would bring in its wake), leaving Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia with nominal independence​—​flags, folk dancing, presidents, elections, and all that​—​would probably be acceptable so long as real power resided in Moscow. Continued Baltic membership in the EU might still be possible, even desirable: A Trojan horse or three within the EU could come in handy one day. Guesses too far? Maybe, but what we know is that Putin will try to take what he thinks he can get away with.

That’s why deterrence counts. Both Latvia and Lithuania have committed to increase defense spending from current (meager) levels to the NATO minimum target of 2 percent of GDP, a target that Estonia has met for a while. Latvia recently bought 123 secondhand armored combat vehicles from the United Kingdom. Estonia has announced that it will improve the demarcation of the border with Russia and will reinforce its border guard with special response teams. Recruitment is running at much higher levels for volunteer home defense units such as Estonia’s Kaitseliit and the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. Again, this is not 1940: This time the Baltics would fight.

That’s all well and good, but it’s important to remember that the Estonian military can boast fewer than 4,000 regulars. Latvia may be getting those combat vehicles, but it only has three tanks. In the end, the security of the Baltic states depends on their membership in NATO and the guarantee that comes with it: An attack on one NATO member, be it France or be it Estonia, is treated as an attack on all. In recent months, NATO has sent a blunt message​—​from tough declarations to an increased and increasing presence in the region​—​that this would indeed be the case, but Moscow’s continued pressure indicates that it is not convinced.

Until it is, this dangerous game will continue.

Baltics on the Edge

National Review Online, September 4, 2014

Hermann Castle, Narva, Estonia (with Ivangorod Castle, Russia, in the background), March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford

Prisoners of geology, Icelanders make it their business to understand volcanoes. Prisoners of geography, the peoples of the Baltic States do the best they can to understand the unruly, dangerous, and enigmatic superpower next door.

So, when Janis Berzins of Latvia’s National Defense Academy published a report in April titled “Russia’s New-Generation Warfare in Ukraine,” it was worth paying attention. Since then, Russia’s actions in Ukraine have evolved beyond the deployment of “little green men” and other irregulars of nominally uncertain provenance into an old-fashioned invasion, plain, simple, and bloody, but the West still needs to focus on what Berzins had to say. His subtitle — “Implications for Latvian Defense Policy” — suggests why.

With Putin seemingly set, so far as opportunity will allow, on reconstituting the “Russian World” (Russkiy Mir) that fell apart with the Soviet Union, it’s easy to imagine that Latvia and Estonia might be somewhere on the target list. They are both former Soviet republics. For two centuries, they were part of the Russian Empire. Both have large, imperfectly assimilated Russian minorities, who, Putin reckons, belong within that Russian World, a status that entitles them — lucky “compatriots” — to his “protection.” Each has a major, almost 100 percent Russian-speaking city (Daugavpils, Latvia, and Narva, Estonia) temptingly close to the Russian border.

Both countries are in NATO, and thus theoretically covered by Article V of the NATO Treaty, which provides that all the alliance’s member states “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” But in an age in which war can proceed by half-denied incursions and bogus popular uprisings (“non-traditional combat,” in Berzins’s phrase), who is to say what an “armed attack” really is? Berzins asks what would happen if a “Crimea-like situation” were to erupt in Narva. After all, Russia would undoubtedly insist that this too was the exercise of a “democratic right of self-determination.” And that, Berzins clearly fears, would cloud the picture enough for some Western politicians to claim that Article V should not apply. If that sounds too cynical, recall the lengths that some of them went last month to avoid calling the Russian assault on Ukraine (a country without the benefit of an Article V guarantee) by its right name: invasion.

According to the (anti-Putin) Russian commentator Andrey Piontkovsky, Putin is well aware that many NATO countries would be reluctant to be drawn into conflict by Article V. And even if they did come to Estonia’s aid, “Putin [could] respond with a very limited nuclear strike and destroy for example two European capitals. Not London and not Paris, of course.” Were that to happen, Piontkovsky believes, Putin would calculate that “all progressive and even all reactionary American society” would shout “‘We do not want to die for f***ing Narva, Mr. President!’”

Far-fetched? Probably. Putin is a gambler, but he’s not reckless. That said, it is worth noting, as did Anne Applebaum in a recent article for the Washington Post, that “Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the Russian member of parliament and court jester who sometimes says things that those in power cannot — argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries . . . and show the West who really holds power in Europe.” Zhirinovsky is not, thankfully, in a position to shape policy, but he is occasionally used by those in the Kremlin to float ideas that they would like to see in circulation. As (notes Applebaum) Putin has put it, he “gets the party going.”

That this sort of talk is even out there will, as Putin knows, encourage a good number of NATO members to define Article V as narrowly as they can. Psychological pressure has always been a part of warfare, but it has an even larger role to play in Russia’s notion of a “New Generation” war. Within that, writes Berzins, “the main battle-space is the mind. . . . The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil[ian] population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country,” a strategy (essentially what once might have been called subversion, but taken to a whole new level) peculiarly suited to some of the more fragile countries that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. In this respect, Berzins’s account of the early months of the Russian onslaught in Ukraine makes depressing reading: “In just three weeks, and without a shot being fired, the morale of the Ukrainian military was broken [in the Crimea] and all of their 190 bases had surrendered.”

But Ukraine, I was repeatedly told during a visit to the Latvian capital, Riga, in June, was a failed state. Latvia is not. Nor is Estonia. Both have made remarkable strides since winning back their freedom from the USSR. They are members of the EU as well as NATO. Their economies have grown fast (if not smoothly), delivering a standard of living far better than that of their Russian neighbor. That is not the case in Ukraine. At their core, Latvia and Estonia have a powerful sense of national identity. Memories of their independent inter-war republics and the nearly half a century of brutal Soviet occupation that followed still sear. In 1940 they were annexed by Moscow without a fight. That would not happen again.

Nevertheless, their political structures are not yet as developed as they could be, and their economies are far from robust. There is a lot of Russian money floating around, particularly in Latvia, and their Russian-speaking populations (30 percent or so of the population in Latvia and approximately 25 percent in Estonia) are not only a cause for Putin, but a potential source of instability that the Kremlin is continually trying to exploit. This should not be overestimated: Most Latvian and Estonian Russians feel at least a degree of loyalty to those countries, and the approval that some of them show for Russian adventurism abroad (in the Crimea, for example) does not necessarily mean that they want Russian troops showing up at their front door.

Looking specifically at Latvia, Berzins cites instances of the early phases of New Generation warfare, including “supporting pseudo human-rights organizations, backing the organization of a referendum for Russian to be the second official language [it failed, but, tellingly, won a majority in Eastern Latvia], and surveying the population of the eastern border to get intelligence on their inclination to support a [Crimean-style] scenario.” Plus, adds Berzins, “in a more subtle way, Russia has been successfully influencing internal politics through some of the political parties.” That may be a reference to, amongst others, Harmony Center, Latvia’s largest, a party that draws most of its support from the country’s Russians, and that has links to Putin’s United Russia party. Its leader is the mayor of Riga, a city in which the population divides roughly evenly between Russian-speakers and ethnic Latvians.

Then throw the Russian media into the mix. It’s no secret that Russian television has become a pathway to a world of nationalist delirium, a world where two plus two does indeed equal five, a “parallel reality,” in Berzins’s words, “legitimizing . . . Russian actions in the realm of ideas.” And this is the TV that most Baltic Russians watch most of the time (local Russian programming is thin gruel). Its poison may be diluted by the fact that these viewers live in the West, but still . . .

And then there is the constant saber-rattling at the border, the incursions into Latvian or Estonian airspace, military exercises such as, most notoriously, Zapad-2013 (“West 2013”), in which some 70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops massed near the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish borders to war-game a scenario in which “Baltic terrorists” were the villains, an exercise designed to demonstrate who was really boss in this part of the world.

But for now, the spying, the probing, the pressing, occasional trade embargoes, cyber-attacks, dirty tricks (check out the way that Interpol was abused in the 2013 mayoral elections in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, for one example), a gnawing at the foundations is “all” that there has been. Polling the inhabitants of the border region is as close as Russia has come to crossing the line that would herald the next phase of a New Generation war — the seizing, maybe, of a building or two in Narva or Daugavpils by a bogus “people’s republic” and the arrival of those “little green men” — a phase that, for now, seems mercifully far off.

Berzins has suggestions as to how Latvia might head off that moment. These include increased funding for economic development in the poorer regions, a boost to military spending (Latvia has since committed to hike its defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, the minimum NATO target that nonetheless hardly any member states hit), and the introduction of something like Swiss-style conscription. But perhaps the most important — and the most optimistic — revolves around securing the revision of Article V to reduce the dangerous ambiguity that New Generation warfare has opened up, an ambiguity that quite a few NATO members might well prefer to keep intact.

It’s an ambiguity that comes with terrible perils — not just for Latvia and Estonia (and, quite probably, Lithuania as well: the third of the Baltic trio has a far smaller Russian-speaking population, but cuts off the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad from Moscow-friendly Belarus), but for NATO too. Standing by our Baltic allies — three democracies that have emerged from Soviet darkness — is the right thing to do, but it is a matter of self-interest too. If Putin prevails over the Baltic countries despite their NATO membership, that would, argues Piontkovsky, “mean the end of NATO, and the end of the U.S. as a world power, and the complete political dominance of Putin’s Russia not only in the area of the Russian World but in the entire European continent.” That may be overstating it, but such a blow to the prestige of Article V would at least risk an unraveling of NATO, with all the nightmares that would come in its wake.

Ambiguity can tempt the aggressor into believing that he get can get away with his next coup at little cost. This can, in turn, lead to catastrophe. Hitler was unconvinced that the British and the French would truly stand by Poland in 1939. The ambiguity over the Baltic guarantee can never be eliminated, but it can be reduced. The symbolism of Obama’s speech in Tallinn this week — and the promise to send additional U.S. Air Force units and aircraft to the Baltics — will have done no harm. The increasing presence of NATO aircraft in Baltic airspace in recent months is a good move, as is the stepped-up pace of joint NATO exercises on Baltic territory. A NATO rapid-response force of several thousand troops, capable of deployment within 48 hours, is now being proposed. Its equipment and supplies would be based in the east. Permanent manned NATO bases would be better still. As Estonia’s President Ilves remarked earlier this week, maintaining a “two-tier” NATO, divided between those countries with permanent bases and those without, sends the “wrong signal” to a “potential aggressor.” We can’t be sure that even bases would be enough to do the trick, but the more the West does now, the less likely it is that Americans will ever be asked whether they are prepared to die for Narva.

A Soviet Brigadoon

National Review Online, January 8, 2013

Sillamäe Town Hall, Estonia, August 2012 © Andrew Stuttaford

It’s not easy to surprise Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s sharp and savvy president, but I reckon I succeeded. In September, I was in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to interview him for National Review. In the small talk before we turned to the euro, economic recovery, Russia, the usual, he asked me where else I had been on this visit to his country. “Sillamäe,” I replied. The presidential eyebrows rose, just a bit. Maybe there was a word thrown in too, an “interesting,” something like that.

The author of the Lonely Planet’s 1994 guide to the Baltic States and Kaliningrad would have been blunter. After explaining that Sillamäe had been “built after WW II to support a military nuclear-chemicals plant,” an over-simplification that will do for now, he went on to tempt the tougher end of the tourist trade with this: “according to press reports, the plant’s waste dump contains several tons of radioactive and highly toxic wastes, surrounded only by an earth wall 10 meters wide and is already contaminating ground water and the Baltic Sea.”

It was worse than that. The waste dump, euphemistically a waste depository, was a large lagoon, a Leninist lake, toxic and vile, described by the man responsible for cleaning it up as a “uranium pond” hosting some twelve million tons of a sludge containing “uranium, heavy metals, acids and other chemicals.” A testament to Soviet environmental sensitivity, it was open to the air, set on far-from-ideal clay, encircled by a poorly constructed wall, and located just a few yards from the sea. It leaked, and the overspill after heavy rainfall added to the mess. In 1993 the International Atomic Energy Agency labeled the site a serious radioactive risk. Four years earlier the New Scientist had reported that many of Sillamäe’s children were losing their hair. The clean-up was finally completed in 2008. I was told that what’s left of the waste is buried (with other safeguards) under a man-made hill that juts out onto the Baltic shore.

“Will that do the trick?”

“Hope so.”

Where the waste is (somewhere), Sillamäe, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

Other traces of Sillamäe’s strange history remain well above ground.

A three-hour trip to Tallinn’s east on a bus that will end up in St. Petersburg, this sleepy, gently-shrinking, largely Russian-speaking town of some 14,000 people is located at a point just a few miles from the Russian border — and at a moment poised somewhere between Estonia’s painful history and its infinitely more promising present. Before the war, there had been just a few houses here, and a Swedish-owned shale oil processing plant. When Estonia’s Soviet “liberators” returned in 1944, the local variety of oil shale (dictyonema argillite, in case you were wondering) interested them very much indeed. Among the minerals that lurked within it was uranium, something which Stalin had — up to then — found rather hard to obtain, but wanted very badly.

The old Swedish works had been destroyed during the war, but a new production unit — Kombinat no. 7, and a new town that was intended to support it — was built, much of it by the forced labor of convicts and POWs. The latter included many Balts caught up in the conflict between their homelands’ Nazi and Soviet invaders. More than half a century later, the facility’s new Estonian owners stripped away sheetrock in its administration building to reveal well-crafted brickwork. A section has been kept exposed as a memorial of sorts to those that worked — and died — here, often in appalling conditions. Just outside is a small Soviet-era monument to the Great Patriotic War, a war that Estonia was doomed to lose regardless of which of its totalitarian occupiers might prevail. History is a via dolorosa in this part of the world.

After the prisoners came yet more wreckage of war, those still remembered in Sillamäe as “the orphans.” As the plant — the USSR’s first fully operational uranium-processing facility — was completed, teenaged survivors of the siege of Leningrad were shipped in to be trained as additions to its workforce. Production started up, beginning with local material, but then switched to higher-grade ore shipped from all over Moscow’s empire. Some 100,000 tons of uranium were produced between 1946 and 1990 for both civilian and military use, a total exceeded in only two other sites in the whole Soviet bloc.

The town grew, but behind a cordon of secrecy, denial, and security. It slipped off and on the map. Sometimes it had a name, sometimes a code. It was a closed town. Access was strictly restricted. It was years before Estonians were allowed to work there (and only a handful did thereafter). For a while, the town was administered, not as a part of Soviet Estonia, but as an exclave of Soviet Russia itself.

There was something else that set Sillamäe apart. Narva, a larger city nearby, and once a jewel of the Northern Baroque, was brutally and slovenly rebuilt after the war as a generic Soviet settlement with a population to match. To be sure, there’s some of that in Sillamäe, but this was a town with a very special purpose. Those who controlled it understood that it would work better if its inhabitants — who included some highly qualified technical staff — were treated better than the Soviet norm. Sillamäe’s center is, I’ll say it, nice, a beautifully preserved showpiece for a Stalinist architecture that is, for once, neither botched, nor slum, nor Mordor. But in feel and former function, if not in appearance, it is also faintly reminiscent of the unsettling picturesque of the Village that housed The Prisoner’s Number Six.

Sillamäe , Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

This creates a vague sense of unease only underlined by the extent to which the past still lingers on here. This must be one of the few places in Estonia where the symbols of the old regime, the hammers, the sickles, the stars, can still be seen in public, discreetly incorporated into the pale, pastel facades of the buildings of downtown. That they are still in place speaks volumes about the attitude of the locals, and, rather more reassuringly, about the self-confidence of the re-born Estonian Republic, and the relative sensitivity with which it handles the ethnic Russian minority (reduced now to perhaps 25 percent of the country’s population) that remains the most troubling relic of Moscow’s colonial rule.

2 Mere Puiestee, Sillamäe Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

 
The predominant architectural style at the town’s heart is what came to be known as “retrospectivist” (yes, really), backward-looking, fortified by the reassurance of a past that predated the storms of the 20th century. Many of the buildings play with neoclassical themes. Beyond that there are stately white staircases with a touch of old Odessa about them, a neatly laid-out park, a curious statue of a man lifting, I think, a symbolic atom, a lovely tree-lined avenue, a dignified cultural center, and a fine cinema by the name of Rodina. That’s Russian for “motherland,” but whether that referred to the shared Soviet home or Mother Russia herself was never quite clear. Neither interpretation was likely to appeal to Estonians, but Estonia is a tolerant sort of place and the cinema, along with the cultural center, has enjoyed protected status for over a decade. Across the street stands the town hall, inspired by the design of a traditional Estonian Lutheran church, something that the Soviets must have thought was innocuous enough to be the subject of pastiche. The same, presumably, could be said of the nods to traditional Estonian manor houses that can be seen elsewhere in town.

Mere Puiestee,Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

Uranium production in Sillamäe was abandoned in 1990. Soviet rule in Estonia collapsed the next year, and Sillamäe rejoined the world. The facility, renamed Silmet, was privatized, sold, resold, and sold again. Since 2011, by which time Silmet had become one of only two centers in Europe for the processing of rare earths (elements that are crucial for a wide range of electronics), it has been owned by the U.S. mining group, Molycorp.

Atom monument, Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

But Sillamäe itself, adrift from time and place, a Soviet Brigadoon but forever in full view, endures. There’s a tucked-away town museum (judging by the friendly, but astonished, welcome I received from the three or four ladies who preside there, I was the first visitor for weeks). Apart from some atrocious local art and a collection of dolls that looks as if it has been curated by a serial killer, it boasts a couple of rooms that give a bric-a-brac impression of everyday life during Sillamäe’s Soviet past.

Town Museum, Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012 © Andrew Stuttaford

Then again, wandering around town will do pretty much the same thing (if you ignore the well-stocked shops). Ethnic Russians continue to make up the overwhelming majority of the town’s population. Dreaming, perhaps, of the lost certainties of Brezhnev’s day, babushkas still wander down Mere Avenue as it sweeps grandly down to the Baltic. Lenin Avenue has gone, but there are streets named after Russian literary figures and the first cosmonaut too. Up by the bus station, there’s an imposing Soviet war memorial with flowers at its base.

Soviet war memorial, Sillamäe, Estonia, August 2012, © Andrew Stuttaford

But, despite pot-stirring by the Kremlin, and the occasional eruption (most notoriously over the removal to a less prominent place of another Soviet memorial — this time in Tallinn), time, the passing of the older generation, Estonia’s remarkable economic performance, and access to the rest of the EU have all brought a measure of live-and-let-live to relations between the country’s two principal ethnic groups. Unlike in Latvia, where the demographics are even more delicately balanced, there is no specifically “Russian” party represented in the Estonian Parliament, and once-noisy calls for the autonomy of the still hardscrabble Russian-speaking Northeast have died down. Both in Sillamäe and in Tallinn I was assured that younger Russians are at last learning Estonian (even if, understandably enough, their Estonian peers are reluctant to learn Russian, the language of their country’s former oppressor), something that may even give them something of an employment edge in a country that is in practice, if not in law, bilingual.

When it comes to this topic, David O’Brock, the engaging Ohio native (and long-time resident of Estonia) who runs Molycorp Silmet, is cautiously upbeat about what lies ahead. Almost all the workers at his factory are ethnic Russians and many, even the middle-aged and older, are studying Estonian, or other languages that could be of use in a world that now extends far beyond Moscow’s reach.

A once-closed town is opening up. And in more ways than one.