Tag Archives: Boris Yeltsin

Tartu University and the Anti-Russian Memory Project

Monuments are never about the past. They are about how we think about history and culture at the time the monument is erected. Monuments are part of national memory projects whose primary purpose is to shape the present and the future. As attitudes change, monuments themselves can become focal points of political debate. We often instrumentalize monuments to help construct a version of history that is compatible with national identity, as I argued in my piece about the Pizarro monument in Lima, Peru. A recent visit to the campus of Tartu University confirmed this vividly.

I participated in a conference that took place in Tallinn and Tartu, the two largest cities in Estonia. Putin’s aggression against Ukraine was a daily topic of conversation, and the fear that Putin may turn his attention to the Baltic states was expressed frequently. During the Tartu portion of the conference, international participants were invited on a walking tour of Tartu University, led by a Tartu professor who had studied in Tartu during the Soviet period and a younger lecturer at Tallinn University who also was a Tartu alumn. We spent a lot of time at the monument of Swedish King Gustav II Adolf (a.k.a Gustavus Adolphus). It is that monument and the history behind it that gives a snapshot of the history of Estonia over the past 400 years.

The University of Tartu was founded by King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden in 1632, the same year the King died in the Battle of Lützen. Estonia was a Swedish territory then, and Tartu became only the second Swedish university–after Uppsala. Russia gained control over Estonia during the Great Northern War in 1710–and promptly closed the university. The university was reopened in 1802 as the Universität Dorpat by the German-Baltic elites as a German-speaking university; its new charter was confirmed by Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1802. As a result of the Russification campaign in the 1880s, Russian displaced German as language of instruction. Most of the German faculty left, and the university lost its international reputation.

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Main building of the University of Tartu, constructed in a neo-classical style in 1804-09.

In 1919, after Estonian independence, the University of Tartu became an Estonian-speaking institution and the national university of a newly independent Estonia. In 1928, the above-mentioned monument to Gustav II Adolf, the founding patron, was erected to mark the pre-Russian origin of the university, to signal Estonia’s Northern European identity, and to symbolically reestablish the university’s link to European intellectual traditions. But Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941-44. At the end of the war, the Soviets introduced Russian as a second language of instruction. And in 1950, they dismantled the monument to Gustav II Adolf.

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Monument to King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden in Tartu (1928).

In the Soviet revisionist reading of history, the university was founded by Russians in 1802–even though the Russians had closed the University a century before that. The monument to the Swedish king who had founded the university contradicted this narrative, and his memory had to be erased. Sometime in the 1960s, according to our guides, students built a snowman that resembled the statue. This triggered an intervention by the KGB, the Soviet secret service, because the snowman referred to the missing monument, which in turn had revived the memory of a time before Russian rule. In the mind of the paranoid Soviet system, this was the very definition of a subversive act. In 1992, one year after Estonia regained independence, the monument was restored as a symbolic reminder that Estonia had rejoined the community of European nations.

Our tour guides then led us into the main auditorium, the Aula. While there is no formal monument here, the Aula clearly has become the locus of an important national memory. In 1964, the Aula at Tartu University was the site of the memorable speech by Urho Kekkonen, the long-time president of Finland, during an unofficial visit of Soviet Estonia. Like Estonia, Finland had been part of Tsarist Russia and was able to free itself at the end of the First World War. But unlike Estonia, Finland was able to maintain its independence during and after the Second World War. As Finnish and Estonian are both part of the Finno-Ugric language group, the two cultures grew closer in the waning years of Tsarist Russia. After 1945, Finland became a model and the window to the West for Soviet Estonia as Finnish TV could be received in the northern half of Estonia. Kekkonen’s speech was entirely in Estonian, and he focused on the kinship of the two nations which gave Estonians hope for a brighter Post-Soviet future.

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Aula (Main Auditorium) at Tartu University.

Even though the Tartu professor started his studies at Tartu a decade after the speech, he described it so vividly and glowingly as if he had been there, including the fact that Kekkonen spoke better Estonian than the rector of the university. This is the nature of vicarious memories: they are transmitted with a great personal and emotional commitment from generation to generation as they hold a symbolic truth that needs to be enshrined in the national memory. Yet, the only tangible impact of Kekkonen’s speech was the establishment of a ferry link between Tallinn and Helsinki in 1965. While the Kekkonen visit was a reminder to this small country that the outside world had not completely forgotten it, some make the argument that it was akin to the recognition of the Soviet occupation.

There is little that reminds the casual visitor to Tartu of the the Soviet period. The entire country is seeking to reconnect with its European past, and the preservation of its pre-Russian cultural legacy has become a national project. The preservation of monuments is a key part of this strategy. The Tartu campus is full of such memory sites. In addition to the Aula and the monument to Gustav II Adolf, they also include monuments to German-Baltic professors at Tartu, such as the statue of Karl Ernst von Baer (1886), and the historically important fraternity house of the Estonian Student Union which was founded in 1870 and whose colors are now the colors of the Estonian flag. Since independence, new memorial sites have been created, such as the monument to the Swedish politician and legal scholar Johan Skytte (2007) who served as the founding chancellor of Tartu University in 1632.

Yet, in the minds of Estonians, the Soviet legacy is omnipresent. The anti-Russian rhetoric permeated the entire tour of the Tartu campus and indeed all conversations with local professors and students. In part, this speaks to the fear of a potential aggression by Putin’s Russia. But in part, this also an indicator of a project to create a national memory and narrative that tries to marginalize the Russian and even more so the Soviet role in Estonian history. Perhaps the sole exception to that is the Tallinn plaque in the memory of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin (2013)–he recognized Estonian independence in 1991.

Estonia’s Russian Legacy and Putin’s Greater Russia

When British defense secretary Michael Fallon publicly stated last week that the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were at high risk to be drawn into armed conflict by Vladimir Putin, much like Ukraine had been over the past year, and that NATO had to prepare for Russian aggression, the media in the West took note. But to people in the Baltic region, this was old news, as I experienced first-hand during a visit last Fall when I had a number of discussions on the topic with colleagues at the universities of Tartu and Tallinn. They confirmed that the Russian covert campaign Fallon warned against in fact had already begun.

Estonia is a classic case of a small country that has been tossed around by history. Estonia was dominated by foreign powers for most of the last millennium: Danes, Germans, Swedes, and Russians, both of the Tsarist (1710-1918) and Soviet flavors (1940-41; 1944-91). In spite of that, Estonia has been able to maintain a cultural and linguistic identity over the centuries which forms the core of its national identity today. To Estonians, the Russian legacy weighs particularly heavily as Tsarist Russia began to russianize Estonia in the late 19th century, the construction of the highly visible Russian-Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral occupying the symbolic spot across from the Toompea Castle being the pinnacle of that effort.

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Russian-Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (1894-1900) on the symbolic Toompea Hill in Tallinn, Estonia.

Estonia was traumatized in particular by the Soviet occupation of 1940 and its subsequent integration into the Soviet Union. While foreign control over the centuries, even by Tsarist Russia, had been comparatively benign, Soviet rule was ruthless and oppressive. The Estonian response after independence in 1991 was a strong anti-Russian backlash and assertive policies to pursue integration into the Western economic and military systems by seeking membership in Nato and the European Union and by joining the Eurozone. The only Russian celebrated in Estonia today seems to be Boris Yeltsin whose supportive role in Estonia’s quest for independence in 1991 was recognized by a plaque in his memory in 2013–which has a distinct anti-Putin edge. The plaque was affixed to the bottom of the massive wall that fortifies Toompea Hill–which since the Middle Ages had been the locus of foreign power.

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Plaque in memory of Boris Yeltsin in Tallinn, placed on the historic city wall in 2013.

But the most obvious legacy of almost 50 years of Soviet rule is a large ethnic Russian population. The Soviet Union used massive forced migration to pursue its goals. According to the Estonian government, the Soviets killed or deported about 60,000 Estonians, or more than five percent of Estonia’s population, between 1940 and 1949. At the same time, a large number of Russians relocated to Estonia, both voluntarily and forcibly. While in 1934, 88.1% of residents of Estonia were ethnic Estonians, their share had dwindled to 61.5% in 1989.

Estonian independence turned the privileged Russian population into losers. Restrictive citizenship laws which are based on the ius sanguinis, disenfranchised many Russians living in Estonia: ethnic Russians, even those born in Estonia, were not automatically given Estonian citizenship but rather had to undergo a naturalization process that required knowledge of the Estonian Language. This turned out to be an insurmountable burden for many Russians. As a result, there were many stateless people in Estonia whom Estonia euphemistically calls “people with undetermined citizenship.” Ironically, it is the European Union which, through its European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, pressured Estonia to improve the plight of the Russian population in Estonia. According to the Estonian government, the situation has vastly improved: while in 1992, 32% of residents of Estonia were stateless, in 2014 only 6.5% were, with another 9.2% holding foreign passports, mostly from other former Soviet republics.

While the issue of “people with undetermined citizenship” appears close to resolution, the integration of ethnic Russians remains a critical issue. An estimated 24% of the resident population are ethnic Russians, and they mostly represent the underprivileged classes in Estonian society. The concentration of Russians is particularly high in urban areas: in Tallinn, the capital, perhaps half the population is Russian, and in the Narva region along the Russian border almost the entire population is Russian–which creates an opportunity for Putin to unfold a similar scenario as in Eastern Ukraine.

This constellation will give Putin ample talking points to repeat what he is currently doing in Ukraine (and what he had done in Georgia before), particularly as Estonia has not dealt with the Russian minority in an exemplary fashion. The pattern is as simple as it is predictable: creating border incidents, developing a rhetoric of assisting beleaguered ethnic Russians in a former Soviet republic, infiltrating the border area with Russian special units in disguise to stir unrest, creating a phony and fabricated resistance and separatist movement, gradually occupying territories and integrating them into his Greater Russia.

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Tallinn presents itself as a Northern European city: there are few traces of the Russian past.

One of the legacies left to us by Soviet Communism is the fiction of international brotherhood which supersedes nationalistic divisions characteristic of capitalist societies. The implosion of Yugoslavia with all the resulting ethnic conflicts speaks to that. The Soviet policy of settling ethnic Russians in far-flung parts of the Soviet empire is another such legacy. It creates ethnic conflict in so many of the former Soviet republics, and even in areas that lie within the Russian Federation. The Baltic states today very much are afflicted by these Soviet settlement policies–and they create an opportunity for Putin to justify his Greater Russia rhetoric.

Conditions in Estonia are ripe for Putin’s strategy to unfold. In fact, stage one has already begun. Russia has been creating small border incidents with all Baltic states as well as with Finland, most commonly air space violations. The most egregious so far has been the capture and abduction of Eston Kohver, an officer of the Estonian Internal Security Service, from Estonian territory on September 5, 2014. Kohver still is in Russian custody at this writing.

Which gets us back to Mr. Fallon’s point. It appears likely that Putin will employ the same strategy in the Baltic states that worked so well in Georgia and Ukraine. In Georgia and Ukraine, Western powers could claim that their interests were not directly at stake. The difference is that the Baltic states are members of Nato, as is Poland, for that matter. We now know that managing Putin’s aggressions after the fact is futile. Yes, Nato promised not to station its troops on the former Soviet sphere of influence. But Russia also guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from Soviet times. It is now time for Nato to increase its commitment to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Baltic states, before Putin has a chance to unfold his time-tested strategy on them.

Postscript added on March 2, 2015: The looming conflict with Russia also overshadowed yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Estonia. In the media, the outcome was represented as a victory for the governing Reform Party. But their coalition with the Social Democrats actually lost the majority in parliament as support for both parties declined slightly. One of the factors is that two new parties will be represented in parliament. Most importantly, the pro-Russia Center Party gained some votes and now enjoys support from 24.8% of the electorate (24% of residents of Estonia are ethnic Russians) and will continue be the second-largest party. It is likely that the Center Party will remain the main opposition party. The concern is that Putin will be able to use both the large number of ethnic Russians and the political support they have within Estonia as a wedge issue.