Behind the Iron Curtain: Soviet Estonia in the Era of the Cold War [New ed.] 363166849X, 9783631668498

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5

Tõnu Tannberg (ed.)

During the Cold War, Estonia lay behind the Iron Curtain. Even in the grip of Soviet rule, the country underwent many important developments. This volume brings together fourteen papers on the political, economic, and cultural history of Estonia during the Cold War. Their topics range from international relations and the border regime to tourism and the media. The papers are based on extensive archival research and make use of many previously unexamined documents. The resulting book offers new insights into the history of Estonia and of the Cold War on a local level.

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THS 05_Tannberg 266849_HOF_A5HCk PLE.indd 1

Volume 5

TARTU HISTORICAL STUDIES

Soviet Estonia in the Era of the Cold War

Tõnu Tannberg (ed.) · Behind the Iron Curtain

Tõnu Tannberg is Professor of Estonian Contemporary History at the University of Tartu and Research Director at the National Archives of Estonia.

Behind the Iron Curtain

ISBN 978-3-631-66849-8

17.09.15 KW 38 10:38

5

Tõnu Tannberg (ed.)

During the Cold War, Estonia lay behind the Iron Curtain. Even in the grip of Soviet rule, the country underwent many important developments. This volume brings together fourteen papers on the political, economic, and cultural history of Estonia during the Cold War. Their topics range from international relations and the border regime to tourism and the media. The papers are based on extensive archival research and make use of many previously unexamined documents. The resulting book offers new insights into the history of Estonia and of the Cold War on a local level.

Volume 5

TARTU HISTORICAL STUDIES

Soviet Estonia in the Era of the Cold War

Tõnu Tannberg (ed.) · Behind the Iron Curtain

Tõnu Tannberg is Professor of Estonian Contemporary History at the University of Tartu and Research Director at the National Archives of Estonia.

Behind the Iron Curtain

www.peterlang.com

THS 05_Tannberg 266849_HOF_A5HCk PLE.indd 1

17.09.15 KW 38 10:38

Behind the Iron Curtain

TARTU HISTORICAL STUDIES Edited by Eero Medijainen and Olaf Mertelsmann

VOLUME 5

Zu Qualitätssicherung und Peer Review der vorliegenden Publikation Die Qualität der in dieser Reihe erscheinenden Arbeiten wird vor der Publikation durch beide Herausgeber der Reihe geprüft.

Notes on the quality assurance and peer review of this publication Prior to publication, the quality of the work published in this series is reviewed by both editors of the series.

Tõnu Tannberg (ed.)

Behind the Iron Curtain Soviet Estonia in the Era of the Cold War

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Behind the Iron Curtain : Soviet Estonia in the era of the Cold War / Tõnu Tannberg (ed.). pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-631-66849-8 (print) -- ISBN 978-3-653-06082-9 (e-book) 1. Estonia--History--1940-1991. 2. Cold War. 3. Estonia--Politics and government-1940-1991. 4. Estonia--Social conditions--20th century. 5. Social change-Estonia--History--20th century. 6. Soviet Union--Foreign relations--Estonia. 7. Estonia--Foreign relations--Soviet Union. I. Tannberg, Tõnu. DK503.75.B44 2015 947.9808'5--dc23 2015035542 Cover Design: © Olaf Gloeckler, Atelier Platen, Friedberg ISSN 2191-0480 ISBN 978-3-631-66849-8 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-06082-9 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/ 978-3-653-06082-9 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2015 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This book is part of the Peter Lang Edition list and was peer reviewed prior to publication. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents Tõnu Tannberg Foreword.........................................................................................................................7 Tõnu Tannberg The First Diplomats of Soviet Estonia on the Eve of the Cold War: The Creation of the Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in 1944����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������15 Kaarel Piirimäe National Self-Determination, Modernization, and the Estonian-Soviet Propaganda Contest in the Early Cold War Era......................................................35 Olev Liivik The ESSR Council of Ministers: An Ethnicity-Based Organ of Power for the Union Republic’s International Administration?...........................53 Meelis Saueauk The “Estonian Affair” in the Context of Late-Stalinist Party Purges....................87 Olaf Mertelsmann The Economic Impact of the Early Cold War on the Estonian SSR.................. 119 Meelis Maripuu Cold War Show Trials in Estonia: Justice and Propaganda in the Balance....... 139 Karin Veski and Anu Raudsepp Images of the Enemy and the Hero in Stalinist Estonian-Language Textbooks................................................................................ 197 Ivo Juurvee KGB and Stasi Traces in Historiography: A Case Study of the Literature on the Estonian Prewar Military Intelligence Service....................... 219 Tiiu Kreegipuu The Press in Soviet Estonia: A Tool of a Closed Society..................................... 249

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Table of Contents

Vahur Made Cold War-Era Germany and Eastern Europe in the Reports by Karl Selter, Ludvig Jakobsen, and Elmar Reisenberg to the Estonian Consulate General in New York............................................................. 277 Oliver Pagel Finnish Foreign Tourism in the Estonian SSR during the Cold War, 1955–1980........................................................................... 295 Marek Miil The Communist Party’s Fight against “Bourgeois Television” 1968–1988......................................................................... 317 Atko Remmel (Anti)-Religious Aspects of the Cold War: Soviet Religious Policy as Applied in the Estonian SSR...................................... 359 Indrek Paavle Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR................. 393 List of Contributors.................................................................................................. 431

Tõnu Tannberg

Foreword Upon emerging victoriously from World War II in 1945, the Soviet Union quickly established itself in Eastern Europe and subjected the regimes in that region to its almost complete control. Wartime cooperation with the Western countries disintegrated, and in its place, a new confrontation between the world’s superpowers developed—the Cold War. The Western powers were unable to contain Moscow’s program for expansion, and thus this confrontation persisted until the end of the 1980s, significantly affecting worldwide developments. The Soviet Union and its satellites, along with the Baltic countries that were once again occupied in 1944, were sealed off behind the “Iron Curtain.” Cut off from the Western world, Estonia was subjected to the extensive Sovietization of community life and the muzzling of intellectual and spiritual life, the suppression of resistance, the implementation of repressions and the introduction of a Soviet-style command economy in the postwar years. The “thaw” following the death of Stalin brought a partial easing of the regime (a modification of the policy of violence and other such measures), economic progress, more active relations with the Western world, an increase in the standard of living, and improvement in people’s living conditions. Yet this did not mean that the Soviet Union was prepared to relax control over its spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, as the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising (1956) and the Prague Spring (1968) corroborated. In the mid-1950s, it was understood in Estonia as well that the “white ship of salvation” that Estonians awaited, meaning hopes for liberation from Soviet rule, would not come and that the Soviet regime was becoming entrenched for a long time to come. This in turn perpetuated a split among Estonians: Estonians who had escaped to the West during the war could not return to their homeland, and thus after the war, the energetic expatriate Estonian community became the bearer of the continuity of the independent Republic of Estonia. The continuation of the annexation paved the way for adaptation to the regime yet did not mean its uncritical acceptance. This was verified by the mass movement for liberation that gathered momentum in the late 1980s and culminated in the restoration of independent statehood in 1991. Thus ended the half-century-long political, economic, and cultural isolation of Estonia from the Western world.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the transformation of the former bipolar world into a unipolar world removed the confrontation of the superpowers from the stage of history. The phenomenon of the Cold War became history, the research of which, however, has expanded exponentially since 1991. In fact, we can even speak of a boom in the research of the Cold War—referred to as the “new” history of the Cold War. However, research work conducted on the Cold War to this point has focused almost entirely on analyzing the actions of the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. It is only in recent years that major attention has been directed at the Cold War’s regional scale. The establishment of Moscow’s hegemony and its later functioning in the Eastern Bloc satellites and the Baltic countries reoccupied at the end of World War II was a complex, multifaceted, and at times even contradictory process that has not yet been studied sufficiently in the context of the Cold War.1 In order to advance research on this topic, the University of Tartu Institute of History and Archaeology initiated research in 2009 on the separately financed topic “Estonia during the Cold War Era,” the objective of which was to apply contemporary academic standards, relying primarily on previously unused archival material, in examining the different aspects of the Estonian SSR’s political, economic, and cultural development and its contacts with the rest of the world on the other side of the “Iron Curtain” within the framework of the confrontation between the superpowers. This book has also been published within the framework of this separately financed topic, bringing 14 articles together in one volume and examining various aspects of the history of Soviet Estonia on the background of the Cold War. The outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Germany in the summer of 1941 laid the foundation for an alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western countries against a common enemy—Nazi Germany. Yet alongside cooperation, both sides started thinking ahead quite early about the organization of the postwar world, for which the founding of a new international organization was envisioned. Naturally, both the Soviet Union and the Western countries were interested in ensuring that their word in particular would carry weight in the postwar world. In this situation, Moscow launched a rather unexpected initiative. In early 1944, it passed legislation prescribing the creation of people’s commissariats for foreign affairs in the USSR’s republics, changing the constitution in the process and 1 Important collected works of recent years include: John Hiden, Vahur Made and David J. Smith (eds.), The Baltic Question during the Cold War (Oxon-New York, 2008); Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), Central and Eastern European Media under Dictatorial Rule and in the Early Cold War (Frankfurt, 2011); Olaf Mertelsmann and Kaarel Piirimäe (eds.), The Baltic Sea Region and the Cold War (Frankfurt, 2012).

Foreword

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delegating issues of defense and foreign policy to the Soviet republics. This was primarily motivated by Moscow’s wish to squeeze all of its Soviet republics into the planned international organization (later named the United Nations) in order to seize control of it. Tõnu Tannberg’s article “The First Diplomats of Soviet Estonia on the Eve of the Cold War: The Creation of the Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in 1944” describes the creation of these people’s commissariats in the Union republics and Moscow’s plans, based on the creation of the Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and in a broader international context. Moscow did not get its wish, due to the opposition of the Western countries. Yet as a founding member of the United Nations, the Soviet Union gained veto power and thus no longer needed all its Soviet republics to have UN membership (the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs were nevertheless included as members of the UN alongside the Soviet Union). Since the Soviet Union had gotten its way in the form of its right of veto, Moscow no longer had any need to provide the people’s commissariats for foreign affairs in its republics with actual “content.” This meant that relevant communication with foreign representatives on foreign policy was not delegated to the Soviet republics. The people’s commissariats for foreign affairs in the Union republics (ministries from 1946 onward) remained in operation, and they were used in the arena of the Cold War, where the Baltic question also started playing an important role. Dealing primarily with the expatriate question and producing propaganda became the primary tasks of the Estonian SSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kaarel Piirimäe’s article in this collection, “National Self-Determination, Modernization, and the Estonian-Soviet Propaganda Contest in the Early Cold War Era,” is dedicated to the propaganda battle between expatriate Estonians and the Soviets in the postwar years. In carrying out Sovietization, Moscow emphasized staffing the Soviet republic’s organs of power with trustworthy officials loyal to the regime, or to use Soviet phraseology, cadres. The “question of cadres” was particularly topical for Moscow in territories captured in 1939–1940 and later reoccupied. Two articles in this collection examine this theme. Olev Liivik’s article “The ESSR Council of Ministers: A Nationality-Based Organ of Power for the Union Republic’s International Administration?” explores the ethnic composition of the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers (the Council of People’s Commissariats until 1946)—the government of the Soviet republic—in the 1940s and 1950s and the regional background and origin of its members. This study reveals that one of the central institutions of power in the Estonian Soviet republic was Estonian in terms of ethnic composition (the proportion of the native nationality was over 75 percent), where Estonians from the Soviet Union rose to the forefront starting in 1947. The blatant

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preferential treatment of Estonians from the Soviet Union was a cornerstone of the cadre policy of the central authorities in Moscow and at the same time a signal that there were no plans to “internationalize” the administration of the Union republic with non-Estonians. The promotion of functionaries with a Soviet background to leading positions in the Soviet republic helped to dislodge Estonians with a “bourgeois” background and exacerbated the power struggle in the Estonian SSR’s political elite, which culminated in the “Estonian Affair” and the replacement of the Union republic’s leadership in the 1950s. Meelis Saueauk’s article “The ‘Estonian Affair’ in the Context of Late-Stalinist Party Purges” explores Party purges that took place in the postwar years in the Estonian SSR in comparison to similar actions in the Soviet Union (the “Leningrad Affair”) and in Eastern Bloc satellites (including the “Kostov Affair” in Bulgaria and the “Rajk Affair” in Hungary) and highlights the differences as well as commonalities in how repressions were carried out. Because the Estonian SSR remained behind the “Iron Curtain,” it was denied a market economy. Instead, a Soviet-style controlled economy was introduced, leading to major changes in society, particularly in the postwar period, during the initial part of the Cold War. Olaf Mertelsmann’s article “The Economic Impact of the Early Cold War on the Estonian SSR” thoroughly dissects this theme. The author describes in detail how the Estonian SSR’s economy was affected by Sovietization, postwar reconstruction of the economy, and meeting the needs of the armament industry. He also analyzes the reorganizations carried out in the Union republic in the context of changes that took place in Europe. After Germany’s defeat, the international community could not overlook the question of punishing persons guilty of war crimes. Crimes had been committed during the war on a massive scale against both civilians and prisoners of war, especially on the Eastern Front between the Soviet Union and Germany. The victors jointly established an international military tribunal. Germany’s higher state officials and military leaders were tried at the Nuremberg Trials (and the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials), charged with starting World War II and committing war crimes. Fissures that developed between the Allies, and the development of the Cold War, politicized the trial of Nazi criminals, affecting their investigation and the prosecution of suspects throughout the world. Meelis Maripuu’s paper “Cold War Show Trials in Estonia: Justice and Propaganda in the Balance” demonstrates how Soviet judicial institutions and the trial of crimes internationally not subject to statutes of limitations as a whole were used to achieve the political aims of the Soviet regime. More specifically, this article considers show trials held in the occupied Baltic countries in the early 1960s, highlighting their

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general organizational scheme, domestic and foreign policy aims, propaganda media coverage, manipulation of witnesses, and discrediting of expatriate circles. Karin Veski and Anu Raudsepp continue to examine the theme of Cold War ideological confrontation using the Sovietization of the Estonian SSR’s educational system as an example in their article “Images of the Enemy and the Hero in Stalinist Estonian-Language Textbooks.” This article examines more precisely the occurrence of images used in Stalinist propaganda, that of the enemy and the hero, in postwar original Estonian-language textbooks in the late-Stalinist Estonian SSR. The authors argue that the images of the enemy and the hero evolved into obligatory elements in textbooks (they were considered most frequently in textbooks on Estonian language and literature). In place of the image of the internal enemy (kulaks, bourgeois nationalists, etc.), the image of the foreign enemy rose to the forefront in the postwar period—first fascism and then the image of the United States. Military heroes and heroes of labor were the most prominent Soviet heroes. Soviet patriotism also became a running theme in textbooks. The security organs (KGB) were very important as backing for the communist regime, carrying out varied tasks from carrying out repressions to shaping public opinion. The secret intelligence agency made its presence felt in all spheres of totalitarian society, including by trying to influence the treatment of the past in the regime’s favor through its propaganda literature. Ivo Juurvee’s article “KGB and Stasi Traces in Historiography: A Case Study of Literature on Estonian Prewar Military Intelligence Service” demonstrates how the propaganda publications by the Estonian SSR KGB operative Leonid Barkov (which did not cite their sources) were cited in the Soviet press in the 1960s to allege extremely close intelligence cooperation between the Republic of Estonia and Germany just before World War II. The article also shows how this allegation was disseminated internationally with the assistance of Julius Mader, an operative of the GDR intelligence service. Barkov’s “studies” were meant to counterbalance the memoirs and collections of articles published by expatriate Estonians; during the 1960s in particular, both the Estonian SSR KGB and East Germany published copious propaganda literature on the corresponding themes. Estonia was one of the most hotly contested arenas in the Cold-War-era propaganda war due to its location along the border and its cultural differentiation. The press had a distinct role to play in establishing ideological control in Soviet society. In addition to domestic propaganda (rearing the new Soviet man), the press was also used as a means of waging ideological struggle in the confrontation between the superpowers. Tiiu Kreegipuu’s paper “The Press in Soviet Estonia: A Tool of a Closed Society” is dedicated to dissecting these themes; the author

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reaches the noteworthy conclusion that, despite everything, the Soviet regime did not manage to gain complete control over the media. To a certain extent, the Soviet media system did indeed function as an effective propaganda weapon in the Cold War and as a means for rearing homo soveticus, yet at the same time, it contradicted Soviet ideology. In this way, the press played a role in undermining the regime, contributing to the evolution of various strategies for adaptation and double-thinking in society. One of the most important means of expression for the expatriate Estonian community was political action that relied on various expatriate organizations. The “foreign policy struggle,” whose main objective was to inform the public and politicians in the expatriates’ host countries about the situation in occupied Estonia and to influence public opinion in Western countries, was one part of this political action. Memoranda were drawn up in the name of these objectives and sent to influential politicians, makers of foreign policy, and international organizations of world powers. Regardless of differences of opinion between expatriate organizations and top leaders (the Consulate General of the Republic of Estonia located in New York did not recognize the Estonian government-in-exile formed in Sweden in 1954), the main result of their action was that most Western countries did not recognize the annexation of the Republic of Estonia by the Soviet Union de jure. Vahur Made’s article “Cold-War-Era Germany and Eastern Europe in the Reports by Karl Selter, Ludvig Jakobsen, and Elmar Reisenberg to the Estonian Consulate General in New York” expands the examination that has been conducted to date of the expatriates’ foreign policy struggle. The article considers the activity of Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg, who represented Estonians in West Germany during the years of the Cold War. The piece analyzes their views of international and European politics, which differed fundamentally from the basic notions of Estonia’s foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s. While major European countries served as models and sources of support in the interwar period, the United States and NATO were seen as Estonia’s primary allies during the Cold War. Living behind the “Iron Curtain” nevertheless did not entail the Estonian SSR’s complete isolation from the rest of the world. The softening of the Soviet regime after the death of Stalin also brought an increase in interaction with other countries. The encouragement of cultural diplomacy became important for the Kremlin, uniting different spheres of culture and society from the mass media, fashion, consumerism, and ways of thinking to foreign tourism and international exchange programs in the arts and in scientific matters. Both sides in the confrontation cultivated this kind of soft policy in the Cold War.

Foreword

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Estonia’s neighbor Finland was an important “window to the West” for Estonians during the Cold War years. Finland had become a capitalist country that was friendly towards the Soviet Union after World War II, a kind of bridge between East and West. The Tallinn-Helsinki ferry line that opened in 1965 brought numerous foreign tourists to the Estonian SSR for the first time. Western consumer culture and consumer goods appeared in the Estonian SSR primarily through these tourists. Oliver Pagel’s article “Finnish Foreign Tourism in the Estonian SSR during the Cold War, 1955–1980” provides an overview of how the pleasure trips of Finns began, highlights the main points in this process, and analyzes the growth in tourism to Estonia and the social background of the tourists. This study ends with the year 1980, when the sailing regatta of the Moscow Olympic Games was held in Tallinn and the Olympia Hotel opened, which was accompanied by an increase in the number of foreigners in the Estonian SSR. From an ideological viewpoint, the “bourgeois television” of the Republic of Finland, which could be watched uninterrupted in northern Estonia since the 1960s and provided people with independent information about world events, posed a great risk to the Soviet regime. While hundreds of jamming stations were built in the Soviet Union beginning in the 1950s to obstruct Western radio broadcasts, the obstruction of Finnish Television was more complicated. Marek Miil’s article “The Communist Party’s Fight against ‘Bourgeois Television’ 1968– 1988” provides a comprehensive overview of how and why the Communist Party implemented measures in an attempt to reduce the influence of Finnish TV in the Estonian SSR in the context of the Cold War’s ideological struggle. Since it was impossible to prevent the reception of Finnish TV in the Estonian SSR, the Communist Party focused instead on exposing “bourgeois propaganda” in Soviet mass media and developing Soviet television programming as the way to keep the people of Soviet Estonia away from independent, uncensored information. The Party did not, of course, succeed in this; the author also analyzes the reasons why it lost the war against “bourgeois television.” Formal religious freedom was preserved in the Estonian SSR, but in practice, believers and congregations faced all manner of direct and indirect obstructions. The reduction of the church’s influence in society was attempted by disseminating atheist propaganda and inculcating various secular customs. Atko Remmel outlines the actions of the Soviet regime and different strategies for subjugating the church to its control in his paper “(Anti)-Religious Aspects of the Cold War: Soviet Religious Policy According as Applied in the Estonian SSR” The author demonstrates that the implementation of state policy on religion was not particularly effective in the Estonian SSR. It was mild compared to several other

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regions of the Soviet Union, and particular campaigns “on the religious front” frequently depended on the discretion of local officials. Soviet policy on religion directed a great deal of attention at new secular Soviet ceremonies and managed rather effectively to graft new rites into society, thus relegating church ceremonies to the background and marginalizing religious life. The church did indeed lose its traditional moral and balancing position in the daily life of Estonians, but despite repression and propaganda, the church remained essentially the only public organization in the Estonian SSR over which the authorities could not assert full control. Thus, the church also filled the role of a distinct kind of spiritual opposition in Soviet society. The passport system and the border regime were important instruments of Soviet rule. Control was secured over the movement of people (both domestically as well as abroad); contacts with the world abroad were reduced to a minimum; and the “anti-Soviet element” was prevented from leaving the state. Indrek Paavle’s article “Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR” analyzes the functioning of the border regime established in Estonia since 1940 and the legislative framework that remained mostly unchanged until the end of the Soviet era. As the editor of this collection, I hope that the articles published here prove to be thought-provoking for the reader and, even more importantly, inspire further research on these topics. I thank my esteemed colleagues Dr Olaf Mertelsmann and Dr Atko Remmel, whose assistance in the final phase of preparing this collection of articles for publication was invaluable. This volume was published with the support of specific financing from the Ministry of Education and Research of the Republic of Estonia for the theme “Estonia in the Cold War Era” (2009–2014) and the “Estonian Military History in the World in the Context of Developments in Military Affairs” project of the Ministry of Defense.

Tõnu Tannberg

The First Diplomats of Soviet Estonia on the Eve of the Cold War: The Creation of the Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in 1944 Abstract: In 1944 Moscow launched a rather unexpected initiative: it passed legislation prescribing the creation of people’s commissariats for foreign affairs in the USSR’s republics, changing the constitution in the process and delegating issues of defense and foreign policy to the Soviet republics. This was primarily motivated by Moscow’s wish to squeeze all of its Soviet republics into the planned international organization that became the United Nations as separate, independent states in a bid to seize control of it.

Moscow’s surprising announcement that people’s commissariats for defense and foreign affairs were to be established in the republics of the Soviet Union reached the West in early 1944.1 While the Soviet Constitution of 1936 placed the international relations and defense policy of the Union republics entirely under the jurisdiction of the central government, now—at the beginning of 1944—amendments were adopted delegating some defense issues and part of international relations to the Union republics. This decision was handed down at the VK(b)P CC Plenum on January 27,2 and a few days later, on February 1, 1944, the USSR Supreme Soviet drew it up as a legislative act in accordance with the motion by People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Viacheslav Molotov. Molotov also gave a vague speech at a session of the Supreme Soviet that cast no light on what lay behind the decisions.3 Other speakers were also rather at a loss, including Chairman of * This study has been undertaken in the framework of the research project “Estonia in the Era of the Cold War,” SF0180050s09. 1 Tõnu Tannberg, ‘“Kui Tallinna hakkab saabuma mitmesuguseid alaliselt siin resideerivaid diplomaate …”: Dokumente Eesti NSV Välisministeeriumi algusaegadest 1944– 1948’ (“When Various Permanently Residing Diplomats Start Arriving in Tallinn …”: Documents from the Early Years of the Estonian SSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1944–1948), Tuna 12 (2009), no. 4, pp. 109–14. 2 The minutes of this plenum have been published: Istoricheskii Arkhiv (1992), no. 1, pp. 61–5. 3 Viacheslav Molotov, ‘On the Reorganization of the People’s Commissariat for Defense and the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs from Union-Wide People’s

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the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet Presidium Johannes Vares, who also praised the announced changes in his speech, apparently without having any information on the Kremlin’s actual plans.4 What prompted this expansion of the “independence” of the Soviet republics was primarily Moscow’s wish to force all of them into the United Nations (UN) and thus to seize the reins of that new international organization. Another, lesser factor was Moscow’s wish to tilt in its own favor the “Polish question” and the “Baltic question,” which were on the international agenda at that time.5 Yet, the UN question was nevertheless of overriding importance.6 This plan of Moscow’s nevertheless came to fruition only partially—alongside the Soviet Union, the Belorussian and Ukrainian SSRs gained membership in the UN. Yet since the Soviet Union gained veto rights as a founding member, it was no longer necessary to force all the Soviet republics into the UN. The Polish and Baltic questions were also resolved favorably for Moscow in relations between the great powers. The people’s commissariats for foreign affairs created in the Union republics in 1944, however, continued to function and became Moscow’s foreign policy tools in the postwar period—under the conditions of the Cold War. Commissariats into Union Republic People’s Commissariats’, Molotov’s speech at the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1944. His speech at the VK(b)P CC Plenum was much more candid. Here he no longer concealed the fact that the objective of creating separate people’s commissariats for defense and foreign affairs in the Union republics was to increase the Soviet Union’s influence in international organizations and more generally in the international arena. See also ‘V. Molotov’s Speech at the VK(b)P CC Plenum, January 27, 1944’, TsK VKP(b) i natsional’nyi vopros. Kniga 2. 1933­–1945: Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii (Moscow, 2010), pp. 791–9. 4 Johannes Vares, ‘Kõne NSVL Ülemnõukogu X istungjärgul 1.II 1944’ (Speech at the 10th Session of the USSR Supreme Soviet, February 1, 1944), idem, Nõukogude Eesti taassünd: Valimik artikleid ja sõnavõtte 1942–1945 (Rebirth of Soviet Estonia: Selection of Articles and Speeches 1942–1945) (Tallinn, 1945), pp. 79–82. 5 See Kaarel Piirimäe, ‘“Autonoomiaseadused” 1944: liiduvabariigid Kremli välispoliitikas liitlastevaheliste suhete kontekstis’ (“Autonomy Acts” 1944: Soviet Republics in the Kremlin’s Foreign Policy in the Context of Relations between the Allies), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2009), no. 1–2, pp. 13–46. 6 Concerning the Baltic question in relations between the Allies during World War II, see Kaarel Piirimäe, ‘Balti riikide küsimus liitlasriikide suhetes, 1941–1942’ (The Question of the Baltic Countries in the Relations between the Allies, 1941–1942), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2007), no. 1, pp. 23–50; no. 2, pp. 163–92; Eero Medijainen, ‘Balti riikide de iure järjepidevus noateral: Ameerika Ühendriikide välispoliitika ja Balti küsimus 1940–1945’ (The De Jure Continuity of the Baltic Countries on a Razor’s Edge: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Baltic Question 1940–1945), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2010), no. 2, pp. 153–90.

The First Diplomats of Soviet Estonia on the Eve of the Cold War

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The Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was officially created in the autumn of 1944, after the Red Army had reoccupied most of Estonian territory. On October 20, the EC(b)P CC Bureau approved historian Hans Kruus as the Estonian SSR People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, after which the staffing of this new agency began. Yet the relevant preparations actually began in the early spring of 1944. The reorganization of the union-wide People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs into Union republic people’s commissariats naturally raised the question of staffing. Where could suitable people be found to work on the planned Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and the people’s commissariats of other Soviet republics? There were, in fact, two aspects to this question. First, a suitable person was needed to serve as people’s commissar, and second, people were needed to work as officials in the people’s commissariats. It was the task of the Union republics’ leaderships to find those employees, but the diplomatic preparation of the selected persons was to take place in Moscow at the Higher Diplomatic School of the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. The objective of this article is to examine in more detail the prologue of the creation of the Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in the context of the aforementioned question of staffing, focusing primarily on three questions: 1) Why did Hans Kruus not become the Estonian SSR people’s commissar for foreign affairs in the spring of 1944? 2) How did “diplomats” start being trained for the planned people’s commissariat? and 3) Who specifically were those new Soviet “diplomats” with whom that new kind of foreign policy had to start being cultivated? The creation of people’s commissariats for foreign affairs in the Union republics of the Soviet Union in 1944 has thus far not been thoroughly researched. This article relies primarily on materials from the Estonian National Archives, published documents, and topical literature. Letters from Hans Kruus and Aleksander Aben to Nikolai Karotamm, the leader of the Communist Party in the Estonian SSR, that are kept in his personal collection and that have thus far not attracted the attention of researchers merit particular attention. Finding suitable persons to fill the positions of people’s commissar was, of course, of overriding importance to Moscow and naturally to the leaderships of the Soviet republics as well. Candidates for the future people’s commissars for foreign affairs in the Union republics were summoned to Moscow in March 1944. They were interviewed individually in the VK(b)P Central Committee and in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, where they met with Deputy People’s Commissars for Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinskii, Maksim Litvinov, and other top officials of the People’s Commissariat. Thereafter the USSR People’s

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Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Viacheslav Molotov, received them to explain the tasks of the Union republic people’s commissariats that were being established in the postwar period. Some time later, however, all the selected future people’s commissars were officially assigned by Molotov for training at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs as state servants (starshii referent) in various departments, where they started familiarizing themselves with everyday diplomatic work. Two hours had to be spent every day on learning foreign languages.7 Hans Kruus had also begun training in Moscow at the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and was supposed to become the Estonian SSR people’s commissar for foreign affairs in the spring of 1944. Kruus’s candidacy for this position was logical in every respect. At the end of 1943, Nikolai Karotamm had even recommended him for the position of USSR deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs. Karotamm argued that the Baltic question would emerge on the agenda in the international arena one way or another in the final phase of the war and after the war, and for this reason an appropriate expert would be needed. “This comrade would, for one thing, be the proponent of the will of the peoples of the Baltic republics in relation to certain diplomatic undertakings. It seems to me that the fact that there is a representative from the Baltic republics among the Soviet Union’s leading diplomats, who would everywhere and in all respects defend the restoration of Soviet power in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and their incorporation as part of the Soviet Union according to the free will of their peoples, would be somewhat important for British and American diplomats,” wrote Karotamm. He considered Kruus the most suitable candidate to serve as that “comrade.”8 After such a proposal, it would have been difficult to see anyone else in the position of the Estonian SSR’s people’s commissar for foreign affairs. Yet Kruus nevertheless did not become people’s commissar in the spring of 1944. A letter from Baltic expatriates signed by Magnus Kolk, Julijs Venters, and Peter Bulaitis, the chairpersons of the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian societies active in London, to the British newspaper The Manchester Guardian, published on April 1, 1944, proved to be a stumbling block for Kruus. In the letter, the representatives of the Baltic expatriate organizations mentioned that Kruus had been negatively disposed towards the Soviet Union in his writings published in 7 See also Istoriia MID Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki (www.gencon.kyrgyz.ru/?page=37, last accessed on October 31, 2010). 8 Karotamm to Molotov, October 12, 1943, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’nopoliticheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, RGASPI) f. 82, o. 2, d. 388, l. 34–7. See also Elena Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml 1940–1953 (The Baltics and the Kremlin 1940–1953) (Tallinn, 2009), p. 104.

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the prewar Republic of Estonia, especially in the context of the Estonian War of Independence (1918–20).9 This was enough to prompt the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to terminate the training of Kruus. This also meant that he was initially not accepted in the Kremlin as the Estonian SSR’s people’s commissar for foreign affairs. In fact, the letter to the editor was a reaction to a letter that appeared in the same newspaper on March 24, 1944, justifying the occupation of the Baltic countries in 1940. And this letter was signed by Kruus along with his “fellow comrades” Liudas Gira and Jānis Sudrabkalns.10 This letter was intended as a clear statement of the position of representatives of intellectuals from the Soviet Baltic Union republics to justify the events of 1940.11 From Kruus’s explanation to the Soviet Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vladimir Dekanozov, it turns out that this letter was an initiative of Moscow’s information agency TASS. In his own defense, Kruus also noted that he received only the rough draft of the text to read. He also tried to justify his earlier works, claiming that Andrei Zhdanov had been aware of them as early as 1940.12 Kruus himself described that situation, which was delicate for him, to Karotamm as follows: “Comrade Strunnikov13 summoned me to his office yesterday and informed me that it would nevertheless be better if I were to ‘discontinue’ my training at the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. And specifically in connection with the positions I had publicized back in those days that the The Manchester Guardian has now quoted. He said that he had discussed the matter with Viacheslav Mikhailovich,14 who was of the same opinion. He did say that this ‘discontinuation’ does not yet mean a final decision concerning my candidacy. 9 Magnus Kolk, Julijs Venters and Peter Bulaitis, ‘Letters to the Editor: The Baltic Countries’, The Manchester Guardian, 1 April 1944. See also: Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. 4962, n. 1, s. 15. 10 Gira (1884–1946) was a Lithuanian writer and Sudrabkalns (1894–1975) a Latvian one. Like Kruus, both had gone along with the coup of June 1940 and had continued to serve the new regime thereafter. All three, incidentally, had been also members of the respective Academy of Sciences of their country. 11 Uldis Neiburgs, ‘Nacistu okupētā Latvija Rietumu sabiedroto skatījumā (1941–1945)’, Dzintars Ērglis (ed.), Totalitārie okupācijas režīmi Latvijā 1940.–1964. gadā. Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas 2003. gada pētījumi (Rīga, 2004), p. 281. 12 Kruus to Dekanozov, April 1944 (draft), Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 9607, n. 1, s. 133, l. 10–1v, 14–4v. 13 Petr Strunnikov (1905–68) was head of the VK(b)P CC Cadre Administration Department in 1943–8, thereafter head of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs Cadre Department and member of the ministry’s collegium in 1948–52. 14 Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.

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That decision will apparently come later. I was left with the impression that the decision is nevertheless more final than Comrade Strunnikov would have led me to believe in trying to inform me in an understated way.”15 He added: “I will attend the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs for another couple of days, as we agreed with Comrade Strunnikov, and that will evidently be how I end my career as ‘minister of foreign affairs.’”16 The emergence of the question of Kruus on the agenda in this manner demonstrates that the Baltic question was a sensitive issue for the Kremlin and that it did not wish to draw international attention to it. Kruus himself also wrote to Karotamm: “Yet in the foreign service, the USSR will have to take many various exceptional circumstances into account since it is surrounded by such a large number of enemies. The enemy side could initiate various provocations against my person in connection with the foreign service, which would make my situation in that position more difficult and, first and foremost, would harm our common cause.”17 In this new situation, the search began for a candidate on a par with Kruus. Kruus himself suggested the names of Nigol Andresen, August Semper, Arkaadi Uibo, Arnold Kress, Harald Haberman, Eduard Konsa, and Nikolai Puusepp (most of whom had sided with the new regime in 1940) as potential candidates; ultimately he favored Konsa.18 Yet in the end, it was not necessary to look for another candidate. The situation had changed by the autumn of 1944, and then there was no problem in appointing Kruus as the Estonian SSR’s people’s commissar for foreign affairs.19 Compared to the beginning of the year, Moscow felt 15 Kruus to Karotamm, May 7, 1944, ERAF f. 9607, n. 1, s. 133, l. 4. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 See also ibid., l. 7. 19 It should also be mentioned that after discontinuing his “minister of foreign affairs” training, Kruus received permission from Molotov to work in the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs archive (then known as the political archive) and to be the first to study the materials from the Soviet Embassy in Tallinn. Kruus later reported to Karotamm: “Of course I work in the archive all the time. I initially set my work schedule for two months (July and August). It turns out that over that period of time I will nevertheless be able to get only a whiff of materials covering the last decade (that is, 1930–40), which is also the most important and eventful era. The initial hunch that casting light on the foreign policy of the bourgeois period will be of immense importance for us in future work in political education has been fully proven true—actually even more so than was previously thought. Even now an abundance of material has been located on why and how Estonia’s foreign policy ended up taking its

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The First Diplomats of Soviet Estonia on the Eve of the Cold War

considerably more secure in terms of foreign policy in the late summer of 1944 and was convinced that the Western Allies would not raise the Baltic question on the agenda. Six-month courses for diplomatic staff were started at the Higher Diplomatic School of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. All Soviet republics had to send their representatives there. At the beginning of April 1944, the EC(b) P CC Bureau approved its candidates for those courses in accordance with the recommendation of the Central Committee’s Cadre Secretary Nikolai Puusepp: Harald Haberman, Eduard Konsa, Aleksander Renning, August Sipsakas, and Aleksander Aben.20 The first course was held in Moscow starting in May 1944 and lasted until November.21 Course work took place according to a fixed program that placed particular emphasis on learning foreign languages as well as on becoming familiar with international relations and law, the history of the Soviet Union, economic and political geography of the world, and other disciplines. The course work consisted of both lectures and practical exercises. Table 1 below provides a more comprehensive overview of the course curriculum. Table 1: Curriculum of the six-month course for diplomatic staff at the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs Higher Diplomatic School, May–November 1944 Number of hours 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

History of the USSR (19th and 20th centuries) (Lectures on the major events) History of international relations, USSR foreign policy and diplomacy Economic and political geography of the world Fundamentals of USSR constitutional law Fundamentals of constitutional law of foreign countries

Of these Practical Lectures exercises

40

40

-

108

108

-

80 24

60 24

20 -

48

48

-

cues from Germany and Poland, how Estonian society was most systematically trained in connection with this to be friendly towards Germany, etc.” (Kruus to Karotamm, July 10, 1944, ERAF f. 9607, n. 1, s. 133, l. 16–7v). Kruus published several articles after the war based on these materials. See also Hans Kruus, Personaalnimestik (Personal List) (Tallinn, 1988), pp. 75–9. 20 EC(b)P CC Bureau minutes no. 57, 7 April 1944, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 109, l. 59. 21 The course’s timing was determined from data recorded on personal forms.

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Number of hours 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

International law Russian language and literature Foreign languages Practical work International overviews

72 80/30 346 96 36

Of these Practical Lectures exercises 72 80 346 96 36 -

Source: ERAF f. 9607, n. 1, s. 129, l. 9.

Aleksander Aben’s letter to Nikolai Karotamm in June 1944 provides a more detailed idea of what took place in the course. Aben wrote: “Course work continues in full swing. We have seven-hour days of study with an average of four hours of lectures per day, while three hours are for foreign language study. Considering mealtimes and time for taking care of everyday personal matters on top of the study day, very little time remains in the day for continuing independent study at home, which, however, is nonetheless very necessary. Because it is not enough to merely listen to the lectures. One must work through the material that has been listened to and read the notes that have been taken. There are no textbooks for most of the subjects. We have been promised shorthand notes, but they have not yet been given to us, because they are reportedly currently being used by students at the Higher Party School (for instance, shorthand notes on the lectures on constitutional law in foreign countries and other such items). The Higher Party School course is supposed to end in one to two months, and then we can use the shorthand notes from there. Books that have thus far been published on USSR constitutional law are also not expressly recommended to us. Similarly, books that have been published on other disciplines are not recommended as explicit study material.”22 Additionally, it turns out from Aben’s letter that he lived in a communal flat at the Metropol with A. Renning and they were not satisfied with this arrangement. Aben stated that working conditions for him and his companions were rather poor,23 since the question of accommodations had not yet been adequately solved. They were actually supposed to be housed in hotel rooms, but the families of members of the Ukrainian Academy of Science had been placed there.

22 Aben to Karotamm, 4 June 1944, ERAF f. 9607, n. 1, s. 129, l. 8. 23 Ibid.

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Aben’s letter also provides more detailed information concerning the study of foreign languages. It turns out that Renning was assigned to study French while Konsa and Aben himself were assigned to study English. Aben also wrote: “It was initially recommended that I study Swedish, but the Swedish language group has not started up yet, just like the groups for studying Turkish and Bulgarian have not started up either. Since the group for studying Swedish did not start up, I started learning English. The need to know English is stressed the most, second is French, and third is German. The German section was very small at first, because there were few students who wanted to learn German. Then some participants in our course were required to participate in the German section (comrades from Ukraine and Belorussia).”24 Exactly how the Estonian SSR leadership came to select the five candidates— Habermann, Konsa, Renning, Sipsakas, and Aben—who were sent to the diplomatic course in Moscow is unclear. Various candidates were surely discussed in Karotamm’s circle of close confidants, and it is quite likely that Johannes Vares and other members of the Estonian SSR political elite in the rear area in the Soviet Union were also aware of the situation. Yet there is no further information on why these people were selected. The fact that these candidates were not discussed with Kruus, who had been slated to become the Estonian SSR’s people’s commissar for foreign affairs, is noteworthy. The selection that was made surprised Kruus, to say the least. He was not satisfied with the preparation and personal characteristics of the candidates or with their understanding of the tasks of the people’s commissariat. At the end of April 1944, Kruus wrote candidly to Karotamm: “I was naturally very dejected by the initial cadre candidates. I was particularly surprised by the selection of Sipsakas, of course, but not much less by Renning. I really started feeling like the director of a poorhouse. When on top of that I heard that some comrades had on that occasion said: ‘Oh, what’s the big deal, Comrade Molotov will surely tell us what to do and show us how the work is done!’—I was, of course, astonished at how mistaken opinions regarding the new people’s commissariat are. Of course, we have to carry out the tasks that Comrade Molotov gives us, but we have to strive to be as skilled as possible in executing those tasks. If we are not at that level, then we are not needed at all. We would only do stupid things and we would be completely detrimental precisely in carrying out those tasks. The primary requirement of our candidates in the new people’s commissariat is that they must be capable of justifying the theses and positions prescribed as necessary in the diplomatic 24 Ibid., l. 10.

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struggle that lies before us. Beyond that, they must also meet many other very sophisticated requirements.”25 The feeling Kruus had of being the “director of a poorhouse” was obviously justified if we take a closer look at who was supposed to be part of his presumptive “team.” Of the five “diplomats” selected, Kruus’s assessment of Harald Haberman was the most positive. This is understandable because Haberman26 had crossed over into the service of the new regime along with Kruus in 1940 and was one of the key figures in the June coup. Haberman said little on that topic in the autobiographical description he wrote in 1945, but he was candid: “I worked as a senior assistant at the university on June 21, 1940 and participated in organizing the overthrow of the government.”27 Haberman elaborated in his later autobiographical description: “I participated in the events of June 21, in Tartu. I participated in organizing a demonstration and gave speeches at the Town Hall Square and in Tähtvere Park. Together with comrades Ilmar Kruus, L. Illisson, and M. Laosson, we took over the editorial office of the Postimees newspaper and published the first revolutionary issue on June 22. That same evening I went to Tallinn on orders from the Party, where I was appointed deputy minister of internal affairs. I then worked primarily on liquidating bourgeois organizations, the police, and the political police, and penalizing political crimes. I was also a member of the representative assembly election commission and was in liaison with Comrade Zhdanov, who worked at the Soviet Embassy at that time.”28

25 Kruus to Karotamm, 25 April 1944, ERAF, f. 9607, n. 1, s. 133, l. 1–4. 26 Haberman was born in Tallinn in 1904. He graduated from the University of Tartu in 1932 with a major in zoology and defended his master’s degree at the same university (1933). He worked as an assistant conservator at the university’s zoology museum and as a senior assistant at the Institute of Zoology starting in 1939. He did not conceal his left-leaning worldview at university. Daniel Palgi has written in his memoirs: “Harald Haberman was a young assistant at the Chair of Zoology. As it later turned out, he was connected with the communists and actively engaged in Marxist propaganda. I know that, for instance, it was H. Haberman who induced Oskar Urgart to convert to communism. […] H. Haberman had to have previously rendered some sort of services. Why else would he have been appointed to such a responsible position requiring trustworthiness in 1940 after the coup?” (Daniel Palgi, Murduvas maailmas. Mälestusi I–III (In a Breaking World: Memoirs I–III) (Tallinn, 2010), p. 107). Haberman himself, who became a member of the EC(b)P in the autumn of 1939, has also stressed: “We worked primarily with writers then—comrades A. Jakobson, O. Urgart, E. Kippel, E. Hiir, A. Hint, and others.” (ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 9602, l. 15). 27 Ibid., l. 7. 28 Ibid., l. 15.

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In August 1940, however, Haberman became the head of the Estonian SSR’s Council of People’s Commissars Administration, and from September 1940 to March 1941, he participated in the work of the German-Soviet joint commission that dealt with questions related to the late resettlement of Baltic Germans.29 Haberman evacuated in the summer of 1941 to the rear area in the Soviet Union, where he continued to head the ESSR’s Council of People’s Commissars Administration, helped to organize the Estonian Rifle Corps, and worked in Leningrad as the editor of Estonian-language broadcasts at the Radio Committee and in Moscow as the acting permanent representative of the Estonian SSR. In April 1944, the EC(b)P CC Bureau decided to send Haberman to the diplomatic course. Yet Haberman did not become a “diplomat.” He was most likely the only one of the five candidates under consideration who did not attend the diplomatic course. The proof for this lies in the biographical descriptions he himself wrote, as well as his cadre registration documents, where participation in the course is not indicated. The reasons for Haberman’s exclusion are unclear, but it is likely that the Estonian SSR’s leadership found it sensible to use him in another field of activity—the Sovietization of Tartu State University. This field likely suited Haberman himself better as well, and in the autumn of 1944, he became the university’s vice rector responsible for academic affairs and head of the Chair of General Biology and Darwinism (until 1948). According to Max Laosson, Haberman was “among the most advanced Bolsheviks at an ideological-political level” who had worked successfully in “implementing the Party line” at the university.30 In 1947, Haberman was appointed director of the newly created Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Biology (later known as the Institute of Zoology and Botany). He remained at this post until 1977.31 Haberman’s work as an academic administrator and his exclusion from direct political activity left him untouched by the repressions of the postwar years.32

29 Ibid., l. 16. 30 Laosson’s characterization of Haberman, 23 January 1945, ibid., l. 21. 31 For more on Haberman’s academic career, see Eesti teaduse biograafiline leksikon. Vol. 1. A-K (Tallinn, 2000), pp. 327–8. His memoirs are also worth reading: Harald Haberman, Tagasivaatamisi: Memuaarid (Looking Back: Memoirs) (Tallinn, 1988). 32 Haberman was nevertheless not entirely spared. He wrote in his autobiographical description: “In June 1950, on orders from the Tartu Municipal Committee, the ESSR’s Academy of Sciences party cell for Tartu institutions initiated the deliberation of my personal question in connection with my work at Tartu State University. Then I was penalized by the Party—a severe rebuke—for a reduction in vigilance regarding bourgeois nationalists.” This penalty was revoked a few years later (ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 9602, l. 17).

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Kruus’s assessment of two other candidate diplomats—Renning and Sipsakas—was rather unforgiving. Kruus considered Renning an “incapable character,” but he was actually the only one of the aforementioned five candidates who had considerable, albeit short-lived, diplomatic experience. For this reason, sending him to study at the USSR’s People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in the spring of 1944 was more logical than surprising. Renning came from an Estonian family that had emigrated to the village of Linda in Abkhazia. His mother was Georgian, and their family had come to Estonia prior to World War I but returned to Georgia in 1917. In 1922, the Rennings repatriated to Estonia once and for all. Aleksander studied law at the University of Tartu and supported himself by giving private lessons.33 He actively supported the June coup in 1940, and in July he was appointed Estonia’s ambassador to the Republic of Latvia,34 where he served until October.35 Thereafter, however, he became the first deputy of the Estonian SSR’s People’s Commissar for State Control A. Uibo.36 Uibo wrote in his characterization that Renning was a “talented workman with great ability” whom he knew personally since 1934, having “worked together with him the whole time in spreading the Marxist-Leninist world view in Tartu’s academic circles.”37 Yet Renning did not remain at this post for long either, because in June 1941, he left government service and took a position as a lecturer at Tartu State University’s Faculty of Law, which he himself had graduated from in 1940. The EC(b)P CC Bureau released Renning from his post on June 5.38 The proposal to take up the position of lecturer came from the Estonian SSR’s People’s Commissar for Education Nigol Andresen, in whose opinion “the Tartu State University’s Faculty of Law could use Comrade Renning in its teaching work, and the lack of lecturers in that faculty, and particularly the lack of Party members among its lecturers, make this transfer especially necessary.”39 33 Eero Medijainen, Saadiku saatus: Välisministeerium ja saatkonnad 1918–1940 (The Ambassador’s Fate: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Embassies 1918–1940) (Tallinn, 1997), p. 246. 34 The previous ambassador of the Republic of Estonia in Latvia, Hans Rebane, submitted his resignation on July 10. In exile, Rebane had the following to say about his successor: “The Vares government appointed a new ambassador to Riga who lounged about there in sandals. His first questions at the embassy were ‘Where is the embassy automobile?’ and ‘Where is the wine cellar?’” (Medijainen, Saadiku saatus, p. 246). 35 Renning’s cadre registration form, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 3035, l. 1v. 36 EC(b)P CC Bureau’s affirmation of Renning’s posting, 31 October 1940, ibid., l. 8. 37 Uibo’s characterization of A. Renning, 15 October 1940, ibid., l. 7. 38 EC(b)P CC Bureau decision no. 9, 5 June 1941, ibid., l. 14. 39 Andresen to EC(b)P CC Cadres Secretary A. Pauk, 5 May 1941, ibid.,l. 1v.

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Renning, who apparently had nothing against taking a job at the university, himself justified going to work at the university on the grounds that “academic work corresponds more to my abilities and interests.”40 Uibo also agreed with Renning’s departure41 and wrote in his new characterization that Renning “completed all of the tasks assigned to him precisely and resourcefully” as deputy people’s commissar.42 However, since the German-Soviet war broke out in June 1941, Renning was unable to start lecturing, even though he noted in his service record that he was a docent in constitutional law at Tartu State University from June to August 1941. Renning evacuated in the summer of 1941 to the rear area in the Soviet Union. There he initially served as a representative of the Estonian SSR’s Council of People’s Commissars, after which he was a scholarship recipient until the spring of 1944.43 Thereafter the idea emerged to send him to the course for diplomatic staff at the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. His characterization by the EC(b)P CC Cadres Secretary Nikolai Puusepp stated that Renning was suitable in all respects as a candidate for the course, since he had shown no deviations from the “main Party line” thus far.44 After completing the course, Renning was placed at the disposal of the newly created Estonian SSR’s People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.45 More precisely, he became the assistant of People’s Commissar Hans Kruus, who made the corresponding proposal to appoint Renning in December 1944.46 Now Renning was no longer an “incapable character” for him but rather someone suitable for being one of his closest assistants. He continued in this position until October 1946,47 after which he was probably sent abroad for a time.48 Renning continued in the service of the Estonian SSR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs until the end of 1951, when he went to work at the Estonian SSR’s Academy of Sciences.49 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Renning’s application to EC(b)P CC Secretary A. Pauk, 10 May 1941, ibid., l. 11. Uibo to A. Pauk, 10 May 1940, ibid., l. 10. Uibo’s characterization of Renning, 21 January 1941, ibid., l. 13. A. Renning’s cadre registration form, ibid., l. 1v. Puusepp’s Party characterization of Renning, 3 April 1944, ibid., l. 15. Renning’s cadre registration form, ibid., l. 1v. Kruus’s statement to the EC(b)P CC, December 1944, ibid., l. 16. A. Vaarandi, assistant to the ESSR minister of foreign affairs, to the EC(b)P CC Cadre Department, 3 August 1946, ibid., l. 22. The EC(b)P CC Bureau, however, did not dismiss Renning from his post until 9 October 1946. 48 See also ERAF ibid., l. 18, 21. 49 Notice from head of the ECP CC Administrative Department Tipner concerning A. Renning, 31 July 1952, ERAF ibid., l. 23.

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August Sipsakas was born in Narva (in 1903), but his large family (11 children in all) moved to the Russian town of Iamburg in 1919. Sipsakas studied and worked in the 1920s and 1930s at various jobs.50 He received special training in June and July 1940 at the Leningrad Military District Political Administration, meaning that he was being prepared for being sent to Estonia. Sipsakas served in several important official positions from September 1940 onward, yet due to his difficult disposition and the denunciations against him, he was excluded from the Estonian SSR’s power elite in the rear area in the Soviet Union. In 1942–43, he served as a Seventh Estonian Rifle Division commissar in the village of Poroshino in Sverdlovsk oblast. In 1943–44 he received further training at the Vystrel Red Flag Higher Rifleman-Tactical Course at the Red Army’s Soviet Marshal B.M. Shaposhnikov courses for training infantry officers. Thereafter he was sent to the diplomatic course, but he was not used in accordance with his professional qualifications in the establishment of the Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. He was instead appointed head of the Chair of Principles of Marxism-Leninism at the Tallinn Polytechnical Institute in 1945. Sipsakas remained true to his nature and continued scheming. He also became one of the key figures in preparing the EC(b)P CC Plenum of March 1950 and in its aftermath.51 Aleksander Aben (born in 1908), from the rural municipality of Kaarma on the island of Saaremaa, was a rather well-known figure in the labor movement in the Republic of Estonia who was expelled from gymnasium (secondary school) in 1925 for his communist views.52 He moved to Tallinn in 1933 and was associated with several left-wing organizations, was jailed for a period and in 1929–34 was also a member of the Estonian Socialist Workers’ Party. Aben was elected in 1938 to the Riigivolikogu (lower house of Estonia’s parliament) as a member of the Working People’s Unity Group but was expelled for passing out a leaflet denouncing the 50 See also Enn Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee organisatsiooniline struktuur 1940–1991 (Estonian Communist Party Central Committee Organizational Structure 1940–1991) (Tallinn, 2002), pp. 354–5. 51 K.O. Veskimägi and O. Kuuli have written in greater detail of the “exploits” of A. Sipsakas. See Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti Eesti NSV-d: Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee büroo 162 etteastumist 1944–1956 vahemängude ja sissejuhatusega (How the Estonian SSR Was Governed: The Bureau of the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party’s 162 Performances in 1944–1956 with Interludes and Introduction) (Tallinn, 2005); Olaf Kuuli, ‘Kaks kljauznikku EK(b)P sisevõitluses (aastad 1949–1952)’ (Two Denunciators in the Inner Struggle of the EC(b)P (1949–1952)) Tuna 8 (2005), no. 2, pp. 151–5. 52 See further information on A. Aben’s biography: Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, pp. 406–8.

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authoritarian regime of Konstantin Päts. In July 1939, he was sentenced to forced labor for five years, but Aben did not surrender to the authorities and fled to Sweden. After the coup of June 1940, he returned to Estonia53 and became the chairman of the Central Association of Estonian Trade Unions and the auditor general in the Vares government. In August, however, he was appointed head of the EC(b)P CC Department of Agriculture. He evacuated in the summer of 1941 to the rear area in the Soviet Union, where he was sent to conduct Party work in the Seventh Estonian Division in 1942. Later he served as the editor of the newspaper Punaväelane (Red Army Soldier). Aben was working in Leningrad as the executive editor of the newspaper Tasuja (Avenger, for partisans) and of the EC(b)P CC publication Talurahvaleht (Peasants’ Newspaper) when he was sent to the diplomatic course. After completing the diplomatic course, Aben was appointed assistant to the Estonian SSR people’s commissar for foreign affairs in December 1944.54 Yet in September 1945, he was sent to Sweden and worked as the assistant to the representative of the USSR’s Council of People’s Commissars Repatriation Administration. Thereafter—from March to July 1946—Aben worked as an attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm.55 Detailed information on his activities in Sweden is not currently available, but his work undoubtedly focused on expatriate Estonians. Upon his return to Estonia, Aben’s career continued at his previous position in the Estonian SSR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.56 In 1947, he became the ministry’s Party secretary for the second time (he had served at this post as well before being sent abroad).57 He was elected to the same position in 1948 as well, and Hans Kruus stressed that Aben “takes his official duties in that position very seriously.” Kruus was clearly satisfied with his assistant and expressed his satisfaction in a longer characterization that he wrote.58 It is likely for this reason that Kruus submitted a proposal in February 1949 to appoint Aben as his deputy. His primary rationale, as he claimed, was that he himself was overloaded with work heading

53 Upon returning to Estonia, he also joined the EC(b)P in July 1940. 54 Kruus’s letter to the EC(b)P CC was the basis for this: “As a candidate for the position of assistant to the People’s Commissar of the ESSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, I nominate Aleksander Aben, who has completed the six-month diplomatic course in Moscow, where he was sent to study by the EC(b)P Central Committee” (ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4743, l. 13). The EC(b)P CC Bureau granted this proposal its final approval on 31 January 1945 (ibid., l. 14). 55 Aben’s autobiography, 10 February 1949, ibid., l. 10. 56 People’s commissariats were renamed ministries in March 1946. 57 Aben’s Party characterization, not dated, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4743, l. 16. 58 Kruus’ characterization of Aben, 14 December 1948, ibid., l. 16–9.

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the Estonian SSR’s Academy of Sciences, and for that reason, the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also needed reinforcements.59 By this time, clouds of concern had already begun gathering over Kruus in the new campaign attacking “bourgeois nationalists.”60 Aben clearly tried to save himself by denouncing others, but this did not save him. In November 1950, the head of the Estonian SSR’s government, Arnold Veimer, proposed to the EC(b)P CC that Aben be dismissed from his position as deputy minister of foreign affairs.61 This is just what the EC(b)P CC Bureau did in its decision of November 9, 1950, and the Estonian SSR’s Council of Ministers did the same a little later, on November 17, 1950.62 These actions were followed by Aben’s expulsion from the Party in January 1951. This was initially done by the EC(b)P Tallinn Municipal Committee on January 12, 1951, and its decision was naturally confirmed higher up later on. The implementation of non-Party methods of management in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ignoring the Party organization, and the creation of an unsound working atmosphere were highlighted as his “offenses” in the corresponding EC(b)P CC Bureau decision. The fact that Aben had belonged to the Estonian Socialist Workers’ Party and had been a member of the Riigikogu (Estonian parliament) were also referred to. The fact that he returned to Estonia from Sweden at the invitation of the “traitor of the Soviet homeland” Karl Säre, who had the utmost trust in him, was also considered an offense.63 This marked the end of Aben’s career as a “diplomat.” By the time he was expelled from the Party, he had already been arrested. He was later sent to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. In 1952, the USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium sentenced him to 25 years of forced labor. Among other things, he was also charged with being an informer of the Estonian political police,64 using erroneous politics 59 Kruus’s proposal concerning the appointment of Aben as deputy minister of foreign affairs, February 1949, ibid., l. 20. The Estonian SSR’s Council of Ministers appointed Aben deputy minister of foreign affairs in its regulation of August 11, 1949 (ibid., l. 22). 60 Kruus was dismissed from the position of minister of foreign affairs by the EC(b)P CC Bureau on 13 February 1950 (ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 1359). 61 Veimer’s proposal concerning the dismissal of Aben from the position of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, November 1950, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4743, l. 23. 62 ESSR’s Council of Ministers regulation concerning the dismissal of Aben from the position of deputy minister of foreign affairs, 17 November 1950, ibid., l. 30. 63 EC(b)P CC Bureau decision, 28 January 1950, ibid., l. 32. 64 It is noteworthy that Nikolai Karotamm sent a letter to the new ESSR Minister of State Security Valentin Moskalenko immediately before the notorious Plenum of March 1950 in which he requested that Aben’s possible connection to the Political Police of the Republic of Estonia be thoroughly checked (Karotamm to Moskalenko, 11 March

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to implement land reform in 1940–41, and committing many mistakes in the work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.65 Aben did forced labor in many prison camps in Siberia in 1952–55 and was not released until 1955. When he returned to Estonia, he was unemployed for some time with no place to live but was rehabilitated and reinstated in the Party in 1957.66 He worked for a brief period at the Estonian SSR’s Academy of Sciences Institute of Language and Literature and thereafter at the Estonian SSR’s State Economy Council in 1957–66.67 Eduard Konsa was born in Narva in 1903, but his family left for Gdov in Russia. Eduard Konsa studied at the Workers’ Faculty in Petrograd and at the Institute of Electro-technology in Leningrad in the early 1920s but did not complete his studies. In 1925 he started doing Komsomol work. In the meantime, he spent a year attending the Third Infantry School in Odessa. In 1931, he enrolled at the Eastern Institute in Leningrad. Without graduating from the Institute, he went to work in Rostov oblast in 1934 as the editor of the raion newspaper. By the summer of 1940, he returned to Leningrad, where he initially worked for a couple of months as a mechanic in a factory but thereafter became the editor of the Estonian edition of the USSR Supreme Soviet Gazette in Moscow. Thus in the case of Konsa, the fact that he was not sent to Estonia after the June 1940 coup to build up the new regime is definitely noteworthy. In 1942, he was included in the process of forming Red Army military units consisting mainly of ethnic Estonians, and he worked as the head of the political department of the 249th Estonian Rifle Division, and later as the deputy head of the political department at division headquarters. In 1943–44, he was the editor of that same division’s newspaper Tasuja (Avenger).68 Yet at the beginning of 1944, Konsa was made the head of the EC(b)P CC Propaganda Department Press Sector; from this position he was sent to the diplomatic course.69 The characterization

65 66 67 68 69

1950, ibid., l. 33). A letter dated February 15, 1949, from Elle Mui, who had married the communist Aleksander Mui in 1940, to the head of the EC(b)P CC Administrative Department was included with Karotamm’s letter. Elle Mui accuses Aben of directly assisting in the arrest of Aleksander Mui in Saaremaa in the summer of 1925. The letter reveals that “A. Mui was certain that Aben set that trap for him since he was already previously a tool of the police” (ibid., l. 37). Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, p. 407. EC(b)P CC Bureau decision concerning the reinstatement of A. Aben in the Party, 24 May 1957, ERAF, f. 1, n. 6, s. 4743, l. 46. Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, p. 408. See Konsa’s record of service, cadre registration form, and biographical description: ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4539, l. 1–8v, 14–5. Excerpt from the EC(b)P CC Bureau decision, 31 January 1945, ibid., l. 11.

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drawn up when he was sent to the course states that he had some slight knowledge of Chinese and English and that he was a “modest and disciplined comrade.”70 After completing his studies, he was assigned to head the Estonian SSR’s People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs Protocol and Consular Department according to Kruus’s proposal in December 1944. The EC(b)P CC Bureau approved this appointment at the end of January 1945.71 Yet his career in Kruus’s agency did not turn out to be long-lived. In September 1945, he was sent to the Soviet Embassy in Sweden. His assignment was to work with repatriates. He remained in Stockholm until June 1946.72 Yet this relatively lengthy mission abroad turned out to be fateful for his “diplomatic career.” He was accused of delaying his departure from Stockholm, which USSR Ambassador Il’ia Chernyshev73 did not like at all and which alerted Moscow to his obstinacy. The result was unpleasant for Konsa on many levels. Upon returning to Tallinn, he had to leave the service of the Estonian SSR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In August 1946, Anton Vaarandi, assistant to the Estonian SSR’s minister of foreign affairs, informed the EC(b)P CC Cadres Department that Konsa was “dismissed from his position as of August 6, 1946, in connection with his transfer to the EC(b)P CC” according to the order of the minister.74 After a few weeks, the EC(b) P CC Bureau assigned him to a new position as the acting head of the Estonian State Institute of Theater’s Chair of Marxism-Leninism.75 He began work at his new position in September, and by October, the following was written about him: “Always proper and willing to help, he has in a short time earned the sympathy and respect of his colleagues and the student body through his Bolshevik frankness and clear points of view.”76 Yet his “Bolshevik frankness” nevertheless proved insufficient, because his personal question and behavior were discussed in Moscow by the VK(b)P CC’s Party Auditing Commission, which decided on

70 EC(b)P CC Secretary N. Puusepp’s characterization of Konsa, not dated, ibid., l. 9. 71 Excerpt from the EC(b)P CC Bureau decision, 31 January 1945, ibid., l. 12. 72 Konsa’s statement to the EC(b)P’s Tallinn Maritime Raion Party Committee, 10 February 1949, ERAF f. 1, n. 7, s. 3349, l. 2. 73 Chernyshev was the Soviet Mission consultant in Stockholm in 1944–45, thereafter serving as envoy in 1945–47 and ambassador to Sweden in 1947–49. He also served as deputy chairman at the UN in 1953–57. 74 Vaarandi to the EC(b)P CC’s Cadres Department, August 9, 1946, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4539, l. 15. 75 EC(b)P CC Bureau decision, 26 August 1946, ibid., l. 15. 76 Head of the ESSR Arts Administration Cadres Department F. Lokk’s characterization of Konsa, October 16, 1946, ibid., l. 17.

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December 27, 1946, to expel him from the Party. He was accused of operating obstinately, meeting with inadvisable persons, and other such “misconduct” in Stockholm. Konsa’s misdemeanors were summed up as the violation of “socialist discipline” abroad. This violation of discipline was actually manifested by the fact that Konsa did not leave Stockholm at the right time in the opinion of the embassy staff. Konsa himself later briefly commented on this as follows: “I was late for my departure because I received my travel tickets so late that I could not make it in time for departure, since I did not receive the ticket until May 29, 1946.”77 The extant documents78 suggest that the main reason for the conflict was that Konsa got along poorly with the ambassador and the consul, because his work in carrying out his specific work assignments in Sweden—resolving questions of repatriation—was assessed positively.79 Expulsion from the Party immediately brought with it dismissal from the Institute of Theater and pointed Konsa in the direction of work in production, so to speak. In 1947–50, he was the managing director of the Sirp ja Vasar (Sickle and Hammer) machine repair factory, and thereafter served as the chief engineer at the Tallinn Central Raion’s Industrial Integrated Plant. Konsa submitted several petitions requesting the review of the decision to expel him from the Party. Nikolai Karotamm also dealt with this question. After Konsa submitted yet another petition at the beginning of 1949, Karotamm sent the following letter to EC(b)P CC Secretary A. Puusepp: “Comrade A. Puusepp! Please take a look at the case of Comrade Konsa, who was in Sweden and was expelled from the Party. He would like to rejoin the Party. What do you think?”80 Konsa did not succeed in restoring his Party membership until 1955.81 In summary, the following points should be stressed. Moscow was initially serious about establishing people’s commissariats for foreign affairs in its Union republics—after the adoption of “constitutional amendments” at the beginning

77 Konsa’s statement at the Industrial Integrated Plant Party organization meeting, 2 January 1955, ERAF f. 1, n. 7, s. 3349, l. 48. 78 Since the decision to expel Konsa from the Party was made in Moscow, these documents are not in Estonian archives. 79 Statement by chairman of the ECP CC’s Party Commission G. Karotom concerning Konsa, December 1954, ibid., l. 35–9. 80 Karotamm to A. Puusepp, February 7, 1949, ibid., l. 3. 81 Decision of the CPSU CC Party Audit Committee concerning the restoration of Konsa’s Party membership, May 5, 1955, ibid., p. 65. This decision was naturally preceded by a request from Estonia that was dispatched to Moscow in March 1955 with the signature of ECP First Secretary Ivan Käbin (ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4539, l. 23).

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of February 1944—and along with that, giving the Union republics at least partial jurisdiction in foreign relations. It seems that this was actually taken into account in the Kremlin, and thus the accelerated preparation of diplomatic cadres for all the Soviet republics began and the coordination of suitable people for the positions of people’s commissar was undertaken. At the same time, Moscow was also careful not to irritate the Western Allies. For this reason, Hans Kruus was not appointed Estonian SSR people’s commissar for foreign affairs in the spring of 1944, since the Kremlin was not yet certain how the Baltic question would be resolved in relations with the Western Allies and what kind of position the Soviet Union would gain for itself in the UN. By the autumn of 1944, the foreign political situation had stabilized, and thus there were no longer any obstacles to Kruus’s appointment to office. Six-month courses for diplomatic staff were set up at the Higher Diplomatic School of the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. All Union republics were required to send their representatives, who were supposed to become the new Soviet “diplomats.” The five candidates from the Estonian SSR (Harald Haberman, Eduard Konsa, Aleksander Renning, August Sipsakas, and Aleksander Aben) were selected for this course rather randomly. The selection probably could not have turned out much better, given the speed at which it had to be made. Kruus himself most likely did not participate in putting together his team. The course began in May 1944 in Moscow and lasted until November. Haberman nevertheless did not attend. The remaining four candidate diplomats completed the course. Sipsakas, however, was sent to work as a lecturer, while the remaining three—Konsa, Renning, and Aben—were sent to perform their professional work, so to speak, in December 1944 at the newly established Estonian SSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Yet their “diplomatic” career proved relatively brief: Konsa was forced to leave in 1946, Aben in 1950, and Renning in 1951. After the end of the war, Moscow no longer wished to give the people’s commissariats for foreign affairs actual “content.” In other words, relevant foreign policy relations were not delegated to the Union republics. The people’s commissars for foreign affairs (ministries as of 1946) of the Union republics remained in operation, and they were used in the Cold War arena. Dealing primarily with questions related to expatriates became the primary task of the Estonian SSR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Kaarel Piirimäe

National Self-Determination, Modernization, and the Estonian-Soviet Propaganda Contest in the Early Cold War Era Abstract: This article deals primarily with the expatriate question and the production of propaganda as the primary tasks of the newly-founded Estonian SSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The article examines the propaganda battle between expatriate Estonians and the Soviets in the postwar years taking place in Western countries.

Introduction The topic of this paper, the propaganda contest between the Estonian exiles and the USSR in the early Cold War period, has never before been rigorously researched. There are surveys of Estonian propaganda written by activists involved in those activities, such as Eesti Vabaduse Eest: Eesti rahvusfond 1946–1951 (For the Freedom of Estonia: The Estonian National Foundation 1946–1951), published in Sweden in 1952, or Estonian Information Centre Ten Years, published in 1956.1 These are important documents on the early Cold War campaigning of the exile community, but written by the participants themselves, and not from an impartial point of view. There are numerous studies on the theory and practice of Soviet propaganda and agitation inside the USSR,2 but surprisingly, the foreign propaganda of the Soviet Union has not been discussed much, even though it formed an important component of the Cold War struggle between East and

* This study has been undertaken in the framework of the research projects “Phoenix from Ashes: The Concept of National Self-Determination in World War Two,” Estonian Research Mobility Scheme, and “Estonia in the Era of the Cold War,” SF0180050s09. 1 Endel Krepp (ed.), Eesti vabaduse eest: Eesti rahvusfond (Stockholm, 1952); Estonian Information Centre Ten Years: A Refugee Group’s Efforts on Behalf of Their Country (Stockholm, 1956). 2 Andrei Fateev, Obraz vraga v sovetskoi propagande, 1945–1954 gg (Moscow, 1999); Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge-London, 2012); Bruno Kalnins, Der sowjetische Propagandastaat: Das System und die Mittel der Massenbeeinflussung in der Sowjetunionen (Stockholm, 1956); Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge, 1985).

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West.3 One of the best analyses of the Soviet effort in the first two decades of the Cold War is Soviet Foreign Propaganda, written in 1964 by Frederick C. Barghoorn.Barghoorn tried to pinpoint the main attractions of Soviet propaganda to the developed and, even more so, to the developing countries, focusing on the Khrushchev era but also discussed the earlier, Stalinist and Leninist, periods.4 More recently, Vladimir Pechatnov has used documents from Russian archives to give a useful glimpse into Soviet perceptions and internal discussions on foreign propaganda during the early Cold War period.5 The operations of the Soviet Information Bureau, which are discussed in Pechatnov’s article, are also analyzed by Wolfram Eggeling.6 Estonian propaganda activities in Sweden have been touched upon by Lars Stöcker.7 The focus of this article is on the content, or “meaning,” of propaganda rather than on the organizational or institutional aspects of its creation, which have been discussed by Pechatnov and Eggeling. For this reason, propaganda texts are taken as the main source of this study and not the bureaucratic correspondence or memoranda produced by actors in propaganda institutions. The article does not try to give a comprehensive overview of the propaganda efforts of the two sides, which would be a formidable task. Nor does it try to assess the impact of propaganda on the audiences, something that would be extremely difficult to measure. The term “propaganda” has defied attempts at precise definition, but scholars tend to agree with Jacques Ellul that its purpose is not primarily to change people’s opinions but to make the individual “cling irrationally to a process of action.”8 It also should not be assumed that propaganda is a very powerful tool in changing well-entrenched beliefs. Instead, as Ellul notes, propaganda may be more effective

3 A similar conclusion is drawn by Ieva Zake, who says knowledge of Soviet psychological warfare is “fragmented”: Ieva Zake, ‘Soviet Campaigns against “Capitalist Ideological Subversives” during the Cold War: The Latvian Experience’, Journal of Cold War Studies 12 (2010), no. 3, pp. 91–114. 4 Frederich C. Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton, 1964). 5 Vladimir Pechatnov, ‘Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War, 1945–47’, Cold War History 1 (2001), no. 2, pp. 1–27. 6 Wolfram Eggeling, ‘The Soviet Information Bureau: Inside View of a Soviet Propaganda Institution, 1945–1947’, Osteuropa 50 (2000), no. 2, pp. 201–14. 7 Lars Stöcker, ‘Bridging the Baltic Sea: Networks of Resistance and Opposition during the Cold War Era’ (PhD-thesis, European University Institute, 2012). 8 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York, 1973), p. 25; Garth S. Jovett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1999), p. 6.

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in manipulating emotions and stereotypes, fostering what he terms “active and mythical” thinking. The article will suggest one way to conceptualize the Estonian-Soviet propaganda war. First, it will try to establish the most attractive aspects of Soviet foreign propaganda in general, using contemporary observers as well as academic analyses as a source. Second, it will assess whether Estonian propaganda was able to challenge in a meaningful way these attractive aspects of Soviet propaganda. Finally, it will examine whether Soviet propagandists responded to the Estonians’ challenge, directly or indirectly, and tried to address the “Baltic question” in their propaganda. In other words, were Estonia and the other Baltic states an issue in Soviet propaganda in the early Cold War period? I do not claim that this is the only way to treat the subject of the Estonian-Soviet propaganda contest in the 1940s. It may well be that important aspects have been excluded from this analysis and that other methods can be used to interpret the Estonian-Soviet propaganda war. However, we must start somewhere in the study of this important aspect of the early Cold War era. After World War II, and despite the armed resistance continuing in the Baltics until the early 1950s, the main effort against the Soviet annexation of Estonia, and probably also in Latvia and Lithuania, in the late Stalinist period was not military but political. It was conducted by the Baltic exiles through propaganda. The campaign built on the “information work” of the Estonian diplomats who had remained in the West after 1940. These efforts were broadened and intensified in 1945 and 1946 as a new wave of refugees joined the exile community. According to Alur Reinans, 18,000–19,000 Estonians arrived in Sweden in 1943–44. In all some 70,000 to 80,000 Estonians may have left Estonia during the war, most of them arriving in Germany, where they ended up as displaced persons in the occupation zones of Britain, the United States, and France.9 The refugees excelled at political and cultural activity: political parties were restored or founded, and relief and welfare organizations, schools, and universities were established. The fight to restore Estonia’s independence was part of the programs of the refugee organizations. For example, the Central World Organization of Free Estonians stated as its first objective the collective struggle for the preservation and development of Estonian culture and the restoration of an Estonian democratic republic.10 The exile community saw propaganda as the basic 9 Numbers cited by Peep Pillak, ‘Suur põgenemine 1944: Eestlaste lahkumine Läände ja selle mõjud’ (The Great Flight 1944: The Departure of Estonians to the West and Its Influence), Tuna 8 (2005), no. 1, pp. 153–6. 10 Vabade eestlaste ülemaailmne keskorganisatsioon VEKO (Stockholm, 1950).

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means of struggle to roll back Soviet rule. The most active political organ of the Estonian diaspora, the Estonian National Fund, concentrated on political warfare against the Soviet Union.11 According to Harold Perlitz, one of the founders of the Fund, propaganda was deemed the existential duty of every Estonian in exile.12 The escapees brought more resources into the effort. By 1952, members of the exile community in Sweden had set aside about 311,100 Swedish krona from their modest income for the campaigns of the Estonian National Foundation, the main Estonian body conducting political warfare. More importantly, the 300 active members of the Foundation contributed an estimated 18,000–20,000 working hours as volunteers, which saved the Foundation 40,000–50,000 krona of staff costs annually. To give a rough idea of the Foundation’s work, by 1952, according to its own data, it had distributed 270,000 copies of its Newsletter, 274 issues of which it had published since 1947. The Newsletter was sent to the important newspaper and journal editors, news and broadcasting corporations, and national and international political organizations. By 1952, more than 2,000 news items and articles published by media organizations of various countries had used the Newsletter as a source.13 The quantitative data may be impressive, but it provides few clues by which to judge the Foundation’s actual impact. Estonian activists’ own onclusions tend to be self-congratulatory, not least because they had to justify the sacrifices of individual donors and volunteers. It is particularly difficult to evaluate the role of Estonian propaganda in the development of the Cold War ideological struggle in general. Was the Estonians’ voice noticed at all? A survey of the press digests collected by one of the Estonian propagandists, Aleksander Kaelas, for the period 1945–51 (the collection is preserved at the library of the University of Tartu) does give an impression of a formidable campaign. In February 1947 the New York-based weekly The New Leader published an article by Kaarel Robert Pusta on the “Plight of the Baltic DP,” which gave a thorough overview of the problems facing Baltic refugees. Criticizing the repatriation policy of the USSR, aided by the UNRRA, Pusta asked: “Why not ask Russia to repatriate first some hundred thousand Balts from Siberia, where they were deported since June 1940?”14 In 1951 another U.S. weekly, Collier’s, with a circulation of 2.8 million in 1946, featured an article by its European team, “Why Stalin Must Be Tried for Murder.” 11 Stöcker, ‘Bridging the Baltic’, pp. 106–7. 12 Harold Perlitz, speech in the Boras department of the Estonian National Fund (1950), f. 138, s. 24. 13 Krepp, Eesti vabaduse eest, p. 16. 14 The New Leader, 1 February 1947.

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“In a ruthless move to Sovietize Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,” the magazine reported, Stalin “has had 1,142,000 people slain or deported—and the terror has only begun.” According to the journalists, at the very same day that the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the Convention on Genocide, on December 9, 1948, in Riga Soviet soldiers “were wielding rifle butts to herd 320 people into the cattle cars of train number 333684 bound for Siberia,” making a “hideous mockery of the Russian vote.” This, according to the article, was just a few hundred people out of more than a million who were “marked for annihilation” for belonging to an unwanted social, racial, or national group. The article featured a photograph of exile leaders August Rei and Aleksander Warma studying a “list of 60,000 fellow countrymen deported by Reds.”15 These two examples show the powerful impact created by inflating the number of victims (there was no way of knowing the correct numbers) and by linking the data and the emotional eyewitness stories to the international conventions and declarations to which the Soviet Union had subscribed. The message of the Estonian activists had, by the early 1950s, penetrated the mainstream Western press and appeared to pose a formidable challenge to the USSR’s image internationally. But could the Estonian arguments impress a wide audience? Could the Estonians convince people who believed the Soviet Union presented a genuine alternative to the Western version of modernity? The prestige of the USSR following its victory in World War II and the attraction of many people in Europe and around the globe to socialist ideas is well known and need not be dwelled on here.16 Two questions stand out. Did the Estonian propaganda challenge the image of the USSR as a multinational state in which national conflicts had been “solved” and the realization of national self-determination guaranteed? Did it question the Soviet record of industrialization, the development of national resources, and the effectiveness of the planned economy that had found numerous admirers in the developed as well as the developing countries? These aspects of the Bolshevik revolution were arguably the most attractive globally and were used in Soviet propaganda with considerable success in the late Stalinist era and even more so in the Khrushchev era. This paper will not only analyze the main arguments of the Estonian propagandists but also look at Soviet propaganda on the Baltic question. Did Moscow, 15 Collier’s, 30 June 1951. Rei was introduced as the “former president of Estonia” and Warma as his assistant. 16 For example, Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005); Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge, 1996).

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as part of its foreign-propaganda operations, devise countermeasures directed specifically against the Estonian exiles? Did Moscow try to promote its own interpretation of Baltic affairs and justify the annexation of the Baltic states in 1940? To what extent did Soviet propagandists adapt and fine-tune their ideological message for the Baltic case? Was there a “dialogue” between the two parties, or did the two sides convey entirely incompatible messages that were untranslatable from one ideological system to the other? In short, did the two parties speak only to their followers, or were they looking for new converts?

Challenge or Response? However, it is not entirely correct to speak of Estonian propaganda as a challenge and of Soviet propaganda as a response. The Estonian activists staying abroad after 1940 were slow to realize the potential of propaganda. The foreign delegation that was set up in 1940 by the diplomats August Rei and Heinrich Laretei in Stockholm and Alexander Warma in Helsinki decided in September 1940 to develop their resistance to the Soviet Union in “complete silence and secrecy.”17 Fearing Soviet retribution against their relatives or the wider population back home, the foreign delegation decided to use trustworthy middlemen in any public activity. This concern was removed when the Soviets were ejected from Estonia by the Wehrmacht in summer 1941. Nevertheless, plans for counterpropaganda were not discussed before April 1942, when the delegation decided to collect material to counter Moscow’s argument that Russia needed the Baltic states for military-strategic reasons and to develop foreign trade.18 In August 1942 the delegation added the need to prove “Estonia’s right and ability to independent existence and its importance in international life” as a major propaganda objective.19 However, the diplomats in the North were still lukewarm about entering the contest with the Soviet propaganda machine. In September Warma wrote to Hans Ronimois in Tartu that it was not particularly clever at present to challenge the “obtuse arguments” of the

17 ‘Warma, Rei ja Laretei põhjendus Eesti Vabariigi Välisdelegatsiooni ellukutsumiseks’ (The Justification by Warma, Rei, and Laretei for the Establishment of a Foreign Delegation of the Republic of Estonia), 1940, Enn Nõu and Mart Orav (eds.), Tõotan ustavaks jääda, (Tartu, 2004), pp. 492–8. 18 Protocol No. 8, 14 April 1942, ibid., pp. 516–7. 19 Protocol No. 9, 22 August 1942, ibid., pp. 535–6. In order to assemble the needed material, assistance from Estonia and from other diplomates was requested: Warma to Klesment, 3 August 1942, ibid., pp. 529–36.

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Bolsheviks, but they had to prepare “objective” counter-arguments for the time of the peace conference.20 The correspondence and the notes of the diplomats in London, New York/ Washington, Stockholm, and Helsinki suggest that they thought they were at the receiving end of an unprovoked communist propaganda attack. For the Estonian actors, the most important signal of the beginning of a Soviet effort was the 1941 pamphlet the Soviet Information Bureau published in London, The Soviet Union, Finland and the Baltic States.21 It was a biting denunciation of the Baltic states’ foreign policies before 1940. The Soviet pamphlet accused the Baltic politicians of turning their countries into places d’armes “fully ripe for submitting without resistance to any demands made by Hitler for furthering the attack he was preparing on the Soviet Union.” According to the pamphlet, Moscow had therefore been wholly justified in withdrawing its support for self-determination, which it had sincerely maintained since 1917, and demanding the change of governments in 1940.22 The first major Estonian pamphlet on this topic, Kaarel Robert Pusta’s The Soviet Union and the Baltic States, published in June 1942, was essentially an answer to the publication of the Soviet Information Bureau. Despite the modest resources available to the diplomats, Pusta’s pamphlet was widely distributed among the American political and opinion-making elites.23 How important was Soviet foreign propaganda at the time? Was it ever as omnipresent and powerful as the Estonian actors believed? Vladimir Pechatnov’s and Wolfram Eggeling’s studies on the Soviet Union’s postwar audit of its foreign operations reveal Moscow’s lack of confidence in its foreign-propaganda organization. Only 25–30 percent of the articles produced by the SIB conformed to the ideological and stylistic criteria established by the central organ of the SIB. The

20 Warma to Ronimois, 25 September 1942, ibid., pp. 537–9. 21 The Soviet Union, Finland and the Baltic States (London, 1941). 22 Ibid. 23 The first edition was mailed to 793 notable persons in politics, the press, and academia. The next year, Pusta personally distributed 157 copies, the Estonian consulate 90 copies, and Pusta’s Polish contact, Professor K. Jedrzcjewski, 350 copies. The Finnish legation received 700 copies and the Polish legation 300 copies. The Russian Institute in the United States received only one copy. In September 1943, when the second edition came out, 509 brochures were sent to senators and representatives: ‘Distribution of the Soviet Union and the Baltic States by Kaarel Robert Pusta’ (John Felsberg, Inc., 1943), Kaarel Robert Pusta kollektsioon, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. 1622, n. 2, s. 3.

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“dryness” of the articles and the unqualified praise of Soviet life was a constant source of criticism.24 The end of the war robbed Soviet propaganda of its enormous advantage, the military feats of the Red Army. S. Rostovsky, a Soviet Information Bureau representative in London, complained: “During the war, the chief Soviet propagandist in England was the Red Army on whose tanks the Soviet word was carried forward loud and clear, while our personnel in England only had to grease the wheels. Now the same people are faced with determined and fierce counteroffensive of the anti-Soviet imperialism and its propaganda.”25 In 1946 he produced a memorandum analyzing his five-year experience in London, pointing out that Soviet propaganda was handicapped by “our own inertia and lack of skill, inability to adjust and respond to the new reality.” He drew his superiors’ attention to a major communication problem with Western audiences: “we have developed a special kind of language in our own press, which was designed to communicate with the Soviet people … For most Western people, including those on the left, this type of language is highly unusual and sometimes incomprehensible.”26 From the Soviet perspective, the USSR had been subjected to an “offensive of Anglo-American propaganda,” which targeted not only the conduct of the Red Army in occupied territories but also Soviet foreign policy and the domestic affairs of the USSR. There was increasing alarm over the international deterioration of the Soviet image in late 1945 and early 1946. Stalin personally became impatient with the work of his subordinates, reprimanding Molotov and TASS editors for liberalizing censorship of foreign correspondents in late 1945. In summer 1946 he ordered the inspection of the main body conducting foreign propaganda, the Soviet Information Bureau (SIB). The results of the investigation were far from satisfactory. Though the number of articles it produced was impressive—7,000 to 8,000 articles were sent to 54 countries each month—most of them were in fact published in marginal press and information bulletins of Soviet missions overseas. It was discovered, for instance, that the chief of the U.S. department of the SIB had “no experience in international affairs” and did not “know the language.” The U.S. section received special attention from the commission. It was found that the SIB’s propaganda material for the United States lacked general direction, served no useful purpose as counterpropaganda, disregarded local conditions, and paid no attention to current international events. The conclusion was stern: “the SIB

24 Eggeling, ‘The Soviet Information Bureau’, pp. 209–12. 25 Cited by Pechatnov, ‘Exercise in Frustration’, pp. 1–27. 26 Ibid., p. 9.

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propaganda is extremely weak and ineffective. It cannot be in any way compared to the propaganda of the United States and England with their enormous resources, professional cadres and superior technology.”27 It is difficult to estimate not only the impact but even the volume of Soviet foreign propaganda on the Baltic question. The aforementioned pamphlet The Soviet Union, Finland and the Baltic States remained the only publication of the Soviet Information Bureau on the subject. Indeed, the SIB published only two other pamphlets, Women against Hitler (1941) and Falsifiers of History (1948), and although the Soviet Embassy in London published a number of brochures in the series “Soviet War News,” none of them touched upon the Baltic question. As has been mentioned, the Soviet missions abroad published information bulletins, which took most of their material from the Soviet Information Bureau. In this paper, “USSR Information Bulletins” of the Soviet Embassy in Washington for the years 1946–50 have been used as a source, and as we will see, the Baltic Soviet republics featured often in those bulletins.28 It must be noted that the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic conducted its own propaganda operations as part of its policy of repatriating all Estonians displaced during the war. Propaganda towards the refugees was the responsibility of the republican People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, which, however, had little staff and few resources.29 One example of the publications that were directed towards the exiles was Uuesti kodumaal (Back in the Homeland),30 which featured accounts of people who had returned. What may have weakened the impact of the book was that all stories followed the same monotonous plot: how the repatriates were slightly afraid of Soviet rule before returning, but upon returning found out that all rumors about Soviet retribution against returnees had been a deliberate propaganda lie by the fascists; how they were warmly welcomed by the republican 27 A report by the Central Committee’s Foreign Policy Department, 1946, cited by Pechatnov, ‘Exercise in Frustration’, p. 12. 28 Most conveniently, the bulletins of the Soviet Embassy in Washington can be found at http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006070625. The collection, unfortunately, is not complete, as the volumes for 1947 and 1949 are missing. 29 On the People’s Commissariat and its operations, see Tõnu Tannberg, ‘Kui Tallinna hakkab saabuma mitmesuguseid alaliselt siin resideeruvaid diplomaate...: dokumente Eesti NSV Välisministeeriumi algusaegadest 1944–1948’ (When Different Permanently Residing Diplomats Arrive in Tallinn …: Documents from the Early Years of the Foreign Ministry of the Estonian SSR 1944–1948), Tuna (2009), no. 4, pp. 109–14. SIB was responsible for repatriating Soviet citizens from “imprisonment” in Germany: Eggeling, ‘The Soviet Information Bureau’, p. 203. 30 Uuesti kodumaal: repatrieerunud Eesti NSV kodanike jutustusi (Tallinn, 1947).

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and the local authorities; how they were given comfortable places to live and opportunities to work and make a career. The common thread in all stories was the launching of the Five-Year Plan and the great energy and patriotism with which the country was being rebuilt and industrialized. The implication seemed to be that the great mobilization of all Estonians, without regard to present or former social status or political views, compensated for the possible inconveniences resulting from returning to a wardevastated country. The publication therefore distorted the reality of filtration camps outside Estonia, sanctions against people who had fought for the Germans, the restrictions on living closer than 100 kilometers to major towns, and the security-police surveillance to which the returnees were subjected. All this was, of course, known to most exiles in Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere, which explains the utter failure of the repatriation policy. Indeed, authorities suspected that returnees speaking on the special programs Kodumaa kutsub (The Homeland Calls) and Kodumaa tund (Hour of the Homeland) on Radio Tallinn were covertly warning their listeners in Sweden of the realities at home. By the end of 1945, 0.2 percent of the repatriation plan was fulfilled; 76 people had come back from Sweden.31

National Self-Determination Both the Estonian exiles and the Soviet organizations were convinced that they were victims of a propaganda attack, and it might be that such a perception is common to all practitioners of propaganda. From this perspective, the question about challenge and response may be unsolvable, and indeed is largely irrelevant to this paper. When we try to place the Soviet propaganda effort on the Baltic question into the larger context of Soviet image management, the problem of selfdetermination looms large. Throughout its existence the Soviet Union presented itself as a successful example of a multinational state that had resolved national enmities and had provided equal opportunities to all its nations to realize their right to self-determination culturally, socially, economically, and politically. Since the adoption of the principle of self-determination in the manifesto of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898 and Lenin’s tactical use of it 31 Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti Eesti NSV-d: Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee büroo 162 etteastumist 1944–1956 vahemängude ja sissejuhatusega (How the Estonian SSR Was Governed: 162 Performances of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party 1944–1956 with Interludes and Introduction) (Tallinn, 2005), p. 143.

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against the Tsarist Empire, the Bolsheviks had always been aware of the potential of nationalism as a weapon against other multinational states to further Soviet foreign-policy interests in Europe, Asia, America, and the colonies of the world.32 Moscow could plausibly claim a certain consistency in its propaganda and its foreign policy during World War II. When Stalin intervened on September 17, 1939, in the Nazi war against Poland and annexed the parts of the Polish provinces that were predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian, he could claim to be defending the rights of the Belarusians and Ukrainians. The Soviet leadership’s awareness of the potential of nationalism was also shown in the speed with which it subscribed to the Atlantic Charter in 1941, even though it had not been consulted or informed about the declaration beforehand. The clause that Moscow added to the Atlantic Charter—that “the practical application of these principles will necessarily adapt itself to the circumstances, needs, and historic peculiarities of particular countries”33—was arguably less cynical than the exception the Polish government-in-exile claimed when it joined the declaration: that national selfdetermination would not be applied to its eastern provinces, the Kresy. The Soviet reservation was consistent with its theory and practice on self-determination.34 The concessions made to nationalist feelings by the Soviet government during the war are a much-discussed subject and need not be repeated here. In addition to propaganda and the pronouncements of Soviet leaders, the Soviet government also stepped up as a major proponent of the codification of national self-determination in international law. It was the Soviet delegation that raised the issue at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 and pressed for self-determination to be included in the United Nations Charter (it had been omitted from the draft charter the Four Powers had agreed upon at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 32 On the nationalities policies in general, see Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik in der Sowjetunion: Von der totalitären Diktatur zur nachstalinschen Gesellschaft (Baden-Baden, 1986); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca-London, 2005); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca-London, 2001). 33 Lloyd C. Gardner, ‘The Atlantic Charter: Idea and Reality, 1942–1945’, Douglas Brinkley and David R. Facey-Crowther (eds.), The Atlantic Charter, (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 45–82. 34 Compare Stalin’s reservation in 1941 to his statement in 1923: “There are occasions when the right of self-determination contradicts another and higher right, the right of the working class to strengthen its power. … The former must give way before the latter.” Cited in Alec Nove, ‘Some Aspects of Soviet Legal Theory’, Modern Law Review 12 (1949), no. 1, p. 22.

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autumn 1944). Since the mid-1950s, Soviet legal scholars emphasized the part played by the Soviet Union in turning self-determination from a principle into a legal norm.35 It was Nikita Khrushchev, a talented propagandist, who turned national self-determination into a powerful weapon in the East-West competition over the allegiance of the colonial peoples, but the foundations were laid in the late Stalinist period. According to Frederick C. Barghoorn, the exploitation of the themes of national liberation and self-determination peaked in 1918–21, and then after 1945, but it took Moscow four to five years to consolidate its gains from World War II and begin using this weapon to maximum effect.36 For E.H. Carr in 1947, the universal Bolshevik appeal to oppressed groups and classes of all nations was “a large element in its strength.”37 The question arises whether the annexation of the Baltic states compromised the Soviet stand on national self-determination. Did it hurt the image of the Soviet Union as an advanced multinational state? At first glance, Estonian propaganda in the 1940s does not seem to have made the question of self-determination a predominant theme. In its first five years, the Estonian National Foundation did not explicitly mention in its propaganda the issue of self-determination as a main objective. Instead, the main tasks were said to be the following: 1) dissemination of evidence that people behind the Iron Curtain were not satisfied with the communist system, 2) exposing the duplicity of communist tactics, 3) emphasizing the legal continuity of the Estonian Republic and its belonging to the West, 4) the inclusion of Estonian delegations in international organizations and conferences, 5) strengthening contacts with international anticommunist propaganda organizations and broadcasting centers, 6) linking an overall anticommunist perspective to the problems of defending the Baltic states, East Central Europe in general, and the entire Western civilization.38 Of the 18 major publications published from 1946 to 1952, only one dealt with national self-determination explicitly:

35 E.I. Garanin, Völkerrecht, I (East Berlin, 1955); G.I. Tunkin, Osnovy sovremennogo mezhdunarodnogo prava (Moscow, 1956). Both authors are cited by Boris Meissner, Sowjetunion und Selbstbestimmungsrecht (Cologne, 1962), pp. 341, 342, 350, 354, 359. 36 Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda, pp. 131, 144. 37 Edward H. Carr, The Soviet Impact on the Western World (New York, 1947), p. 98. Carr quoted Stalin’s speech of November 6, 1944: “The strength of Soviet patriotism lies in the fact that it is based not on racial or nationalist prejudices but... on the fraternal partnership of the working people of all the nations of our country.” 38 Eesti Vabaduse Eest: Eesti rahvusfond 1946–1951 (Stockholm, 1952), p. 10.

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The Right to Self-Determination and the Soviet Union by A.A. Kristian, which appeared in 1952.39 However, it can be said that many more pamphlets approached the issue of selfdetermination indirectly. August Rei’s Have the Small Nations a Right to Freedom and Independence? from 1946 clearly falls into this category, as well as Karl Aun’s On the Spirit of the Estonian Minorities Law, which can be viewed as a promotion of the Estonian, “bourgeois” experience in “solving” the nationality question. August Rei’s Have the Baltic Nations Voluntarily Renounced Their Freedom? (1943) and Nazi-Soviet Conspiracy and the Baltic States (1948), which analyzed the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states from a legal point of view, directly undercut the Soviet thesis that the annexation had been based on a free vote and that therefore the sovereignty of the peoples had not been violated.40 Moreover, pamphlets analyzing economic and social conditions, and particularly the position of the working people in Soviet Estonia, were potentially the most effective ideological weapons against the Soviet position. As both E.H. Carr and Frederick Barghoorn have noted, the USSR argued that its version of selfdetermination allowed real liberation and personal emancipation for all people, while the Western version of self-determination was a sham, masking the slavery of the working people under the conditions of capitalism. The Soviet interpretation of self-determination was thus linked to its concept of democracy. “Democracy is democracy for the working people, i.e. democracy for all,” said Stalin in his speech introducing the constitution of 1936.41 According to Stalin’s doctrine of the late 1940s, “socialist nations” had developed within the USSR “on the basis of old, bourgeois nations as the result of the liquidation of capitalism.”42 The working class in capitalist countries, according to Lavrentii Beriia in 1952, saw in the USSR the path “from denial of rights to freedom and independence.”43 This view was not shared by Aleksander Kaelas, a social democrat who had worked as the inspector-general of labor under the first Soviet occupation in 1940–41. He was the author of The Worker in the Soviet Paradise, published by the Estonian National Foundation in 1947. “One of the most insistent claims of Soviet propaganda,” Kaelas observed, “is that only in the Soviet Union can the problems of public welfare of the workers and the working-classes in general be 39 Axel A. Kristian, The Right to Self-Determination and the Soviet Union (London, 1952). 40 August Rei, Have the Baltic Nations Voluntarily Renounced their Freedom? (London, 1943); idem, Nazi-Soviet Conspiracy and the Baltic States (London, 1948). 41 Quoted by Carr, Soviet Impact, p. 11. 42 Stalin’s writing from 1949 quoted by Barghoorn, Soviet Foreign Propaganda, p. 146. 43 Beriia’s speech at the Nineteenth Party Congress, 1952, quoted by ibid., p. 147.

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regarded as conclusively solved.” Basing his survey on thorough statistical data as well as on his own experience, he concluded that from 1940 to 1941, the real income of Estonian workers had dropped by four to 10 times. Indeed, according to Kaelas, the workers were not the privileged class in the Soviet Union but the most downtrodden of all. Analyzing the Soviet laws and regulations concerning the “protection” of labor, Kaelas concluded that liberation from the capitalist yoke had been a lie: “the Estonian workers soon felt that they had been ‘liberated’ from the protection of all the laws and were compelled meekly to submit to what the Communist Party thought fit to do with them. From free citizens they had been turned into the slaves of the totalitarian state. It is the considered opinion of Estonian workers that nowhere in the world are the workers so oppressed as in the Soviet Union, nowhere are they in such an unprotected, slavish state.”44

Modernization—Part of the Equation The Soviet message was, of course, different. In the bulletins of the Soviet Embassy in New York from 1946 to 1952, the development of the Baltic republics within the USSR, along with other socialist nations, was an important topic. Soviet propagandists made it clear that the overall foreign policy of the USSR was essentially a “continuation of its domestic policy” and the expression of its political structure. “The Soviet Union,” wrote D.B. Levin in 1948, “is a voluntary federation of equal and free nations that ensures the maximum development of the material and spiritual forces of every nation.”45 If the international status of the USSR depended on its internal development, then it was all the more important to show how well the Baltic nations were doing after their incorporation into the USSR. Conditions in Estonia were discussed in October 1946 from the perspective of the Five-Year Plan, placing the issue in the context of the great modernizing mission of the Bolshevik Revolution, which was contrasted to the “stagnation” that had prevailed under bourgeois rule in the interwar period.46 The supposedly poor economic state of “bourgeois” Estonia had been a recurring theme in communist propaganda throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As early as 1920, a prominent Estonian communist, Viktor Kingissepp, blamed the failure of the proletarian revolution primarily on what he called the destruction of 44 Aleksander Kaelas, Worker in the Soviet Paradise (London, 1947), p. 22. 45 D.B. Levin, ‘Foreign Policy of the USSR and International Law’, USSR Information Bulletin, 14 January 1948. 46 ‘The Estonian Soviet Republic in the Five-Year Plan’, USSR Information Bulletin, 2 October 1946.

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industry by the German occupation authorities and later the Estonian bourgeois. According to Kingissepp, there was simply no proletariat left: in 1917 up to 17,000 workers had been employed in machine and shipbuilding factories alone, but only 2,000 were in 1920.47 An unsigned report on the incorporation of the Estonian SSR into the USSR in August 1940, found among Andrei Zhdanov’s papers in the Russian archives, stressed the collapse of the metal and textile industries and the large number of unemployed under the regime of the capitalist clique.48 These passages on the economic situation of independent Estonia appeared in Johannes Lauristin’s speech on the occasion of Estonia’s incorporation into the USSR at the Supreme Soviet session on August 6, 1940.49 D.B. Levin’s article for the American audience also centered on the development of heavy industry and the energy sector, though the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture and progress in the social sector were also mentioned. The numbers were striking: shale production increased five times, and electricity production increased by 355 percent. Altogether, 3.5 billion rubles of fraternal help were said to be invested as part of the plan, which was more per capita than in any other Soviet republic. By contrast, the bourgeois republic had been an agrarian country “completely in debt to foreign powers,” while industry inherited from the Russian Empire had “dwindled.”50 As for Latvia, the country had become a “puppet state, a semi-colonial raw material reserve … an anteroom of capitalist Europe.”51 The workers, of course, had suffered. During the time of independence, allegedly only one-seventh as many workers were employed in industry as in 1913. Now, the bulletin asserted, “wherever you travel in Latvia today you see evidence of this rapid and mighty process of development … an eagerness to embrace socialist culture.”52 47 Wiktor Kingisepp, Iseseiswuse ikke all (Under the Yoke of Independence) (Petrograd, 1920), pp. 4–7, 101. 48 Doklad po povodu Estonskoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki v chislo chlenov Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’nopoliticheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, RGASPI), f. 77, o. 4, d. 41. 49 Rahva tahe – rahva otsus: Kõned NSVL Ülemnõukogu ees 6.VIII 1940 Eesti NSV vastuvõtmise puhul Nõukogude Sotsialistlike Vabariikide Liitu (The Wish of the People— The Decision of the People: Speeches before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the Occasion of the Incorporation of the Estonian SSR into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) (Tallinn, 1940), p. 11. 50 ‘The Estonian Soviet Republic in the Five-Year Plan’. 51 ‘Latvia Builds Anew’, USSR Information Bulletin, 14 January 1948. 52 Ibid.

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In the articles on the Baltic states, there was no information on the wages of the workers, their welfare, or social security, the issues that had been raised in the Estonian pamphlets. Perhaps the authors wanted the reader to think that the Five-Year Plan would automatically translate into higher living standards for the people. However, there were a number of articles in the bulletins that were specifically devoted to the issue of workers’ welfare. For example, an article by N. Yeliseyev in July 1946 gave an overview of the social insurance system in the USSR. Another article, “What the Revolution Gave the Working People,” reiterated all the Marxist-Leninist dogma about the liberation of the worker under socialism. Only under the socialist system, it was said, could the worker work for his own benefit; labor was the “duty and the honor of every able-bodied citizen”; unemployment had been done away with in the USSR; all workers were rewarded in accordance with the “quantity and the quality of their efforts”; they enjoyed vacations with full pay and a wide network of sanatoriums and rest homes; housing conditions were said to have been “greatly improved.”53

Conclusion Soviet propaganda was thus most anxious to present the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise, and there is no doubt that there were people who were willing to take it at face value. For E.H. Carr, the Soviet system was not only more efficient but also more just: “under socialism work is something more honorable, even pleasurable—a contribution by the worker to building up a society of which he is a full member.”54 The Marxist interpretation of democracy thus offered the means to counter the accusations by numerous Estonian pamphlets that peoples’ right to self-determination and state sovereignty had been violated. For communists, and converts like Carr, the economic well-being of the masses, ostensibly guaranteed by the socialist system, outweighed “bourgeois” concerns about electoral processes and parliamentary procedures. It is for this reason that the Estonian pamphlets accusing the Soviet Union of violating the principle of self-determination, like Rei’s Have the Baltic Nations Voluntarily Renounced Their Freedom? found few readers among the extreme Left. Much of Estonian propaganda could thus do little to convince those who believed the Soviet Union offered an alternative path towards national liberation and personal emancipation.

53 A. Matushkin and A. Rubichev, ‘What the Revolution Gave the Working People’, USSR Information Bulletin, 6 November 1946. 54 Carr, Soviet Impact, p. 54.

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Aleksander Kaelas’ book The Worker in the Soviet Paradise had the potential to cross the barrier and communicate with the opposite camp. As Estonian sources reveal, it was the most successful of the Estonian pamphlets; it was the only one to be translated into languages other than English, namely Dutch and Spanish. Basing his exposé on personal experience and reliable statistics, he revealed the Soviet claim of liberating the worker to be a hollow one. According to Kaelas, the position of the Estonian worker had not improved but had weakened considerably as a result of the Soviet annexation. In contrast to the Estonian effort, Soviet propaganda remained sectarian and dogmatic, repeating the same old arguments that had been employed against independent Estonia since the 1920s. Soviet propaganda was anchored at the concept of the Five-Year Plan dragging the Estonian economy and especially heavy industry from the shambles, providing work and welfare for everyone. The modernizing effort of the Soviets was presented as a truly democratic process that gave everyone an equal chance to contribute to building a utopia. This would demolish former class distinctions and, indeed, allow people of the bourgeois past to rehabilitate themselves through labor. But the Estonian SSR authorities’ attempt to appeal to the exile community with these ideas failed utterly. Soviet propaganda did not appeal much to those who had experienced life under real socialism.

Olev Liivik

The ESSR Council of Ministers: An Ethnicity-Based Organ of Power for the Union Republic’s International Administration? Abstract: The paper explores the ethnic composition of the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers (the Council of People’s Commissariats until 1946)—the government of the Soviet republic—in the 1940s and 1950s and the regional background and origin of its members. This study reveals that one of the central institutions of power in the Estonian Soviet Republic was Estonian in terms of ethnic composition, and within it Estonians from the Soviet Union rose to the forefront starting in 1947.

Introduction Ethnicity was considered one of the most characteristic attributes of an individual in the Soviet Union. While ethnicity was considered conditional and mutable in post-revolutionary Russia, the notion took root in the 1930s that it was inherent and permanent.1 Since ethnicity started being considered hereditary, every citizen of the Soviet Union was therefore born as part of a specific nationality and had to remain part of that nationality until death, stating his ethnicity in countless applications, forms, and other official documents.2 Thus ethnicity was not merely a social category; it was also a legal category. The ethnicity of citizens was noted in passports from the beginning. When the uniform passport system was established in 1933, entries concerning ethnicity were made in passports in accordance with the passport applicant’s wishes. However, the system that took effect in 1938 prescribed that a citizen’s ethnicity was to be recorded in official documents according to the ethnicity of the citizen’s parents; only if one’s parents came from different ethnic groups could a passport applicant of at least 16 years of

1 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001), p. 448. 2 Concerning the determination of nationality and personal documents, see Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston-London, 1986).

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age decide which of his parents’ ethnicity was to be entered in his passport.3 The designation of ethnicity was in fact richer in connotations and more flexible, and it was possible to manipulate one’s ethnicity. Leonid Brezhnev reportedly changed his nationality twice. He became a “Ukrainian” when he worked in Ukraine in the 1930s, even though he had no Ukrainian roots and did not speak Ukrainian. Brezhnev had to carry on being a “Ukrainian” at least until 1947 when he was issued a passport in Zaporozh’e, but when he went to work in the higher organs of the Soviet Union, he became a “Russian” once again.4 Although the Brezhnev example is indicative of the possibility of changing one’s ethnicity, most residents of the Soviet Union nevertheless accepted their biologically inherited ethnicity. Yet the rigid formal principles for designating ethnicity led to a situation where the ethnicity entered in registry documents could differ from the ethnic identity shaped by language, education and/or cultural environment. Contradictions between ethnic origin and identity were found mostly among the cadre from minority nationalities, including ethnic Estonians in the Soviet Union. After the annexation and incorporation of Estonia into the Soviet Union, this phenomenon was encountered in Estonia as well, since Estonians of different backgrounds started coming to the Estonian SSR from other regions of the Soviet Union. The ethnic ties of some of these new arrivals were very weak, and they actually belonged to the Russian-speaking “international” cadres. According to Russian historian Elena Zubkova, who has studied the postwar power structure in the Baltic Soviet republics, “non-locals,” many of whom were allegedly Estonians, Latvians, or Lithuanians in ethnic origin only since they spoke their mother tongue poorly, were prevalent among the ethnic cadres of the governmental and administrative organs of the three republics during the Stalinist era. The aspiration to find an optimal balance between native and international cadres, however, allegedly prevailed in the cadre policy of the Soviet Union’s central authorities in the Baltic republics. Despite the influx of ethnic cadres from

3 Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina (Moscow, 2001), pp. 206–7; Indrek Paavle, ‘Ebaühtlane ühtne süsteem: Sovetliku passisüsteemi kujunemine, regulatsioon ja rakendamine Eesti NSV-s, I. Passisüsteemi mehhanism’ (A Non-Uniform Uniform System: The Evolution, Regulation, and Application of the Soviet Passport System in the Estonian SSR; I. Mechanism of the Passport System), Tuna 13 (2010), no. 4, pp. 37–53, here p. 43. 4 Boriss Sokolov, Leonid Brežnev ja tema “kuldne ajajärk” (Leonid Brezhnev and his “Golden Era”) (Tallinn, 2011), pp. 140–1.

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other republics of the USSR, the authorities did not achieve this balance during the first postwar years.5 This paper examines the ethnic composition of the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers (until 1946, the Council of People’s Commissars)—the government of the Soviet republic—in the 1940s and 1950s as one of the central power structures of the Union republic, along with the regional background and origin of its members. Both decades were a dynamic period in the development of the institution of the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers (Sovmin) in term of organizational administration, changes that took place in the network of government institutions, as well as turnover in personnel. Yet this period unquestionably includes several distinct intervals, like the first year of Soviet rule in 1940–41, the war years that followed it in 1941–44, the postwar Stalinist era in 1944–53, and the latter half of the 1950s. This paper explores three of them. The years 1941–44—when, due to the war, the ESSR’s organs of power were evacuated to the Russian SFSR and no significant developments in the field of cadres occured—are beyond the scope of this article. Considering the internal division of the period under consideration and Elena Zubkova’s implications concerning ethnic composition and the origin of cadres in the power structures of the Baltic republics, answers are sought to the following questions. In staffing the Sovmin of the Estonian SSR, was a balance reached between Estonians and non-Estonians, and if so, when? Did ethnic Estonians of local or non-local origin dominate among the government’s ethnic Estonian cadres? How did the proportion of local to non-local “national cadres” vary from 1940 to 1960? How can the mastery of the Estonian language be gauged of ethnic Estonian members of the Sovmin who had come to Estonia from other parts of the Soviet Union? Were there Estonians among the members of the Sovmin who can be considered non-Estonian because of their poor proficiency in the Estonian language? There are no known studies focused specifically on the ethnic composition or staffing of the Sovmin in the USSR’s republics. The leadership of the republics, however, has been better represented. Thus the Australian Grey Hodnettdevoted himself to studying the leadership of non-Russian Soviet republics in the 1970s. He spearheaded the compilation of a handbook of the cadres who worked in leading positions according to 49 positions (Party central committee secretaries, heads of departments, members of the Sovmin and other positions) in 1955–72.6 A 5 Jelena Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml 1940–1953 (The Baltic Countries and the Kremlin 1940–1953) (Tallinn, 2009), pp. 110–1. 6 Grey Hodnett and Val Ogareff, Leaders of the Soviet Republics, 1955–1972: A Guide to Posts and Occupants (Canberra, 1973).

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few years later he completed a study of the staffing of the leading positions in the Soviet republics that examined the recruitment of the leadership and the specifics of staffing individual positions, including the filling of positions with cadres from the nominal nationality and the careers, movements, and patterns of transfering of leading cadres.7 Hodnett’s writings are of great help in researching the Sovmin, since data based on the centralized press of the Soviet republics is unreliable and not representative. Members of the Latvian and Lithuanian Sovmin from 1940 are mentioned in literature concerning government and the communist elite.8 One doctoral dissertation has been completed on the Sovmin of the Estonian SSR during the Stalinist era, along with a shorter paper on the years 1940–41.9 Of the government institutions in the Estonian SSR, only the cadres of the Stalinist-era Ministry of Internal Affairs have been examined in greater detail.10 Considerably more papers have been written on topics concerning the organization and Party apparatus of the Estonian Communist Party (ECP).11 Another two papers on 7 Grey Hodnett, Leadership in the Soviet National Republics: A Quantitative Study of Recruitment Policy (Oakville, 1978). 8 Thomas Remeikis, ‘The Administration of Power: The Communist Party and the Soviet Government’, Vytas Stanley Vardys (ed.), Lithuania under the Soviets: Portrait of a Nation 1940–1965 (New York, Washington, and London, 1965), pp. 111–40; Michael Björn Felder, Lettland im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Zwischen sowjetischen und deutschen Besatzern 1940–1946 (Hamburg, 2009). 9 Olev Liivik, Eesti NSV Ministrite Nõukogu institutsionaalne areng ja kaadrid 1940– 1953 (Institutional Development and Cadres of the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers 1940–1953) (Tartu, 2014); Indrek Paavle, ‘The Council of People’s Commissars of the Estonian SSR in 1940–1941’, Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu, and Indrek Paavle (eds.), Estonia 1940–1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2006), pp. 217–40. 10 Valdur Ohmann, Eesti NSV Siseministeeriumi institutsionaalne areng ja arhivaalid (1940–1954) (Institutional Development and Archival Documents of the Estonian SSR Ministry of Internal Affairs 1940–1954) (MA thesis, Tartu, 2000); idem, ‘Kaadrid otsustasid kõik …: ENSV Siseministeeriumi kaadrist aastatel 1940–1954’ (Cadres Decided Everything…: On the ESSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Cadres in 1940–1954), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2000), no. 1, pp. 61–70. 11 Enn Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee organisatsiooniline struktuur 1940–1991 (Organizational Structure of the Estonian Communist Party Central Committee 1940–1991) (Tallinn, 2002); idem (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei kohalikud organisatsioonid 1940–1991 (Estonian Communist Party Local Organizations 1940–1991) (Tallinn, 2005); Olev Liivik, Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee aparaat 1945–1953 (The Apparatus of the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party 1945–1953) (Tartu, 2006); David Feest, ‘Põlisrahvuse

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the Sovietization of Estonian rural municipalities and villages in the Stalinist era should also be mentioned here, since they also consider issues related to cadres. There is also an examination of the aims of the central authorities in Moscow in the Baltic republics during the first postwar decade.12

Cadre Differentiation and Concepts The cadres of Soviet Estonia can be divided into two parts based on origin: locals and persons who came from the Soviet Union. Two categories in turn can be differentiated among the local cadres: local ethnic Estonians and local ethnic Russians. Representatives of other nationalities can be dismissed in the analysis of Party and state apparatus due to their small number. Who can be considered part of the local cadre? I consider a close connection to the independent Republic of Estonia the primary attribute, including permanent residence in Estonia prior to the Soviet occupation. Thus people born in Estonia before the establishment of the Republic of Estonia, as well as people from outside the country’s administrative territory who settled down to live in the Republic of Estonia as optants or in some other manner, can be considered locals. According to the same principle, ethnic Estonians and Russians can be differentiated from among the cadres originating from the Soviet Union on the basis of ethnic attributes. However, in addition to these two main nationalities, a significant number of functionaries who considered themselves Ukrainians based on either ethnic origin or national affiliation were in leading positions in Estonia. The terms “Estonian from Russia,” “Estonian from the Soviet Union,” and “Estonian from the Union” are used in historiography to refer to ethnic Estonians who came from the Soviet Union. The impression emerges that these terms are taaseelistamise poliitika Balti liiduvabariikides? Eestimaa Kommunistlik Partei pärast Teist maailmasõda’ (Re-establishment of a Policy of Preferential Treatment of Indigenous Peoples in the Baltic Republics? The Estonian Communist Party after World War II), Tõnu Tannberg (ed.), Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953: sovetiseerimise mehhanismid ja tagajärjed Nõukogude Liidu ja Ida-Euroopa arengute kontekstis (The Estonian SSR in 1940–1953: Mechanisms and Consequences of Sovietization in the Context of Developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) (Tartu, 2007), pp. 207–24. 12 David Feest, Zwangskollektivierung im Baltikum: Die Sowjetisierung des estnischen Dorfes 1944–1953 (Cologne-Vienna, 2007); Indrek Paavle, Kohaliku halduse sovetiseerimine Eestis 1940–1950 (Sovietization of Local Administration in Estonia 1940–1950) (PhD-thesis, Tartu, 2009); Tõnu Tannberg, Politika Moskvy v Respublikakh Baltii v poslevoennye gody (1944–1956): issledovaniia i dokumenty (Moscow, 2010).

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used interchangeably. However, each has certain individual shades of meaning, and thus each needs to be clarified in the context of the history of the Estonian SSR in order to decide when and why one should be preferred over the others. “Estonian from Russia” is the most commonly used term. Since in analyzing this term it is important to know in relation to what or whom it is used, it should be noted that people who were born in Russia, relocated in their childhood, departed before the Bolsheviks seized power, and often even people who went to Russia during the years of the Russian Civil War or later are understood to be ethnic Estonians from Russia.13 It should also be noted that people who prefer to use the remaining two terms also usually point out the same attributes. In using this term under consideration, misunderstandings may arise concerning Estonians who emigrated to Soviet Russia or the Soviet Union after the Bolsheviks came to power. Is it correct to consider them Estonians from Russia? For the most part, these emigrants’ decision to leave was based on political motivations. They placed high hopes on the ruling regime in the Soviet Union and believed in the bright future that was promised to them. On the other hand, given the later return emigration, political emigrants cannot be differentiated from the remaining categories of Estonians from Russia, because representatives of both categories came to occupied Estonia from other parts of the Soviet Union. On top of all this, the communist regime had obedient collaborators among Estonians born in Russia, Estonians who left Estonia in their childhood, and later emigrants. Regardless of whether they were born in Russia or had emigrated to Russia, respectively the Soviet Union, Estonians who had lived in the USSR were likewise under the scrutiny of the regime: at the crest of the wave of the policy of preferential treatment of indigenous peoples,14 they reaped benefits from the favorable nationalities policy as representatives of minority peoples. In the 1930s, every one 13 This term appears to be so elementary and comprehensible in Estonian historical literature that authors have generally not taken the trouble to explain who is specifically meant under the term “Estonian from Russia.” The author of this article has used this term in analyzing Party cadres together with explanations and justifications related to content. See Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei kohalikud organisatsioonid, pp. 46–8, 84–6. 14 The policy of preferential treatment of indigenous peoples (korenizatsiia in Russian) is described in numerous studies on the USSR’s nationalities policy. Some of the more widely known works are as follows: Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923­–1939 (Ithaca-London, 2001); Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik in der Sowjetunion: Von der totalitären Diktatur zur nachstalinistischen Gesellschaft (Baden-Baden, 1986); Jörg Baberowski, Der Feind ist überall: Stalinismus im Kaukasus (Munich, 2003); Yuri

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of them could become an enemy of the regime on the basis of their ethnicity, but in the 1940s, great expectations were placed on them in Sovietizing Estonia.15 In short, the central authorities in Moscow invested in the cadre of ethnic Estonians with backgrounds in the Soviet Union, who were preferred over the local cadre since they were considered more experienced and reliable. Beyond that, Estonians from the Soviet Union were valued due to their knowledge of Estonian and Russian.16 In some organizations such as the apparatus of state security and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where the working language was Russian, they were valued primarily due to their knowledge of Russian.17 In following the orientation of Moscow’s cadre policy, the leadership and agencies of the Estonian SSR in 1940 continually sent requests to the Soviet Union’s central agencies asking that Estonian communists or speakers of Estonian be sent to the ESSR, in this case implying that knowledge of Estonian was necessary in order to work in that republic.18 Such applications were in clear contradiction of the actual situation. The lack of knowledge of Estonian was not an obstruction to working in the republic’s administration or elsewhere, and numerous functionaries in the state and Party apparatus did not understand Estonian and did not bother to learn it. After Stalin’s death, the central authorities became more exacting regarding the leading cadre’s knowledge of the local language in the ethnic republics of the union. During the time of the “new nationalities policy” in the spring and

Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review 53 (1994), no. 2, pp. 414–52. 15 In the opinion of David Feest, who has studied the profiles of the ECP leadership, only the cadres associated with Russia earned Moscow’s trust, but in the opinion of Elena Zubkova, Moscow sought ethnic balance in staffing the local leadership, since it needed leaders of local origin in order to create a positive image of the regime. See Feest, Zwangskollektivierung im Baltikum, pp. 58–9; Elena Zubkova, Pribaltika i Kreml’ 1940–1953 (Moscow, 2008), pp. 263–4. 16 Ago Pajur and Tõnu Tannberg (eds.), Eesti ajalugu VI: Vabadussõjast taasiseseisvuseni (Estonian History VI: From the Estonian War of Independence to the Restoration of Independence) (Tartu, 2005), p. 253. 17 Meelis Saueauk, Nõukogude julgeolekuorganite ja Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei koostöö Eesti sovetiseerimisel aastatel 1944–1953 (Cooperation between Soviet Security Organs and the Estonian Communist Party in Sovietizing Estonia in 1944–1953) (PhD thesis, Tartu, 2013), pp. 75–6. 18 Liivik, Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee aparaat, pp. 64, 74; Hill Kulu, Eestlaste tagasiränne 1940–1989: Lääne-Siberist pärit eestlaste näitel (The Return Emigration of Estonians in 1940–1989: Based on the Example of Estonians from Western Siberia) (Tartu, 1999), p. 132.

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summer of 1953 initiated by Lavrentii Beria, personnel who were part of the local nomenklatura but did not know the local language started being dismissed in the Baltic republics and had to prepare to return to the disposal of the CPSU CC.19 Cadres from the local indigenous people, on the other hand, had to be sought in place of the Russian-speaking personnel. When Beria was deposed, the cadre policy of the central authorities regarding the “national” republics of the union remained essentially the same. The language question and the employment of the local cadres remained on the agenda. The leadership of the Estonian SSR was reproached for insufficiently promoting local cadres to leading positions and for the scant use of Estonian.20 The criticism from Moscow did not lead to a solution to either problem because, unlike in the previous era, the central authorities expected local initiative from the Union republic on these issues and did not expressly prescribe what to do. Returning to the justification of the use of the term “Estonian from Russia,” the fact that cadres who came from the Soviet Union, including people who had emigrated from Estonia and people who had grown up in Russia, had worked in the 1920s and 1930s to a lesser extent in the state and Party apparatus outside of the Russian SFSR as well is also significant. To be more precise, they were sent to Estonia not from the territory of Russia but rather from the Soviet Union. Additionally, the term “Estonian from Russia” appears to be too neutral to describe the communist cadres. Functionaries who came from the Soviet Union were the bearers and mediators of Soviet mentality, activists, and influential persons of Soviet power. In this sense they differed from ordinary Estonians from Russia who were not the active tools of the authorities, even though the latter group also had to adopt the behavioral patterns that the communist regime imposed upon them. Regardless of the common traits in the careers, educational background, or ideological convictions of people who came from the Soviet Union during the

19 For the CPSU CC Presidium decision concerning the Latvian SSR, see Oleg Khlevniuk et al. (eds.), Regional’naia politika N.S. Khrushcheva: TsK KPSS i mestnye partiinye komitety. 1953–1964 gg (Moscow, 2009), pp. 32–3. See Tõnu Tannberg, ‘“Lubjanka marssal” Nõukogude impeeriumi äärealasid reformimas: Beria rahvuspoliitika eesmärkidest ja tagajärgedest 1953. aastal’ (The “Marshal of the Lubyanka” Reforming the Peripheral Territories of the Soviet Empire: On the Aims and Consequences of Beria’s Nationalities Policy in 1953), Tuna 2 (1999), no. 3, pp. 22–37; no. 4, pp. 56–71; Tuna 3 (2000), no. 1, 42–52. 20 Tõnu Tannberg, ‘1956. aasta Baltikumis Moskvast vaadatuna’ (1956 in the Baltic Republics as Seen from Moscow), Tuna 9 (2006), no. 3, pp. 56–71, here pp. 61–3.

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years of Stalinism, what connects them to each other is citizenship. This applies to the people who arrived in 1940–41 and to those who came to Estonia after it was once again occupied. They were citizens of the Soviet Union in the period when the Republic of Estonia was occupied and then annexed, which is an objective type of attribute in determining cadres. For this reason, it is justified to use the judicially motivated term “Estonian from the Soviet Union” in defining the cadre of Estonian ethnicity that came from the Soviet Union.21 Third, the term “Estonian from the Union” should also be considered. Semantically, it can be viewed as a relatively successful derivation of the term “Estonian from the Soviet Union.” Nevertheless, it is more nebulous than the latter term, and the question can arise as to which “union” the Estonian in question is actually from.

Organ of Power of Estonians, though of Non-Locals Alongside the ethnic affiliation of the members of the Estonian SSR government, the examination of their origin makes it possible to trace in greater relief the relationships among the members of the Soviet republic’s higher executive power, which was relatively homogenous in terms of ethnic makeup in the 1940s and even later. Of the 115 members who were part of the Estonian SSR’s government in 1940–60, 98 members (84%) were Estonians, and 16 members were of Russian nationality. It can be seen in Table 1 that functionaries of Estonian ethnicity formed the vast majority of the membership of the Sovmin throughout this period. The Sovmin was composed exclusively of Estonians until January 1945, when Konstantin Boitsov became the deputy chairman of the ESSR Council of People’s Commissars (ESSR Sovnarkom). The number of non-Estonians was greatest in the years following the EC(b)P CC22 Eighth Plenum of 1950, yet during the latter half of the decade, this number dropped once again to its previous level. 21 Soviet citizenship has previously also been taken as the selective attribute that forms the basis for the cadre sent from the Soviet Union to work in the Union republics. See Saueauk, Nõukogude julgeolekuorganite ja Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei koostöö, p. 75; Daina Bleiere, ‘Latvijas PSR nomenklatūras veidošanās 1940.–1941. gadā’, Dzintars Ērglis (ed.), Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti. 25. sēj.: Okupācijas režīmi Baltijas valstīs. 1940–1991. Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas 2008. gada pētījumi un starptautiskās konferences “Okupācijas režīmi Baltijas valstīs (1940–1990): izpētes rezultāti un problēmas” materiāli, 2008. gada 30.–31. oktobris (Riga, 2009), pp. 17–49. 22 Estonian Communist (bolshevik) Party Central Committee. The name of the Estonian SSR Party organization was the Estonian Communist (bolshevik) Party, abbreviated EC(b)P, and thereafter its name was the Estonian Communist Party, abbreviated ECP.

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In ethnic composition, the ESSR government differed significantly from Party committees and some other government institutions, where Estonian representation was considerably more modest. For instance, the EC(b)P CC apparatus had more or less equal numbers of Estonians and other ethnicities in the latter half of the 1940s. However, in the early 1950s, communists of Estonian nationality achieved a majority there as well. By the beginning of 1953, the proportion of Estonians in the Central Committee apparatus had risen to nearly 60%, increasing to nearly 64% by the end of that same year. The growth in the ratio of Estonians was impressive, because at the turn of 1950–51, Estonians made up only 48.2% of the Central Committee apparatus.23 In the mid-1950s, the growth in the proportion of Estonians in the Party apparatus slowed down. In 1956, Estonians made up 67% of the ECP CC apparatus, remaining at the same level until the end of the decade.24 At the same time, the proportion of Estonians increased particularly rapidly among leading personnel of the Central Committee apparatus at the beginning of the 1950s. While Estonians held 42.8% of the leading positions in the Party apparatus at the beginning of 1951, by January 1, 1954, they accounted for a total of 70% of leading personnel of the Central Committee apparatus.25 The rather large fluctuations in the ethnic makeup of the Party apparatus can be explained by the large turnover in cadres. Party functionaries ordinarily did not remain in the same position for longer than one to two years.26 Intensive turnover in cadres, in turn, simplified the Party apparatus’s timely reaction to changes in the cadre policy of the central authorities. The continuation of the increase in the proportion of Estonians in the Party apparatus can at least partially be explained in 1953 by Beriia’s “new nationalities policy.”27 Compared to the Party apparatus, the changes in the Ministry of Internal Affairs that was subordinate to Beriia were more conspicuous. As a result of structural and cadre changes implemented in the spring of 1953, Estonians achieved a majority for the first time in the leadership of the ministry.28 Nevertheless, the Ministry of Internal Affairs remained an institution staffed mostly by aliens, as it was during Stalin’s lifetime. While at the beginning of 1946 there were nearly 45% Estonians in the governing organ

23 Liivik, Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee aparaat, pp. 73, 75. 24 Data on the ethnic composition of cadres, 27 October 1956, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 1, n. 307, s. 154, l. 34, 35. 25 Liivik, Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee aparaat, pp. 73, 75. 26 Ibid., pp. 141–3. 27 See concerning this concept: Tannberg, ‘“Lubjanka marssal” I’, p. 24. 28 Tannberg, ‘“Lubjanka marssal” II’, pp. 59–60, 62.

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system, by 1953 that number had dropped to 37.7%.29 According to an overview completed in the ECP CC apparatus in 1959, there were nevertheless slightly more ethnic Estonians in the ministry in 1953, and their proportion increased slowly but steadily until the end of the decade. While Estonians accounted for 44.8% of officials in the ministry in 1953, by the beginning of 1959, the proportion was 53.75%.30 The same sort of trend is characteristic of the entire state apparatus. The proportion of Estonians in the Ministry of Justice increased from 55% to 64% in 1953–59, while the total increase in the Ministry of Commerce was from 65% to 83%. Even in those ministries where there were more Estonians in the early 1950s than cadres of other ethnicities, the proportion of Estonians rose noticeably. According to statistics compiled by the ECP CC, there were nearly 87% Estonians in the Ministry of Agriculture apparatus in 1953, increasing to 94% in 1959. And at the Ministry of Education, Estonians made up 90% in 1953, but by 1959, all 50 officials in the ministry were Estonians.31 Table 1.  Council of Ministers of the ESSR by ethnic composition and origin32 Estonians

Date

Total members of Sovmin

Total

Locals

8/25/1940 8/1/1941 1/1/1945 1/1/1946 1/1/1947 1/1/1948 1/1/1949 1/1/1950 1/1/1951 1/1/1952

15 19 23 25 28 30 28 30 31 29

15 19 23 23 25 27 26 26 25 22

14 14 18 15 13 15 15 13 6 2

From the Russians USSR 1 5 5 8 1 12 2 12 2 11 1 13 3 19 5 20 6

Others 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

29 Ohmann, ‘Kaadrid otsustasid kõik …’, p. 67. 30 Statement on the ethnic composition of the apparatus of the Estonian SSR’s Soviets and Party, not dated, ERAF f. 1, n. 307, s. 163, l. 5–9. 31 Ibid. 32 This table was compiled on the basis of the personal files of members of the government preserved in ERAF f. 1, n. 6 and Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA), f. R-1, n. 2k.

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Date

Total members of Sovmin

Total

Locals

1/1/1953 1/1/1954 1/1/1955 1/1/1956 1/1/1957 1/1/1958 1/1/1959 1/1/1960

30 26 29 31 31 25 23 28

23 22 23 25 25 21 20 24

2 3 3 4 4 6 6 8

From the Russians USSR 21 6 19 4 20 6 21 6 21 6 15 4 14 3 16 4

Others 1 -

These statistics show that the ethnic composition varied somewhat from institution to institution. If, however, the leading cadres of the Estonian SSR are taken as a basis more generally and the ECP CC nomenklatura is taken into account, a completely different picture of the ethnic composition emerges that more closely resembles the Estonian SSR’s Sovmin and differs completely from what Elena Zubkova has published concerning the organs of power and administration in the Baltic republics. There is indeed no consolidated data from the latter half of the 1940s on the ethnic composition of the nomenklatura, yet there are time series concerning the leading cadres that include most of the leading functionaries of the Soviets and Party in the Union republic, cities, and counties, and the leaders of agricultural organizations. In the mid-1940s, the list consisted of around 400–500 positions, but this grew to nearly 750 by the end of the decade. Cadre statistics indicate that significantly more Estonians were in leading positions in the Estonian SSR than non-Estonians in the latter half of the 1940s as well as in later years. At the beginning of 1946, 330 Estonians worked in leading positions (79% of the total), and at the beginning of 1947, this number had grown to 356 (77% of the total).33 By the beginning of 1950, the proportion of Estonians had dropped a few percent, to 73%, which was insignificant.34 All ECP CC nomenklatura positions were added to the statistics of the leading cadres in the 1950s, but the overall ethnic composition remained almost the same. About three-quarters of the ECP CC nomenklatura consisted of Estonians in the 1950s. According to data from

33 Summary data on the composition of leading personnel in the Union republic, 1 January 1946, and 1947, ERAF f. 1, n. 307, s. 6, l. 12v, 13. 34 Statistical report on the composition of the leading cadres, 1 January 1950, 14 February 1950, ERAF f. 1, n. 307, s. 33, l. 84, 84v.

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the ECP CC, 902 Estonians occupied nomenklatura positions at the beginning of 1955, accounting for 75.6% of all occupied nomenklatura posts.35 Based on the origin of the cadres, the background of the ESSR’s state and Party apparatus was already predominantly non-local from the mid-1940s onward. The Estonian SSR’s Sovmin was no exception in this regard. Personnel with a Soviet background formed the majority of the government from the mid-1940s onward. Members from the Soviet Union exceeded locals for the first time at the beginning of 1947. A relative balance was maintained between the local cadres and those of Soviet origin until 1949. This balance disappeared once and for all in 1949. The proportion of cadres of local origin in the Sovmin dropped particularly sharply in the months following the EC(b)P CC Eighth Plenum in 1950. By the end of 1951, only two Estonians of local origin remained in the government. By that time, not a single local Estonian who had been appointed as a member of the Sovmin during the 1940s remained part of the Sovmin. During the period following the Eighth Plenum, Jaan Pärn was appointed temporary acting minister of the meat and dairy industry. He was officially approved as minister in 1951. After the dismissal of Minister of Social Insurance Eduard Plaan in July 1951, Pärn remained the only local Estonian minister in the government of the ESSR. Head of the Administration of the Arts Max Laosson was part of the Council of Ministers at the same time as Pärn.36 The number of members of the Sovmin of local origin increased by a couple of people in the mid-1950s, but this did not significantly alter the proportions in the republic’s government, where the cadres with a Soviet background continued to dominate. The developments of the end of the 1940s significantly altered the overall composition of the government. In 1940–60, members of the government with a Soviet background accounted for nearly 63% of the Sovmin. Of that 63%, 78% in turn were Estonians from the Soviet Union. In total, of the 115 members of the government, 56 were Estonians with a Soviet background and 41 were local Estonians. Three categories of local Estonians among members of the Sovmin emerge in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1940s, “former underground communists” were the 35 Statistical report on cadre composition on 1 January 1955, 11 January 1955, ERAF, f. 1, n. 307, s. 132, l. 54, 54v. 36 Olev Liivik, ‘Tagasivaade 1950. aasta märtsipleenumile: Kas venelased ja Venemaa eestlased saavutasid võidu “juunikommunistide” ja “korpuslaste” üle?’ (A Look Back at the Plenum of March 1950: Did the Russians and Estonians from Russia Achieve a Victory over the “June Communists” and the “Corps Veterans”?) Tuna 13 (2010), no. 1, pp. 55–69, here p. 64.

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most numerous group in the government. This category must not be confused with the Bolsheviks who operated in Russia before 1917, who are sometimes referred to by the same term in historical literature.37 There were so few communists with pre-revolutionary seniority in leading positions in the Estonian SSR that the use of this term in this form is not justified. The terms “old political prisoners” and “former political prisoners” should also be mentioned.38 Both of these terms, however, have a narrower meaning. Members of the ECP, the Communist Party that was illegal in the Republic of Estonia, and communists who had been sentenced to forced labor for subversion against the Republic of Estonia and accepted into the ECP after the 1938–40 Amnesty Act can both be considered former underground communists. However, logic dictates that only communists who were imprisoned in the Republic of Estonia can be considered old political prisoners. An important argument in favor of the use of this term is the consolidation of old political prisoners in the Republic of Estonia due to their common fate. Despite this, Elena Zubkova’s position that old political prisoners had formed an “inwardly very monolithic, clearly defined brotherhood closed to outsiders,” whose members had similar views, experience in interaction in a specific environment, and skills for survival in extreme conditions, appears to be an obvious exaggeration.39 By taking the word “monolithic” out of context, Zubkova’s line of reasoning is for some reason associated with the wording of the preamble of the USSR Constitution that declares that the strength of the Party is due to its monolithic nature and the unity of its will and action.40 Thus, the researcher of the Soviet period is in danger of being caught in the net of Soviet panegyrics. Sometimes internal discord, tensions, and dislike between individuals can be concealed behind external unity. To claim that former fellow prison inmates became rivals in Soviet Estonia would be to veer to the other extreme. Even so, some incidents prove that the unity of former underground communists was severely tested from the mid-1940s onward. ESSR Prosecutor Kaarel Paas’s written complaint accusing Hendrik Allik in 1944 is significant. In this letter, he reproached Allik as a “member of the brotherhood” for Trotskyite declarations 37 Leonard Schapiro, for instance, has used this concept. See Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960). 38 According to Elena Zubkova, illegal communists were referred to in Latvia as “former underground activists,” but as “old political prisoners” (“former political prisoners”) in Estonia. Cf: Zubkova, Pribaltika i Kreml’, p. 270. 39 Ibid., pp. 195–6. 40 The Estonian-language version of the Soviet Constitution of 1946 is used: Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Tallinn, 1947), p. 3.

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made in discussions in prison in 1928. Specifically, the prisoners sought a way to pass the time in prison and organized a debate between the two visions of the Communist Party in which Allik had to defend Trotskyism. The accusations that Kaarel Paas repeated from the rostrum at the Eighth Party Plenum in 1950 to settle scores between local communists had dramatic consequences for Allik. Paas’s complaint may well have led to the arrest of Allik at the end of 1950.41 Hendrik Allik was not the only former underground communist expelled from the Sovmin during the cadre purge at the beginning of the 1950s. The same fate befell many of the ECP’s communists of long standing and members of the Sovmin in 1949–51. As a result, the representation of this category dried up completely in the Sovmin. Then in 1940, eight former members of the ECP were part of the Sovnarkom, including seven who had been in prison in the Republic of Estonia at one time or another. The premier of the republic’s government originated from the ranks of former underground communists until 1951, and they were entrusted with the more influential ministerial portfolios, like those of the minister of state security and the minister of internal affairs. Additionally, at least one of the deputy premiers of the Sovmin had a background in the underground ECP until 1951. Considering how numerous former communists were in the republic’s government in the 1940s, it is surprising that after the structural changes implemented after Stalin’s death in the spring of 1953, not a single former underground communist remained in the Sovmin. Communists with an ECP background were once again represented in the Sovmin in the latter half of the decade because Arnold Veimer and Hendrik Allik, who had fallen out of favor after the EC(b)P CC Eighth Plenum, were once again appointed members of the government. In addition to them, the same Kaarel Paaswho had previously accused Allik of Trotskyism was appointed a member of the Sovmin as minister of justice in 1959.42 The people who joined the Communist Party in the summer of 1940, often referred to as “June communists,” formed the second category. Most of them had participated in the political and social life of the Republic of Estonia, had a leftist worldview, and belonged to left-wing parties. June communists occupied 41 Olaf Kuuli, Stalini-aja võimukaader ja kultuurijuhid Eesti NSV-s (1940–1954) (The Stalinist-Era Cadre of Power and Cultural Leaders in the Estonian SSR 1940–1954) (Tallinn, 2007), pp. 103–4; Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, pp. 413–4. 42 Jaan Toomla (ed.), Valitud ja valitsenud: Eesti parlamentaarsete ja muude esinduskogude ning valitsuste isikkoosseis aastail 1917–1999 (Elected and Having Ruled: The Composition of Estonia’s Parliamentary and Other Representative Bodies and Governments in 1917–1999) (Tallinn, 1999), p. 344.

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prominent positions in the process of Sovietizing Estonia until the end of the 1940s, even though not many of them were in the postwar Sovmin. There were six June communists in the ESSR’s Sovnarkom in 1940. Nigol Andresen’s dismissal from the position of deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers in May 1946 and his transfer to the relatively insignificant position of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet can be considered the first setback. Johannes Semper was briefly a member of the Sovmin in the 1940s. He was appointed to the ESSR’s Sovmin in 1947 as the head of the Administration of the Arts, even though he had occupied that position since the beginning of 1941. The decisive blow was dealt to the June communists in the initial phase of the extensive cadre purges of the state apparatus until 1949–50, when, in addition to Semper, who had been dismissed from his post in 1948, Lembit Lüüs, Aleksander Jõeäär, Hans Kruus, and Viktor Hion were dismissed one after another. Viktor Hion, the last to be let go, was dismissed from the position of minister of health care by decision of the EC(b)P CC Bureau immediately after the EC(b)P CC Eighth Plenum.43 In 1953, local Estonians, sometimes called “Corps men” in historical literature due to their background in the Estonian Rifle Corps during World War II, once again began finding their way into the political elite in the Estonian SSR.44 In that same year, three communists from the younger generation became members of the Sovmin: Arnold Green as first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Valter Raudsalu as minister of justice, and Edgar Tõnurist as minister of agriculture and stockpiling.45 In the mid-1950s, when the composition of the Sovmin became more stable than before and most changes in cadres took place as a result of structural changes, several Estonians who had belonged to “national” Estonian units of the Red Army during the war years were appointed to the Sovmin. These included Harald Arman as chairman of the ESSR’s Council of Ministers State Construction and Architecture Committee in 1955, Madis Pesti as chairman of the State Higher Education and Vocational Secondary Education Committee and Endel-Johannes Jaanimägi as chairman of the Radio and Television Committee in 1959, and Artur Kässer, who served as Minister of Light Industry for a brief period of time in 1956.46 43 Minutes no. 96 of EC(b)P CC session, 22 April 1950, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 953, l. 41. 44 See Liivik, ‘Tagasivaade 1950. aasta märtsipleenumile’, pp. 57, 68–69. 45 Toomla (ed.), Valitud ja valitsenud, pp. 172–3; Edgar Tõnurist’s personal file, ERA f. R-2306, n. 1, s. 1, l. 1. 46 Harald Arman’s personal file, ERA f. 1 n. 2k, s. 26; Madis Pesti’s personal file, ERA f. 1, n. 2k, s. 398; Artur Kässer’s personal file, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 242; Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, pp. 296–7.

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The cadres that came to the Estonian SSR from the Soviet Union were more diverse. Estonians from the Soviet Union dominated among the imported cadres during the first year of Soviet rule. Mostly functionaries who had ties to Estonia and an Estonian orientation that could have originated from a childhood spent in Estonia or from closely associating with fellow Estonians in Russia were promoted to leading positions in the state and Party apparatus. All the Estonians from the Soviet Union who were members of the ESSR Sovmin in 1940–41 had been born in Estonia (see Table 2). They had received their primary education in Estonia and most likely studied for a couple of years in primary schools where the language of instruction was Estonian, since after the Revolution of 1905, teaching in Estonian was permitted in the first two years of school in primary schools in Estonia.47 Future members of the ESSR’s Sovmin left their Estonian homeland in adolescence, remaining connected to Leningrad for a time. Due to the new policy of preferential treatment for indigenous peoples in the Soviet Union, 1920s Leningrad had educational institutions where students could study in Estonian. Thanks to this, Friedrich Kiiser, Johannes Sauer, Algus Raadik, and Eduard Päll had the opportunity to continue their education in their mother tongue. Arnold Kress, who had mastered the locksmith’s trade before moving to Russia, made his career in industry and completed his studies to become a shipbuilding engineer when he was in his thirties and living in the USSR.48 Table 2. Estonians from the Soviet Union who were members of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1940–4149 Name Friedrich Kiiser Arnold Kress

Position People’s commissar for local industry 1941 Deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars 1941

Year of birth

Year of emigration from Estonia

1903

1917

1897

1916

47 Toomas Karjahärm and Tiit Rosenberg (eds.), Eesti ajalugu V: Pärisorjuse kaotamisest Vabadussõjani (Estonian History V: From the Abolition of Serfdom to the Estonian War of Independence) (Tartu, 2010), p. 384. 48 See biographies of Arnold Kress, Eduard Päll, and Algus Raadik: Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, pp. 335–9, 495–6. 49 Biographical data on members of the Sovmin form the basis for the compilation of this table. See ibid., pp. 335–9, 495–6; Friedrich Kiiser’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 1131; Johannes Sauer’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 3283.

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Name Eduard Päll Algus Raadik Johannes Sauer

Position Deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and people’s commissar for the State Audit Office 1941 People’s commissar for public utilities and services 1941 People’s commissar for local industry 1940–41, people’s commissar for the food industry 1941

Year of birth

Year of emigration from Estonia

1903

1919

1906

1921

1904

1922

Non-Local Cadre’s Knowledge of the Estonian Language The cadres who came from the Soviet Union became noticeably more heterogeneous during the postwar period. Emigrants of the second generation who had been born and raised outside of Estonia joined people who had emigrated from Estonia in their adolescence or childhood and communist emigrants. Yet language proficiency, which can be considered the primary selective attribute of Estonian functionaries from the Soviet Union, was a far more important indicator than the generational difference of the emigrants in the postwar period. The cadres of the Soviets and the Party had to provide data on language proficiency on the cadre registration form.50 Members of the Sovmin who were part of the ECP CC nomenklatura had to fill out the cadre registration form in their own hand for both the ECP CC and the Sovmin. This form was filed in their personal files, which were kept in the ECP CC apparatus as well as in the Council of Ministers’ Main Administration. The cadre registration form specifically asked for information on knowledge of foreign languages and languages of the peoples of the Soviet Union. The languages spoken were to be entered in the appropriate space on the form. It was the task of the person filling out the form to evaluate his knowledge of the language in writing, speech, and reading on a scale from “good” to “poor.”51 Naturally, the level of language skills could vary significantly in speech and in writing, but few persons took the trouble to elaborate on this.

50 See further concerning cadre registration forms and personal files: Liivik, Eesti NSV Ministrite Nõukogu, pp. 53–7. 51 See Olev Liivik, ‘Parteikomiteed 1944–1960’, Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei kohalikud organisatsioonid, p. 137.

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The mother tongue of the person filling out the cadre registration form generally does not emerge from the questionnaire if the number of languages entered on the form is not limited to one. On the other hand, the language skills of those Estonians from the Soviet Union whose mother tongue acquired at home in their childhood was overshadowed by Russian due to their Russian-speaking environment and whose ability to read and write remained poor or was lacking entirely offers room for interpretation. Regardless of this, knowledge of Russian and Estonian could be assessed as equal when filling out the cadre registration form. In such cases, we can probably speak of assimilation into the Russian nationality, or at least bilingualism where bilingualism was complete, or coordinative, to borrow sociolinguistic categories.52 There were bilingual persons among emigrants from both the first and second generations among the Estonians from the Soviet Union in the republic’s leading cadre. Yet which of them had been assimilated into the Russian nationality and which had not depends on one’s point of view. A considerable number of second-generation Estonians from the Soviet Union sent to Estonia to work in the state and Party apparatus in the 1940s had not used their mother tongue since childhood, since their ties with their ethnicity had been severed. Naturally, their arrival in Estonia opened up new prospects for them, which could have inspired them to improve their Estonian or to start learning the language of their parents, to justify their belonging to the Estonian ethnicity and to start communicating with the local cadre and population in Estonian. Even means of coercion were used in the mid-1940s to stimulate the learning of the local language. In 1945, the EC(b)P CC Bureau issued a decision stating that personnel of the Soviets and the Party who did not know Estonian had to start learning it. How this decision was implemented would require separate research, but based at least on courses organized for EC(b)P CC functionaries, it can be noted that Estonians from the Soviet Union were also interested in learning Estonian.53 Returning to the language proficiency specified on the cadre registration forms, it should be added that the listing of languages spoken, as well as the appraisal of the level of mastery of a particular language, were subjective. What one wrote on the cadre registration form concerning language skills was subject only to one’s own conscience, because language proficiency was not measured or checked. Surely there was no practical need for this kind of procedure, because 52 Aivar Jürgenson has written on the problem of bilingualism among Estonians from Siberia. See Aivar Jürgenson, Siberi eestlaste territoriaalsus ja identiteet (Territoriality and Identity of Siberian Estonians) (PhD-thesis, Tallinn, 2002), pp. 192–4. 53 Liivik, Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee aparaat, p. 81.

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this information was not used in the important cadre statistics or in drawing up cadre statements. Sometimes summary data was presented by Party and state institutions in cadre reports, but this was not a consistent undertaking.54 The limited use of data on language proficiency can probably partially explain why some members of the Sovmin left the spaces provided for detailing language skills blank. Furthermore, some individuals undoubtedly lied or exaggerated about their proficiency in languages when filling out their cadre registration forms. Thus, it is no surprise that the picture of language proficiency among members of Sovmin is inconsistent and even contradictory. Numerous functionaries who claimed to know Russian and one or more additional foreign languages in addition to Estonian worked in the institutions of power in the Estonian SSR in the 1940s and early 1950s. Local Estonians marked either German or English more frequently on the cadre registration forms, but due to their origin or work-related experience, Estonians who came from the Soviet Union might also have been familiar with the language of some small ethnic group in Russia.55 There were no Estonian members of the Estonian SSR government during the first postwar decade who did not know Estonian, according to the cadre registration forms, though there were some who assessed their language proficiency as “poor.” It must be considered in interpreting data on language proficiency that a member of the government could complete the cadre registration form upon taking up a nomenklatura position in the ECP CC or a leading position in the Council of Ministers system but not necessarily upon becoming a member of the Sovmin. The functionary’s language proficiency could improve between the time he was approved for a nomenklatura position and the time that he became a member of the Sovmin. A review of hundreds of personal files of members of the Estonian SSR government and functionaries in the ECP CC apparatus indicates that the proficiency of some Estonians from the Soviet Union in Estonian improved according to their personal documents. It is not prudent, however, to make far-reaching conclusions from this fact, because there is relatively little data for comparison: there is only one cadre registration form in most personal files, and for some of the members of the republic’s government, either the Party file or the Council of Ministers’ Main Administration file has not been preserved. If we were to attempt 54 Reports from 1945 and 1953 on the language skills of Party functionaries have been preserved. See ibid., pp. 76–7. 55 Vsevolod Generalov, who worked briefly as a school teacher in his youth in Bashkiria, wrote on his “form” that he knew how to speak a little Bashkirian. Vsevolod Generalov’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 10553, l. 3–5.

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nevertheless to explain the improvement in the level of proficiency of Estonians from the Soviet Union in their mother tongue, three versions can be proposed. The level of proficiency in Estonian of Estonians from the Soviet Union could indeed have improved; over the years, a self-critical attitude could have faded depending on self-esteem; or incorrect information was simply entered concerning language proficiency according to someone’s recommendation or at their own initiative. According to the personal files of the ECP CC nomenklatura and the ESSR’s Council of Ministers Main Administration, 15 members of the government can be identified who indicated on the cadre registration form (or forms) in one or both files that their knowledge of Estonian was “poor” when they were members of the Sovmin or during the preceding years (see Table 3). With two exceptions, these Estonians from the Soviet Union were promoted to membership in the Council of Ministers either at the end of the 1940s or in the 1950s. It is also worth mentioning that of the nine Estonians from the Soviet Union appointed to the Sovmin in the 1950s after Stalin’s death, nearly half considered their knowledge of Estonian to be poor upon their arrival in Estonia and this could subsequently have been appraised more favorably. For some reason, Karl Vaino, who was appointed to the Sovmin in 1959, was not among those Estonians. At the end of the 1950s, he assured the Sovmin that he knew Estonian very well, even though many people who came into contact with him acknowledged that he had great difficulty speaking Estonian and he most likely could not properly read Estonian, not to mention writing it.56 Even though the ability to speak, read, and write Estonian was ordinarily not differentiated, in the extant cadre registration forms on which language skills are recorded in detail, ethnic Estonians with poor knowledge of Estonian stated that they understood Estonian and could manage to communicate in that language but did not know how to write or read properly. The private and official letters written by Estonians from the Soviet Union provide indirect evidence of this, since they are written in Russian. Some Estonian members of the Sovmin from the Soviet Union may have been more self-critical regarding language proficiency than their colleagues. This applies primarily to Adolf Lõhmus, whose biographical data suggests that he would not have been among the government functionaries with “poor” knowledge of Estonian. He was born in Saaremaa in 1894 into an Estonian family and studied at the local primary school. It is unclear from his personal documents whether he

56 Much has been written about Karl Vaino’s poor command of Estonian and his antipathy to his mother tongue. See, for instance, Mati Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek (Kalevipoeg’s Return Home) (Tallinn, 2008), pp. 35–6.

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studied only in Russian in primary school or if he was initially able to study in his mother tongue. If he had studied only in Russian, he might have had difficulties in writing in Estonian. Otherwise, he would have certainly acquired elementary literacy in Estonian from primary school. Nevertheless, while working in Estonia in the postwar years—both in the 1940s and 1950s—he did not complete a single form or write any applications or other kind of representation in Estonian. Preference for Russian naturally does not preclude literacy in Estonian. Nevertheless, it can be surmised that he at least felt uncertain in writing in Estonian and preferred to use Russian, which he knew better. Adolf Lõhmus’s biography suggests that he first entered a Russian-speaking environment in 1908, at the age of 14, when he moved to the multiethnic border town of Narva. He ended up in Russia in 1915, at the age of 21, when he settled down in Moscow after serving in the army for a few months. He married a Russian, and their children naturally attended a school that taught in Russian. His official and private sphere became entirely Russian-speaking in Moscow, as was typical for most Estonians from the Soviet Union who lived in cities and were married to non-Estonians. Lõhmus was nevertheless not completely cut off from his ethnicity, because by the time of the war, he attracted the attention of the ESSR’s leadership due to his ethnic origin. In the spring of 1944, he was invited to leave his position as managing director of the sausage factory in the city of Engels to serve as the head of the Estonian SSR Main Administration for the Meat and Dairy Industry.57 Peeter Raudsepp, whose father was Estonian and mother was Latvian and who was born in Heinaste58 on the ethnic periphery of Estonians in Livland, identified himself as an Estonian.59 On a form he filled out in Moscow in 1944, he indicated that he understood Estonian only in speech and acknowledged that he had forgotten Latvian.60 It can be presumed that Raudsepp used Estonian more than Latvian in his childhood, because he started attending the Pärnu61 Gymnasium (high school) in 1908. He did not graduate from that school, since, because of the war, he was evacuated to Kharkov in 1915, where he completed high school the following year. He remained in Russia and joined the Red Army in 1918, where he served until 1944. Like Adolf Lõhmus, he presumably also came into contact once again with an Estonian-speaking environment only in 1944, when he arrived back in Estonia.62 57 58 59 60 61 62

Adolf Lõhmus’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 1735, l. 3–5. Ainaži in Latvian. Peeter Raudsepp’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 8431, l. 3–7. Ibid., p. 7. A town in North Livland with a majority of ethnic Estonians. Ibid., pp. 3–7, 11–6.

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Position

1954–57 minister of public utilities and services; Arseni Blum 1958–63 minister of local industry 1952–75 minister of health August Goldberg care 1956 minister of the textile industry, 1956–57 minister of light industry, 1957–65 Vladimir Käo deputy chairman of the ESSR Council of the State Economy 1954–57 minister of the food Vladimir Lipp commodities industry 1949–53 minister of the food industry, 1953–54 minister of the food commodities Adolf Lõhmus industry, 1954–57 minister of the meat and dairy products industry 1952–53, 1953–57 minister Aleksander of sovkhozes, 1953 minister Mette of agriculture and stockpiling 1952–75 deputy chairman of Georg Nellis the Council of Ministers 1951–53 minister of Ivan Oja agriculture

Year of birth

Place of birth

1915

Omsk

1908

Tomsk Province

1924

Petrograd

1904

Gatchina

1894

Livland Province, Saaremaa

1913

St. Petersburg Province, Iamburg raion

1906

St. Petersburg

1909

Kutaisi Province, village of Lower-Linda

63 Arseni Blum’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 43; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 10295; August Goldberg’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 10566; Vladimir Käo’s personal file, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 808; Adolf Lõhmus’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 281; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 1735; Aleksander Mette’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 325; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4584; Georg Nellis’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 843; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4599; Ivan Oja’s personal file, ERA, f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 374; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 12515; Lembit Pärn’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 2844; Richard Sibul’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 13528; Anatoli Tihane’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 597; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 3813; Johannes Tomberg’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 607; ERAF, f. 1, n. 6, s. 14140; Albert Vendelin’s personal file, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 677; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 14512; Rudolf Vester’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 472.

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Name

Position

Lembit Pärn

1945–5164 minister of state defense/armed forces

1944–46 acting people’s commissar for the Peeter Raudsepp construction and building materials industry 1958–79 minister of Richard Sibul automobile transportation and highways

Year of birth

Place of birth

1903

Stavropol Province, village of Esto-Khaginskij

1897

Livland Province, Ainaži

1914

Novonikolaevsk Pskov Province, Novorzhevskii raion Stavropol Province, village of Esto-Khaginskii

Anatoli Tihane

1950–67 minister of finance

1900

Johannes Tomberg

1949–53 minister of the fishing industry

1911

Albert Vendelin

1952–57 deputy chairman of the ESSR Council of Ministers

1914

Petrograd

Rudolf Vester

1950–63 minister of commerce

1909

St. Petersburg Province, Gdovsky raion

64

Lembit Pärn, Johannes Tomberg, and Ivan Oja, who were born in Estonian villages in Russia, had to have relatively good command of Estonian. They presumably acquired at least their primary education in Estonian, because from the end of 1904 onward, Russia implemented a more liberal nationalities policy, which restored the practice of teaching in the various ethnic languages in village schools after, for a time, it was conducted in Russian.65 Lembit Pärn, the oldest of the three, attended a three-grade village school in the northern Caucasus in the prosperous Estonian settlement of Esto-Khaginskii, continued his education at progymnasium and thereafter at gymnasium (secondary school), but remained more or less connected to his home neighborhood until 1922.66 As he recalled, the language of 64 Lembit Pärn formally served as minister until 1951. He was dismissed on January 20, 1951, according to an enactment by the ESSR’s Supreme Soviet Presidium. See Enactment concerning the dismissal of Lieutenant General of the Guard Lembit, son of Abram, Pärn from the duties of Estonian SSR Minister of War, 20 January 1951, ERA f. R-3, n. 3, s. 1561, l. 1. 65 Jürgenson, Siberi eestlaste territoriaalsus ja identiteet, p. 233. 66 Karl Aru and Fjodor Paulman, Meie kindral (Our General) (Tallinn, 1984), pp. 9–14.

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instruction in the village school was both Russian and Estonian in the first two classes.67 Several decades later, when General Pärn served as commander of the Estonian Rifle Corps,68 his Estonian was assessed as flawless.69 Johannes Tomberg was born in the same village as Lembit Pärn but was seven years younger than the future general. Information on his knowledge of his mother tongue during the postwar period is contradictory. In the winter of 1948, he stated that his knowledge of Estonian was “poor” in filling in documents for the Main Administration of the Council of Ministers, but in January of the following year, he assured the ECP CC that his language proficiency was “good.”70 Similarly, the information concerning Ivan Oja’s proficiency in Estonian is contradictory. On the ECP CC nomenklatura file cadre registration form filled out on December 9, 1948, he confirmed that his knowledge of Estonian was “poor.” Yet when filling out documents for the Main Administration of the Council of Ministers on April 6, 1948, he assessed his knowledge of Estonian as “good.”71 Since Oja was born in an Estonian village in Abkhazia, he had to at least speak Estonian fluently. Aside from Tomberg and Oja, there were other Estonians from the Soviet Union who submitted contradictory information concerning their knowledge of Estonian over a brief period of time. As if copying Ivan Oja, Albert Vendelin stated to the EC(b)P CC on August 9, 1952, after being promoted to deputy chairman of the ESSR’s Sovmin, that his knowledge of Estonian was “poor.” Yet in filling out the cadre registration form for the Main Administration of the Council of Ministers on November 18, 1952, he claimed that his knowledge of Estonian was “good.”72 It is hardly likely that Ivan Oja’s proficiency in Estonian had worsened in the space of a few months while that of Albert Vendelin improved. It can be presumed that both men knew how to speak Estonian properly but not how to write or perhaps even read Estonian. At least, there is not a single document in the personal files of Ivan Oja and Albert Vendelin that was filled out or composed in Estonian.

67 Lembit Pärn, Sõjakeerises: mälestused (Turmoil of War: Memories) (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1968), p. 10. 68 Lembit Pärn was commander of the Eighth Estonian Rifle Corps in the Red Army from 1942 to 1945. 69 Eduard Soorsk, Mälestused (Memoirs) (Tallinn, 2006), p. 122. 70 Johannes Tomberg’s personal files, ERA f. R-1, n. 2, s. 607, l. 4–5v; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 14140, l. 3–5v. 71 Ivan Oja’s personal files, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 12515, l. 6v; ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 374, l. 7v. 72 Albert Vendelin’s personal files, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 14512, l. 8v; ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 677, l. 13v.

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The case of Johannes Tomberg differs somewhat from that of Ivan Oja and Albert Vendelin, because the interval between filling out his cadre registration forms was nearly one year. Several factors may have affected his language proficiency. The first was his rise on the career ladder. At the beginning of 1948, he was a departmental head and chief engineer at the ESSR’s Ministry of the Fishing Industry, but when he filled out his cadre registration form for the Party in 1949, he was already the deputy minister of the fishing industry. Second, it cannot be ruled out that he initially assessed his language proficiency in more general terms, taking into account writing, reading, and speech, while the second time, he referred to his proficiency in speaking Estonian, which could have been flawless in his case, since he was born in the same Estonian village in Russia as Lembit Pärn. Tomberg’s Estonian writing ability, however, could have been completely lacking, or else primitive. A biographical description from early 1949 indicates that Tomberg completed an eight-grade secondary school in Iki-Chonos in 1930.73 This village is located near Esto-Khaginskii, but considering the name of the settlement, it can be assumed that there was no school there in which the language of instruction was Estonian. Consequently, J. Tomberg acquired his education at the end of the 1920s in the Russian language, and if he did not complete primary school where the language of instruction was Estonian (concerning which there is no information), it is likely that he did not know how to write in Estonian. Another two ministers’ improvement in proficiency in Estonian during the first postwar decade can also be ascertained on the basis of cadre registration forms. Both Vladimir Lipp, who became minister of the food commodities industry in 1954, and Richard Sibul, who was appointed minister of automobile transportation and highways in 1958, considered their proficiency in Estonian to be mediocre after arriving in Estonia in the mid-1940s. Yet in the mid-1950s they stated that they had a good command of Estonian.74 It is much more complicated to interpret Aleksander Mette’s level of proficiency in Estonia. In 1947, he wrote on the cadre registration form he submitted to the EC(b)P CC that his knowledge of Estonian was good, but on the corresponding form he submitted to the Council of Ministers in 1952, he considered his proficiency in the language to be poor.75 It is not plausible that after he served 73 Johannes Tomberg’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 14140, l. 8–9. 74 Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, pp. 382–3; Vladimir Lipp’s personal file, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 273, l. 8v; Richard Sibul’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 13528, l. 9–13. 75 Aleksander Mette’s personal files, ERA f. R-1 n. 2k, s. 325, l. 8v; ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4584, l. 9v.

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in Estonian “national” military units during the war and later as the managing director of a sovkhoz and the secretary of a raion committee, Mette’s command of Estonian deteriorated. Working in the centers of raions and in rural districts had to have given him sufficient practice in Estonian, so by all rights his proficiency in the language should have increased. The proficiency in Estonian of two members of the Sovmin did not change, according to their cadre registration forms. Anatoli Tihane indicated on both cadre registration formsthat he completed in 1948 and 1950 and that were submitted to the EC(b)P CC and the Main Administration of the Council of Ministers respectively that his proficiency in Estonian was “poor.”76 Information concerning the language proficiency of Georg Nellis derives from two cadre registration forms, the first of which was completed in 1949 and the second of which was from 1952.77 On both forms, Nellis stated that his knowledge of Estonian was poor. He could have made separate assessments of his verbal and writing skills. Since his education was in Russian, he no doubt had trouble writing in Estonian. Yet it is not known how well he knew Estonian when he became deputy chairman of the ESSR Sovmin in 1952, because no letters or applications in Estonian can be found among his personal documents from the period under consideration.78 Rudolf Vester, who was promoted to the post of minister of agriculture in 1950, described his proficiency in Estonian more precisely. On the cadre registration form he filled out for the EC(b)P CC, he stated that his ability to read and write in Estonian was poor but that he could speak it well.79 On the other hand, Vladimir Käo, who became a member of the ESSR Sovmin in the mid-1950s, indicated that his command of Estonian was poorer than his command of Russian. He admitted that he could understand Estonian but had difficulty reading it.80 Most Estonian members of the Sovmin from the Soviet Union in the postwar period were sent to Estonia in 1944–45 or were demobilized from the Red Army. The situation was different for two Estonians from the Soviet Union who were

76 Anatoli Tihane’s personal files, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 3813, l. 4v; ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 597, l. 5. 77 Georg Nellis’s personal files, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4599, l. 7–10v; ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 843, l. 4–7v. 78 Nellis’s correspondence as a representative in the Supreme Soviet provides a certain picture of his lack of writing habits in Estonian. He wrote resolutions in Russian on most letters in Estonian that were sent to Estonian officials to be filled out. See Georg Nellis’s personal collection, ERA f. R-2305, n. 1, s. 3–9. 79 Rudolf Vester’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 472, p. 3. 80 Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee, p. 318; Vladimir Käo’s personal file, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 808, l. 8v.

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appointed to ministerial positions in the first half of the 1950s. Arseni Blum, who became a member of the Sovmin in 1954, was sent to the ESSR from Belorussia in 1949. As was habitual in the case of ethnic Estonians summoned to work in leading positions in the ESSR, the ESSR leadership, in requesting approval from Moscow, stressed that Arseni Blum was Estonian by ethnicity.81 He was undoubtedly Estonian according to the relevant documents. However, having been born in Omsk in 1915 and raised as the son of a railcar factory lathe turner, Blum seemed to be completely Russified. Otherwise this highway engineer, who went to work in Gomel, Belorussia, in 1943 would have been noticed by the ESSR earlier, or Blum himself would have displayed interest in Estonia, where there was a severe shortage of reliable cadres loyal to the Soviet regime. On all the cadre registration forms that he filled out in the late 1940s and in the first half of the 1950s, A. Blum consistently wrote “poor” in the space provided for proficiency in Estonian, though he did not specify to what extent he knew Estonian at all. Minister of Health Care August Goldberg was another completely Russified Estonian from the Soviet Union. He grew up in the family of a poor peasant in Tomsk Province. He graduated from the Tomsk Institute of Medicine in 1937 and had a successful professional career in Krasnoiarsk krai. Before relocating to Estonia, Goldberg worked as the head of the health care department of the oblast executive committee in Krasnoiarsk krai. He apparently did not attract the attention of the Estonian SSR leadership until 1950, when it invited him to work in the Estonian health care system. Goldberg initially had no interest in the offer. EC(b)P CC Secretary Aleksander Jaanus had to contact the Khakasskii oblast committee twice to obtain the committee’s permission and Goldberg’s consent to accept a job in a leading position in Estonia. No reply came to the first letter. In the second letter sent in January 1951, Jaanus claimed that an “acute shortage of medical cadre who knew Estonian” prevailed in Estonia. This time the EC(b)P CC received a reply curtly stating that Goldberg had not agreed to come to Estonia.82 Soviet Deputy Minister of Health Care A. Beloussovtried to convince the reluctant Goldberg and informed the EC(b)P CC of the progress of the negotiations in May 1951.83 Goldberg apparently gave up resisting when Moscow intervened. The future minister arrived in Tallinn at the end of the summer of 1951. He was temporarily assigned to the post of deputy minister of health care, most likely to 81 A. Veimer’s letter to USSR Minister of Roads B. Betchev, 17 July 1949, Arseni Blum’s personal file, ERA f. R-1, n. 2k, s. 43, l. 6. 82 A. Jaanus to comrade Nemzhikov, 12 January 1951; Comrade Nemzhikov to A. Jaanus, 27 February 1951, August Goldberg’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 10566, l. 10, 11. 83 A. Beloussov to I. Käbin, 4 May 1951, ibid., l. 12.

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gain a better understanding of his capabilities, but in March 1952 he became the minister. A later deputy minister of health care, Oku Tamm, has recalled that when he took a job at the ministry in 1964, all work in the institution was conducted in Russian. According to Tamm, even colleagues had to communicate with each other in Russian.84 Regardless of the fact that there were Estonians from the Soviet Union among the members of the Estonian SSR government whose proficiency in Estonian was poor, the situation was better than in the republic’s Party organization. In the EC(b)P CC apparatus, where Estonians and Russians who had emigrated to Estonia accounted for 85% of all functionaries by 1945, there were communists among the ethnic Estonians who did not know any Estonian at all. Nikolai Allo and Nikolai Korri, who had served in succession as heads of the Central Committee Finance Economy Sector in the 1940s, were Estonians according to registration documents but had been completely Russified. They did not hide the fact that they did not know the language of their ancestors at all.85 In the 1940s, Estonians from the Soviet Union were readily sent to work in county Party committees. Generally speaking, Party employees in the counties had to communicate in Estonian on a daily basis, which created a challenge for quite a few Estonians from the Soviet Union. Sometimes they faced the choice of either learning Estonian at a satisfactory level or giving up and asking to be transferred to another job. The experienced economics employee Eduard Eiche, for instance, chose the path of least resistance, and his letters speak of his hesitance. Eiche was born in 1894 in Porkhov County in Pskov Province. After the re-occupation of Estonia, he became a typical Party functionary of local importance who was constantly shuffled from one place to another. In the years 1944–47, he managed in succession to nominally head the Petseri County Executive Committee and to serve as the chairman of the Järvamaa Executive Committee, the first secretary of the Tartu County Party Committee, and the chairman of the Pärnu County Executive Committee. While working as Party secretary in Tartu County in 1946, he sent an agonized letter to the EC(b) P CC Cadre Secretary Villem Kuusik asking to be released from Party work and transferred to “Soviet-economic work.” He complained that he lacked political education and that his preparation in terms of general education was poor. Eiche assessed his proficiency in Estonian as very poor, claiming that he only knew how to read in Estonian as much as he had learned independently while working

84 Helle Raidla, ‘Elav sõna ravib rohkem kui arstim’ (The Living Word Cures Better than Medicine), Elukiri (2010), no. 6, p. 21. 85 Liivik, Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee aparaat, pp. 72, 81–2.

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in Järvamaa. He admitted that he was incapable of giving political presentations in Estonian, since he did not know how to pronounce all the words.86 Eiche’s self-criticism laced with self-pity was anything but what was expected from local leaders. To paraphrase David Feest’s metaphor concerning Party organizers in rural municipalities, the Party leader in the county was ideally supposed to be the general of the county.87 In other words, he was supposed to be the local authority and example. The reality was nevertheless different. Many functionaries lacked leadership traits or were found wanting in initiative and self-confidence. Whether or not they admitted this to themselves, burned-out functionaries sooner or later had to find work that was more suited to their abilities. Estonians from the Soviet Union whose knowledge of Estonian was poor could work in organizations and agencies where it was not necessary to work and communicate in the local language. Most of the members of the government of Russian ethnicity and representatives of all other nationalities were sent to Estonia from the Soviet Union. The exceptions were Dmitrii Kuzmin, who served as minister of social insurance in 1953–58, and Aleksei Shiskin, who was appointed head of the ESSR Council of Ministers Main Administration for State Vocational Education in 1959. They were both Russians from Estonia and were fluent in Estonian. Compared to Estonians from the Soviet Union, non-Estonian members of the Sovmin sent to the ESSR had greater experience in administrative work in the state or Party apparatus. On the other hand, their language proficiency was poorer than that of the local cadre or of Estonians from the Soviet Union. Nikolai Krylov was of Russian nationality and had exceptional linguistic talent. He served as the minister of the local oil shale and chemical industry in 1950–53. He indicated on his cadre registration form that he had good command of Russian and Ukrainian and “poor” command of English, German, French, and Estonian.88 Aside from Krylov, there was one more functionary of Russian nationality in the Sovmin during the postwar period who stated knowledge of Estonian on his form. Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Konstantin Boitsov stated in early 1947 on the cadre registration form addressed to the EC(b)P CC that in addition to Russian, he had “poor” knowledge of both Estonian and German.89 It was very likely that Boitsov was not bragging about his command of the local language, because when he fell out of favor in 86 Eiche to the EC(b)P CC Bureau, 14 January 1946, Eduard Eiche’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4251, l. 40. 87 Feest, Zwangskollektivierung im Baltikum, p. 83. 88 Nikolai Krylov’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 6550, l. 2–4. 89 Konstantin Boitsov’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 5050, l. 5–7.

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1950, he was scolded for having started learning Estonian and for giving a speech in Estonian at a meeting.90 Formally speaking, three functionaries of other nationalities who, on the basis of knowledge of languages, can definitely be categorized as part of the Russianspeaking cadres were members of the ESSR Sovmin in 1940–60. According to registration documents, Minister of the Oil Shale and Chemical Industry Vassilii Matveev, of Mari nationality, knew his “mother tongue” a little.91 He was presumably sincere about his knowledge of the Mari language, because he was summoned from Estonia in 1948 to serve as the chairman of the Mari ASSR Council of Ministers.92 Command of the Mari language was obviously not a requirement for working in that position, but knowledge of the local language could nevertheless become decisive in making the final decision. The mother tongue of Moisei Asnini, who was of Jewish origin and served as ESSR Minister of Construction and the Building Materials Industry in 1948–50, was most likely Russian, but he also stated on his cadre registration form that he had “poor” knowledge of English and German.93 The third member of government of non-Russian nationality was the Ukrainian Valentin Moskalenko, who worked as the ESSR Minister of State Security and Internal Affairs in 1950–53, but there is no information on his knowledge of languages in his ECP CC and ESSR Council of Ministers personal file.

Summary The government of the Estonian SSR, the Sovmin, in the 1940s and 1950s can be characterized on the basis of its ethnic makeup as an organ of power made up of Estonians, in which the proportion of representatives of the republic’s indigenous people did not drop below 75%. There were significant differences between the prewar years of 1940–41 and the postwar period of 1945–60. During the first year of Soviet rule, the ESSR’s Council of People’s Commissars consisted exclusively of communists of Estonian ethnicity, but later functionaries of Russian ethnicity 90 Tõnurist, Traagiliste sündmuste aasta – Ausalt ja avameelselt EKP Keskkomitee VIII pleenumist, Karotammest ja Käbinist, hinge harimatusest: mõttevahetus Eesti Raadios (Year of Tragic Events – Honestly and Openly about the ECP Central Committee Eighth Plenum, Karotamm and Käbin, the Ignorance of the Soul: Exchange of Ideas on Estonian Radio), compiled by Ene Hion (Tallinn: Kirjastus Perioodika 1989), pp. 31– 62, here p. 58. 91 Vassili Matveev’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 7249, pp. 3–7. 92 Spravochnik po istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii i Sovetskogo Soiuza 1898–1991. (http://www.knowbysight.info/MMM/10154.asp, last accessed on September 8, 2014). 93 Moisei Asnin’s personal file, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4907, l. 3–5v.

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consistently held positions in the government. The staffing of the Sovmin was not based on the principle of a numerical balance between Estonians and nonEstonians. Such a balance was not an objective in staffing other leading positions in the republic either, as confirmed by statistics on the leading cadres in the Estonian SSR. According to the cadres’ place of origin, local Estonians were the most numerous in the ESSR Sovmin until the mid-1940s, but by the end of the decade, they had for the most part been replaced by Estonians from the Soviet Union. The proportion of cadres of non-local origin started growing in the latter half of the 1940s, surpassing locals for the first time in 1947. A sharp contrast prevailed between the local and non-local cadres in the early 1950s, when the proportion of functionaries of local origin in the Sovmin dropped to less than one-tenth. The proportion of the local cadre increased a little in the latter half of the decade, rising to one-third of the membership of the Sovmin by the end of the decade, which was nevertheless considerably less than in the 1940s. Most Estonians from the Soviet Union who had served as members of the Estonian SSR Sovmin had good command of Estonian, according to information from the relevant forms, even though quite a few Estonians with a Soviet background who stated that their knowledge of Estonian was “weak” also served as members of the Sovmin during the postwar decades. Most of them understood the language and were able to communicate in Estonian but had difficulty in reading and writing in Estonian. The poor language proficiency of Estonian members of the Sovmin from the Soviet Union unquestionably left its mark on the republic’s entire state and Party bureaucracy. Russian increasingly started being used in this bureaucracy as the language of meetings and of doing business in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The role of Russians in the republic’s leadership consequently appeared greater than it actually was. The fact that Estonians from the Soviet Union with poor knowledge of Estonian remained members of the ESSR Sovmin, and even increased their numbers there, in the mid- and late 1950s could not significantly strengthen the position of the Estonian language in the republic’s administration, despite the fact that the central authorities in Moscow expressed increased support for the use of Estonian. Regardless of this, by fostering the ethnic cadres, the central authorities in Moscow clearly signaled that there were no plans to “internationalize” the administration of the republic with non-Estonians. At the same time, it is obvious that the visible preference of Estonians from the Soviet Union was the cornerstone of the cadre policy of the central authorities in Moscow, leading to several simultaneous effects. First of all, this made it possible to create the illusion that the republic was run by Estonians. Second, the extensive use of functionaries

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with Soviet backgrounds who grew up in the Soviet Union helped to dislodge Estonians with a “bourgeois” background from the administration of the republic. Third, the preference of Estonians from the Soviet Union encouraged them to completely support the policy of Sovietization. The last aspect, which was of no little importance, was the integration into Estonian society of Estonians sent to this ethnic Soviet republic.

Meelis Saueauk

The “Estonian Affair” in the Context of Late-Stalinist Party Purges Abstract: This article explores Party purges that took place in the postwar years in the Estonian SSR in comparison to similar actions in the Soviet Union (the “Leningrad Affair”) and in Eastern Bloc satellites (including the “Kostov Affair” in Bulgaria and the “Rajk Affair” in Hungary) and highlights the differences as well as commonalities in how repressions were carried out.

In the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union made concerted efforts to Sovietize the territories it had incorporated (the Baltic states, western Ukraine, and western Belorussia), as well as the countries of Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria). Methods of terror were used abundantly in this violent, Stalinist phase—mass repressions and purges of the Party, including the staging of show trials to intimidate the cadres that were in power and to expose “traitors” among them.1 The replacement of the leading cadre of the Estonian SSR that was carried out at the Eighth Plenum, or March Plenum, of the Estonian Communist (bolshevik) Party Central Committee (hereinafter abbreviated as the EC(b)P CC) in 1950 is the best-known episode of the postwar purge, known as the “Estonian Affair,” carried out in the Party organization in the Estonian SSR. The “Estonian Affair” has been associated with similar campaigns for purging the Party in the Soviet Union (such as the “Leningrad Affair”) and in its Eastern European satellites (for instance, the “Kostov Affair” in Bulgaria and

1 George Hermann Hodos, Schauprozesse: Stalinistische Säuberungen in Osteuropa, 1948–54 (Berlin, 1990); Hermann Weber and Ulrich Mählert (eds.), Terror: Stalinistische Parteisäuberungen 1935–1953 (Paderborn, 1998); Tat’iana Volokitina et al., Moskva i Vostochnaia Evropa: stanovlenie politicheskikh rezhimov sovetskogo tipa (1949–1953): ocherki istorii (Moscow, 2008); Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe (eds.), Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression (Manchester and New York, 2012). For collections of documents on this topic, see Galina Murashko (ed.), Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiiskikh arkhivov 1944–1953 gg. T. 1–2, 1944–1948 (MoscowNovosibirsk, 1997–1998); Tat’iana Volokitina (ed.), Sovetskii faktor v Vostochnoi Evrope 1944–1953, T. 1, 1944–1948: dokumenty (Moscow, 1999); idem (ed.), Sovetskii faktor v Vostochnoi Evrope 1944–1953, T. 2, 1949–1953: dokumenty (Moscow, 2002).

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the “Rajk Affair” in Hungary, all in 1949).2 In this article, I compare the “Estonian Affair” to these and other purges of the Party in the late Stalinist period, primarily considering their organizational aspects, including the role of the Soviet Union’s intelligence and security service, or the “Soviet state security organ”—the Ministry of State Security (MGB)—and attempting to find differences as well as commonalities.3 The fact that such common aspects existed could be detected from the Estonian SSR Minister of State Security’s speech at the 1952 Party Congress and from other allusions, but I will return to them later. By purges of the Party,4 I mean in this paper the part of the Stalinist terror, undertakings of a repressive nature, carried out in campaigns against members of the Communist Party or (in Eastern Europe) members of pro-Soviet parties supporting those in power. These undertakings could include the deliberation of a Party member’s “personal case,” dismissal from work or from elective office, imposition of penalties by the Party (up to expulsion from the Party), or arrest and repression (including conviction and penalization by incarceration or the death penalty). Thus, not everyone targeted in Party purges can be considered to have been repressed. Largely, the people affected “merely” lost their social position and the privileges that came with it. Because of this, those repressed in Party purges account for only a miniscule proportion—estimated at less than 1 percent—of all victims of Stalinist mass violence.5 The most sensational part of Party purges was the show trials of leading communists.6 The Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Union already had extensive experience in holding such trials from the 1920s and 1930s, when trials in Moscow targeted Party members opposed to Stalin. These have been considered part of 2 Еlena Zubkova, Pribaltika i Kreml’ 1940–1953 (Moscow, 2008). The Estonian translation of this book was used in this article: Jelena Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml 1940– 1953 (The Baltic Countries and the Kremlin 1940–1953) (Tallinn, 2009), p. 217. 3 On the role of the security organs in Sovietizing Eastern Europe, including the organization of show trials, see Nikita Petrov, Po stsenariiu Stalina: rol’ organov NKVD-MGB SSSR v sovetizatsii stran Tsentral’noi i Vostochnoi Evropy: 1945–1953 gg (Moscow, 2011). 4 The term “elite purges” has also been used in the relevant literature to express the same meaning, under the assumption that the members of the leading party formed society’s political, economic, and cultural elite. Given the way in which Party members came to power and their relative proportion in the society of that time, the use of the term “elite” is nevertheless problematic. 5 McDermott, Stibbe (eds.), Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe, pp. 11–2. 6 Concerning show trials in theory, see at greater length Klaus Marxen and Annette Weinke, eds., Inszenierungen des Rechts: Schauprozesse, Medienprozesse und Prozessfilme in der DDR (Berlin, 2006).

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the “Great Terror” or as a parallel campaign.7 Yet what distinguishes the postwar trials in Eastern Europe is the fact that while Stalin put his former Bolshevik comrades-in-arms on trial in the 1930s, now the target was Party members who as a rule were earnest Stalinists.8 In fact, there is no contradiction here. If we consider that Stalin hoped to turn the communist parties of Eastern Europe into “pocket parties” obedient to him, his heightened preoccupation with exposing all manner of “traitors” is understandable. Show trials nevertheless formed only the tip of the iceberg of Party purges. The initial and main target of the repressions was naturally the persons who impeded communists and other pro-Soviet forces from taking power. Considering the scant influence that the communists had, Stalin made tipping the scales of the forces in the new territories the first covert mission for the Soviet security organs that arrived together with the Red Army.9 The local state security services and other repressive institutions being formed were meant to assist the Soviets in this work. The Soviets tried to channel Eastern European communists into the service of these new local institutions to bring them under Soviet control.10 The methods of the Soviet Union’s security organs for establishing control over Eastern European communist state security services became control over the hiring of personnel, cadre training in the Soviet Union, the presence of an agency of advisors dispatched from the Soviet Union, and methodological instructions concerning organization and the management of work, in which the latter often

7 See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York and Oxford, 1990); J. Arch Getty, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven-London, 1999); Stephane Courtois et al., Kommunismi must raamat: kuriteod, terror, repressioonid (The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression) (Tallinn, 2000); Leonid Naumov, Stalin i NKVD (Moscow, 2007); Vladimir Khaustov and Lennart Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD i repressii 1936–1938 gg (Moscow, 2009); Oleg Khlevniuk, Khoziain: Stalin i utverzhdenie stalinskoi diktatury (Moscow, 2010), and many others. 8 McDermott, Stibbe (eds.), Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe, p. 10; Hodos, Schauprozesse, p. 10. 9 On the role of the security organs based on the example of Estonia, see Meelis Saueauk, Nõukogude julgeolekuorganite ja Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei koostöö Eesti sovetiseerimisel aastatel 1944–1953 (Cooperation between the Soviet Security Organs and the Estonian Communist Party in Sovietizing Estonia in 1944–1953) (PhD thesis, Tartu, 2013). 10 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2006). The Estonian translation of this book is used in this article: Pärast sõda: Euroopa ajalugu 1945. aastast (Tallinn, 2007), pp. 145–7.

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copied the Soviet Union’s model.11 However, some have also interpreted repressions as a way of finding Party unity, and even national unity.12 It is not surprising that in such interpretations, the role of the Soviet security organs is mostly relegated to the background. Typically in this case, an entirely different picture of Party purges takes shape, in which power struggle within the Party emerges as the main argument. Party purges began when communist parties attained sole power in their own country or territory with the help of the Soviet Union. The official grounds given for initiating the purges must be examined critically. In most cases, a local factor was also involved in the form of friction between regional leaders, their zeal as earnest Stalinists, or some other reason that the Soviet leadership also tried to use. It should be noted that trials were not held according to the same pattern everywhere. The fact that some new Eastern European communist governments immediately started taking steps that they did not coordinate with Moscow, including establishing bilateral relations (such as the agreement between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia), irritated the Kremlin. This attitude reflects Stalin’s position that any initiative not coordinated with Moscow was out of the question. In the late winter of 1948, the All-Union Communist Party (hereinafter abbreviated using the Russian abbreviation VK[b]P) Central Committee headed by Mikhail Suslov began drawing up confidential overviews of the communist parties in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in which the prevalent accusation was nationalism and the underestimation of the Soviet Union’s role. At the same time, Bulgaria’s leader Georgi Dimitrov and Romania’s Party leaders were also subjected to severe criticism.13 Similar critical reports based on supervisory visits were also drawn up concerning the Estonian SSR at the beginning of 1948. Stalin began initiating Party purges in Eastern Europe in connection with the crisis in Soviet-Yugoslav relations, which became publicly known in February 1948 and was confirmed in June, when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau). Yugoslavia and its leader Josif Broz Tito had set a precedent for those Eastern European nationalist communists who hoped to carry out their own national revolutions and establish communism without the dictate of Moscow. For this reason, “nationalism” was no longer treated as a local threat but rather as the primary enemy. Yugoslavia’s “deviations” were condemned using the same

11 Petrov, Po stsenariiu Stalina, p. 12. 12 Volokitina et al., Moskva i Vostochnaia Evropa, p. 25. 13 Ibid., pp. 499–501.

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term at the Cominform meeting in June 1948. In response to “Titoism,” the Soviet Union started a “second wave” of arrests, purge campaigns and, above all, political show trials in Eastern Europe. This corresponded to the Party purges of the 1930s, when Stalin aspired to gain absolute power.14 “Titoism” became a kind of symbol and a pretext, like “Trotskyism” or other “deviations” from the mainstream Party line had been in their time, which in practice were perceived or emphasized by Stalin and the Soviet leadership as heresy. The attitude towards Tito became the litmus test in assessing the attitudes of the communist parties of other countries. Initially, Albania was designated the necessary scapegoat country. Koçi Xoxe, the secretary of the Albanian Communist Party Central Committee and member of the Central Committee Bureau, minister of internal affairs and head of the state security organ, was made the scapegoat politician there, since he had made no secret of his support for independent Albanian policy similar to that of Yugoslavia. When the Xoxe question was deliberated at the Albanian Communist Party Central Committee Plenum in September 1948, he was accused of making overtures to Yugoslavia and distancing Albania from the Soviet Union. Yet he was also accused of placing the Ministry of Internal Affairs higher than the Party and of adhering to the position that the Ministry of Internal Affairs should control the work of the Party. Right at that point, surveillance, denunciations, and mass recruitment of a network of agents (including from among Party members), in other words the creation of an atmosphere of terror, had earned widespread criticism among Party members. The plenum assessed the actions of the security organs as high-handedness and violence against the population and communists. Thus, the ambivalent relations between the security organs and the Party could be used against Xoxe, which is what one of his rivals, Albania’s Communist Party leader Enver Hoxha, readily did. Xoxe was first dismissed from his post, then expelled from the Party, arrested, put on trial in May and June 1949 (admittedly in camera), and sentenced to death. The end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949 mark the turning point when the Soviet leadership abandoned its softer policy, associated with Andrei Zhdanov, and returned to the methods of force from the 1930s, where fabricated charges and sensational show trials accounted for a substantial portion of the campaigns of the VK(b)P CC. First, Soviet institutions located in each particular Eastern European country sent large quantities of information bulletins to Moscow that reported on the “nationalism” and “underestimation of the role of the Soviet Union” of local Party leaders or “espionage” on behalf of Yugoslavia or Tito that 14 Judt, Pärast sõda, pp. 192–4.

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those Party leaders conducted. It was precisely such notices that set in motion the “Traicho Kostov Affair” in Bulgaria and the “László Rajk Affair” in Hungary in 1949.15 Since these are the most important cases in contextualizing the Party purge carried out in Estonia, I will describe them below in greater detail.16 In May 1948, the Soviet military adviser in Bulgaria sent information to Moscow on some Bulgarian communists, including member of the Bulgarian Communist Party Politburo and deputy prime minister Traicho Kostov, reporting that they “underestimated the role of the Soviet Union in liberating Bulgaria.” In December 1948, Stalin criticized Kostov at their meeting in Moscow, and that notice was sent to Bulgaria as well. One of the main points of the criticism was the fact that the sharing of information on what was taking place in Bulgaria with representatives of the Soviet Union was not permitted. Soviet representatives considered this a show of hostility. In this instance, discrimination was not based so much on actual hostility but rather on where a given Bulgarian communist was during the war. Thus, those who had been in the rear area in the Soviet Union (such as Georgi Dimitrov) were considered trustworthy, while those who had remained underground in Bulgaria (such as Kostov) were considered hostile. In March 1949, Kostov was expelled from the Politburo, and some of his co-workers were arrested. The Kremlin officially announced that it had not requested Kostov’s expulsion. When Dimitrov died, Stalin secretly placed Kostov’s fate in the hands of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s “Moscow group,” meaning the communists who had lived in the Soviet Union. The Bulgarian minister of internal affairs discussed the Kostov case with Stalin and Minister of the MGB Abakumov, after which Operation “Doctor” began. On Stalin’s orders, the deputies of the head of the USSR MGB department for investigating matters of particular importance, colonels Lev Shvartzman (who was known in Sofia as “General Chernov”) and Mikhail Likhachov, were sent to Bulgaria in early June 1949. Kostov was expelled from the Party for “nationalist deviations,” “anti-Soviet attitudes,” and other such charges at the Bulgarian CP CC Plenum on June 11. He was arrested on June 20, 1949. The deputy minister of the MGB, Lieutenant General Sergei Ogoltsov,was sent to Sofia to extort “evidence” of “Titoism.” He was also assigned the task of providing security for the trial. Units of a division of the MGB interior forces—over 15 Volokitina et al., Moskva i Vostochnaia Evropa, p. 518. 16 I have primarily used the following sources as the basis for this description: Petrov, Po stsenariiu Stalina; Volokitina et al., Moskva i Vostochnaia Evropa; Galina Murashko and Al’bina Noskova, ‘Sovetskoe rukovodstvo i politicheskie protsessy T. Kostova i L. Raika’, Aleksandr Chubar’ian (ed.), Stalinskoe desiatiletie kholodnoi voiny: fakty i gipotezy (Moscow, 1999).

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4,000 soldiers in all—were sent to Bulgaria in civilian clothes. A campaign began in which members of the Bulgarian military were arrested, primarily “Yugoslavian officers.” Even before the beginning of the show trial, the statement of charges was coordinated in Moscow. The trial was held in Sofia in December 1949. Even though Kostov had been tortured into confessing to spying for Great Britain in connection with prewar Bulgarian fascists and in conspiracy with Tito, he retracted his confession in court. Nevertheless, he was convicted on December 14, 1949, sentenced to death, and hanged two days later. He was charged with being a British and American spy and working as a henchman of Tito. Kostov’s retraction of his confession at the trial established an unfavorable precedent. Thus the decision was made to prevent this sort of thing from being repeated. The problem was solved by reading out in court the confessions extracted from Kostov during the preliminary investigation. Around 100 Party members were on trial along with Kostov. A total of 100,000 members of the Bulgarian CP, however, were under investigation or surveillance in 1948–53. All leading officials of the security organs were completely replaced by 1950.17 A Party purge was also in progress in Hungary in parallel with the “Kostov Affair.” This was known as the “László Rajk Affair.” Since this trial and the participation of Soviet security organs in it are well documented and detailed in historical literature, let us consider it in further detail. As minister of internal affairs, Rajk played a leading role in mass repressions from 1946 until August 1948. He thereafter served as minister of foreign affairs until the time of his arrest. He was essentially the number-two figure in the Communist Party (the Hungarian Workers’ Party until 1948), just as Kostov had been in the Bulgarian Communist Party. He had been a member of the Communist Party since 1931 and had participated in the Spanish Civil War. Yet, unlike many other Eastern European communists, he had not spent the war in the rear area in the Soviet Union but rather in France and Czechoslovakia. According to a statement from Cominform, during his time as minister of internal affairs, Rajk had tried in every possible way to remove communists who had been in the Soviet Union from working in his ministry, refused the assistance of Soviet advisers at the ministry, and even demanded that their networks of agents be placed under his control. He had also allegedly demanded that the ministry’s Party organization be disbanded. Clouds started gathering above Rajk when the leader of the Hungarian Communist Party Mátyás Rákosi, who claimed to be “Stalin’s best pupil” and wanted to promote the exposure of

17 Jordan Baev, ‘Stalinist Terror in Bulgaria 1944–1956’, McDermott, Stibbe (eds.), Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe, pp. 180–97.

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“Titoists” in Hungary, received information in the spring of 1949 alleging that Rajk had been the contact person of U.S. intelligence in Switzerland in 1945. This information was provided under interrogation by Tibor Szönyi, who had been arrested primarily on the basis of Noel Field’s confessions.18 Rajk was arrested on May 30, 1949. Although the Hungarian security organs carried out the investigation very forcefully under the supervision of Rákosi himself, Rákosi soon asked the Soviet security emissary to provide assistance in the investigation. As a result, the head of the Central Army Group MGB Counterintelligence Administration Lieutenant General Mikhail Belkin, residing in Vienna, and departmental head of the USSR MGB Second Main Administration Nikolai Makarov were sent to Budapest by Stalin’s order on June 20, 1949. The charges that Rákosi had planned were immediately forwarded to Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov in Moscow, who passed them on to Stalin. MGB operatives repeatedly and thoroughly interrogated the defendants and witnesses personally to make sure that they would stick with the confessions they had previously made. They also worked with prison cell agents for the same objective, and these informers continually passed on information concerning the moods and attitudes of the prisoners under investigation. Similarly, prosecutors, evidentiary material, and materials for radio and the press were prepared in cooperation with Hungarian security personnel, and the trial’s venue was prepared. Rákosi went to Moscow to coordinate the summary of charges with the Soviet leadership. As a result of the same meeting, Stalin made the decision to send 12 permanent MGB advisers to Hungary. The trial of Rajk and seven other defendants took place September 16–24, 1949, in Budapest. Belkin and Makarov continued the work in “preparing” the defendants, prosecutors, and judges even though Rákosi’s wish to run the proceedings often proved to be a hindrance for them. Rákosi coordinated the court verdict with Stalin in advance. Among other things, Rajk confessed in court that Yugoslav intelligence had recruited him in 1946 by threatening to expose his collaboration with Hungarian Nazis during the war. Rajk and two other defendants were sentenced to death on September 24, 1949, and were hanged on October 16, 1949. Party purges in Eastern Europe that included show trials are divided into two different categories. Campaigns against “Titoists” and “nationalist deviants” in Albania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, all three of which bordered on Yugoslavia, are 18 For further information about Noel Field and his participation, see Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 1990), 337–345; Bernd Rainer Barth and Werner Schweizer (eds.), Der Fall Noel Field: Schlüsselfigur der Schauprozesse in Osteuropa, vols. 1–2 (Berlin, 2005; 2007).

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part of the first wave (1948–49). At the same time, Party purges were also carried out elsewhere (Poland, East Germany, and other countries), but events did not extend to show trials. The anti-Semitic trials held according to Stalin’s example in 1950–53 in Romania, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia are considered part of the second wave. In these, communists primarily of Jewish origin were accused of being “Zionists” and “cosmopolitanists.”19 Party purges in Eastern European countries were irregular, yet the process of their preparation, the participation of Soviet security organ operatives, and the results were identical to the trials held in Bulgaria and Hungary. They were meant to have a disciplinary effect on the leadership and the population of the respective countries, to teach everyone a lesson. They were meant to be the climax of the widespread mass repressions that were being carried out throughout society. The role of Soviet security organ operatives in these campaigns was the following: instructng local investigators, informing the Soviet leadership, holding consultations for slanting investigations in the desired direction (“for eliminating shortcomings”), and sending investigation materials for coordination. At the same time, their work and even the fact of their presence was to be kept in the strictest secrecy. Documents prove that before the trials, the summaries of charges against Rajk and Kostov were sent to Stalin personally for “coordination,” meaning approval.20 The show trials had nothing to do with the administration of justice. They were a warning aimed at demonstrating the mechanisms of power of the Soviet system. Another aim was to find scapegoats for everything that went wrong. The trials were also meant as a reminder for the public of the approaching confrontation with the West, a justification for the Soviet fear of war. In Stalin’s view, every communist who had been in the West and beyond the reach of the Soviet state had to be considered suspect. For these reasons, “national” communists were almost always the primary victims of postwar trials. The Kremlin preferred “Muscovites,” meaning communists sent from the Soviet Union who followed orders without asking questions.21 Moscow’s best chance to influence events was provided by the personal enmities that existed in Eastern European communist parties. These made it possible to secretly hatch political plots while simultaneously playing the role of the highest arbitrator.

19 Judt, Pärast sõda; Volokitina et al., Moskva i Vostochnaia Evropa; McDermott, Stibbe (eds.), Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe, p. 7. 20 Petrov, Po stsenariiu Stalina, pp. 263–4. 21 Judt, Pärast sõda, pp. 203–5.

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The fact that the first major victims of repression—Xoxe and Rajk—were rather unpopular figures in their homeland is interesting. As communist ministers of internal affairs (and thus also the heads of the secret police), they were the symbols of bloody postwar mass repressions.22 Here it makes sense to draw parallels to the execution and demonization of Nikolai Ezhov, the head of the NKVD and the leader in carrying out the “Great Terror.” One of Stalin’s primary objectives was to make Ezhov the primary scapegoat for mass terror. Naturally, all the aforementioned individuals were the best-informed persons concerning the state leadership’s and Stalin’s own primary role in terror. It was apparently useful for Stalin to extend the investigation for as long as possible (as was done in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere). Throughout that time, the person under investigation served as an example in order to intimidate others. He was trapped in a situation in which he was neither convicted nor acquitted. The Soviet leadership engineered the “Estonian Affair” as well in the same year as the Rajk, Kostov, and Leningrad affairs.23 It was the first postwar purge campaign where the primary motive of the accusations was “bourgeois nationalism.”24 This would indeed apply in regard to the Soviet Union, but as we have seen, the “nationalism” motive was also prominent in the charges against Rajk and Kostov. At the time of the events considered here, the term “bourgeois nationalism” was in circulation in Estonia. Since 1944, the term “bourgeois nationalist” was used primarily to ideologically stigmatize supporters of Estonian independence, people

22 McDermott, Stibbe (eds.), Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe, p. 9. 23 Concerning the “Estonian Affair” and the March Plenum, see Jelena Subkowa, ‘Kaderpolitik und Säuberungen in der KPdSU (1945–1953)’, Weber, Mählert (eds.), Terror: Stalinistische Parteisäuberungen, pp.  217–32; Jelena Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml; Olaf Kuuli, Sotsialistid ja kommunistid Eestis 1917–1991 (Socialists and Communists in Estonia 1917–1991) (Tallinn, 1999); Tõnu Tannberg, ‘1950. aasta märtsipleenumi eel- ja järellugu: “Eesti süüasi” (1949–1952) Moskvast vaadatuna’ (Prologue and Epilogue of the Plenum of 1950: The “Estonian Affair” (1949–1952) as Seen from Moscow), Tuna 4 (2001), no. 3, pp. 120–5; Olev Liivik, ‘“The Estonian Affair” in 1949–1952 and the 8th Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Estonia Communist (bolshevist) Party in 1950’, Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle (eds.), Estonia since 1944: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2009), pp. 131–49, and others. Stenographic records from the March Plenum have been published in the periodical Akadeemia 10 (1998), no. 12; and Akadeemia 11 (1999), no. 1–10. 24 Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml, p. 217.

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who wanted the independent statehood of the Republic of Estonia to be restored (such as the members of the Otto Tief government of 1944). According to the Stalinist interpretation of history, the VK(b)P CC decision of February 20, 1950, “Concerning Errors and Shortcomings in the Work of the Estonian C(B)P Central Committee,”25 under the guidance of which the “bourgeois nationalist group hostile to the people was exposed and crushed,” played a “decisive part in shoring up the struggle against bourgeois nationalism.”26 Hans Kruus and Nigol Andresen allegedly headed the group, seriously damaging the development of Estonian Soviet culture and science. At first glance, this kind of statement appears contradictory because, as has been demonstrated, “bourgeois nationalist” had until then served primarily as the Party’s propagandistic term for supporters of independence. Kruus and Andresen, however, were “June communists,” in other words men who actively participated in Estonia’s occupation in June 1940 and thereafter joined the Communist Party. Andresen and Kruus were by that time still among the most authoritative living members of the Communist Party who were citizens of the former Republic of Estonia (of Estonian origin). Nigol Andresen was deputy chairman of the Estonian SSR Council of People’s Commissars in 1940–46 and deputy chairman of the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet Presidium in 1946–49. Hans Kruus was the minister of foreign affairs of the Estonian SSR and president of the Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences. Kruus himself also wrote to Stalin that the “most dreadful, most disgraceful mark of the bourgeois nationalist has been stamped on my political countenance.”27 As I demonstrate below, rhetoric against “bourgeois nationalism” was also very well suited for accusing people who cannot be considered supporters of independence. When did the Estonian Affair take place? For the most part, it was in 1949–52. The Affair began with supervisory visits to Estonia by the VKP(b) Central Committee. The last VKP(b) CC commission met in 1952 to examine the activities of Karotamm and Veimer, former leaders of the Estonian SSR.28 Yet it must be noted that the MGB, the Ministry of State Security, continued to hold persons 25 The Politburo approved this decision on March 7, 1950. See ‘Postanovlenie Politbiuro o rabote TsK KP(b) Estonii, 7.03.1950’, Vadim Denisov et al. (eds.), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partiinye komitety 1945–1953 (Moscow, 2004), pp. 248–51; in Estonian: Tõnu Tannberg, ‘Kuidas Moskvas valmistati ette 1950. aasta märtsipleenumit’ (How the Plenum of March 1950 was Prepared in Moscow), Tuna 13 (2010), no. 1, pp. 120–3. 26 Gustav Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu: kõige vanemast ajast tänapäevani (History of the Estonian SSR: From the Earliest Times until Today) (Tallinn, 1952), pp. 443–4. 27 Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml, p. 226. 28 Ibid., p. 217; see Liivik, ‘The Estonian Affair’, on periodization.

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arrested in connection with the Affair in custody after that point as well. Thus I propose my own version of when the Estonian Affair began and ended. The beginning can be considered to be August 1949, when the VKP(b) Central Committee assigned the VKP(b) CC Party Monitoring Commission and the Central Committee Department of the Party, Komsomol, and Trade Unions the task of organizing monitoring in Estonia. Even though VKP(b) supervisory visits had been made to Estonia before, the results of this particular visit led to the events of the March Plenum. The end of the affair, however, can be dated to January 1954, when Hans Kruus, one of the main defendants, was released from custody without any charges being brought against him. This dating raises the question of whether these Party purges can be considered Stalinist. But given that the process was initiated during the Stalinist era and that Kruus was probably no longer being actively investigated after Stalin’s death (in March 1953) and that he had been “forgotten” in custody, this designation of the purges is nevertheless justified. The next important milestone was September 1955, when persons sentenced to imprisonment were released from prison. What were the reasons and pretexts for the Estonian Affair? In 1948, supervisory visits sent from Moscow found that the establishment of kolkhozes was not progressing in Estonia and that local authorities had not succeeded in overcoming armed resistance. The EC(b)P Central Committee headed by First Secretary Nikolai Karotamm was blamed for this failure, and Karotamm, in turn, accused the ESSR’s MGB and Minister of State Security Major General Boris Kumm. It is possible that confessions referring to the formation of an “anti-Party group” in the Estonian SSR squeezed out of the EC(b)P CC Second Secretary Georgii Kedrov, who had been arrested in October 1949 in connection with the “Leningrad Affair,” provided the direct impetus for unleashing the “Estonian Affair.”29 Kedrov had become EC(b)P CC Second Secretary upon the recommendation of Aleksei Kuznetsov, one of the main figures in the Leningrad Affair. VKP(b) CC Secretary Georgii Malenkov was informed that Karotamm did not sufficiently emphasize the role of the VKP(b) Central Committee in developing kolkhozes. This was a reproach against Karotamm for overemphasizing his own importance at the expense of the central authorities in Moscow, which had also been the main accusation in the “Leningrad Affair.” A group of VKP(b) CC inspectors arrived in Estonia in December 1949. According to their report, their main informer in Estonia was EC(b)P CC Secretary Ivan Käbin, who was

29 This was one of the charges against Kedrov; see Kalev Tammistu, ‘Tasalülitamine’ (Neutralization), no. 4, Õhtuleht, 29 April 1989.

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indeed nominally of Estonian nationality but was by origin a communist from the Soviet Union. Käbin was the person who, as EC(b)P CC Secretary curating ideological questions, had initiated the May 1949 accusation of Nigol Andresen as a supporter of “bourgeois nationalism” and drew up a draft Central Committee decision against him that was approved after compromising information had been received from the ESSR’s MGB. Andresen was removed from his position as deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium on August 6, 1949. He was expelled from the Party on October 29 of that same year. Then he was charged with hiding a “Forest Brother” (an Estonian anti-Soviet partisan) in his flat and political “duplicity,” primarily in his treatment of questions concerning literature. Käbin also sent a letter to Malenkov in January 1950 accusing Karotamm. Other complaints that had been sent from the Estonian SSR to Moscow were also used as a pretext for the Affair.30 The year 1950 promised to be special for the Estonian SSR. The 10th anniversary of its status as a Union republic lay ahead, promising recognition, honors, and praise for those who were locally building up the Soviet regime. However, Karotamm and Kumm, like many other leading figures in the ESSR, were not able to celebrate that red-letter day in their onetime positions. The beginning of 1950 also marked the toughening of the Soviet Union’s penal regime. In January 1950, the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium enactment concerning the reinstatement of the death penalty for “traitors of the Soviet fatherland, spies, subversives, and saboteurs” was passed and published. Stalinist espionage mania, which attacked all types of contacts with the world abroad, was back in all its severity. In January 1950, when the Karotamm question was still undecided, a USSR MGB supervisory commission visited the Estonian SSR Ministry of State Security. The commission, chaired by the head of the USSR’s MGB Fifth Administration, Colonel Aleksandr Volkov, was sent to Tallinn in January 1950. After finding out the inspection results, the Politburo adopted the decision on January 24 to dismiss Minister Major General Boris Kumm from his post and to appoint Colonel Valentin Moskalenko to the position.31 Thus the removal of persons from office did not begin with the Party leadership but rather with that of the security organs. Nevertheless, the reason could not have been solely the poor results of the ESSR MGB’s work, about which Karotamm was also one of the people who “alerted”

30 Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml, pp. 222–3. 31 Kebin – Spravka inspektoru TsK VKP(b) Turkinu, 19 September 1950, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 1, n. 6, s. 1423, l. 30.

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Moscow in previous years. The deputy ministers who ran the actual day-to-day operative work and thus should have been held equally responsible for poor work results initially retained their positions. Thus, the reason was that the generation of “old revolutionaries” of Estonian origin had, in Stalin’s view, done its work in Sovietization and needed to be replaced by politically more reliable Sovietizers of Soviet origin. Few other security organ generals could write on their registration forms, as Kumm could, that they had served in a bourgeois army that fought against the Soviet regime (in the 1918–20 Estonian War of Independence).32 When the MGB was working intensely to purge Soviet society of “former persons,” how could a minister of state security with a background as a “Civil War era” enemy have remained in office? Kumm was absent from the Central Committee Bureau sessions on January 28 and February 1. It is possible that right in the course of being replaced as minister, Kumm was asked to provide explanations, and that the possibility of making him a scapegoat was considered for a future show trial, similarly to Rajk, the Hungarian minister of internal affairs. In that way, a culprit in carrying out mass repressions could have been found for society (in March 1949, the ESSR MGB headed by Kumm had played the leading role in the mass deportation of about 20,000 Estonians, who were sent to Siberia as family members of “kulaks,” “nationalists,” and “bandits”). At the same time, he could have been accused within the Party of shortcomings in carrying out the deportation (the security organs failed to deport many of the individuals who were slated for deportation). For some reason, however, this course of action was not adopted. Kumm suffered no further repression beyond being relieved of his status as a Chekist and transferred to a lower position. He was initially assigned to the post of first deputy minister of public utilities and services. Stalin had used the same tactics in earlier decades just before engaging in repression against the heads of the security organs. Thus Kumm certainly could not yet have felt that he had escaped more serious sanctions. The USSR MGB appointed the new minister of state security on January 28, 1950.33 He had served in the security organs since 1928 and had participated in the occupation and Sovietization of western Ukraine in 1939–41. Moskalenko had until then indeed been head of the Chita oblast MGB administration, but it has been indicated that the decision made in his favor was based on his previous work in SMERSH (the security organs in the USSR armed forces during the war) under 32 Anketa delegata 5-go s’ezda KP(b)E B. Kumm, 16 December 1948, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 513, l. 165. 33 Nikita Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti 1941–1954 (Moscow, 2010), p. 623.

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the command of Viktor Abakumov.34 Moskalenko’s corrupt deeds at his previous job, however, could also have led to his transfer. Disciplinary action concerning these instances of corruption was nevertheless limited to taking an explanation from Moskalenko. Moskalenko’s appointment to office removed the last bits of “Estonian” window dressing from the ESSR’s MGB, as well as the emergence of a new style of management where the minister personally ran operative work and the execution of primary assignments. The new minister thus became one of the main figures in the “Estonian Affair” and in the intensified struggle against the resistance movement.35 Karotamm, the leader of the EC(b)P, did not attend the sessions of the EC(b) PCC in January 1950, officially due to poor health.36 It is possible that he was already dismissed from his position then. Intense activity took place in January and February to launch the “Estonian Affair.” The VKP(b) CC Secretariat made a decision on January 20, 1950, concerning the results of the inspection raid in Estonia that accused Karotammof relying on the old, politically unreliable bourgeois cadre. This placed his future as Party leader in doubt.37 Karotamm’s explanations to Stalin in February 1950 included an overview of the achievements in the work of the EC(b)PCC in Party organization and political work, in questions related to cadres, in guiding agriculture, and so on. It also included self-criticism, as prescribed by the Party’s requirements of form. Among other things, Karotamm wrote that the EC(b)P Central Committee had taken substantial steps to combat bourgeois nationalism but that they were still not nearly enough. He listed the following examples:

34 Vadim Abramov, Smersh: Sovetskaia voennaia kontrrazvedka protiv razvedki Tret’ego reikha (Moscow, 2005), pp. 245–6. 35 Karotamm has also mentioned Moskalenko’s central position here in his later diary. See Voldemar Pinn, Kes oli Nikolai Karotamm? 1, Kultuuritragöödia jälgedes: kompartei kolmest esimesest sekretärist Karl Särest, Nikolai Karotammest, Johannes Käbinist (Who Was Nikolai Karotamm? 1, In the Footsteps of a Cultural Tragedy: On the First Three Secretaries of the Communist Party, Karl Säre, Nikolai Karotamm, Johannes Käbin) (Haapsalu, 1996), p. 103. 36 Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti Eesti NSV-d: Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee büroo 162 etteastumist 1944–1956 vahemängude ja sissejuhatusega (How the Estonian SSR Was Ruled: 162 Performances by the Estonian Communist Party Central Committee Bureau in 1944–1956, with Interludes and an Introduction) (Tallinn, 2005), p. 246. 37 Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml, pp. 223–4.

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• t he arrest and conviction of 12,000 people who were part of the anti-Soviet nationalist elements;38 • the banishment of many kulak-nationalist elements from the Estonian SSR in 1949;39 • the firing of 1,022 teachers for political motives over the preceding three years; • the purge of nationalist elements from among professors and lecturers in the ESSR’s institutions of higher education; • the exposure of nationalists and formalists in literature and art (Nigol A ­ ndresen, Paul Viiding, and others).40 This, however, was not enough for the Kremlin leadership. The main accusation leveled at the EC(b)P leadership in the Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) decision “Concerning Shortcomings and Errors in the Work of the Estonian C(b)P CC” of February 20, 1950, was insufficient measures to combat bourgeois nationalism. Karotamm was singled out as bearing personal responsibility for this, as he “­ignored” the topic of bourgeois nationalism in his speeches and articles. Ironically, the VKP(b) CC decision questioned the wisdom of firing teachers in such large numbers, which Karotamm had pointed out as a victory in the struggle against nationalism. One important milestone of the Estonian Affair is the EC(b)P CC Eighth Plenum held in 1950, otherwise known as the March Plenum. This resulted in the removal of Nikolai Karotamm and a number of other leading figures, including four members of the EC(b)P CC Bureau. The Eighth Plenum, held on March 21–26, 1950, became a campaign of criticism of the EC(b)P led by Karotamm and of the ESSR leadership. Practically all the speakers did nothing but accuse them on the basis of the VKP(b) CC decision and according to the example demonstrated by VKP(b) CC Secretary Panteleimon Ponomarenko, who came from Moscow to attend the Plenum. The main accusations concerned the inadequacy of the struggle against bourgeois nationalism and the support of bourgeois nationalists that consisted primarily of favoring Andresen, Kruus, and others. The political past of Kruus and Andresen (their membership in Estonian political parties) was

38 Actually, the number of arrested persons in 1944–49 was about 27,000, about 17,000 of whom had been arrested in 1944–45. The ESSR MGB alone had arrested almost 14,000 persons in 1944–49. 39 The deportation of March 1949. 40 Sekretar’ TsK KPE Karotamm – Stalinu, 17 February 1950, Tynu Tannberg, Politika Moskvy v respublikakh Baltii v poslevoennye gody (1944–1956): issledovaniia i dokumenty (Tartu, 2008), pp. 195–6.

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highlighted at the Plenum as their primary fault, but also, for instance, the sheltering of a “bandit” by Andresen. Accusations of supporting bourgeois nationalism were also leveled at other more prominent former communists of Estonian origin, including Arnold Veimer, Hendrik Allik, and Boris Kumm. Those communists from the Soviet Union who had allegedly succumbed to the influence of bourgeois nationalists in the top positions in the Estonian SSR were also sharply criticized. The speakers attempted, in all seriousness, to drive home the point that Andresen and Kruus had secretly worked to restore Estonia’s independence. Department head of the ESSR MGB Dmitri Taevere point-blank named Kruus “the initiator of Estonian secession from the Soviet Union.” “Traitors” and their supporters from the ESSR leadership, however, were only some of the persons subjected to criticism. Criticism was also directed at people involved in creative work, because the struggle against bourgeois nationalism carried out among them was one of the primary spheres of EC(b)P CC propaganda and agitation work. The composers Theodor Vettik, Alfred Karindi, and Riho Päts (not members of the Party), who were lecturers at the Tallinn Conservatory and had been arrested starting in February 1950, were accused in several speeches at the Plenum. The Plenum will not be described in detail here, but a few of the more salient events should be highlighted. First, Karotamm and the chairman of the ESSR Supreme Soviet Presidium Eduard Päll were removed from their positions by the decision of the Plenum. Minister Kumm was dismissed from his position as member of the Central Committee Bureau on the grounds of “errors committed while working as Minister of State Security,” and Moskalenko took his place in the Bureau. The only representative of the armed forces in the Bureau, Vice-Admiral Fedor Zozulia, head of the Northern Baltic fleet, was also released.41 Secondly, Ivan Käbin was appointed leader of the Party. The appointment of Käbin as a communist from the Soviet Union to the top position in the republic can be considered an important turning point in the intensification of Sovietization, considering the hierarchical nature of the power structure. This was the placement in power of communists with backgrounds in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that their positions had already been shored up, for instance, through the election of the 41 Zozulia had already been released from his post, and the Party Inspection Commission at the VK(b)P CC had penalized him in February 1950 with a stern reprimand for undignified behavior. Otvet. kontroler KPK pri TsK VKP(b) Samodelkin – Zamestiteliu pred. KPK pri TsK VKP(b) Iagodkinu, not dated (1951), Hoover Institution Archives, Collection: Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State (original: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, RGANI), f. 6, o. 2, d. 217, l. 11–2.

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new membership of the Central Committee at the EC(b)P V Congress in 1948. Vassilii Kossov, inspector of the VKP(b) CC, who had also prepared the March Plenum, was soon named second secretary of the Central Committee alongside Käbin. Kossov was of Soviet origin and had no previous contact with Estonia. Third, considering the fact that Andresen and some cultural figures had already been arrested by the MGB or were at least under surveillance, the March Plenum could be considered an internal campaign within the Party to reinforce with propaganda the new wave of arrests ordered by the Soviet leadership. Thus, the March Plenum can be assessed as the kickoff of a campaign within the Party (the Plenum was closed to the public) in a new phase of Sovietization, in which people who had been publicly active during Estonia’s independence became subject to removal from the Estonian SSR administration and society. The first arrests were made by the MGB during the Plenum. It is likely that officials from the highest USSR (MGB) leadership had also come to Estonia to coordinate the arrests. In any case, rumors among the people told of an entire MGB “echelon” (trainload) and that the “Marshal of the Lubianka,” Lavrentii Beriia, had arrived to personally direct the arrests.42 One of the first people to be arrested was Nigol Andresen, who later recalled: I was arrested on March 24, 1950, while the historic Eighth Plenum was being held. The arrest order had been signed by the USSR Minister of State Security [Viktor Abakumov]. All the usual formalities were not carried out in my case. Thus, the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet Presidium was not asked for consent for my arrest as a member of the ESSR Supreme Soviet. This was replaced by a strip of paper typed in Russian signed by the chairman of the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet Presidium, Ed. Päll, stating that he had nothing against my arrest. […] My preliminary investigation lasted until the end of 1951 [that is, one-and-three-quarters years]. My investigator […] Colonel V. Gorkusha explained the nature of the trial over the course of the preliminary investigation. He did not deny that a trial was coming in Estonia like the famous T. Kostov trial that had quite recently been held in Bulgaria, which had generally been reported on by V. Chervenkov, who is well known even in Estonia [at this point Andresen referred to a picture in the book Eesti NSV ajalugu (History of the Estonian SSR, 1957, p. 603), where the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Valko Chervenkov,is at the CPSU 20th Congress with Estonian delegates, including Ivan Käbin]. At the same time, the investigator reassured me that I would not in any way be in Kostov’s role—of course Karotamm was in that role. I, however, would be the kind of defendant Stefanov wasin Bulgaria, who exposed the entire organization and who was sentenced to only 10 years imprisonment [head of the Bank

42 See, for instance, Spetssoobshchenie o reagirovanii naseleniia v sviazi s proishodivshim v gor. Talline plenumom TsK KP/b/ Estonii, 6 April 1950, ERAF f. 131SM, n. 1, s. 205, l. 41–51.

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of Bulgaria Tsonyu Stefanov was sentenced to 15 years in prison]. There appeared to be other indications as well that the trial would take place in a new form with an expanded composition. In any case, the USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium sentenced me in camera at the end of January 1952 to 25 years of imprisonment in camps, counting March 24, 1950, as the first day served of my sentence, of which I had been in custody for only the last couple of hours.43

Andresen was accused of participating in political activity during the period of Estonian independence as a member of the Social Democratic (menshevik) Party and of activity hostile to the Soviet Union as an official in 1940–49. He did not confess to hostile anti-Soviet activity at the court session. He retracted the confessions he had given during the preliminary investigation, which he had given in a state of disorientation.44 Andresen was 52 years old when he was sentenced, and his term of imprisonment was scheduled to expire in 1975, when he would have been 75 years old. The other major defendant, Hans Kruus, was expelled from the Party in March 1950 and arrested in October 1950 by the USSR MGB, officially on the basis of testimony from Andresen, Aben, and Roose. He was accused of having been the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party in 1919–22 and thereafter of the Estonian Socialist Party, and of having carried out subversive activity against the Communist Party and the Soviet state. The fact that Kruus had drawn up a memorandum requesting the recognition of Estonia’s independence and presented it to the Soviet government in 1918 was highlighted as an important circumstance. No faults were detected during the investigation in his activity after 1940.45 He later wrote that his public vilification continued throughout 1950 and that signs soon appeared that the authorities planned to have him arrested. Soviet Minister of State Security Abakumov signed his arrest warrant on October 21, 1950, and he was arrested on October 24 in Tallinn. As Kruus wrote, the authorities wanted to make a state criminal out of him using serious provocations and all types of illegal methods. One of the investigators who most zealously used illegal methods was Major General Aleksandr Leonov, head of the USSR MGB department for investigating matters of special importance, who became infamous in the 43 Andresen’s letter to the Institute of Communist Party History, 8 February 1965, ERAF f. 247, n. 51, s. 19a, l. 124. 44 Zakliuchenie, August 16, 1955 (copy dated 16 December 1955), ERAF f. 1, n. 7, s. 314, l. 239–44. 45 Postanovlenie o prekrashchenii ugolovnogo presledovaniia i osvobozhdeniia arestovannogo iz-pod strazhi, 19 January 1953 (the correct date is 19 January 1954), copy dated 5 March 1959, ERAF f. 1, n. 7, s. 314, l. 225–7.

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“Leningrad Affair” and was later dismissed along with Minister Abakumov and sentenced to death.46 The purge of the ESSR Party nomenklatura continued thereafter. Minister of Internal Affairs Aleksander Resev (a former imprisoned communist) was removed from his post in December 1950 in connection with “serious political errors,” and the long-time Chekist, Major General Johan Lombak, who had until that point served as the Estonian SSR’s War Commissar, was appointed the new minister of internal affairs. Resev retired from the MVD in November 1954. The chairman of the ESSR Council of Ministers, Arnold Veimer, was dismissed from his post in March 1951.47 Nikolai Karotamm was sent to Moscow for research work in economics, and he was never again allowed to return to work in Estonia. Frustration can be detected in a letter Karotamm sent to Malenkov in 1951, arising from his perception that the “former political prisoners” did not accept him, instead considering him an alien who had been sent to Estonia by the VKP(b) Central Committee.48 In 1951, Käbin wrote another denunciation of Karotamm and Veimer to the VKP(b) Central Committee.49 Even at the beginning of 1952, a commission was formed in the Party’s Central Committee to investigate the actions of Karotamm and Veimer at the time when they were leaders of the Estonian SSR. Käbin also participated in the work of the commission. On December 30, 1952, the Party Monitoring Commission at the VKP(b) CC punished Veimer with a severe reprimand and a warning. Yet the work of this commission did not lead to any more serious consequences, and the matter faded away. Thus, leaders of the Party, security organs, and government did not face repression during the Estonian Affair, even though in the case of the latter two institutions, the communists were not from the Soviet Union but were of Estonian origin. The decision “Concerning Errors and Shortcomings in the Work of the EC(b) P Central Committee,” issued in 1950 by the VKP(b) CC, stressed the need to intensify the struggle against bourgeois nationalism and became the defining document of the program of Käbin’s administration. Käbin wanted to make the struggle against bourgeois nationalism the focus of the EC(b)P Sixth Congress in April 1951, but the positions he presented did not contain anything essentially new beyond perhaps a few nuances, such as that emphasizing ethnic distinctions 46 Zaiavlenie Kh. Kruusa, 1961, ibid., s. 3647, l. 13. 47 Enn Tarvel (ed.), Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei Keskkomitee organisatsiooniline struktuur 1940–1991 (Organizational Structure of the Estonian Communist Party Central Committee 1940–1991) (Tallinn, 2002), pp. 576–9 and 652–5. 48 Zubkova, Baltimaad ja Kreml, p. 197. 49 Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti, p. 275.

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in the work of the Party and the soviets was referred to as unsound practice and that according to the example set by Stalin, the term “local nationalism” (this was apparently meant to mark the reduced emphasis on class struggle, which was ambivalent in the context of the Baltic countries) was introduced. Käbin labeled the following factors as manifestations of nationalism: • U  nwillingness to organize the teaching of Russian, particularly in institutions of higher education; • Glorification of the customs of the bourgeois era; • Attempts to spread the ideology of bourgeois nationalism through literature, art, and science. All of the failures of the Soviet regime in Estonia were blamed on “bourgeois nationalists.” Among other things, however, “penal policy must be thoroughly improved” for the struggle against them, “aiming it like a spearhead at the remains of the class enemy that tries to harm us […] ‘Judicial grimaces’ do not help but rather hinder the struggle against the enemy.”50 This last position demonstrated the Party’s condescending attitude towards the law and legality, which had already been inherent to the security organs from the time of their inception, creating conflicts with the prosecutor’s office and local institutions. Important changes also took place in the composition of the ESSR MGB leadership from 1950 onwards. In addition to Minister Kumm, head of the investigation department Idel Jakobson was removed from his post in 1950 due to errors and inactivity, followed in October of that same year by Deputy Minister Aleksandr Mikhailov.51 The heads of all operative departments of the central apparat and of most support departments were also replaced in 1950. Newly arrived state security officers sent from elsewhere to the Estonian SSR were favored in appointing new departmental heads. The replacement of deputy ministers began in 1951. Former USSR Deputy Minister of State Security responsible for cadres Major General Mikhail Svinelupov, whom Stalin had already replaced with head of the VKP(b) CC Administrative Department Lieutenant General Vassilii Makarov in 1950 to strengthen control over Party organs, was appointed the new deputy minister responsible for operational matters as of April 1951. This was clearly a step down the career ladder for Svinelupov.

50 Protokol i stenogramma 6-go s’ezda KP(b)E, 11–14 April 1951, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 1097, l. 71–7. 51 Protokol no. 9 obshchego zakrytogo partsobraniia MGB ESSR, 4 July 1950, ERAF f. 1, n. 53, s. 239, l. 55.

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The fact that the MGB organs had, since 1950, participated in purges of the top-level administration of the EC(b)P and ESSR was very likely the reason why Moskalenko was rather condescending towards the Party authorities from the beginning of his time as minister, even though he made sure to say all the right words about the leading role of the Party. The decisions of the March Plenum were discussed in April 1950 at a meeting of the ESSR MGB Party organization. Central Committee Secretary Aleksander Jaanus gave a speech there. Now MGB staff criticized their former Party curators. They spoke of the treachery of the ESSR leadership—Karotamm, Veimer, and Päll—and accused them of conniving with bourgeois nationalists, kulaks, and other enemies of the Soviets, meaning conniving with those against whom they were supposed to lead the struggle, so to speak. Former minister Kumm (and his deputy Mikhailov) was roundly criticized, primarily due to inactivity. He had apparently not put to use reports on the case of Andresen and other similar cases. Even Central Committee Secretary Jaanus himself, who was present, was not spared criticism. The meeting decided to take under consideration the personal issues of two MGB staff members and the errors of the former leading figures Kumm, Mikhailov, and Jakobson, as well as the “anti-Party behavior” of Veimer, the leader of the ESSR government, and Minister of Internal Affairs Resev (both of whom were still in office) in regard to questions concerning the struggle against the nationalist anti-Soviet underground and kulakism.52 This was a demonstration of supremacy over the entire leadership of the Estonian SSR. Minister Moskalenko presented his vision of the role of Party organs in leading the security organs at an MGB Party meeting in July 1950, held after an incident where a Party official was not permitted to check on the work of the ministry with reference to its confidential nature. Moskalenko said in this Party meeting that the Party guided everything, including the security organs, and that the Central Committee and municipal and raion committees thus had a direct relationship to the MGB Party organization (the point of emphasis here was that the Central Committee was reduced to being the curator of the MGB Party organization and not of the entire ministry). The issue was allegedly that the staff members of Party organizations would not monitor the confidential work or operative work of one or another department. The staff members of Party committees allegedly had every right to monitor Party work, to attend MGB Party meetings, to intervene in Party work, and so on. Moskalenko said that the MGB needed to “actively assist”

52 Protokol no. 8 obshchego partsobraniia partorganizatsii MGB ESSR, 28 April 1950, ibid., s. 240, l. 74–102.

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the EC(b)P Central Committee in implementing the decisions of the VKP(b) and of the EC(b)P CC Eighth Plenum. This kind of stance was essentially a warning to the EC(b)P Central Committee and the ESSR leadership. Moskalenko stressed on many occasions that the MGB bore responsibility for its work before the VKP(b) Central Committee and Stalin personally.53 This refers to the fact that the local security organs did not see the EC(b)P Central Committee as its leader. The fact that from the beginning of 1950 until the summer of 1952, the Central Committee did not adopt a single decision to pressure the security organs affirms the notion that the EC(b)P leadership also did not pressure the MGB, even though armed resistance and armed actions by Forest Brothers continued, and despite the fact that the VKP(b) Central Committee had declared in July 1951 that Party guidance and control over the security organs should be restored. At the same time, First Secretary Käbin worked intensively with emissaries from the VKP(b) CC to remove “June communists” and other persons against whom accusations had been made at the March Plenum from the ESSR leadership. Käbin remained particularly resolute in regard to Karotamm, who had by then already left Estonia. This means that Käbin fought steadfastly within the Party against “bourgeois nationalists” and their alleged supporters. This was not only in the Kremlin’s interests but also his own, because it enabled him to establish and fortify his position as the leader of the Union republic. The passiveness of Party leaders in “guiding” the security organs might simply have reflected Käbin’s fear of Moskalenko and his agency. As Käbin himself reportedly said later, Moskalenko was an “awful person.”54 The plenum of March 1950 and the purges/repressions that followed in the power elite were also a touchstone for Minister of State Security Moskalenko. The struggle against bourgeois nationalism was turned against the current leaders of the puppet regime themselves. As with Minister Kumm’s removal from office, other communists were also subjected to Party purges in 1950–52 primarily for “biographical reasons.” It was as if their contribution to Sovietization was forgotten and anti-Soviet circumstances from their past were brought up, facts that should have long since been known and settled. Thus it was mostly communists of Estonian origin that were subject to purges. Negative or criminal manifestations were often found in recent actions of Party members with a “bourgeois past.” Along with inspectors from the VKP(b) CC, Käbin personally investigated such personal questions on behalf of the EC(b)P Central Committee, as happened, for instance, in the case of Hendrik Allik and Aleksander Kelberg. Removal from

53 Protokol No. 9 obshchego zakrytogo partsobraniia MGB ESSR, 4 July 1950, ibid., s. 239, l. 60. 54 Tammistu, ‘Tasalülitamine’, no. 14, Õhtuleht, 17 May 1989.

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one’s position was, for the most part, followed by expulsion from the Party and in some cases, arrest by the MGB. Arrest could be preceded by surveillance by the MGB, or what was known as “agent processing.” This was intended to ascertain the ties of the person under surveillance and his possible current anti-Soviet activity. Thus the ESSR MGB Fifth Department opened a record card file (operational accounting file concerning an individual suspected of anti-Soviet activity) in March and April and began surveillance of Viktor Hion, a representative in the ESSR Supreme Soviet, Party member, and former ESSR minister of health, because he had participated actively in the Estonian War of Independence and been decorated with the Vabadusrist (Cross of Liberty), and he had expressed anti-Soviet views. The same methods were used on other Party members in higher positions such as Aleksander Aben (he was followed under suspicion in connection with Andresen and his Menshevik past), head of the Estonian Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics and Law Bernhard Veimer, and former ESSR Minister of Justice Aleksander Jõeäär. Aben was compromised by reports that after the dismissal of a number of Estonian SSR ministers from office, he had allegedly said that “the removal of Jõeäär and Kruus from office is proof of the Russian offensive in Estonia and the dislodging of intellectuals from the former bourgeois Estonian republic.” Surveillance of some other people who were associated with Andresen also began. The ESSR MGB Fifth Department had an immense network of agents that consisted of 4,724 persons as of May 1, 1950, including 278 residents, 351 agents, and 4,095 secret informers.55 While the work of agents was concentrated in the hands of the ESSR MGB, the USSR MGB department for investigating matters of particular importance, based in Moscow, started investigating the main arrested (former) communists. The arrested people were transported to Moscow. This group included former ESSR Minister of the Food Products Industry Lembit Lüüs, Nigol Andresen, Responsible Secretary of Literature of the ESSR Academy of Sciences Feliks Roose (arrested by the ESSR MGB on February 5, 1950, and transferred to the investigative jurisdiction of the USSR MGB in March 1950), Major General Jaan Lukas (arrested during the Eighth Plenum), Hans Kruus, former ESSR Minister of Commerce Augustin Hansen (arrested on October 24, 1950), former Deputy Chairman of the ESSR Council of Ministers Hendrik Allik (arrested on December 29, 1950), former ESSR Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aleksander Aben (arrested on

55 Moskalenko i Tarakanov – dokladnaia zapiska Volkovu “Ob itogakh agenturno-operativnoi raboty 5-go otdela MGB ESSR za mart-aprel’ mes. 1950 g”, 27 March 1950, ERAF f. 131SM, n. 1, s. 203, l. 71–142, 93.

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January 17, 1951), former ESSR Minister of Justice Aleksander Jõeäär (arrested on June 7, 1951), and others. At the same time, then-EC(b)P CC Second Secretary Georgii Kedrov, and Leo Looring, alias Johannes Meerits, one of the leaders of the ECP in the 1930s, were in Moscow under investigation. As a rule, the investigation files of the people who were arrested in connection with the “Estonian Affair” are not preserved in Estonian archives. The file of Aleksander Jõeäär is an exception, which I have used as an example for describing analogous proceedings.56 According to the file, ESSR MGB operatives arrested Jõeäär on June 7, 1951, in Tallinn on the basis of an order from ESSR Minister of State Security Moskalenko. Jõeäär arrived by prisoner transport in Moscow on June 14 and was taken to USSR MGB headquarters, where his formal arrest warrant was drawn up. Colonel Anatolii Bolkhovitin, deputy head of the USSR MGB department for investigating matters of particular importance, indicated in the arrest warrant that Jõeäär had “fought against the revolutionary workers’ movement over long years as a member of the Menshevik Party (meaning as a social democrat).” The warrant further alleges that after becoming a member of the Party through deception, he engaged in subversive activity as a nationalist and enemy of the Soviet regime along with his accomplices. The file indicates that Jõeäär was arrested in connection with the “affair of the group of nationalists” (Andresen, Allik, and others). Jõeäär was interrogated repeatedly, and the deadlines for the completion of the investigation of his case were extended. The summary of charges was approved on November 22, 1951. Then Jõeäär was imprisoned in Lefortovo Prison. His case was deliberated at a closed session of the USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium in Moscow on January 22, 1952, without the participation of either his defense attorney or the prosecutor. Jõeäär confessed to the vast majority of the charges, and it appears that he hoped that a “heartfelt confession” would mitigate his penalty. The court found Jõeäär guilty of being a member of the “Menshevik Party” in 1919–40 and of being a member of Estonia’s bourgeois parliament in 1921–40. During this time, the court found, he slandered the Communist Party and the Soviet Union in his public speeches while at the same time defending fascist Germany. During his time in parliament, the court found, Jõeäär voted in favor of laws against the people. The court also found that as ESSR minister of justice, Jõeäär engaged in hostile anti-Soviet nationalist activity, planted nationalists among the staff of his ministry, slandered the kolkhoz system, and so on. For this, he was sentenced as punishment to 25 years imprisonment in a labor camp (Jõeäär was then 61 years old) plus deprivation of rights for an 56 Delo po obvineniiu A. Ioer, ERAF f. 130SM, n. 1, s. 15585, vol. 1–2.

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additional five years, and all his property was confiscated. He had to return his decorations and medals. It was not possible to appeal the court verdict. When his case was reviewed at the beginning of 1955, Jõeäär stated that he had made his confessions under psychological and physical duress. On September 10, 1955, the USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium decided to amend the 1952 verdict, to close Jõeäär’s criminal case due to a lack of evidence, and to release him from custody. Jõeäär did not apply for reinstatement by the Party. Of former EC(b)P CC secretaries and members of the EC(b)P CC Bureau, besides Kedrov, only Villem Kuusik was arrested. The ESSR MGB in Tallinn investigated his case. Kuusik was arrested at the initiation of the ESSR MGB Fifth Department only on June 21, 1952, about a year after he was dismissed from his position as Central Committee secretary. The basis for his arrest was that, under interrogation after his 1930 arrest, Kuusik had allegedly provided the Estonian political police with information on Estonia’s underground communists. According to his investigation file, Kuusik had been summoned to the VKP(b) Central Committee in Moscow a year earlier, in May 1951, where he was reportedly informed of these charges and removed from his position as EC(b)P CC Secretary. The MGB had gathered testimony on Kuusik from the end of July 1951 onward, interrogating persons arrested by then in connection with the “Estonian Affair.” By the time Kuusik was arrested, his career had nosedived—he had become a shoemaker’s apprentice at the Pärnu leather factory. He had been expelled from the Party in 1952. Compared to other members of the ECP who had been arrested in connection with the “Estonian Affair,” the investigation of Kuusik’s case was rather brief, and the ESSR Supreme Soviet handed down its verdict in his case on October 9, 1952. Kuusik was convicted of turning in 14 underground Party operatives to the Estonian political police, 13 of whom were arrested and convicted. Those arrests were allegedly made partially on the basis of Kuusik’s testimony. Kuusik confessed to the charges and was penalized according to Section 58-4 of the Russian SFSR Criminal Code (“rendering assistance to the international bourgeoisie in hostile activity against the Soviet Union”). He was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in a labor camp, to which the deprivation of rights for five years was added. All his property was confiscated, and he was stripped of all his decorations and medals. In 1955, the USSR Supreme Court reduced his sentence to 10 years and released him from the MVD Mineralnyi camp in November of that same year.57 Kuusik did not apply for reinstatement by the Party, unlike many other expelled communists.

57 Sledstvennoe delo MGB ESSR, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 15872, including Prigovor, 9 October 1952, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 15872 vol. 2, l. 266–8.

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The procedure for removing Hendrik Allik from the Party can be cited as an example. Allik was released from his position as deputy chairman of the ESSR Council of Ministers by the EC(b)P CC Bureau on December 7, 1950. Permission was requested from the VK(b)P Central Committee for supplementary investigation of his personal question and for deciding on his responsibility before the Party. There were many different charges against him, from writing Trotskyite articles during his imprisonment in the Republic of Estonia to errors in the work of the Ministry of State Planning and Commerce that was under his direction.58 After his arrest in December 1950, the EC(b)P CC Bureau decided on January 15, 1951, to expel him from the Party (along with Hansen) for “anti-Party behavior.” Interestingly, Second Secretary Kossov later said in the Central Committee Bureau that he did not know what Allik was arrested for, “but it is clear that he did something, otherwise he wouldn’t have been arrested.”59 This alludes to the probability that the VKP(b) CC regulation of December 1, 1938, that prescribed the coordination by the ESSR MGB of the arrest of Party members with the Party organ was not followed, or was only formally followed, because it is hardly likely that the circumstances of coordination would have been kept secret from the second secretary. Militia Colonel Arved Kalvo (also a communist of Estonian origin), who had served as the ESSR deputy minister of internal affairs and head of the militia in 1944–48, was one of the arrested officials. He was taken into custody on April 13, 1950. When the investigator of Kalvo’s case reminded Minister Moskalenko that as a member of the military (militia officers were counted as a special category of military personnel), Kalvo could only be arrested with the consent of the EC(b)P Central Committee and the USSR ministers of state security and internal affairs, Moskalenko replied: “You’re still too young to understand current politics, do what you’re told!”60 This also refers to the fact that Moskalenko ignored (though presumably not without the approval of the USSR MGB) the requirement concerning coordinating the arrest of Party members that was in effect since the end of 1938. An analogous campaign for purging the Party began in 1950 in Lithuania. Lithuanian Communist Party leader Antanas Sniečkus and his comrades-in-arms feared losing their own positions in connection with the new purge campaign. 58 Protokol no. 145 zasedaniia biuro TsK P(b)E ot 7 dekabria 1950 § 1 “O tov. Allik G.G.”, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s. 45, l. 1–2. 59 Stenogramma zakrytogo zasedaniia biuro TsK KP(b)E ot 19 marta 1951, ibid., s. 46, l. 24–5. 60 Spravka, 14 April 1953, ERAF f. 134SM, n. 1, s. 99, l. 5–10.

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The top figures in the Lithuanian SSR administration found themselves the focus of the scrutiny of the Lithuanian SSR’s MGB, even though, like the officials in power in Estonia, they had passed the background check (“special monitoring”) conducted by the security organs years ago. Thus Minister of the Lithuanian MGB Major General Petr Kapralov sent a list containing the names of 32 “politically unreliable” officials of the Council of Ministers and the Academy of Sciences (including five ministers) to the second secretary of the Lithuanian CP CC on July 28, 1950. The MGB proposed discussing the suitability of each person on the list for their official position.61 The arrested Estonian communists under investigation did not receive a show trial, or even a common trial. Augustin Hansen and Leo Looring received the most severe punishment of the group: in January 1952, they were sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out. The USSR MGB Special Counsel determined Hansen’s penalty on January 21, 1952, according to the “counterrevolutionary crimes” sections 58-1a (“treason against the Soviet fatherland”), 58-10 (“anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation”), and 58-11 (“participation in counterrevolutionary organizations”) of the Russian SFSR Criminal Code. The USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium determined the penalty of Looring-Meerits on January 24, 1952. Most of the Estonians who had been under investigation in Moscow were tried at a closed session of the USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium held in January 1952. The Collegium sentenced Lembit Lüüs to 25 years imprisonment and five years deprivation of rights along with the confiscation of his property on January 23, 1952, according to sections 58-1a, 58-10, and 58-11 of the Russian SFSR Criminal Code. The same sentences were assigned to Nigol Andresen on January 16, 1952, Aleksander Aben (sections 58-1a and 58-4 [“attempt to overthrow the communist system by the international bourgeoisie”]) on January 17, 1952, Hendrik Allik on January 19, 1952, Aleksander Jõeäär on January 22, 1952, and Feliks Roose (section 58-10 clause 2) on January 23, 1952. Thus, the trials of the Estonians were indeed held separately, but practically at the same time. What has been described above may leave the impression that the intensification of arrests in 1950–52 and the struggle against the “bourgeois nationalists” mainly affected communists—members of the EC(b)P Party apparatus and the ESSR administration. Soviet historical research has also encouraged this impression, demonstrating that some leading personnel of the Estonian SSR were

61 Vytautas Tininis, Sovietų Sąjungos politinés struktūros Lietuvoje ir jų nusikalstama veikla (Political Bodies of the Soviet Union in Lithuania and their Activities) (Vilnius, 2008), p. 114.

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repressed as “errors” in the struggle against bourgeois nationalism “according to decisions of the Plenum of March 1950” and “as serious violations of socialist legislation.”62 In fact, the arrests of communists accounted for only a negligible portion of the persons arrested in those years. At the same time, Estonian SSR Minister of State Security Moskalenko instead intensified the struggle against the Forest Brothers and other supporters of Estonian independence and the people who assisted them first. This was demonstrated by a sharp increase in the number of arrests among the aforementioned groups. In July 1950, Käbin described Moskalenko as follows: “With a great deal of experience in Chekist work, he managed to quickly familiarize himself with the situation in the republic and to mobilize security operatives to decisively root out the bourgeois nationalist underground. Based on several indicators, more has been done in the first six months of 1950 than in the entire preceding year of 1949.”63 According to ESSR MGB statistics on arrests, the total number of arrests increased by about 35 percent over the previous year. In that same year of 1950, Moskalenko, along with other leading personnel of the ESSR, was decorated with the Order of Lenin in connection with the 10th anniversary of the Union republic. Moskalenko’s meteoric rise nevertheless did not last long. In the spring of 1952, a USSR MGB brigade inspected the work of the ESSR MGB, finding that agentoperative work and investigative work in the ministry was rather low-quality.64 Minister Moskalenko was summoned to Moscow in July and August, where the report he presented together with his deputy, head of the militia Dmitrii Sokolov, on the situation in the ESSR MGB was heard by the USSR MGB Collegium on July 29. Moskalenko was also “called on the carpet” by the USSR Minister of the MGB Semion Ignat’ev. Moskalenko’s continuation as minister hung by a thread then. The USSR MGB Collegium and Minister Ignat’ev strictly warned him to eliminate serious shortcomings in the ESSR MGB as soon as possible.65 On this basis, the USSR MGB issued an order on August 19, 1952, “Concerning Serious Errors and Shortcomings in Agent-Operative and Investigative Work in the ESSR 62 See, for instance, Aleksandr Panksejev, Loova ajalooteaduse eest: Eesti NSV ajaloolaste ülesandeid NLKP XXII kongressi otsuste valgusel (In the Name of Creative Historical Research: The Tasks of Estonian SSR Historians in Light of the Decisions of the CPSU 22nd Congress) (Tallinn, 1962), p. 74–5. 63 Kharakteristika, 7 July 1950, ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 7438, l. 14. 64 Spravka o sostoianii partiino-polititicheskoi raboty v MGB ESSR, 9 January 1953, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s. 50, l. 122–35. 65 Protokol no. 4 Zakrytogo otchetno-vybornogo partiinogo sobraniia pervichnoi partorganizatsii MGB ESSR, 11–12 August 1952, ERAF f. 246, n. 31, s. 4, l. 20–2.

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MGB,” which compelled the ESSR MGB to liquidate “banditry,” meaning the armed resistance movement, in 1952.66 However, as in previous years, the armed resistance movement was not liquidated. At the EC(b)P Seventh Congress in September 1952, Käbin no longer stressed the topic of bourgeois nationalism so much. In touching on questions of Party organizational work, he said that after the February 20, 1950, decision by the VKP(b) CC, many people foreign to the Party had been removed from it, primarily former members of the Kaitseliit (Estonian Defense League), the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), the Omakaitse (Home Guard), and other bourgeois organizations, but also including former kulaks and merchants who had been accepted into the Party with the approval of Karotamm and Veimer. At the same time, according to Käbin, slanderers and the authors of numerous complaints who had used the acrimony of the moment to attack “honest people” (who had submitted complaints concerning fellow Party members) had been exposed. He highlighted Veimer in particular, who had by then been removed from his post and had reportedly already managed to tell everyone that the VKP(b) Central Committee had dropped the charges against him. For this, Käbin warned that accusations against Veimer would only increase due to this kind of behavior, which was unbecoming of the Party. He also claimed that bourgeois nationalist conceptions had not yet been rooted out of science, literature, and art, even though this had been prescribed by the previous congress. The activity of the bourgeois nationalists had become more covert and clever.67 In light of this new rhetoric, the final decision of the Congress included the following: “To expose the machinations of American and British warmongers and the hostile activity of their network of agents—bourgeois nationalists.”68 This corresponded to the political conditions of the Cold War, where the Soviet government wanted to show that the covert activity of the United States and the UK was behind everything hostile. In his speech at the same congress, Minister of State Security Moskalenko highlighted statements that former members of the EC(b)P and ESSR administration, the accused Allik, Jõeäär, Lüüs, Andresen, Kruus, and others had made under interrogation at the MGB. They had reportedly spoken of their attempts to scuttle the struggle against the kulaks. Lüüs had confessed that he supported an independent bourgeois Estonian state. Additionally, he had been a Menshevik: 66 Spravka o sostoianii partiino-polititicheskoi raboty v MGB ESSR, 9 January 1953, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s. 50, l. 127. 67 Stenogramma 7-go s’ezda KP(b)E, 16–19 September 1952, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 1282, l. 105–6, 115, 125. 68 Rezoliutsiia 7-go s’ezda KP(b)E, 16–19 September 1952, ibid., l. 47.

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“These two factors, nationalism and Menshevik views, shaped my hostile attitude towards the Soviet regime.” The MGB investigator had also most likely adjusted that wording, as was customary, yet the treatment of support for independence as nationalism is clearly illustrated here. Andresen reportedly confessed, “Kruus and I did everything we could to shore up the positions of bourgeois nationalism in Estonia and to divert the country from the socialist path of development.”69 As demonstrated above, Andresen actually retracted those confessions at the court session. The circumstances highlighted in Moskalenko’s speech were most likely supposed to destroy the authority of the “June communists” and “former political prisoners” (meaning communists of Estonian origin who had served prison sentences in the Republic of Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s for their communist activities, such as Allik and Kumm) of Estonian origin in the ECP. Yet Moskalenko’s speech also elicited disgruntled remarks. Some military men considered the speech a failure. They felt that too much of it consisted of the utterances of “enemies of the people.” Moskalenko explained that a few congress delegates had asked him about the reasons for the arrest of Allik and others. He noted that even the head of the Central Committee’s Administrative Department, Johannes Tipner (who was supposed to oversee the work of the security organs), had reportedly said to Kossov after Hansen’s arrest, “I would never have dreamed that Hansen could prove to be that kind of criminal.” Concerning the exposure of Veimer, Moskalenko said that this did not depend on him but that he had done everything he could possibly do. What is particularly important here is that Moskalenko also tried to justify himself by the fact that trials of traitors held in “people’s democracies” (meaning in Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe) had similarly been widely reported in the press.70 This confirms once again that the Soviet regime and its security organs saw what was taking place in Estonia as analogous to the Party purges and the associated show trials in Eastern Europe. After Joseph Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, quite a few witch hunts were discontinued, including the “Estonian Affair.” The last major defendant under investigation, Hans Kruus, was released without being charged in January 1954. Those who had been sentenced to imprisonment in January 1952 (Andresen, Jõeäär, Allik, and others) were brought to Moscow for further review of their cases in the spring of 1955. They were released from custody in September 1955 and sent back to Estonia together. An important circumstance in the decision to release them was the fact that the confessions of the defendants were obtained

69 Stenogramma 7-go s’ezda KP(b)E,16–19 September 1952, ibid., l. 149–59. 70 Ibid., l. 308–9.

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through the use of “physical means of influence.” This was an official euphemism for abuses that were widely used by Stalin-era security organs, like the beating of persons in custody and confinement in punishment cells. In that same year, Nigol Andresen applied for reinstatement in the Party. The review of his case, however, lasted five years, and he was not reinstated in the Party until February 1961, taking into account the interval in his Party tenure. He died in Tartu in 1985. Hans Kruus was reinstated in the Party in December 1962. He died in 1976. Both Andresen and Kruus were politically rehabilitated posthumously in September 1989 by the ECP Central Committee. As has been shown, no public show trial in the form of the trials in Bulgaria and Hungary, for instance, developed out of the “Estonian Affair” (as was also the case with the “Leningrad Affair”), even though this could have been part of the initial plan. The main reason may be that the Party purges in Estonia had already fulfilled their disciplinary objective and also that figures who had been shoved aside, like Karotamm and others, no longer presented any threat to the regime. The most important similarity with the Party purges in Eastern Europe was that communists of local origin were removed from leading positions (in Estonia these were “former political prisoners” and “June communists” who were former citizens of the Republic of Estonia) and replaced by cadres imported from the Soviet Union. Naturally, it was not possible to replace all officials due to the lack of suitable candidates, but within the framework of the regime’s hierarchical system, it made sense to start by replacing the top-level leaders. Exceptions should also be noted, such as the fact that higher-ranking communists of Estonian origin (head of state security Boris Kumm and leader of the government Arnold Veimer) did not face repression, but other communists who were former citizens of Estonia and were noted authorities were selected for arrest. The EC(b)P CC Eighth Plenum, held in 1950, resembled show trials, since accusations against leading members of the Party were presented in a concerted campaign. Given the public background of fear created by the show trials in Eastern Europe, leading Party members in the Estonian SSR had to fear not only for their positions but for their lives. It can be presumed that, like the show trials in Eastern Europe, the organization, preparation of speeches, and other questions connected with the Plenum were not left to chance but rather were arranged by the highest Party and/ or security institutions in Moscow. Yet the answer to precisely how all this took place will hopefully be provided in the future, when the corresponding archival materials become completely accessible.

Olaf Mertelsmann

The Economic Impact of the Early Cold War on the Estonian SSR Abstract: The author describes and analyzes in detail how the Estonian SSR’s economy was affected by Sovietization, postwar reconstruction of the economy, the needs of the armament industry, and the impact of the Cold War. He also analyzes the reorganizations carried out in the Union republic in the context of changes that took place in Europe.

Introduction Economic history is not usually a central focus of Cold War historiography, which is far more interested in politics.1 Nevertheless, a great deal of effort was invested by the West in researching the economic system of the ideological enemy, and the * This paper was written in the framework of the target-financed project “Estonia in the Era of the Cold War” (SF0180050S09). I have used some material from a previous publication: Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘The Social Costs of the Early Cold War: An Example from a Soviet Republic’, Olaf Mertelsmann and Kaarel Piirimäe (eds.), The Baltic Sea Region and the Cold War (Frankfurt, 2012), pp. 141–61. 1 See, for example, Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter (eds.), Origins of the Cold War: An International History (London, 1995); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996); John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997); A.O. Chubur’ian, N.I. Egorov, and I.V. Gaichuk, (eds.), Stalin i kholodnaia voina (Moscow, 1998); A.O. Chubur’ian, N.I. Egorov, and I.V. Gaichuk, (eds.), Stalinskoe desiatiletie kholodnoi voiny: Fakty i gipotezy (Мoscow, 1999); Wilfried Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950–1991 (Basingstoke, 2002); Vojtech Mastny, Sven Holtsmark and Andreas Wenger, (eds.), War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West (London, 2006); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005); Bernd Stöver, Der kalte Krieg: Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters (Munich, 2007); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York, 2007); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: Norton, 2007); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, 2009); Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958 (New York, 2012); Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (New York, 2013); Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon, (eds.), Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 (Oxford-New York, 2014).

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first deep insights into Soviet economics were a product of the Cold War.2 But in the last two decades this field did not develop much.3 Still-existing restrictions hamper archival access. Thus, to my knowledge, only four monographs have been published that are based on research in Soviet archives and that deal with postwar Soviet economic history and the military industrial complex.4 Nevertheless, the economic impact of the Cold War on all societies involved was significant, which makes this topic a valuable one. For far too long, master narratives presented the Cold War as a conflict taking place in a bipolar world with only two superpowers. But Moscow and Washington were not the only parties involved. It would be more accurate to regard the Cold War as a conflict taking place on various levels with a multitude of players fulfilling different roles. Small countries like Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia were not simply pawns on a chess board; they were also actors, as were international institutions, NGOs, and some large enterprises. Recent investigations of the Cold War from a regional perspective stressed the importance of local players and local studies in the larger picture.5 This approach also justifies picking out a single Soviet republic, in this case the Estonian SSR, and exploring the economic impact of the early Cold War on a local level. This kind of case study might serve not only to better understand Estonian history but also to investigate the Cold War from a local perspective. In the case of the Estonian SSR, in the postwar years three different processes appeared in parallel, and they were very difficult to distinguish from each other. First, Sovietization continued. Estonia belonged to a vast stretch of territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea with more than 20 million inhabitants that was first occupied and 2 For example, Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, 1957); Abram Bergson, The Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1928 (Cambridge, 1961). 3 For the latest research in the field, see Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Claudia Weber, (eds.), Ökonomie im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2010). 4 Nikolai S. Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR v 20–50-e gody: Tempy ekonomicheskogo rosta, struktura, organizatsiia proizvodstva i upravlenie (Moscow, 1996); Vassilii P. Popov, Ekonomicheskaia politika sovetskogo gosudarstvo 1946–1953 gg. (Moscow-Tambov, 2000); Irina V. Bystrova, Voenno-promyshlennii kompleks SSSR v gody kholodnoi voiny (Vtoraia polovina 40-kh—nachalo 60-kh godov) (Moscow, 2000); Olaf Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau in Estland: Von der Markt- zur Kommandowirtschaft (Hamburg, 2006). 5 Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Brendan Humphreys, (eds.), Winter Kept Us Warm: Cold War Interactions Reconsidered (Helsinki, 2010); Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy, Reassessing Cold War Europe (London, 2011); Mertelsmann, Piirimäe, (eds.), The Baltic Sea Region and the Cold War.

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then annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939–40. Eastern Poland, which was occupied first, served as a rough model for the Sovietization process in other territories. These “newly acquired territories” were conquered and occupied by the Germans during the war against the USSR, and Sovietization resumed after the Red Army reconquered them in 1944–45. Economically the liquidation of private enterprises and the collectivization of agriculture were most important.6 Second, the destruction caused by war and reconstruction were important processes, too. Officially, reconstruction was declared to be finished by 1950, but in reality, it took much longer.7 Third, the massive Soviet defense spending, caused by the anticipation of future conflict and the outbreak of the Cold War, hindered postwar reconstruction and the general economic development of each individual Union republic.8 6 Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940–1990 (London, 1993); Olaf Mertelsmann, (ed.), The Sovietization of the Baltic States, 1940–1956 (Tartu, 2003); idem (ed.), Vom Hitler-Stalin-Pakt bis zu Stalins Tod: Estland 1939–1953 (Hamburg, 2005); idem, Der stalinistische Umbau; Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle, (eds.), Estonia 1940–1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2006); Tõnu Tannberg, (ed.), Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953: Sovetiseerimise mehhanismid ja tagajärjed Nõukogude Liidu ja Ida-Euroopa arengute kontekstis (The Estonian SSR in 1940–1953: Mechanisms of Sovietization and Their Consequences in the Context of the Developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) (Tartu, 2007); David Feest, Zwangskollektivierung im Baltikum: Die Sowjetisierung des estnischen Dorfes 1944–1953 (Cologne, 2007); Elena Zubkova, Pribaltika i Kreml’ 1940–1953 (Moscow, 2008); Tõnu Tannberg, Politika Moskvy v respublikakh Baltii v poslevoennye gody (1944–1956): Issledovaniia i dokumenty (Tartu, 2008); Indrek Paavle, Kohaliku halduse sovetiseerimine Eestis 1940–1950 (The Sovietization of the Local Administration in Estonia 1940–1950) (Tartu, 2009); Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle, (eds.), Estonia since 1944: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2009); Olaf Mertelsmann, Die Sowjetisierung Estlands und seiner Gesellschaft (Hamburg, 2012); idem, Everyday Life in Stalinist Estonia (Frankfurt, 2012); Meelis Saueauk, Nõukogude julgeolekuorganite ja Eestimaa Kommunistliku Partei koostöö Eesti sovetiseerimisel aastatel 1944–1953 (The Cooperation of Soviet Security Organs and the Estonian Communist Party in the Sovietization of Estonia 1944–1953) (Tartu, 2013); Olev Liivik, Eesti NSV Ministrite Nõukogu institutsionaalne areng ja kaadrid 1940–1953 (The Institutional Development and the Cadres of the Sovmin of the Estonian SSR 1940–1953) (Tartu, 2014). 7 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau; idem, ‘Poslevoennoe vosstanovlenie v pribaltiiskikh respublikakh na primere Estonii’, Nathalie Moine and Beate Fieseler (eds.), Pobediteli i pobezhdennye: ot voiny k miru: SSSR, Frantsiia, Velikobritanniia, Germaniia, SShA (1941–1950) (Moscow, 2010), pp. 213–26. 8 Mertelsmann, ‘The Social Costs of the Early Cold War’, pp. 141–61.

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Sovietization This term “refers to a complex network of processes of adoption, transfer and imposition of the Soviet model of power and social structure. These processes included the institutional and structural change of society, economy and state, and the restructuring of culture and education and of everyday life.”9 For the Estonian economy during the first year of Soviet rule, Sovietization meant the nationalization of the majority of enterprises and of larger houses, severe restraints on private consumption, price-fixing, a confiscatory exchange rate for the national currency, delivery norms for agriculture, an inefficient land reform, large-scale exploitation, first steps towards a command economy, and a severe decline of output. Contrary to official propaganda, the first Soviet year ended in an economic and social catastrophe that was overshadowed only by Stalinist terror and the subsequent war.10 The process of economic restructuring was not finished when war broke out in June 1941. In fact, the vast majority of the economy still remained in private hands—agriculture was largely privately owned and run. In addition, some small private enterprises survived until 1947. Since Estonia had been an agricultural country, a Soviet-style economy was initially more developed in the towns. Even there the establishment of the command economy was not finished and was greatly improvised. Any large-scale transformation of an economy exacts a high price, and this was the case in the newly acquired territories. According to my own estimate, due to Sovietization, Estonia’s national income might have declined by one-quarter within only one year.11 The Soviets prepared their return during the war in the unoccupied Soviet hinterland. Some institutions were built up, specialists trained, and general plans made. While the leitmotif of 1940–41 had been the restructuring of existing institutions according to the rough blueprint for Eastern Poland, the second attempt seemed to be better prepared. Available documentation of the people’s commissariats of the Estonian SSR reveals that a Soviet style of administration 9 Mertelsmann, Everyday Life in Stalinist Estonia, p. 19. 10 Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Transition to Command Economy and Economic Exploitation: The Experience of Estonia 1940–1941’, Dzintars Ērglis (ed.), History of the Baltic Region of the 1940s–1980s (Riga, 2009), pp. 349–75. For a more optimistic view, see Maie Pihlamägi, ‘Eesti tööstus murrangulisel 1940.–1941. aastal: turumajanduselt plaanimajandusele’ (The Estonian Industry in the Revolutionary Year of 1940–1941: From a Market to a Planned Economy), Acta Historica Tallinnensia 1 (1997), pp. 154–74; idem, ‘Esimene nõukogude aasta Eesti majanduses, 1940–1941’ (The First Soviet Year in the Estonian Economy, 1940–1941), Acta Historica Tallinnensia 9 (2005), pp. 187–209. 11 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 74.

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was implemented comparatively quickly. Stalin and his inner circle decided to deal with the peasants in the newly acquired territories more slowly. First, the land reform was restaged, then agricultural taxes increased tremendously, dekulakization started, and finally, agriculture was collectivized in 1949, which was accompanied by a second mass deportation (the first one was in 1941).12 By this time private enterprises had been nationalized, but private economic activities like petty trade, moonlighting, or growing food in the garden nevertheless formed an important part of individual survival strategies.13 Thus the Soviet economy always contained an important but declining element of private economic activity. In the late 1950s, the Sovietization process for the Estonian economy was more or less finished. Several elements of Estonia’s Sovietization stood out in the context of the USSR. In agriculture, dairy farming and pig breeding was more important than grain production, and in industry the share of the light industries was larger than the average, where heavy industry dominated. According to published statistics, the inhabitants of Estonia and Latvia possessed the highest standard of living in the Soviet Union, comparable only to Moscow, Leningrad, or some privileged centers of the arms industry. In addition, they could legally own larger houses in towns than elsewhere. Still, the Estonian SSR had turned into an integral part of the Soviet economy, which was based on the results of Stalin’s “revolution from above” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then Stalin had started the first Five-Year Plan, the forced collectivization of agriculture, the brutal industrialization process, and the establishment of a command economy. The Soviet government financed the high investment rate, especially concerning heavy industry, by reducing the standard of living of the overall population. The outlook of the Soviet economy would continue to bear the strong imprint of Stalin’s revolution in the future.14 12 Feest, Zwangskollektivierung im Baltikum; see also Rein Taagepera, ‘Soviet Collectivization of Estonian Agriculture: The Taxation Phase’, Journal of Baltic Studies 10 (1979), no. 3, pp. 263–82; idem, ‘Soviet Collectivization of Estonian Agriculture: The Deportation Phase’, Soviet Studies 32 (1980), no. 3, pp. 379–97; Paul Hinnov, Kui need talud tapeti: Lehekülgi ühe küla ajaloost (When They Killed Those Farms: Aspects of the History of one Village) (Tartu, 1999); Anu Mai Kõll, ‘Tender Wolves: Identification and Persecution of Kulaks in Viljandimaa, 1940–1949’, Mertelsmann, (ed.), The Sovietization of the Baltic States, pp. 127–49. 13 Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Mehrdimensionale Arbeitswelten als Überlebensstrategie während der stalinistischen Industrialisierung am Beispiel Estlands’, Burghart Schmidt and Jürgen Hogeforster (eds.), Mehrdimensionale Arbeitswelten im baltischen Raum (Hamburg, 2007), pp. 94–106. 14 For Soviet economic history and Stalin’s impact, see Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR; Bergson, The Real National Income of Soviet Russia; Abram Bergson, The

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Reconstruction The preparations for the postwar Five-Year Plan covering the years 1946–1950 became apparent in 1943, and a year later the basics for this plan of “reconstruction” (vosstanovlenie) were clear. The plan continued the prewar tendencies of high investment into heavy industry and of massive defense spending. In addition, the Soviet Union intended to build its own atomic bombs.15 In that sense, the main emphasis in the “reconstruction” plan was put not on reconstruction but on building up the military strength of the USSR and further developing heavy industry. Concerning our case study, in October 1944, after Estonia’s liberation from German occupation and the re-occupation by the Soviets, the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) of the Estonian SSR already possessed 47 employees. Other Union republics supported this institution by finding the personnel for the local Gosplan. The first plan targets were set, and “local resources had to be mobilized

Economics of Soviet Planning (New Haven, 1964); Timothy Dunmore, The Stalinist Command Economy: The Soviet State Apparatus and Economic Policy, 1945–53 (London, 1980); Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1992); Holland Hunter and Janusz M. Szyrmer, Faulty Foundations: Soviet Economic Politics, 1928– 1940 (Princeton, 1992); Robert W. Davies, Mark Harrison and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, (eds.), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge, 1994); Robert W. Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, 1998); Paul R. Gregory, (ed.), Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy (Stanford, 2001); Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, 2003); Paul R. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (Cambridge, 2004). 15 On the atomic bomb project, see David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, 1994). On Soviet armament industries, see Mark Harrison, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945 (Cambridge, 1996); Simonov, Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR; Mark Harrison, (ed.), The Economies of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge, 1998); Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates (College Station, TX, 1998); John Barber and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev (Basingstoke, 2000); Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941 (Basingstoke, 2000); Bystrova, Voenno-promyshlennii kompleks SSSR; Paul R. Gregory, ’Soviet Defence Puzzles: Archives, Strategy, and Underfulfillment’, Europe-Asia Studies 55 (2003), pp. 923–38; Mark Harrison, (ed.), Guns and Rubles: The Soviet Defense Industry in the Stalinist State (New Haven, 2008).

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to fulfill those targets quicker.”16 By the end of 1944, the assignments for 1945 were the following, listed according to their importance: 1) reconstruction of the energy sector; 2) the oil shale industry; 3) production of construction materials; 4) regularity of deliveries for industry; and 5) transport and fuel.17 In May 1945, after the end of World War II in Europe, the targets for industrial reconstruction were re-formulated as 1) the energy sector; 2) oil shale; 3) construction; 4) engineering and metal works; and 5) textile and food industries.18 Because the war was still raging in Europe, and because of the damage caused by the war and because of the planned war against Japan, in late 1944 or early 1945 a transition to a peace economy was unthinkable for Moscow. Putting energy, construction, transport, and fuel on the list appears logical, as does the mention of the textile and food industries in the later version of the plan targets. Other states would have set similar priorities. The positions of oil shale, engineering, and metal works on the list are problematic, because investment into those sectors needed a longer span of time to bear any results, and they were clearly related to the defense industry, just as the oil shale region, which had a role in the project of constructing a Soviet atomic bomb. For the forthcoming conflict with Japan, this investment was useless, because it could not have borne fruit until long after this conflict was over. The war losses were smaller in the Estonian SSR than in other occupied Soviet regions. The population did decline from 1.1 million in 1939 to 854,000 in January 1945. But this decline was not caused by the war alone. The resettlement of Baltic Germans in 1939–1941 and of Estonia’s Swedes in 1944 (27,000 people in all), arrests (8,000), and a first mass deportation (10,000) during the first year of Soviet rule, evacuation to the Soviet hinterland after the beginning of the German attack (25,000), mobilization into the Red Army and into units fighting on the German side (together more than 100,000 males), Nazi terror (8,000), the mass flight to the West in 1944 (70,000), and the wave of arrests until the end of 1945 all contributed to population losses. By 1950, 70,000 people returned to Estonia.19 The low standard of living and malnutrition led to approximately 40,000 additional deaths in the 1940s.20 Demographically, the losses were later compensated by immigration from other Union republics. 16 Estonian SSR State Planning Committee (Gosplan) 1941–48, 28 October 1948, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 1, n. 4, s. 47, l. 169. 17 Ibid. 18 Explanatory report concerning the economic plan for the Estonian SSR in 1945, 16 May 1945, ERAF f. 1, n. 3, s. 429, l. 1. 19 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, pp. 116–8. 20 Ibid., p. 125.

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In literature we often find official Soviet estimates for war destruction concerning the Estonian SSR, but the data is frequently exaggerated and contradicts Soviet archival documents. In reality, war losses were, apart from the population losses, smaller in Estonia than one would expect. Neither Germans nor Soviets employed a scorched-earth policy on a large scale in Estonia; instead, both sides destroyed infrastructure and industrial capital stock when retreating. Some machinery and other goods were also evacuated. By the end of fighting, Estonian industry had lost about half of its capital stock.21 Another reason for this was the negative investment rate since 1940, which did not allow for the replacement of outdated equipment.22 Officially, the war destroyed 55 percent of the urban housing stock,23 but the Soviet Extraordinary Commission working on war and occupation damages reported only 9,200 out of 39,500 houses in Estonian towns as being demolished—less than half of the published figures.24 Their data is, in fact, consistent with later sources, too. In rural areas less than 5 percent of all buildings were lost.25 The amount of livestock declined by one-third in comparison with the figures of 1941.26 Nevertheless, material war damages were not as excessive as declared. In postwar reconstruction there was more to recover from than infrastructural damage. The population was exhausted from German exploitation and a long period of extremely low living standards, which, for many, meant long-lasting malnutrition. But, as mentioned above, Soviet priorities were elsewhere. Feeding the population and helping to recover from war and exhaustion was not high on the agenda.

The Impact of the Early Cold War There is no final agreement among scholars as to when the Cold War started. But there is enough evidence concerning postwar economic planning, as mentioned above, that the Kremlin anticipated some kind of international conflict

21 Kalev Kukk, ‘Industry’, Juhan Kahk (ed.) World War II and Soviet Occupation in Estonia: A Damages Report (Tallinn, 1991), p. 63. 22 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 221. 23 Misiunas, Taagepera, The Baltic States, p. 74. 24 Gosudarstevenyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archives of the Russian Federation, GARF) f. R-7021, o. 97, d. 6, l. 24. 25 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 90. 26 Data for January 1941, ERAF f. 1, n. 47, s. 49, l. 61; October 1944, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. R-1, n. 5, s. 93, pages not numbered.

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and intended to continue a policy of high investment in heavy industry, especially in the arms industry. In Estonia, as in all other Soviet republics, this meant that reconstruction was delayed in favor of high defense spending and heavy industry investment. This indicated that the population paid a high price, since wartime was characterized by stricter austerity, extreme shortages, and even malnutrition and hunger. This unfavorable situation would continue longer than necessary due to Stalin’s priorities. The postwar famine27 in western parts of Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova might be attributed at least partly to the Kremlin’s policy of heavy industry investment and defense spending instead of reconstruction. Only with the end of the 1940s did the Soviet population enjoy a modest food security of sorts, after decades of destitution.28 Below I will explore the details of this development, using the example of Estonia. The Estonian SSR was an agricultural country with more light industry than the Soviet average. This meant that the concentration on heavy industry and defense would slow down the postwar recovery of the dominant fields of the economy. In addition, a vast restructuring and reallocation of resources was needed to develop the preferred fields. In the Estonian case, this was oil shale-mining and processing and the establishment of a secret uranium enrichment facility in Sillamäe. First of all, we have to look at the role of defense spending. In the 1930s, due to the political situation in Europe and the rise of right-wing regimes like that of Hitler, an international arms race started, in which the Soviet Union duly participated. This became possible because of the establishment of a large heavy-industry sector by brute force during Stalin’s “revolution from above” and because of the expansion of education and R&D that provided those industries with experts and engineers. The Red Army was turned into the world’s largest army, designed to overwhelm potential enemies not only by its mass of soldiers but also by the amount of its weapons, like tanks or air fighters. While Hermann Göring in Nazi Germany spoke of “cannons instead of butter,” in the USSR the reality was “cannons instead of bread,” which led to another food crisis by the end of the decade.29 27 Veniamin F. Zima, Golod v SSSR 1946–1947 godov: proiskhodeshchdenie i posledstviia (Moscow, 1996); Michael Ellman, ‘The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 24 (2000), no. 5, pp. 603–30; Nicholas Ganson, The Soviet Famine of 1946–47 in Global and Historical Perspective (Houndsmills, 2009). 28 Julie Hessler, ‘Postwar Normalisation and its Limits in the USSR: The Case of Trade’, Europe-Asia Studies 53 (2001), no. 3, pp. 445–6. 29 Elena A. Osokina, Ierarkhiia potrebleniia: O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh Stalinskogo snabzheniia 1928–1935 gg. (Moscow, 1993); idem, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and

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Obviously, by then the Stalinist project of socialist modernization with the help of heavy industry had turned into a project of military buildup at the expense of society, especially the peasants. We do not know exactly how high Soviet defense spending really was in peacetime, but approximately 15 percent of GDP until the late 1980s seems to be a realistic estimate.30 Mark Harrison has assumed on the basis of a recently found source that in 1980, more than one-fifth of GDP was used for defense-related expenditures.31 Thus for more than half a century, the USSR spent a much larger share of its GDP for defense than its Cold War opponents, whose defense expenditure remained in the one-digit range. In other words, if the Soviet Union had been less militarized and spent a “normal” amount of money on the military, then real incomes would have been much higher. If Abram Bergson’s estimates of the USSR’s national income are correct, the Soviet defense burden was equal to one-third of private consumption from the 1930s until the late Cold War. “Normal” levels of spending for defense would have raised real incomes by one-fifth. This was a lot for a poor and underdeveloped country, where until the late 1940s man-made famines occurred regularly. With the Soviets’ westward expansion in 1939 and 1940, the inhabitants of the newly acquired territories experienced the extreme austerity of the socialist economic order, and those territories were also exploited on a large scale.32 Given the international tensions and the threat posed by Hitler in the 1930s, there is no doubt that the USSR had to participate in the arms race to guarantee its security. Whether Stalin actually planned to launch an attack is outside the scope of this paper.33 Without timely armament and without Stalin’s industrialization, the Soviet Union may not have survived World War II.34 During the war,

30 31

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the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941 (Armonk, NY, 2001). The Nazi rearmament was also paid for by the population: J. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006). Vladimir Kontorovich and Alexander Wein, ‘What did the Soviet Rulers Maximise?’, Europe-Asia Studies 61 (2009), no. 9, pp. 1579–1601, here p. 1592. Mark Harrison, ‘How Much Did the Soviets Really Spend on Defence? New Evidence from the Close of the Brezhnev Era’, PERSA Working Paper No. 24, 3 January 2003, pp.  24–5. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/ archive/persa/024fulltext.pdf (last accessed 2 November 2014). Mertelsmann, ‘Transition to Command Economy’, pp. 349–75. Mikhail Mel’tiukhov, Upushchennyi shans Stalina: Sovetskii Soiuz i bor’ba za Evropu 1939–1941 (Moscow, 2000); Bogdan Musial, Kampfplatz Deutschland: Stalins Kriegspläne gegen den Westen (Berlin, 2008). This is so even though the author of this paper does not believe that Stalinism was necessary. A democratic and capitalist Russia could have defended itself without the human costs of Stalin’s “revolution from above.”

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the Soviet Union did mobilize a larger share of the economy for the war effort than any other combatant. The defense burden increased to more than half of the national income, according to estimates, while private consumption declined to only about 30 percent of it.35 This led to a social catastrophe in the unoccupied Soviet hinterland, regional famines, and excess mortality.36 In 1943, after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, it became clear that the Allies would win the war, but war ended only after Japan’s capitulation. To understand the Soviet side in the Cold War, it is important to note that certain developments that had started during the arms race in the 1930s and World War II, such as the draconian labor legislation, the continuation of Stalinist terror, or the policy of extreme austerity, continued into the postwar period.37 The Soviet Union obviously learned the wrong lesson from the war: Stalin understood this conflict as the final test for the regime, which it survived only because of the militarization of the economy. Thus such policies had to continue.38 The Soviet arms industry after the war was sited mainly in the core and not the periphery of the country. The network of defense industry factories and secret defense R&D institutes contained, as we now know, some 27,000 institutions, only 60 of them located inside the Estonian SSR.39 Thus the Estonian SSR was not of direct importance to the Soviet defense industry, though the population paid equally for the expenses. One of the reasons for the USSR’s high defense spending was definitely the desire to prevent any other power from attacking like the Germans did in 1941. It has also been argued that the establishment of socialist puppet regimes in Central Eastern Europe was Stalin’s attempt to establish a cordon sanitaire.40 35 Bergson, The Real National Income, p. 277; Harrison, Accounting for War, see the chapter “GNP and the Defence Burden,” pp. 91–127. 36 Vladimir A. Isupov, Demograficheskie katastrofy i krizisy v Rossii v pervoi polovine XX veka: istoriko-demograficheskie ocherki (Novosibirsk, 2000), pp. 144, 159. 37 Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London, 1986); idem, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002). 38 Mark Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War 1938–1945 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 237. 39 Keith Dexter and Ivan Rodionov, The Factories, Research and Design Establishments of the Soviet Defence Industry: A Guide. Version 15, University of Warwick, Department of Economics. January 2014, http://go.warwick.ac.uk/vpk (last accessed 2 November 2014). 40 Donal O’Sullivan, Stalins “Cordon sanitaire”: Die sowjetische Osteuropapolitik und die Reaktionen des Westens 1939–1949 (Paderborn, 2004).

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To explain the impact of the continuation of high defense expenditure after the war, I use a very simple model. A defense burden of 15 percent of GDP might be financed in two ways: by suppressing consumption or keeping investment low.41 There is ample evidence and nearly no doubt in the literature that the Soviet Union, until its final days, had a high investment rate and relatively low and only slowly increasing levels of consumption. In comparison to Western Europe, where approximately 5 percent of GDP was used for defense, the Soviet Union spent at least 10 percent more, the equivalent of approximately one-fifth of private consumption. Soviet citizens would have had 20 percent higher real incomes in a peaceful USSR. But these were, of course, not the only outcomes of the Cold War for the Soviet population. Long years of people’s lifetimes were spent in obligatory military service. Large areas were reserved for the military and closed to the public, environmental damage occurred on an epic scale in Estonia and elsewhere,42 and obviously many repressive measures in the newly acquired territories were related in various ways to the unfolding Cold War. The border regions were cleared of potential enemies. In addition, such extraordinary military spending is negative for economic growth. Defense expenditures not only cost money but also commit labor, human capital, resources, raw materials, and equipment needed elsewhere in the economy. If we estimate that defense spending excesses slowed economic growth in Soviet Estonia by 1 percent annually, then without this burden, in the late 1980s GDP and real incomes would have been 50 percent higher. If defense spending excesses restrained economic growth by an annual 2 percent—which seems plausible to me—then GDP and income levels could have been twice as high as they actually were. This indicates the price that Soviet citizens, including those of the Estonian SSR, paid for the Cold War in the long run. Recently Martin Klesment constructed a rough GDP series for the Estonian SSR since the year 1950, published in a joint publication. This is the first GDP estimate for any Soviet republic based on the use of statistical output data from the archives.43 Since my own estimates based on qualitative, not on quantitative,

41 Harrison, ‘How Much Did the Soviets Really Spend on Defence?’, p. 4. 42 Anto Raukas (ed.), Endise Nõukogude Liidu sõjaväe jääkreostus ja selle likvideerimine (The Remaining Pollution of the Former Military of the Soviet Union and the Liquidation) (Tallinn, 1999); idem (ed.), Nõukogude okupatsiooni poolt tekitatud keskkonnakahjud (Environmental Damage Caused by the Soviet Occupation) (Tallinn, 2006). 43 Martin Klesment, Allan Puur and Jaak Valge, Child Bearing and Macro-Economic Trends in Estonia in the XX Century (Tallinn, 2010), p. 44.

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methods for the 1940s and 1950s were quite similar,44 Klesment’s series appears credible to me. Without the excess military spending of the Cold War, Estonia could have reached today’s level of economic development much earlier. Second, we have to consider the impact on infrastructure. The postwar reconstruction of infrastructure, sewage systems, communications, and so on to enhance transport and trade and to improve hygienic conditions remained slow. In fact, the infrastructure was only partially rebuilt,45 and for many years even fresh water, not to speak of a proper sewage system, was unavailable in many parts of Northeast Estonia.46 This led to unbearable hygienic conditions, because the Soviet leadership preferred to spend money on arms than on soap and proper sewage.47 Instead of on infrastructure, money was spent on arms and heavy industry, which hampered the development of other branches. Third, agriculture was in dire need of support, but no help was forthcoming from the state. During the war, levels of mechanization and the amount of horses, the most important source of draft power, had already declined in Estonia. The uncollectivized peasants needed cheap loans to improve their equipment and to buy horses. Furthermore, production of agricultural tools and machinery had to increase. The state did not provide any loans, though the peasants could buy horses on their own initiative,48 but the de-mechanization of agriculture continued. Despite high inflation in 1945–47, procurement prices for agricultural products were not increased; thus in real terms, they declined. A second land reform was staged and agricultural taxes, mostly to be paid in kind, nearly tripled in 1947 and increased further in the following year.49 There were not many incentives for the peasants to increase output. Instead of helping agriculture, the state damaged this sector, especially with the forced collectivization in 1949.50 There was neither the 44 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau. 45 Even in 1955 most of the statistical indicators concerning infrastructure did not indicate a better situation than in 1939. See Estonskaia SSR za gody Sovetskoi vlasti: Kratkii statistichiskikh sbornik (Tallinn, 1967), p. 105. 46 Report on the living conditions in the oil shale district, ERAF f. 1, n. 40, s. 4, l. 35–6. 47 On the horrifying postwar conditions in Russian towns that were not occupied during the war, see Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–1953 (Cambridge, 2010). 48 In 1939 there were still 210,800 horses (Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 63). By 1944 their number had declined to 140,000 (Statistical overview on farm animals 1940 and 1944, ERA f. R-6, n. 16, s. 1, l. 14) and increased by 1947 to 167,000 (Feest, Zwangskollektivierung im Baltikum, p. 208). 49 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 174. 50 As a result, agricultural output declined further: ibid., p. 197.

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will nor the funding to support agriculture. On the contrary, the peasants were exploited, and agriculture was supposed to provide cheap labor for other sectors of the economy.51 This meant the largest sector of the economy was neglected and could not properly recover from war and the bad agricultural policy in the 1940s. Indeed, collectivization of agriculture provided more cheap labor, but the desolate state of agriculture all over the Soviet Union led to widespread malnutrition and sometimes even hunger. Now imagine an economy where most of the work is manual and not mechanized, as it was in the USSR and in the Estonian SSR until after the death of Stalin. Human beings and work animals—horses did more work than tractors—subsisting on an insufficient diet will be less productive. Due to the neglect of agriculture in favor of weapons and steel in the context of the Cold War, Stalin harmed the entire economy and the society. Fourth, if consumer industries had been prioritized after the end of fighting, not only would the living conditions have improved, but it would have led quicker to economic growth; investment in heavy industry takes longer to achieve results. In practice, heavy industry received priority; in Estonia this was oil shale mining and processing. According to labor historian Donald Filter, in the first postwar Five-Year Plan, approximately 88 percent of investment went into heavy industry.52 The situation in the Estonian SSR was very similar, but because of the larger share of light industry,53 one might assume that investment in this sector was likely above the Soviet average. Much of heavy industry was related to the military-industrial complex, and thus “cannons instead of bread” remained a reality. Furthermore, often “industrial investment” actually represented hidden military expenditure. For example, one-fifth of “industrial investment” of the Estonian SSR in the first half-year of 1946 was used for military construction, especially installations for the Soviet Baltic Fleet.54 Fifth, to repair the war damage in the towns, large construction projects were needed. This need, however, was not met. According to calculations by Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, due to the speed of urbanization as a result of 51 Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Searching for Reasons of the Forced Collectivization in the Baltic Republics’, Dzintars Ērglis (ed.), Occupation Regimes in the Baltic States 1940–1991 (Riga, 2009), pp. 636–8. 52 Donald Filtzer, ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft der Nachkriegszeit’, Stefan Plaggenborg (ed.), Handbuch der Geschichte Russlands, Band 5, I. Halbband (Stuttgart, 2002), p. 80. 53 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 94. 54 Statistical overview on the fullfillment of the investment plan of the Estonian SSR during the first half-year 1946, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, RGASPI), f. 598, o. 1, d. 9, l. 117.

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large-scale immigration and fleeing the countryside after collectivization, available urban living space per capita actually declined from 12 sq. meters in 1945 to 8.8 sq. meters in 1955.55 This means that for many urban families, housing conditions became even worse. In Soviet parlance this was called “increasing the density of the population.” People who are not well fed and live in overcrowded housing conditions cannot be expected to be highly productive. Sixth, the improvement of medical services and hygienic conditions was highly important. Estonia lost much of its medical personnel through the mass exodus in 1944, war losses, and evacuation to the Soviet rear in 1941. All kinds of diseases threatened the population, which was already weakened by malnutrition. In this field the state acted and increased employment in medicine from 1940 to 1955 by three times.56 Though the new physicians and nurses were not always well qualified, medical treatment still improved over the long term.57 The Cold War definitely slowed down the tempo of reconstruction and the recovery from war. Soviet propaganda claiming that economic recovery was achieved by 1950 was false. Martin Klesment’s data suggests that GDP recovered to the prewar level only by the late 1950s.58 The Cold War severely harmed Estonia’s economy. But it is impossible to fully isolate the impact of the early Cold War from the shocks of Sovietization and the results of war damage.

The Example of the Estonian Oil Shale Industry From Moscow’s perspective, the mining and processing of oil shale was the most important sector of Estonia’s economy, and the largest share of investment went into this industry in the postwar years. Thus it makes sense to take a closer look at this sector.59 Rurik Holmberg has recently analyzed the phenomenon of Estonian oil shale, though not in a Cold War context. He sees the industry as an excellent example of path dependence under different political regimes allowing for the

55 Misiunas, Taagepera, The Baltic States, p. 364. 56 Mertelsmann, Der stalinistische Umbau, p. 245. 57 See also Christopher Burton, ‘Medical Welfare during Late Stalinism: A Study of Doctors and the Soviet Health System’ (PhD-thesis, University of Chicago, 2000). 58 Klesment, Puur, Valge, Child Bearing and Macro-Economic Trends, p. 44. 59 On the oil shale region in the postwar years, see Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Die Arbeiter des estnischen Ölschieferbeckens – eine Industrieregion des Stalinismus’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen (2007), no. 37, pp. 113–31; idem, ‘Ida-Virumaale sisserändamise põhjused pärast Teist maailmasõda’ (The Reasons for Immigration to Ida-Virumaa after World War II), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2007), no. 1, pp. 51–74.

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survival of industrial dinosaurs that were not really profitable.60 Even in the interwar period, when the branch was established, Estonian oil shale was severely dependent on protectionism and state subsidies.61 Because of its low energy value in comparison to coal, oil shale is only cost-effective when there are high energy prices on the world market. In addition, environmental damage and the need for huge stretches of land have to be considered. Immediately after Estonia’s annexation by the USSR in 1940, the oil shale industry was not yet in Moscow’s focus. Nevertheless, due to the arms race, the USSR suffered from a lack of fuel. Soviet oil production and processing could not cover the demand.62 Thus the Soviet leadership decided to extend oil shale mining and processing in the old republics. In December 1940 the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and the Politburo decided that earlier plans had not been fulfilled and that by 1945, 10 million tons of oil shale should be mined, not including the capacity of the Estonian SSR.63 One month later, in January 1941, the Politburo and Sovnarkom approved a plan for the Estonian economy that foresaw the “accelerated development” of the oil shale industry and an increase in mining by one-half.64 Later, Moscow provided additional funding. Even before the Germans attacked, the Estonian oil shale industry helped the Soviet arms industry to overcome fuel shortages and also delivered special fuel to the German navy, the Kriegsmarine. By 1945 the mining of oil shale was intended to be increased to eight million tons to process 750,000 tons of fuel.65 The Estonian SSR would have turned into the most important oil shale producer and processor in the entire

60 Rurik Holmberg, Survival of the Unfit: Path Dependence and the Estonian Oil Shale Industry (Linköping, 2008). 61 Jaak Valge, ‘Riikliku põlevkivitööstuse majandamistingimused ja -tulemused 1920. ja 1930. aastatel’ (The Economic Conditions and Results of the State Oil Shale Industry in the 1920s and 1930s), Akadeemia 7 (1995), pp. 1712–40, 1929–49. 62 А.А. Igolkin and А.K. Sokolov, ‘Neftianoi shturm i ego posledstviia’, Ekonomicheskaia istoriia: Ezhegodnik 8 (2006), pp.  385–438; А.А. Igolkin, ‘Sovetskaia energiticheskaia strategiia i neftianaia promyshlennost’ v 1940 – pervoi polovine 1941 g.’, Ekonomicheskaia istoriia: Ezhegodnik 9 (2007), pp. 340–65. 63 Joint decision of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and of the Politburo of the VKP(b) “On the Extension of the Mining and Processing of Oil Shale,” 29 December 1940, RGASPI f. 17, o. 3, d. 1031, l. 208–15. 64 Materals concerning the decision of Politburo, protocol 26, point 91, 28 January 1941, RGASPI f. 17, o. 163, d. 1294, l. 53–4. 65 Statement concerning occupation damages, People’s Commissariat of Oil Shale and Chemical Industry, Estonian SSR, 15 March 1945, GARF f. 7021, o. 97, d. 865, l. 31.

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USSR. For a better understanding of postwar priorities, it is thus important to look briefly at prewar planning. In 1944, when the Five-Year Plan of “reconstruction” was developed, those prewar ideas were realized. Oil shale mining received the highest priority of all industrial branches in Estonia; only in the 1950s did a few other branches catch up with it in status.66 On the one hand, we might view this as a case of path dependence, as Holmberg does. On the other hand, the lack of energy and fuel in the postwar period due to war destruction and armament also played an important role, as did the construction of a secret uranium enrichment factory in Sillamäe,67 the single most important construction project of this period in Estonia. Uranium for Stalin’s atomic bombs was to be produced there. Again, the Cold War and not profitability was the main driving force behind the expansion of the oil shale industry. Because the Soviet command economy functioned on the basis not of market prices but of fixed prices, which did not really mirror production costs, the scarcity of resources, or the relation of supply and demand, it was impossible to calculate precise losses or profits. This meant it was even impossible to figure out which factories or branches were permanently in the red.68 Obviously, the oil shale industry was such a loss-maker during the early Cold War. Even according to the strange methods of Soviet bookkeeping, half of the enterprises under the authority of the Estonian SSR’s oil shale ministry made “planned” losses in 1951.69 In 1955 every worker mined 2.7 tons of oil shale per day, while in Soviet coal mining the corresponding figure was 1.4 tons.70 Given that the energy value of oil shale is only one-fourth that of coal, and given that labor was, before largescale mechanization, the largest cost factor in mining, oil shale mining in Estonia cost approximately twice as much as coal mining in the Ukrainian SSR in terms

66 Report on the first years of the Five-Year Plan (1951−55), ERAF f. 1, n. 126, s. 33, l. 119. 67 Ello Maremäe, ‘Sillamäe uraanitehaste asutamine ja töö aastatel 1946−1952 (1973): Eesti diktüoneemakilda kasutamine’ (The Foundation and Operation of the Sillamäe Uranium Factory 1946−1952 (1973): Use of Estonian Dictyonema-Shale), Akadeemia 12 (2000), no. 3, pp. 476−512. 68 See Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes, Russia’s Virtual Economy (Washington, 2002), pp. 47–9. 69 Balance sheet of the enterprises of the ministry, ERA f. R-4, n. 13, s. 43, l. 18–23. 70 I. Kagananovitš, ‘Materiaalse ja tehnilise baasi arenemine ja tööviljakuse tõus Eesti NSV põlevkivi kaevandavas tööstuses’ (The Development of the Material and Technical Basis and the Increase of Labor Productivity in the Oil Shale Mining Industry of the Estonian SSR), Nõukogude Eesti majandus 1940–1960 (Tallinn, 1960), p. 230.

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of energy value. In other words, the expansion of oil shale mining in Estonia was economically absurd, and the industry could never have afforded the high level of investment it required—40 percent of the republic’s total capital investment— during the postwar Five-Year Plan of 1946–1950.71 Instead of supporting reconstruction and improving the population’s living standards, the regime invested large sums into an inefficient branch of industry and mainly wasted the money. Instead of repairing war damage, three-quarters of the German prisoners of war were assigned to work in May 1945 in the oil shale region in mining and construction.72 The building sites and enterprises of this region attracted so many immigrants from the “old republics” that in less than a decade, the ethnic structure was changed forever, and the towns in the region became Russian-speaking.73 In the immediate postwar years, the region had the worst living conditions in the entire republic. In addition, the ecological damage caused by oil shale mining and processing continues to this day. The large-scale development of the oil shale industry is also an example of how the Union directed Soviet republics onto a wrong path of development that had to be corrected painfully during the post-socialist transformation. The stress on heavy industry and defense-related industries became a liability for the economic structure.74 Even today, more than 70 years after Stalin’s decision to expand the Estonian oil shale industry, structural and social problems and high unemployment in the region are the result.

Conclusion As mentioned above, only well after the death of Stalin did Estonia’s economy recover from the war, Sovietization, and the Cold War. Under Khrushchev’s rule the Seven-Year Plan of 1959–65 provided relatively high economic growth,75 and 71 Kukk, ‘Industry’, p. 64. 72 Ivanov, deputy head of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior of the Estonian SSR, to Nikolai Karotamm, 30 May 1945, ERAF f. 1, n. 3, s. 438, l. 4. 73 David Vseviov, Kirde-Eesti urbaanse anomaalia kujunemine ning struktuur pärast Teist maailmasõda (Tallinn, 2002); Mertelsmann, ‘Ida-Virumaale sisserändamise põhjused’. 74 See also Kalev Kukk, ‘Majanduskahjud’ (Economic Damages), Valge raamat: Eesti rahva kaotustest okupatsioonide läbi 1940–1991 (Tallinn, 2005), pp. 125–154. 75 Maie Pihlamägi, ‘Eesti NSV tööstuse areng seitseaastakul (1959–1965) rahvamajanduse nõukogu reformi taustal’ (The Development of Estonian Industry during the SevenYear Plan (1959–1965) on the Background of the Reform of the Council of the National Economy), Acta Historica Tallinnensia 19 (2013), pp. 115–146; Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Tagasi sotsialismi juurde – Eesti majanduse parim võimalus?’ (Return to Socialism: The Best Opportunity for the Estonian Economy?), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2014), nos. 2–3, pp. 265–70.

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the standard of living improved, too. This is one reason why the decade was referred to in Estonia as the “Golden Sixties.” Nevertheless, we should not disregard the long-term impact of an inefficient command economy and extremely high defense spending. Before World War II, Europe was economically divided between north and south, with two poor northern countries—Ireland and the Soviet Union. In the north the western half of the continent was richer. Southern Europe—Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Balkan states—was poor and underdeveloped in comparison with Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and, at least in some cases, Poland. Today, economically there is a fairly neat division of Europe, still following, with few exceptions, the borderline of the Cold War. The reason seems clear to me—the long-term impact of high defense spending and of the command economy.

Meelis Maripuu

Cold War Show Trials in Estonia: Justice and Propaganda in the Balance Abstract: The paper demonstrates how Soviet judicial institutions and the prosecution of crimes internationally not subject to statutes of limitations as a whole were used to achieve the political aims of the Soviet regime. More specifically, the author considers show trials held in the occupied Baltic countries in the early 1960s, highlighting their general organizational scheme, domestic and foreign policy aims, propaganda media coverage, manipulation of witnesses, and discrediting of expatriate circles.

Introduction Starting in 1960, a wave of show trials of persons accused of Nazi crimes, including participation in the Holocaust, rippled through the Soviet bloc as part of the Cold War. These trials had several important features in common. From the end of World War II until the mid-1950s, political show trials took place in countries under the control of the Soviet Union in which communists and socialists, former comrades-in-arms of the Soviets, were convicted, and even sentenced to death, with the aim of consolidating Soviet control.1 Alongside the direct consolidation of power, these trials played an important role in the Cold War propaganda battle, where they were meant to demonstrate the immutability of the Soviet regime. The trials were held in classic Stalinist style, with arrest and the bringing of charges generally guaranteeing a conviction.2 Two factors worked together to make contemporary historians accept unquestioningly the results of Soviet show trials concerning World War II: the importance of the Holocaust in today’s world and the inaccessibility of relevant archives of the Soviet state security services, which would have shed a light on

1 See George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954 (New York, 1987). 2 For instance, the trial of the first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, and others in Prague in 1951. See Ronald Radosh, ‘A Tale of Two Trials: Soviet Propaganda at Home and Abroad’, World Affairs (2012), May/June (http://www. worldaffairsjournal.org/article/tale-two-trials-soviet-propaganda-home-and-abroad, last accessed on 7 February 2014).

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the motives for launching these trials.3 Due to the archival restrictions, an assessment of these cases is often only possible by drawing conclusions from, and/ or making comparisons with, similar trials. The show trials of Nazi criminals staged by Soviet authorities in Estonia in the 1960s are the focus of the following article.

Punishment of Nazi Crimes After World War II, the world faced questions of penalizing war criminals more seriously than ever before. The development of international justice had made great strides since World War I: the earlier Hague and Geneva conventions were considered customary international law by World War II, regardless of whether a country had ratified a particular convention. Massive numbers of war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war were committed, especially on the Eastern Front in the war between the Soviet Union and Germany. In 1944, the Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin introduced the term “genocide” in the sense of the murder of a people.4 As a result of political agreements, this term entered into circulation in the context of World War II primarily in connection with the killing of Jews. In August 1945, the Soviet Union and the Western Allies signed the London Agreement, resulting in an international war tribunal to try suspects accused of war crimes committed (by the losers) during World War II. Germany’s higher public officials and military leaders, who were accused of starting World War II and of war crimes, were tried at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and by U.S. military tribunals organized at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. From the postwar development of international law, it is important in the context of this paper to highlight the updating of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

3 Show trials held in the Soviet Union have been examined perhaps to the greatest extent through the Latvian example, mostly in connection with the conviction in absentia of accused persons who lived in the United States or other Western countries. Since most of the authors who have examined these trials are themselves of Latvian origin, they have faced reproaches regarding the politicization of those examinations, accusations that they are attempting to whitewash the crimes of their own people, and charges that they support neo-Nazism. 4 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation; Analysis of Government; Proposals for Redress (Washington, 1944).

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signed in 1948,5 and particularly the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity signed in 1968.6 Despite the rapid development of international justice, the Nuremberg International War Tribunal Trial, conducted in 1945–46 on the basis of the London Charter (or Nuremberg Charter) between the Allied countries, where 24 of Germany’s higher political and military leaders were tried, remained the only one of its kind.7 Conflicts between the Soviet Union and the Western countries emerged vividly even during the trial. The crimes of the adjudicator countries themselves were discernible, yet they still managed to maintain the image of the victorious Allies and enforce victors’ justice. An embellished image of this trial developed over the decades of the Cold War, while largely ignoring the Soviet Union’s experiences in holding staged political show trials.8 The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials held by the United States occupying authorities in 1946–49 were conducted in the spirit of the principles of Nuremberg, relying on Control Council Law No. 10 of the Allied countries occupying Germany. At the same time, the occupying Allied countries held numerous trials of lower-level accused persons in Germany’s occupation zones on the basis of military tribunals from their own countries.9 In these and subsequent years, thousands of citizens of Nazi Germany and countries that it had occupied or that it had cooperated with were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity in various countries based on domestic laws and procedures.

5 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948. (http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/res/260(III), last accessed on 12 January 2014). 6 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 26 November 1968 (https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/ UNTS/Volume%20754/v754.pdf, last accessed on 12 January 2014). 7 The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was formed under the leadership and domination of the United States to punish the crimes committed by Japan. In general, it was supposed to function according to the same principle as the Nuremberg Tribunal. In 1946–48, 28 major political and military leaders were put on trial in Tokyo, along with thousands of less important figures. The Tokyo trials did not have the international weight or influence on the development of international law comparable to the trials in Nuremberg. 8 See, for instance, Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Post-war Order’, American Historical Review 113 (2008), no. 3, pp. 701–731. 9 See also Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.), Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht: Die alliierten Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten 1943–1952 (Frankfurt, 1999).

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Under the conditions of the emerging Cold War, the trial of Nazi criminals became ever more politicized. The Nuremberg Trial itself was political by its nature, regardless of its legal basis, and thus could easily be criticized from this aspect.10 Now that Germany is reunified, the Federal Republic of Germany could theoretically review the verdicts of the Nuremberg Trials,11 but given contemporary political, legal, and moral developments, this is unlikely. Regardless of their shortcomings, the Nuremberg Trials have become an iconic landmark in the evolution of modern international criminal justice (Völkerstrafrecht in German). Together with more recently established Holocaust studies, they form an important moral standard of contemporary Western civilization. The Cold War significantly affected the investigation of Nazi crimes and the bringing of suspects to justice throughout the world for decades and has left a lasting trace in the historical narratives of many peoples.12 In addition to the essentially different legal systems and judicial practice of different countries, the Iron Curtain divided the world into two cordoned-off spaces. Cooperation across the Iron Curtain in proving the guilt of Nazi criminals was slow to develop. If information was exchanged, it was still marked by palpable mistrust and suspicions regarding the authenticity of the other side’s evidence. The possible shielding of criminals from the opposite side could accompany this. Persons suspected of committing such crimes were used as military and (security) police specialists in the service of governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain, perhaps simply more covertly on the eastern side.13

10 Eric A. Posner, ‘Political Trials in Domestic and International Law’, Duke Law Journal 55 (2005), no. 75, pp.  75–152; Susanne Jung, Die Rechtsprobleme der Nürnberger Prozesse: dargestellt am Verfahren gegen Friedrich Flick (Tübingen, 1992). 11 Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Jan Korte, Petra Pau, Ulla Jelpke, weiterer Abgeordneter und der Fraktion Die Linke, Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 16/3452 (http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/ btd/16/037/1603744.pdf, last accessed 17 December 2014). 12 As an example taken from the Estonian context, the perception of Estonians and other peoples living on Russia’s western border as “fascists” is widespread in Russia as a result of Soviet treatments of history, which was also effectively disseminated in Western countries through propaganda channels. 13 Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (online resource, 2010, http://www.archives.gov/iwg/ reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf, last accessed December 17, 2014).

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Trials of Nazi Crimes in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union set up “Extraordinary State Commissions” (ESC) with representation in even the smallest administrative units in territories liberated from German rule and recaptured.14 The first political show trials were held during the war in 1943 in the Soviet Union based on the work of these commissions, resulting in the submission to the Nuremberg Tribunal of Soviet accusations concerning war crimes and economic demands for compensation for war damages.15 USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium Enactment No. 39 “Concerning Terms of Punishment for Fascist German Criminals Guilty of Killing and Torturing the Soviet Civilian Population and Imprisoned Red Army Soldiers; For Spies, Traitors of the Homeland and Their Accomplices from among Soviet Citizens” was issued in April 1943 to punish Nazi crimes.16 Public hanging was prescribed as the punishment for war criminals and Soviet citizens who acted as spies and traitors of the fatherland. Immediately after the Soviet occupation resumed in October 1944, the corresponding regional commission also set to work in Estonia. It was supposed to complete its investigation within two weeks.17 There was no possible way to thoroughly and objectively ascertain the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the preceding four years and to identify material losses during this 14 Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia po ustanovleniiu i rassledovaniiu zlodeianii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshchnikov i prichinennogo imi ushcherba grazhdanam, kolkhozam, obshchestvennym organizatsiiam, gosudarstvennym predpriiatiiam i uchrezhdeniiam SSSR / Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German-Fascist invaders and their accomplices, and the damage inflicted by them on citizens, collective farms, social organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the USSR (abbreviated ESC). 15 See Niels Bo Poulsen, ‘The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes: An Analysis of the Commission’s Investigative Work in War and Post-War Stalinist Society’ (PhD-thesis, Copenhagen, 2004); Victor Prusin, ‘Fascist Criminals to the Gallows! The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003), no. 1, pp. 1–30; Tanja Penter, ‘Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material on Soviet Post-War Trials against Collaborators’, Slavic Review 64 (2005), no. 4, pp. 782–90. 16 ‘Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR no. 39 ot 19 aprelia 1943 goda “O merakh nakazaniia dlia nemetsko-fashistskikh zlodeev, vinovnykh v ubiistvakh i istiazaniiakh sovetskogo grazhdanskogo naseleniia i plennykh krasnoarmeitsev, dlia shpionov, izmennikov rodiny iz chisla sovetskikh grazhdan i dlia ikh posobnikov”’, E. Zaitsev (ed.), Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov o repressiiakh i reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh repressii (Moscow, 1993), pp. 66, 148. 17 Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. R-364, n. 1, f. 1, l. 3.

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short period.18 At that time, it was important for the USSR to present to the world as many “Soviet citizens” as possible who perished at the hands of the German side, even if they were not really Soviet citizens, and to establish the “greatest sufferer” image with an eye to dividing up the spoils after victory. Soviet authorities began arresting and punishing those who had cooperated with the German occupying authorities everywhere immediately after the front line had passed through the area. According to data since disclosed by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), over 320,000 local residents were arrested in the Soviet Union in 1943–53. Since the vast majority of material on arrests is in the classified archives of the Russian Federation’s security services, and historians have virtually no access to them,19 there has been little analysis of their content.20 According to the available information, over 5,000 people were arrested in Estonia in the autumn of 1944, with over 12,000 arrests the following year. By the end of 1949, over 27,000 had been arrested on political grounds. About 20,000 had been deported to the eastern Soviet Union in March of that year.21 It can be presumed that people who had cooperated more closely with the German authorities mostly joined the tens of thousands of people who fled from Estonia to the West before the advance of the Red Army. The investigation of arrested persons was in most cases conducted quickly and cursorily during the first postwar years. According to the investigation practices of that time, the confession of the accused or the testimony of a witness was generally sufficient to prove the guilt of the accused. Domestically, the Soviet Union did not base the conviction of people who had cooperated with the Germans on the definition of war crimes but rather on its own criminal code and relevant regulations, and it convicted people in accordance with the section dealing with betrayal of the fatherland. The Soviet Union used the 18 As a result of the ESC’s working campaign, a large amount of data of widely differing content and quality was gathered and presented to the Union-wide commission. This data was summed up as unsubstantiated total losses that were inflated for propaganda purposes. The data presented by the commission was canonized in the USSR over the subsequent years. 19 The corresponding files from the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were handed over to the national archival system after the restoration of national independence, and they can be accessed for research work. Their use is regulated by domestic legislation protecting personal data. 20 Penter,‘Collaboration on Trial’, p. 783. 21 Meelis Saueauk,‘Data about Persons Arrested in Estonia during the Soviet Repressions in 1944–1990’, Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle (eds.), Estonia since 1944: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2009), p. 309.

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term “war crimes” primarily in communication with other countries, for instance, when demanding the extradition of Estonians from Finland who had fought in the Finnish Army. This was purely a case of stigmatizing people, because the Soviets had no information whatsoever connecting those persons with war crimes. The actual motive was to punish those who had fought against the Red Army; in the event of extradition, they were convicted of “betrayal of the fatherland.”22 The first public trials were held during the war in order to influence society more broadly. Yet a more opportune time for them came after the end of the war, when the Soviet Union competed in its own way with the Nuremberg Trials. The first people to be publicly convicted were primarily captured German prisoners of war and a few isolated collaborators. In November 1945, the Communist Party’s Central Committee adopted two decisions for holding public trials of the major German military leaders and penal institutions.23 Convictions and executions took place in two waves. At the seven trials held at the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946, 84 persons were sentenced to death by public hanging. At the nine trials carried out at the end of 1947, the fate of another 137 persons was decided.24 Subsequent trials of accused prisoners of war were held in camera, and in connection with the temporary abolition of the death penalty in the Soviet Union (1947–50), 25 years imprisonment in the Gulag became the prevailing punishment. About 34,000 German prisoners of war were convicted in the Soviet Union

22 Meelis Saueauk, ‘Soomepoisid raudeesriide taga Nõukogude võimu all’ (Finnish Boys behind the Iron Curtain under the Soviet Regime), Soomepoisid – võitlus jätkub (Finnish Boys: The Struggle Continues) (Tallinn, 2010), pp. 180–1. 23 Postanovlenie politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ob organizatsii otkrytykh sudebnykh protsessov, 10 November 1945, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, RGASPI), f. 17, o. 162, d. 37, l. 157; Postanovlenie politbiuro TsK VKP(b) o provedenii sudebnykh protsessov nad byvshimi voennosluzhashchimi germanskoi armii i nemetskikh karatel’nykh otriadov, 21 November 1945, ibid., l. 159–60 (http://www.hrono.ru/dokum/194_dok/, last accessed on 23 March 2014). 24 Valentin Iushkevich, ‘Uchastie organov gosbezopasnosti v podgotovke i provedenii otkrytykh sudebnykh protsessov nad natsistskimi voennymi prestupnikami’, Istoricheskie chteniia na Lubianke. 2001: Otechestvennye spetssluzhby v poslevoennye gody 1945–1953 gg (Velikii Novgorod, 2002), pp. 76–83.

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in 1949–50. Examination of these trials by both German25 and Russian26 historians has vividly illustrated that they were political and propagandistic in nature. This is also proven by the fact that in the first 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991–2001), 13,035 citizens of foreign countries (mostly former German prisoners of war) were rehabilitated by Russian Federation military tribunals—over three-quarters of the more than 15,000 applications submitted for rehabilitation.27 For prisoners of war, however, being placed under investigation meant conviction as a rule.

Khrushchev’s Thaw and Cold War (Show) Trials Noticeable changes followed Stalin’s death in 1953. The granting of amnesty to hundreds of thousands of previously convicted people was followed in September 1955 by an extensive amnesty of people who had cooperated with the German side during World War II. Over 50,000 people were released from forced labor camps. The number of people released from detention centers was considerably larger than the number of new arrests.28 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a 25 For instance, Andreas Hilger (ed.), Sowjetische Militärtribunale: Die Verurteilung deutscher Kriegsgefangener 1941–1953, vol. 1 (Cologne, 2001); idem, Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion 1941­–1956: Kriegsgefangenenpolitik, Lageralltag und Erinnerung (Essen, 2000); idem, ‘Sowjetische Justiz und Kriegsverbrechen: Dokumente zu den Verurteilungen deutscher Kriegsgefangener, 1941–1949’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 54 (2006), no. 3, pp. 461–515; also thematic publications by Manfred Zeidler and Gerd R. Überschär. 26 For instance, Aleksandr Epifanov,‘Otvetstvennost’ za voennye prestupleniia, sovershennye na territorii SSSR v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Istoriko-pravovoi aspekt’ (PhD-thesis, Moscow, 2001) (http://www.dissercat.com/content/otvetstvennost-za-voennye-prestupleniya-sovershennye-na-territorii-sssr-v-period-velikoiote#ixzz2sIp4iABK, last accessed on 12 January 2014); Viktor Konasov, ‘Politika Sovetskogo gosudarstva v otnoshenii nemetskikh voennoplennykh (1941–1956 gg)’ (PhD-thesis, Moscow, 1998) (http://www.dissercat.com/content/politika-sovetskogogosudarstva-v-otnoshenii-nemetskikh-voennoplennykh-1941-1956-gg, last accessed on 12 January 2014). 27 Epifanov, ‘Otvetstvennost’ za voennye prestupleniia’. 28 ‘Prezidium Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR. Ukaz ot 17 sentiabria 1955 goda ob amnistii sovetskikh grazhdan, sotrudnichavshikh s okkupantami v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg; Dokument no. 102. Spravka o nalichii, dvizhenii i sostave zakliuchennykh v ITL i ITK MVD SSSR za period 1953–1955 gg’, Al’manakh “Rossiia. XX vek.” Internet-proekt “Arkhiv Aleksandra N. Iakovleva” (http://www.alexanderyakovlev. org/, last accessed on 12 January 2014).

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speech at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 denouncing the abuses of power and the crimes committed during the Stalin era, along with Stalin’s personality cult. The period that became known as the “Thaw” brought fundamental changes in society and politics throughout Eastern Europe. The Cold War entered a new phase, one with contradictory politics. The Soviet Union under Khrushchev had taken a new course towards “peaceful coexistence” with the West after the CPSU 20th Congress, but this took place in part at the expense of peoples under the rule of the Soviet empire. The revolution and uprisings that broke out in Hungary and Poland and were crushed by the Soviet armed forces made Khrushchev apprehensive concerning subjugated peoples. In order to stabilize the system, Russification was accelerated. To support the weakened Soviet regime, a new framework for mobilizing and orchestrating was needed in place of the personality cult of the late Stalin. The great leader was symbolically replaced by the Soviet people, personified primarily by the Russian people. The Great Patriotic War, or more broadly, the struggle against German occupation in Eastern Europe, became the symbol for uniting the people.29 The postwar generation had emerged in society, and with it, a new treatment of the war and the sufferings of the people was formed in opposition to the “attempts of imperialist countries to continue the work of the fascists to destroy the Soviet Union.”30 Victory over Germany and the sufferings of the people took on a monumental and sacral aspect. The Soviet Union became the world’s main sufferer and its sole savior.31 The collaboration of peoples that had lived under German occupation and Nazi crimes their representatives might have committed were placed under the magnifying glass in a new form. The tragedy that befell the Jews of Eastern Europe was employed for propaganda purposes as an example of imperialist policy. In addition to accusing Eastern European peoples, accusing Western countries of continuing Nazi policy after the collapse of Hitler’s Germany became part of the Soviet Union’s “arsenal.” A propaganda campaign was started in May 1957 under the aegis of the German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED)32 29 Andrew Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation about the Holocaust in Latvia: Daugavas vanagi – Who Are They? Revisited (Riga, 2005), p. 18. 30 Nina Tumarkin, ‘The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory’, European Review 11 (2003) no. 4, pp. 595–611. 31 Catherine Merridale, ‘War, Death, and Remembrance in Soviet Russia’, Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 77–83. 32 The SED was controlled by the Soviet Union.

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against West German judges and lawyers who had served Hitler’s regime.33 These events formed the background for the subsequent Berlin crisis, which the Soviets caused in November 1958 by presenting their onetime allies with an ultimatum demanding that they withdraw their military forces from West Berlin within six months.34 Khrushchev was on a state visit to Austria on July 3, 1959. While visiting the former Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, he publicly disclosed that the East German leadership had been instructed at the beginning of the year to hurl accusations of Nazism at West Germany. The international situation was critical, and the status of divided Germany was not yet unequivocally decided. The Soviet Union’s aim was to use the underlying mistrust in the international community from the Nazi era and to weaken West Germany’s international position with accusations of revanchism, fascism, and militarism, since West Germany had already managed to isolate East Germany internationally. In his speech, Khrushchev compared Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to Hitler and warned against West German irredentism and the spread of Nazism as long as ex-Nazis like Theodor Oberländer35 were part of the government. It was decided, apparently at the end of October 1959 with the approval of the CPSU CC Politburo, to end this campaign, which initially began as a propaganda operation, with a public show trial. As if ordered, anti-Semitic graffiti appeared overnight across West Germany at the end of the year. Western countries reacted with criticism. The debates on this scandal that began in the Bundestag at the beginning of the new year also marked the end of Adenauer’s “restoration policy” that had followed postwar de-nazification.36 33 Former members of the Einsatzgruppe Tilsit were put on trial in Ulm, West Germany, in 1958, attracting widespread media attention and focusing greater attention than before in West Germany on wartime Nazi crimes. 34 See, for instance, Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, 2011). 35 Theodor Oberländer (1905–98) devised, before World War II, plans against the Jewish and Polish populations in territories that were to be conquered by Nazi Germany. During the war he supported ethnic cleansing policies, and after the invasion of the Soviet Union, he served as a contact officer on the Eastern Front. After the war he served as federal minister for displaced persons, refugees, and victims of war from 1953 to 1960, and as a member of the Bundestag from 1953 to 1961 and from 1963 to 1965.  36 Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewältigung 1949–1969 oder: Eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn, 2002), pp.  141–51; Philipp-Christian Wachs, ‘Die Inszenierung eines Schauprozesses – das Verfahren gegen Theodor Oberländer vor dem Obersten Gericht der DDR’, Wolfgang Buschfort, Philipp-Christian Wachs and

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Khrushchev’s speech was the public kickoff to the judicial farce in East Berlin orchestrated by the USSR and staged by the East German SED and the Ministry of State Security, which culminated with the West German government minister Oberländer being sentenced in absentia to life in prison in April 1960.37 The trial was timed to take place immediately before the summit meeting between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies (in Paris in May 1960) in order to discredit West German endeavors to integrate with democratic Western countries and vice versa: to achieve the withdrawal of U.S. and British forces from West Berlin. At the beginning of the year, East German leader Walter Ulbricht had presented a proposal for holding an all-German referendum on disarming and forming a confederation and for signing a peace treaty. In April, the SED disclosed the Central Committee’s action plan Deutschlandplan des Volkes, which referred to the possibility of Germany’s reunification in light of the Camp David summit meeting.38 Different social systems were not presented as an obstacle to reunification; the stumbling block was instead presented as West Germany’s aggressive militarism.39 Yet the Cold War instead gained new impetus when the Soviet Union shot down an American U2 spy plane over its territory on May 1, 1960. The summit meeting held in Paris a couple of weeks later became another of Khrushchev’s performances revolving around the U2 plane and the captured American pilot, regardless of events in Germany. At the end of the 1950s began a struggle against expatriate communities of peoples living under Soviet rule (predominantly consisting of people who had fled to the West during World War II). The size and influence of expatriate communities differed widely from ethnic group to ethnic group and from country to country. From the Soviet standpoint, what was taking place in North America was definitely the most important: the United States was the main ideological enemy, Falco Werkentin (eds.), Vorträge zur deutsch-deutschen Geschichte: Schriftenreihe des Berliner Landesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR, vol. 14 (Berlin, 2007), p. 37. 37 Weinke, Die Verfolgung, p. 144; about Oberländer, see also Philipp-Christian Wachs, Der Fall Theodor Oberländer (1905–1998): Ein Lehrstück deutscher Geschichte (Frankfurt, 2000). 38 A certain warming of Soviet-U.S. relations took place in 1959, which culminated in a tour of the United States by Nikita Khrushchev as the first Soviet leader to visit the United States (the Camp David meeting). This created hope internationally for an end to the Cold War, and the Paris summit meeting of 1960 was seen as the next important step in that process. 39 Deutschland im Kalten Krieg 1945–1963. Deutsches Historisches Museum (http://www. dhm.de/ausstellungen/kalter_krieg/zeit/z1960.htm, last accessed on 6 February 2014).

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and large communities of refugees from the Soviet Union (Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Caucasian peoples, etc.) lived there. For Estonia, the activity of its expatriate community in Sweden was undoubtedly also important. During the Cold War, these expatriates were, of course, a welcome guard on every front imaginable in the fight against communism. The expatriate theme also found its way into the domestic politics of their host countries, not to mention the foreign policy of those countries. In 1959, the president of the United States declared the annual commemoration of a week in support of the “captive nations” controlled by the Soviet Union. This became an important landmark in the anticommunist struggle of emigrant communities that had fled from Soviet rule.40 The Soviets initially hoped that refugees would extensively repatriate, but when this hope was extinguished, the Soviets focused on recruiting agents from among the expatriates. The manipulation of information concerning the recruit’s alleged collaboration with the occupying regime, participation in crimes, and so on was an important means of influence during recruitment. Additionally, the CPSU Central Committee Presidium had issued an order in 1959 to destroy all emigrant centers hostile towards the Soviet Union within the next few years, which meant a propaganda war.41 In the hope of influencing expatriate communities through propaganda, “societies for developing cultural ties” coordinated mainly by the security organs were set up in the Soviet Union to operate among the corresponding peoples. These societies published newspapers for circulation primarily in the host countries of expatriate communities.42 The discrediting of expatriates and expatriate organizations that were hostile to the Soviet Union in their country of residence as well as in their native homeland became an important line of activity. Accusations of their connection to war crimes were mostly used for this purpose. At the same time, attempts were made to also discredit the governments of Western countries

40 Public Law 86–90, July 17, 1959. Joint Resolution. [s. J.Res. 111] Providing for the designation of the third week of July as “Captive Nations Week” (www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ pkg/...73/.../STATUTE-73-Pg212.pdf, last accessed on 6 February 2014). 41 Overview of Estonian emigrants in Sweden. V. Naidenkov, Soviet embassy attaché in Stockholm, 18 December 1962, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 1, n. 254, s. 23, l. 61–125. 42 The VEKSA Society (Society for Developing Cultural Ties with Estonians Abroad) was formed on April 15, 1960, to influence Estonian expatriate communities. The newspaper Kodumaa (Homeland) became its mouthpiece; its publication began in November 1958. Similar organizations and newspapers were started up at the same time in Latvia and Lithuania.

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or certain political circles, accusing them of shielding and conniving with alleged war criminals.43 The latter accusation, of course, was not entirely a fabrication. People who had participated in various crimes on the side of Nazi Germany were active on both the eastern and western sides of the Iron Curtain. In some cases, governments that employed these individuals as specialists deliberately concealed their backgrounds to some degree. In most cases, though, the governments were not aware of these individuals’ pasts; the individual—aided by the chaos of the postwar years—concealed his own background. The Soviet state, according to Khrushchev’s grandiose plans, was supposed to overtake the Western countries not only economically, but in all aspects. The judicial system after Stalin was supposed to represent a new step forward on a global scale, completely different from preceding judicial systems, a humane court that stressed the equal standing of the defense and the prosecution in the proceedings. At the trial of Francis G. Powers, pilot of the downed American U2 spy plane, the Soviet defense attorney said, “The Soviet court deciding the question of the punishment of the accused proceeds not only from the circumstances of the case, but takes into consideration the individuality of the defendant and the mitigating circumstances.”44 A number of formal changes were indeed made, but the new criminal code did not change the nature of the Stalinist system, which fully developed only after Stalin’s death. From a formal standpoint, the Stalinist regime had managed to create a completely misleading impression of itself, starting with the nominally democratic and progressive constitution of 1936.45 Stalin monopolized criminal justice for political objectives: the system was designed under the 43 See Indrek Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti. Vaateid KGB, EKP ja VEKSA arhiividokumentide põhjal (Exile and Soviet Estonia: Views Based on KGB, ECP, and VEKSA Archival Documents) (Tallinn, 1996). 44 Kazimierz Grzybowski,‘The Powers Trial and the 1958 Reform of Soviet Criminal Law’, The American Journal of Comparative Law 9 (1960), no. 3, p. 425. 45 According to Soviet ideology, the Soviet Union had arrived at a significantly higher stage of social development than other countries, and correspondingly, the administration of justice also had to be at a new level. Considering what has been written above in the text, the content of the work of the Soviet judicial system could remain entirely incomprehensible, especially as viewed from the Anglo-American judicial area. The solution of a conflict between two parties did not take place in the Soviet judicial system. In the tradition of the Inquisition, the Soviet court was the “last instance for seeking universal truth.” Hence a trend developed to avoid the acquittal of accused persons brought to trial or the review of court decisions through appeals in cassation. This would have implied that mistakes were made by investigative organs or lower courts, something that was not supposed to happen.

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conditions of ideological war and corresponded to the scheme in which Soviet judicial power was run politically. All too often, court decisions were founded on quasi-legislation that was invisible to the defendant (and society). This quasilegislation consisted of confidential lower-level legislation that replaced or altered the intent of publicly disclosed legal acts. As such, criminal justice as it was applied in practice in the Soviet Union differed significantly from the ordinary perception of criminal justice. Though it relaxed somewhat over the subsequent decades, the main contours of Stalin’s scheme persisted until the 1980s.46 Over about the first 10 years, numerous show trials of communists who were comrades-in-arms of the Soviets and of leftists who had cooperated with them were held in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, as well as show trials of Nazi criminals. The new regime cemented its power through those show trials of communists: those who remained in official positions knew what awaited those who deviated from the main line.47 The last trial of such Party figures took place in Latvia in 1959. The following year, show trials of persons accused of Nazi crimes became the focus of the media. They had several traits in common with earlier trials. The amnesty of September 17, 1955, proved useful in seeking possible culprits. It released persons who collaborated with the occupying powers out of either cowardice or ignorance but did not affect persons who were convicted of murdering and humiliating “Soviet citizens.” Finding collaborators who could be accused of those charges and bringing them before a court was one field of activity for the Soviet security organs over the next 20 or so years.48 Criminal regimes try to hide the traces of their acts, and thus the major role accorded to potential witnesses in investigating war crimes is understandable. The instructions given to the Soviet security organs for the extensive use of witness testimony originated from Andrei Vyshinskii, who became notorious during the show trials of the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s:49 witness testimony is one of the oldest and most widespread types of evidence in court. And it is crystal clear that since the living word of the

46 Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 402 ff; for a treatment of the Khrushchev period, see Yoram Gorlizki, ‘De-Stalinisation and the Politics of Russian Criminal Justice, 1953–1964’ (PhD-thesis, Oxford, 1992). 47 See the paper by Meelis Saueauk in this volume. 48 Boris Kovalev, ‘Svidetel’skie pokazaniia v ugolovnykh delakh kollaboratsionistov v Rossii’, Vestnik Novgorodskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 33 (2005), pp. 108–13. 49 Andrei Ianuar’evich Vyshinskii (1883–1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist, and diplomat. He is known as a state prosecutor in Stalin’s Moscow show trials and the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet foreign minister from 1949 to 1953 and permanent representative of the Soviet Union to the UN. In 1953 he was among the chief figures

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eyewitness of events calmly and objectively informs the investigation and the court about the criminal, the circumstances of the crime, and so on, it cannot fail to have immense importance in connection with the court verdict.50 Restrictions on access to archival materials concerning the Soviet Union’s political leadership and security services prevents us from clarifying when, how and by whose decision the staging of such trials was placed on the agenda and what specific objectives were set for them. Based on a comparison of sources, at the current stage of research, the beginning of preparations for show trials of Nazi crimes can be dated to 1959 at the latest, since they became public with Khrushchev’s speech in Mauthausen on July 3, 1959. This was followed by the rapid preparation of court trials in the Party and security organs and the first show trial in 1960 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (followed by others) and trials in the Soviet Union starting in 1961. Due to lack of archival access, we cannot pinpoint the document calling for the organization of the trial, but the first evidence of this appeared in October and November 1959.51 It was clear to the security organs themselves that holding such show trials was an important precautionary measure in the struggle against one of the main anti-Soviet “crimes”—bourgeois nationalism. This is also how such trials were considered in the confidential teaching literature used by the security organs. They were meant to provide the chance to compromise prominent figures in expatriate communities abroad. Domestically, the most effective method was considered to be the implementation of precautionary measures concerning persons associated with bourgeois nationalism during the investigation. This was carried out during interrogations of persons subject to precautionary measures as witnesses during the preliminary investigation.52 The use of wartime incidents to achieve various objectives continued with certain variations until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Viktor Cherkashin, one of the Soviet Union’s most notable counterintelligence officers from the Cold War era (he served in Washington in 1979–86), has commented on the case of Constantine Warwariv, who fled from Ukraine at the end of the war and made a career in diplomacy in the United States in the 1970s. He writes: “Needless to accused by the U.S. Congress’s Kersten Committee during its investigation of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. He committed suicide in 1954 in New York. 50 Kovalev, ‘Svidetel’skie pokazaniia’, pp. 108–13. 51 Weinke, Die Verfolgung, p. 143. 52 M.G. Maiorov, Nekotorye osobennosti rassledovaniia gosudarstvennykh prestuplenii, sovershaemykh burzhuaznymi natsionalistami (Thesis defended at the Academy of State Security, Moscow, 1964), pp. 40–3.

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say, we weren’t interested in punishing Nazi collaborators. The entire incident concerned the KGB’s operational interest—and in that, it was a great success. The State Department finally threw in the towel. Warwariv, whose continued presence in UNESCO tarnished Washington’s reputation, was dismissed.”53

The Beginning of Show Trials A number of common traits characterize the show trials of Nazi criminals that began in 1960 in the Eastern bloc and especially in the Soviet Union. Temporal coordination. The show trial of West German minister Theodor Oberländer and his conviction in absentia in the GDR in April 1960 followed Khrushchev’s speech in July 1959.54 Preparations began at practically the same time for show trials in the interior of the Soviet Union and in the annexed territories along its western frontier (the Baltic countries, western Ukraine) under Soviet rule, including roughly the entire territory that had been under German occupation. Preparations for the first such trial began in Estonia in May 1960. The trial was held on March 6–11, 1961,55 one month before the Eichmann trial in Israel (from April 2 to August 14, 1961) that resonated worldwide.56 Another four similar trials were staged in Estonia in 1961–62 and 1966–67. Trials of this type were held in Latvia from 1961 to 1974. In March 1961, a group of men who had served in the 18th (Latvian) Police Battalion was convicted of participating in crimes against Jews in Belorussia. Latvia’s most prominent show trial (known as the Rēzekne trial) was held in October 1965. Three Latvians living in exile were tried in absentia and convicted of crimes against Jews in the Rēzekne region in Latvia. During this trial, the Soviet Union issued diplomatic notes to the governments of West Germany, the United States, and Canada, where the persons in question lived. The trial in 1974–75 of men who had served in the 21st 53 Victor Cherkashin and Gregory Feifer, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer; The True Story of the Man who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames (New York, 2005), p. 129. 54 Wachs, ‘Die Inszenierung’, p. 48. 55 Investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653. 56 For the propaganda campaign in the Eastern bloc countries associated with the Eichmann trial, see Ruth Bettina Birn, ‘Ein deutscher Staatsanwalt in Jerusalem: Zum Kenntnisstand der Anklagebehörde im Eichmann-Prozess und der Strafverfolgungsbehörden der Bundesrepublik’, Werner Renz (ed.), Interessen um Eichmann: Israelische Justiz, deutsche Strafverfolgung und alte Kameradschaften (Frankfurt, 2001), p. 94.

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(Latvian) Police Battalion convicted them of killings in the Liepāja area of Latvia in 1941. A trial had been held two years earlier in Hanover, West Germany,where the same events were at the center of the charges, and members of various units were ascertained as the culprits.57 Similar trials were held in Lithuania at the same time: three men who had served as policemen during the German occupation were sentenced to death in Vilnius in March 1961 for participating in the murder of over 60,000 people. Trials were held in Kaunas and Vilnius in October 1962 in which a number of men who had served in Lithuanian police battalions during the German occupation were convicted in connection with mass murders that took place in the Ninth Fort of Kaunas in October 1941. Five Lithuanians were convicted of the mass murder of Jews in September 1967.58 The first such show trial began in Belorussia in October 1961, followed by at least five trials in 1962–63, 1966–67, and 1971.59 Analogous show trials began in Ukraine in April 1963, followed by another three trials in 1966–67.60 Preparations for convicting local collaborators at show trials began in the same way in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in October 1960 (for instance, in Novgorod) as was being done in “nationalist areas” in the Baltic region, Ukraine, and Belorussia.61 Data on trials held in the Russian SFSR is sketchy. They began at the same time as the trials described above, but they reached their peak somewhat later. Show trials included those in Krasnodar in northern Caucasia in 1963, 1965, and 1966, and in Stavropol in 1968. Other examples are trials held in Leningrad in 1966 and 1970, in Pskov in 1972 and 1973, in Novgorod in 1976 and 1978, and in Orel in 1978.62 Comprehensive statistics on such Soviet show trials are not available. In 1983 the Ukrainian-American newspaper Ukrainian Weekly reported that 24 such show trials were held in the Soviet Union in 1961–65 alone: three in Estonia, three in Ukraine, four in Belorussia, two in Latvia, six in Lithuania, and six in Russia. In 57 Lukasz Hirszowicz, ‘The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror’, Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (eds.), The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945 (New York, 1993), p. 41; Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation, pp. 45–55. 58 Hirszowicz, ‘The Holocaust’, p. 42. 59 Ibid., p. 43. 60 Ibid. 61 Kovalev, ‘Svidetel’skie pokazaniia’, pp. 108–13. 62 Hirszowicz, ‘The Holocaust’, pp. 44–6.

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all, 127 persons were tried and convicted, eight63 of them in absentia.64 Although there was strong political and ideological motivation for these show trials, it cannot be assumed that all of the defendants were innocent or that they were not connected at least to a certain extent with the given crimes.

Trials in Estonia In the case of Estonia, five Cold War-era show trials of war criminals can be cited that illustrate different aspects of this action.

First Case: Mere-Gerrets-Viik Historical background. Two trainloads of Jews (about 2,000 in all) were brought from Czechoslovakia and Germany to Estonia to the Jägala correctional labor camp under the jurisdiction of the German Security Police and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) in September 1942. About 400–500 younger persons were selected from the arrivals and sent to the camp. The remainder were executed on the day of their arrival at the nearby Kalevi-Liiva artillery range, with the participation of camp staff of Estonian origin.65 An article entitled “Tragedy at Kalevi-Liiva” appeared in Estonia in a local Russian-language newspaper, Molodezh’ Estonii, on May 22, 1960.66 The editorial office had added a long description of the executions that took place at KaleviLiiva in 1942, including plenty of excerpts from interviews with witnesses and details, as if the investigation had already been completed. It goes without saying that no foreign “letter to the editor” was published in the Soviet press without being coordinated with the KGB. Thereafter, writings by survivors of that camp started appearing in Canadian newspapers.67 Propaganda reportage in the media 63 The number of persons convicted in absentia should most likely nevertheless be greater, since four people were charged in absentia during the period under consideration in Estonia alone, of whom three were also sentenced to death in absentia. One of the persons charged committed suicide before the end of his trial. 64 Lydia Demjanjuk, ‘“Nazi War Criminals”: Time for Truth to Emerge’, The Ukrainian Weekly, 31 July 1983. 65 See Meelis Maripuu,‘Annihilation of Czech and German Jews in Estonia in 1942–1943’, Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle (eds.), Estonia 1940–1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2006), pp. 705–16. 66 ‘Tragediia v Kalevi-Liiva’ (Tragedy at Kalevi-Liiva), Molodezh’ Estonii, 22 May 1960. 67 For instance, in the Toronto Daily Star, known among newspapers for its hostility towards Nazis.

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accompanied the entire subsequent preliminary investigation period and the trial in both Estonia and Canada. On June 3, 1960, the ESSR KGB decided to initiate criminal proceedings in connection with this matter,68 referring to information disclosed in the press, since “the main culprits in the killings under discussion have gone unpunished thus far.” There had not been any interest in the matter until then, although the basic facts about the executions that took place at Kalevi-Liiva and the identities of the camp commandant (Aleksander Laak) and his adjutant (Ralf Gerrets) had been known to Soviet state security organs since November 1944,69 and part of this information had even been published in a book along with narratives from witnesses in 1947.70 Ralf Gerrets was arrested as the first suspect on June 10, 1960. An investigation was initiated regarding four persons: Ain-Ervin Mere, head of the Estonian Security Police71 in 1942 (lived in Great Britain); Aleksander Laak, commandant of the Jägala camp in 1942–43 (lived in Canada); Ralf Gerrets, adjutant to the camp commandant (arrested in Estonia); Jaan Viik, a camp guard (arrested in Estonia; had already been punished once along with other guards in 1946, having been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment). In terms of the propaganda meaning of the trial, Mere and Laak, who escaped to the West at the end of the war, are currently of the most interest in the context of this article. Among the few KGB counterintelligence materials currently accessible, there is nothing to indicate that the KGB had tried to establish contact with Laak, who lived in Canada, during the preceding years. The prosecution of the camp commandant in absentia, however, certainly suited propaganda needs.

68 Investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, vols. I–XIX. 69 Testimony of Jägala camp manager K. Rääk, 9 November and 24 December 1944, ibid., vol. XIV, l. 301–6. 70 Max Laosson et al, Saksa fašistlik okupatsioon Eestis aastail 1941–1944 (The German Fascist Occupation in Estonia in 1941–1944) (Tallinn, 1947). 71 Unlike in other occupied territories, the German Security Police in Estonia formed a security police parallel structure employing local residents (officially the German Security Police in Estonia, Group B, unofficially known as the Estonian Security Police), which carried out most of the security police functions under the control of Group A, which was small in number and formed of Germans. See also Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland 1941–1944: Eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2006).

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After the in absentia charges and their disclosure in both the Soviet and the international press, Laak committed suicide in Canada on September 6, 1960.72 Mere was an air force officer from the Republic of Estonia and was recruited as an NKVD agent with the code name “Müller” at the beginning of Soviet rule in 1940. After war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, he crossed over to the German side at the front in the summer of 1941 and began serving in Estonia in the Omakaitse (Home Guard), a voluntary auxiliary police organization. In December 1941, the German occupying authorities appointed Mere head of the Estonian Political Police, which operated under the control of the German Security Police and SD. When the Estonian Security Police was formed on May 1, 1942, he was appointed its head and served in that position until March 31, 1943. Mere later served in Waffen-SS Estonian units. He went to Germany in 1944 and lived in Great Britain after the war. The USSR KGB hoped to recruit him again in 1953–57 but did not find a suitable opportunity.73 The escaped agent, however, was an excellent target as a show trial defendant. At the trial, held March 6–11, 1961, the ESSR Supreme Court sentenced AinErvin Mere, Ralf Gerrets, and Jaan Viik to death. Great Britain did not extradite Mere to the Soviet Union. The two defendants who participated in the trial were executed.74

Second Case: Jüriste-Linnas-Viks Historical background. In July 1941, the German occupying authorities set up a prison camp in the city of Tartu with the support of members of the local Omakaitse. This facility thereafter remained in operation as a “correctional labor camp” under the jurisdiction of the German Security Police. The camp also functioned during its first months as an extermination camp, where partially in response to the Red Terror,75 up to 4,000 local residents were executed. The head

72 One version of the story holds that Laak did not commit suicide but was instead forced to kill himself by members of an underground Jewish vengeance group who located his home through press reports on the trial. See Michael Elkins, Forged in Fury (New York, 1971), p. 302. 73 Ain Mere’s file (agent “Müller”), ERAF f. 138SM, n. 1, s. 9. 74 Investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, vols. I–XIX. 75 Here “Red Terror” refers to the mass arrests and the deportation campaign carried out by the Soviet regime in Estonia in 1940–41, culminating with the terrorization of the local population by Soviet destruction battalions in the summer of 1941 after war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union.

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of the camp for most of this time was Karl Linnas, who moved to the United States after World War II.76 On November 25, 1960, the ESSR KGB initiated criminal proceedings to ascertain and bring to justice the culprits of the executions carried out at the Tartu camp during the years of German occupation. The pre-trial media coverage was more reserved than that of the previously described trial. Within the framework of the criminal proceedings, charges were brought against Juhan Jüriste (the first head of the Tartu concentration camp in the summer of 1941, arrested in Estonia), Ervin Viks (who briefly served in the Tartu concentration camp special department, later served as head of Department IV of the Estonian Security Police, and then moved to Australia), and Karl Linnas (the second head of the Tartu concentration camp in 1941–42 when mass executions took place; he later moved to the United States). All the defendants were sentenced to death at the public trial held on January 16–20, 1962, Viks and Linnas in absentia. The dates of the court sessions were postponed just before they were about to begin. The postponement publicly exposed the court’s decorative role, as the court verdict and the report from the court session appeared in Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’, the periodical published by the Soviet Union’s Prosecutor’s Office, before the actual start of the court sessions. Public disclosure, however, was in this case relative: the periodical was not in mass circulation, and most copies were probably successfully reclaimed from libraries and domestic subscribers. The author of the current article is not aware of any evidence that this information became public knowledge more broadly or that it leaked from the Prosecutor’s Office. Information on the mishaps of the Soviet court system first came to light in the United States in connection with the Linnas case.77 Viks, who lived in Australia, was not extradited to the Soviet Union. U.S. authorities revoked Linnas’s citizenship in 1981, after which a new campaign started to demand his extradition upon the recommendation of the ESSR KGB. Linnas was extradited to the Soviet Union in April 1987. The court verdict from 1962 expired. Linnas died in a prison hospital in the summer of that year without being brought to trial again.78 76 See Riho Västrik, ‘Tartu Concentration Camp 1941–1944’, Hiio, Maripuu, Paavle (eds.), Estonia 1940–1945, pp. 689–704. 77 The periodical Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ (Socialist Legality), January 1962, pp. 73– 4; see S. Paul Zumbakis, Soviet Evidence in North American Courts: an Analysis of Problems and Concerns with Reliance on Communist Source Evidence in Alleged War Criminal Trials (Chicago, 1986). 78 Investigation file of Jüriste, Linnas, and Viks, ERAF, f. 130SM, n.1, s. 28195, vol. I–X.

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Third Case: Evald Mikson Historical background. Estonian Forest Brothers operated in Estonia near the Soviet-German front line in July 194179 in support of the German forces. When the front line advanced beyond Estonia, the paramilitary Omakaitse organization was formed on the basis of those Forest Brother units. In the initial phase of the German occupation, members of the Omakaitse lynched people accused of perpetrating the Red Terror. The Omakaitse also participated in executions by the German authorities. Evald Miksonwas one of the leaders of the local Omakaitse unit in Võnnu rural municipality in Tartu County in southern Estonia. In the autumn of 1941, he joined the Political Police in Tallinn yet was himself arrested, apparently accused of appropriating the property of people being held in custody. At the end of the war, he escaped from Estonia and settled in Iceland.80 On June 5, 1961, the ESSR KGB initiated criminal proceedings to investigate the activity of Evald Mikson (in Iceland, he went by the name Edvald Hindriksson) during the German occupation. His address in Iceland was also indicated.81 Specific grounds for initiating criminal proceedings are not indicated in the file (there is a reference to “published materials”), yet materials that compromised Mikson that had already been published in Thjodviljinn (Þjóðviljann), the voice of Iceland’s Socialist Party, were included in the file. These materials reached the newspaper through an Icelander who studied in Moscow and operated at the same time as the paper’s Soviet Union correspondent.82 No information is available on any possible earlier interest that the state security organs may have had in Mikson personally, although his name figured in 1948 investigation files of other individuals in connection with arrests and executions that took place in 1941.83 The preliminary investigation was carried out June– 79 The Forest Brothers (Estonian: metsavennad) were Estonian partisans who waged guerrilla warfare against Soviet rule during the Soviet invasion and occupation of the three Baltic states during and after World War II. 80 Valur Ingimundarson, ‘The Mikson Case: War Crimes Memory, Estonian Identity Reconstructions, and the Transnational Politics of Justice’, Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk and Thomas Lindenberger (eds.), Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (New York, 2012), pp. 321–46. 81 Investigation file of Mikson, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28654, vols. I, II. 82 The first materials on Mikson appeared in Thjodviljinn on March 14, 1961. The newspaper is accessible in the digital collection of the National and University Library of Iceland, Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn (http://timarit.is/search_init. jsp?lang=en, last accessed on 13 February 2014). 83 Investigation file of Koolmeister and Luha, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 1442.

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August 1961, during which a number of testimonies were collected concerning Mikson’s activity as a leader of the Forest Brothers and later of Omakaitse units in the summer of 1941. According to witnesses’ statements, Mikson participated personally in the execution of persons arrested by the Forest Brothers and the Omakaitse. On August 24, the investigator nevertheless requested an extension of the deadline from the prosecutor for completing the preliminary investigation in order to acquire testimony from family members of the executed persons. On September 19, 1961, however, the ESSR KGB investigation department announced the suspension of the preliminary investigation, since the suspect’s exact place of residence was reportedly not known. The file was sent to Moscow to the USSR KGB.84 Recall that six months earlier, his address was in the file, and there were no references to any change of address.

Fourth Case: Pärnu’s Omakaitse Historical background. Much like the previous case, Forest Brothers and Omakaitse units later formed out of them operated in Pärnu County from July 1941 onward. The participation of members of the Omakaitse in repressions carried out by the German authorities connects them with several crimes. No noticeable campaign preceded this case in the media. Materials associated with this criminal case begin with the statement drawn up in 1961 in the security organs: “It is evident from existing compromising materials concerning persons who were active assistants, etc., of the Germans in Pärnu and other places during the German occupation […] that a special 30-man detachment also known as a ‘hunting detachment’ led by Captain Villem Raid and Arkadi Valdin was formed to carry out death sentences handed down by the Political Police. According to incomplete information available to the Extraordinary State Commission, over 1,000 people were shot in the city and county of Pärnu.”85 In March and April 1962, wartime members of the Pärnu Omakaitse Edmund Kuusik, August Reinvald, Julius Viks, and Teodor Kaldre were arrested. Raid and Valdin were repeatedly cited as leading figures by the arrested persons and by witnesses that were questioned. Charges were brought, and Kuusik, Reinvald, Viks, and Kaldre were sentenced to death at the trial held on December 11–15, 1962.86 The matter no longer concerned Raid and Valdin, even though they were both on the list of persons in July

84 Investigation file of Mikson, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28654, vol. III, l. 111–3, 114–5, 116. 85 ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 19, l. 1–10. 86 Investigation file of Kaldre and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28668.

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1962 for whom searches were to be initiated on the basis of materials gathered during the preliminary investigation.87

Fifth Case: Lääne County Omakaitse and Ago Talvar Historical background. Much like the two previous cases, the background of events is the Forest Brothers who operated in the summer of 1941 and the Omakaitse units that they later formed, this time in Lääne County. Ago Talvar was an organizer of a group of Forest Brothers in Lääne County in the summer of 1941 and was the head of the Lääne County Omakaitse from August 31, 1941, until March 1, 1942. Thereafter he served as head of the Omakaitse Headquarters Administrative Department in Tallinn until the end of the German occupation. Ago Talvar lived in Sweden and was wanted by the KGB starting in 1947. From his correspondence with his wife and relatives who remained in the Soviet Union, his whereabouts were ascertained in 1958.88 A trial had already been held in 1945 concerning executions carried out by the Lääne County Omakaitse, and four men had been sentenced to death.89 In July 1967, four men were on trial: Roland-Rudolf Rand, Ants Tinniste, Harri Paisu, and Ago Talvar. A letter from the Estonian SSR Prosecutor Valter Raudsalu was sent to Ago Talvarin Sweden on May 13, 1967, informing him that criminal proceedings had been initiated against him and of his rights in this regard. If he did not appear, the verdict would be handed down in absentia. He was to contact the Soviet Embassy in Sweden to obtain a visa and to cover his travel expenses. A Soviet journalist was sent to check whether he had received the letter. Talvar informed the journalist that he refused to participate in this Soviet propaganda exercise.90 Rand and Tinniste, and Talvarin absentia, were sentenced to death on July 13, 1967. Paisu was declared mentally incompetent and was sent to a psychoneurological hospital for coercive treatment. Talvar was accused of organizing and supervising the shooting of over 100 people in Haapsalu and Lääne County.91 The real battle—the propaganda battle—was still to come for Talvar, sentenced

87 88 89 90 91

ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 19, l. 142–4. Ibid., s. 13, l. 69–70. Investigation file of Aavasaar and others, court verdict, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 18262-jv. ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 15, l. 130–1. Investigation file of Talvar and others, court verdict, ERAF, f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 29004, vol. V.

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to death in absentia, and his family who remained in Estonia, and it lasted until the end of the 1980s.92

Public Preparation of Trials The prescriptive documents of the trials under consideration are represented sporadically in archives accessible to historians. The most relevant documents are preserved in Estonian archives concerning the earliest trial (Mere-GerretsViik). Using information on the organization of analogous trials, we can obtain a general idea of what took place, even if it does not correspond exactly to the circumstances of each individual trial. In addition to the trials held in Estonia, the trial of Theodor Oberländer and members of the Nachtigall Battalion initiated by Soviet security organs and held in the GDR, and its preparation in Ukraine, is also used as an analog.93 The preparation of such trials and the carrying out of the related investigations was part of the jurisdiction of the security organs.94 When it was decided to initiate a particular criminal proceeding and who made the decisions still remains unknown. In the case of show trials, the dissemination of targeted information typically began through the press along with a propaganda campaign before the official initiation of criminal proceedings. Recall at this point Khrushchev’s July 1959 speech, which preceded the trial against West German minister Theodor Oberländer in East Germany. The Soviet regime presented itself as the power of the

92 The documentary film Lemmin rakkaus (Lemmi’s Love) focuses on the story of Talvar’s wife Lemmi and their children, who remained in Estonia and faced repression on two occasions by the Soviet authorities because of her husband. The existence of Ago Talvar, sentenced to death in absentia, in Sweden affects the story of this family left behind on the Soviet side for decades. Lemmin rakkaus, directed by Ville Mäkelä (Finland, 2011) (http://ses.fi/fileadmin/dokumentit/Finnish_documentary_films_2011.pdf, last accessed on 5 January 2015). 93 The preserved portion of GDR confidential documents that became accessible after the reunification of Germany, and the Ukrainian security service archive, which was partially accessible during the intervening years, provide important additional information concerning the organizational side of show trials. 94 The Estonian SSR Criminal Trial Code specified institutions that are considered investigative organs (Section 99), including state security organs, and the jurisdictional limits of their authorization for investigation (Section 105). In preparation for show trials, the suspects were presented with charges of betrayal of the Soviet fatherland (ESSR Criminal Code Section 62), in which case the Prosecutor’s Office and the state security organs were assigned to carry out the preliminary investigation.

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people. Thus it was particularly fitting to portray criminal proceedings as initiated “from below,” based on materials published in the press and according to the demands of the working people. Public attacks against Estonia’s leading figures from the German occupation began in the press in early 1959 as well. Estonian Self-Administration Director of Internal Affairs Oskar Angelus was the first target. He was an excellent target, since the Omakaitse, the Estonian Security Police, and most penal institutions, all of which were more or less associated with actually committed crimes, were formally subordinated to him during the war. This kind of formal delegation of responsibility was the shrewd policy of the German occupying authorities, yet Angelus’s actual power over the aforementioned institutions and his direct connection to executions were nevertheless nonexistent. Even Soviet investigative organs must have concurred, since attacks against Angelus remained limited to current-affairs publications, in which he was equated with Hans Globke,95 for instance, who had been targeted in East Germany.96 Prior to the Mere-Gerrets-Viik trial, the article “Tragedy at Kalevi-Liiva” was published on May 25, 1960, in Estonia in Molodezh’ Estonii, a local Russian-language newspaper. A letter from Czechoslovakia provided the formal impetus for this article.97 The letter was from Gita Kleinerova, one of the few Jewish inmates to survive the Jägala camp. A choir from Estonia had visited her hometown, which had motivated her to write a letter of thanks and also to recall her camp years in wartime Estonia. On June 3, 1960, the ESSR KGB decided to initiate criminal proceedings, referring to information published in the press, since the main culprits in the killings 95 Hans Globke participated as a lawyer in working out Nazi German legislation in the 1930s. After the war, he was a close advisor to West German chancellor Adenauer. In 1963, he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment at a show trial held in East Germany. Completely irrelevant witnesses and experts from the Soviet Union, including three representatives from Estonia, were employed in the trial. The historian and former minister of foreign affairs of the ESSR Hans Kruus testified as an expert. See‘The Trial of H. Globke (Interview with H. Kruus)’, Estonian National Broadcasting Corporation audio archive (arhiiv.err.ee/vaata/41397, last accessed on 3 February 2014). About Globke, see Erik Lomatsch, Hans Globke (1898–1973): Beamter im Dritten Reich und Staatssekretär Adenauers (Frankfurt, 2009). 96 ‘Reeturil ei ole kodumaad: Hitlerlik landesdirektor Angelus teeskleb demokraati’ (Traitors Have No Homeland: Hitlerite Landesdirektor Angelus Pretends to be a Democrat), Kodumaa (1959), no. 4; Ervin Martinson, ‘Ühe perekonna tragöödia’ (One Family’s Tragedy), Sirp ja Vasar, 19 July 1963. 97 ‘Tragediia v Kalevi-Liiva’.

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under consideration had not been punished thus far.98 This disclosure was seconded by articles in the North American press in the name of six former Jägala prisoners who lived in New York and one who lived in Toronto. The local public was prepped for the show trial during the preliminary investigation, and “voices from among the people” demanded the punishment of the accused. All the relevant archival material in Estonia was controlled by the security organs, and it was according to their instructions that thematic articles and radio broadcasts were prepared. Since the authorities had a monopoly on the relevant information, they could present absurd accusations and connections, and no one had the chance to check the information presented. The background information presented was for the most part limited to information from the Extraordinary State Commission of 1944, which is limited to summarizing repressions from the period of German occupation and an assessment of the role of various institutions. Ascertaining the exact circumstances was not the objective of the forthcoming trials. The materials disclosed in the press were primarily supposed to create a suitable emotional atmosphere. During the media campaign preceding the Mere-Gerrets-Viik trial, the demand was made to prosecute Hjalmar Mäe, who then lived in Austria and had served as the head of the Estonian Self-Administration during the German occupation, in addition to Mere as the head of the Estonian Security Police. Mäe’s brother, who lived in Estonia, implicated him in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and other such crimes. Apart from the prominent role he played under German occupation, Mäe was undoubtedly a considerable propaganda object, since he served the Austrian government as an expert on the Soviet Union. Mäe’s activity in Austria was equated with the continuation of fascist policy in Austria.99 Documents of the security organs in Estonia do not indicate whether steps were taken against Mäe other than threats broadcast over the radio, or why they were abandoned.100

98 99

Investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, vol. I, l. 2–3. Austria was occupied by the Soviet Union and the Allied powers at the end of the war and was a hostage of the Cold War until 1955, suffering primarily from the ambitions of the Soviet Union. It was not until the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union and the end of the Korean War that political tensions eased to the point where Austrian politicians succeeded in achieving a compromise and restoring national independence. 100 Recordings of the radio broadcasts ‘The Hills of Kalevi-Liiva Accuse, I–V’. 22 September, 3 October, 9 October, 16 October, 30 October 1960. Estonian National Broadcasting Corporation audio archive.

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Just before the court sessions of the Mere-Gerrets-Viik trial started, the brochure Mõrvarid maskita (Murderers Unmasked) was published. It was authored by Ants Saar, a writer who was a loyal Party confidant.101 This sheds some light on the events that were to follow. The brochure’s title page states: “Compiled by Ants Saar on the basis of materials and documents published in the press.”102 “Investigative journalism” did not exist in the Soviet conditions of that time, and thus these are materials that the security organs presented in a popular form for propaganda purposes. Information on this subject matter was not published in the press in any case without the approval of the security organs, to say nothing of documents directly controlled by the security organs. The brochure outlines the events of the war and the main groups of persons targeted by the show trials. It also details the domestic and foreign policy objectives of the Soviet Union, which such trials were supposed to support. The outlined aims were: • t he activity of the Estonian Security Police: brought to the public as show trials, Mere and Viks as the accused (first and second cases); • what took place at the Jägala camp/Kalevi-Liiva: brought to the public as a show trial (first case, Mere-Gerrets-Viik); • what took place in the Tartu camp: was realized as a show trial (second case, Jüriste-Linnas-Viks trial), even though the central figures changed to a certain extent. The later central figure, Linnas, is mentioned only once in the brochure; • activity of the Tartu County Omakaitse: culminated with the preliminary investigation of Evald Mikson (third case), which was discontinued without charges being brought; • activity of the Estonian Self-Administration headed by Hjalmar Mäe: limited to the publication of propaganda publications; • figures that stood out in Waffen-SS Estonian units: limited to the publication of propaganda materials (Johannes Soodla, Alfons Rebane, Harald Riipalu).

101 Ants Saar (1920–89) joined the Komsomol in 1940 and fought in a Soviet destruction battalion in 1941 and thereafter in the Red Army. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1943, studied at the VKP(b) Central Committee Higher Party School after the war in 1950–53, and worked at responsible positions in the press and later in the ECP CC apparatus. He served as the editor of the cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar (Sickle and Hammer) in 1953–61. He consistently represented the Communist Party’s orthodox line. 102 Ants Saar, Mõrvarid maskita (Tallinn, 1961).

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The following stands out in the publication as political objectives: • b  randing expatriates as the “henchmen of fascists who fled from the Estonian homeland,” including figures from the National Committee of the Republic of Estonia103 who worked against the German occupying authorities; • discrediting expatriate organizations in the eyes of the governments and population of their host countries by accusing them of “fascism”; • discrediting the governments or politicians of Western countries that maintained contacts with expatriate organizations, accusing them of “conniving with fascists and war criminals,” continuing Nazi policy, and so on. The policy of the United States, Canada,104 Great Britain, and Sweden was attacked along with West German revanchism (with reference to Hans Globke); • drawing parallels between the show trials being prepared in Estonia and the Eichmann trial that was starting in Israel. The staging of justification for initiating criminal proceedings against Evald Mikson through Thjodviljinn, the voice of Iceland’s Socialist Party, is particularly blatant. The KGB had materials published in that newspaper that had previously been disclosed in the brochure Murderers Unmasked in February of 1961. In the chapter on Mikson entitled “Murderer and Spy under a False Name,” even his address in Reykjavik was published.105 The brochure devoted more attention to the defendants in the Mere-Gerrets-Viik trial that was held in March of that year (see first case) but also to several other persons who were not brought to trial but were used by Soviet propaganda. In the case of Mikson, the material to be disclosed was, of course, meant to influence readers in Iceland but primarily to affect the accused himself. The campaign in the Icelandic press was extensive: in the two-and-a-half months from March 14, 1961, to the formal initiation of criminal proceedings in Estonia at the beginning of June, Mikson was written

103 The National Committee was formed by Estonian politicians and their supporters in February and March 1944 as a proxy parliament, the highest authority in Estonia until constitutional institutions were put in place. The Committee’s activities were paralyzed by the arrest of hundreds of Estonian activists by the German Security Service (SD). Some Committee members were arrested, while others went underground. Due to the activities of the National Committee, the formation of a legitimate government succeeded in Estonia in August 1944. This formed the basis for the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia until the end of the Soviet annexation. 104 Sharp rebukes aimed at Canada’s prime minister John Diefenbaker, who met representatives of the Estonian expatriate organization. 105 Saar, Mõrvarid maskita, pp. 85–90.

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about 11 times in Thjodviljinn. Additionally, articles defending Mikson appeared in right-wing papers.106 Propaganda articles on Mikson were published in parallel in the Estonian press, although to a lesser extent.107 It is noteworthy that Mikson was accused of arresting and murdering communists in the first articles concerning his actions (appearing in March). Starting in April, when the Eichmann trial began in Israel, the Jewish origin of Mikson’s victims was stressed. Both categories of victims were considered in the same article so that the reader could not miss the comparison. The articles that appeared in May primarily criticized the Icelandic authorities for not dealing with Mikson.108 Even when writing specifically about Holocaust victims, Soviet literature typically did not highlight the Jewish origin of the victims but instead fused victims into a single mass of “Soviet people.” The simultaneous Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel allowed the Soviets to connect Mikson to the “Jewish question,” which was receiving considerable international attention at this time. This might have been seen as adding more weight to the news concerning Mikson. Further comparing the scheme outlined in the brochure Murderers Unmasked and the subsequent events, it can be seen that the Soviet regime had prepared systematically for holding the show trial. Most of the relevant institutions were inundated with accusations, and individuals who could potentially be accused were located. Measures adopted later concerning the Estonian Self-Administration, which operated as the executive organ of the German occupying authorities, and persons of interest in Waffen-SS Estonian units were limited to propaganda measures (at least, there is no information to the contrary in the currently accessible archives). The Tartu County Omakaitse, with Evald Mikson as the central character, was initially selected for the “illustrative execution” of the Omakaitse as a local paramilitary organization, which tied in well with the actions of the

106 Materials implicating Mikson were published in Iceland in Thjodviljinn, the voice of the country’s Socialist Party, based on the remnants of the onetime Communist Party. The activity of the party was coordinated by the CPSU. The articles on Mikson were written by the newspaper’s then-Moscow correspondent and later editor-inchief Árni Bergmann, who was at that time studying Russian literature in Moscow. The newspaper is accessible online (http://timarit.is/search_init.jsp?lang=en, last accessed on 13 February 2014). 107 For instance, Ervin Martinson, ‘Roimar Mikson ja tema kaitsjad’ (Mikson the Criminal and His Defenders), Rahva Hääl, 17 May 1961. 108 Thjodviljinn, 14, 16, and 17 March, 18, 19, 20, 22, and 23 April, 16, 18, and 31 May 1961. Many thanks to Sigurdur Emil Palsson for summarizing and translating the articles from Icelandic.

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Tartu concentration camp that operated in parallel. After the Mikson trial was abandoned, the investigation of the activities of the Pärnu County Omakaitse, and somewhat later, that of Lääne County as well, was quickly initiated.109 Former leaders of the Estonian Security Police (Ain-Ervin Mere and Ervin Viks) were included in two show trials, each of which focused on the activity of one concentration camp (Jägala/Kalevi-Liiva and Tartu). The people compromised in the brochure were not always the people actually brought to trial (or targeted in propaganda literature). For instance, Karl Linnas, who was mentioned only once in the brochure in the case of the Tartu camp, later became the main figure in the case. Articles about him started appearing in the United States in May 1961. At the same time, the brochure made graphic accusations against the former policeman Aksel Luitsalu, who had emigrated to Canada, although the Soviet security organs themselves later admitted that he had been an official in the criminal police and that no charges could be brought against him.

Attempts to Recruit the Accused to Collaborate with Soviet Intelligence Organizations? Soviet state security organs mainly used two approaches in the 1950s to attempt to recruit persons who had escaped to the West from territories that remained under Soviet control. Some of the targeted individuals had, for various reasons, collaborated with Soviet intelligence services during the first year of Soviet rule in 1940–41. Contact with them was severed during the war, and these people escaped to the West. In the new situation, attempts were made to re-recruit such people using threats to leak information on their previous cooperation with Soviet intelligence services to the expatriate community and/or to repress family members who remained in Estonia. The other option was to use relatives of the refugees who remained in Estonia and try to approach the “object” through them. In the 1950s, threats to repress those relatives could still readily be made, but by the early 1960s, the period of mass repressions had passed. As more time went by since the refugees had left Estonia, the security organs had more chance to emphasize the emotional side, 109 Members of the Omakaitse from other counties were also put on trial over the following years, and in those trials as well, most of the defendants were sentenced to death. However, those trials got minimal press coverage in the newspapers Kodumaa and Rahva Hääl. They involved, for instance, members of the Omakaitse in Valga County in 1966; members of the Petseri Omakaitse in Pskov oblast in the Russian Federation in 1970 and 1974; and members of the Omakaitse in Viru County in 1974.

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stressing the chance to meet long-lost family members again. When this approach was selected, the security organs first attempted to recruit family members living in Estonia. Their own possible cooperation with the German occupying authorities was a suitable pretext for applying pressure to them. So was simply the fact that their relative lived abroad, which was definitely something considered compromising in the Soviet Union and a hindrance in many situations in life.110 In the 1960s it turned out to be advantageous to release material that implicated emigrants living in the West in cooperation with the German occupiers. Internationally, the prosecution of Nazi war crimes was entering a new stage. Genocide against the Jews in wartime Europe was increasingly highlighted, and the Eichmann trial, along with its media coverage, significantly contributed to this. In addition to the judicial system, the Holocaust as a historical event started evolving into its own field of research for historians, thus affecting literature and art, and social attitudes in general. Finding documentary evidence of Soviet intelligence recruiting or attempting to recruit an individual is exceptional. In such cases, the question inevitably arises whether the materials accessed by historians111 were made available by mistake or deliberately. Soviet intelligence services had relatively long-term relations with Ain-Ervin Mere (first case). He had served as the head of the Estonian Armed Forces’ Headquarters Mobilization Department, and after the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union, he was incorporated into the Red Army along with other Estonian officers. Mere was recruited as an NKVD agent with the code name Müller on October 10, 1940, and within a short period of time, he had managed to provide valuable information. After war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, he crossed over to the German side at the front in the summer of 1941 and at the end of the war, he escaped to the West. The KGB became active in regard to Mere in 1956 when it identified his postwar place of residence in England, where he was one of the leading figures in the Estonian Association. The plans for his re-recruitment called for using people who had been in contact with him as an agent in 1940–41, but for various reasons these plans were not implemented. 110 Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 53–76. 111 Among the materials of the Estonian SSR’s KGB, 18 files compiled mostly on Estonians who lived in exile and that, in isolated cases, contain documents extending to the end of the 1960s are preserved in the National Archives collection ERAF f. 138SM (collection of ESSR State Security Committee foreign intelligence files). Based on other materials, it can be said that this is a small portion of the files that were kept on Estonians who lived in exile or in the Estonian homeland.

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Approaching him through relatives also did not succeed, because Mere did not have close relatives in Estonia. The KGB appears to have abandoned plans to re-recruit Mere in 1957.112 According to their operating principles, agents who defected abroad and could not be re-recruited were to be compromised, and Mere’s cooperation with the Germans provided plenty of opportunity for this. It was logical in every respect to tie his activity as the head of the Estonian Security Police to the Jägala camp that was under his jurisdiction and the mass murder that was carried out there. Mere was sentenced to death in absentia, but the British government did not extradite him to the Soviet Union. No information is available concerning contacts between Evald Mikson as a former official of the Political Police of the Republic of Estonia and the Soviet Union’s NKVD in 1940–41. As a policeman dismissed from his post by the Soviet authorities, Mikson had good reason for going into hiding, and as a result, he made it through the first year of Soviet rule without being arrested. His activities during the German occupation are somewhat obscure. In addition to fighting against the Red Army, the Forest Brothers and the Omakaitse sometimes engaged in lynchings. The general situation can be characterized by the fact that quite shortly, the German occupying authorities prohibited the Estonian Omakaitse and other such groups from carrying out death sentences without court verdicts, and all detained people had to be handed over to the German authorities. Mikson’s career in the Political Police under German rule, where he participated in interrogating the leading Estonian communist Karl Säre, turned out to be very brief. He was arrested, apparently on charges of appropriating the property of people being held in custody or who had been executed.113 His captivity nevertheless did not last long, and he allegedly even found work in the service of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, before escaping to Sweden before the end of the war. In Sweden, other Estonian expatriates accused him of committing crimes while he served in the police during the German occupation. He was found guilty of war crimes and was to be extradited to the Soviet Union. Mikson nevertheless managed to be merely expelled to Norway, and from there he continued to Iceland.114 According to the evidence gathered by the KGB, the people arrested and executed by the Omakaitse and the police were for the most part local Soviet activists, fighters from the destruction battalions (or at least people accused of being part 112 Ain Mere’s file (Agent “Müller”), ERAF f. 138SM, n. 1, s.  9; Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 57–8. 113 Mikson’s investigation file covering the period of the German occupation has not been preserved in the archives. 114 Ingimundarson, ‘The Mikson Case’, pp. 324–5.

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of those battalions), and Jews. Given Soviet practice from that time in bringing similar charges, this would have been more than sufficient to sentence Mikson to death. Why did the KGB nevertheless decline to bring this case to court? The Icelandic researcher Valur Ingimundarson has speculated that the leaders of the Socialist Party of Iceland could have discouraged that idea, believing that the political timing was not ripe, or that the government of Iceland would not extradite him anyway, or that they did not have sufficient evidence. Ingimundarson dismisses the possibility that the Soviet Union recruited Mikson, given Mikson’s anticommunist views.115 Considering how the Soviet Union treated other people and countries, among them Sweden, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States, it is hardly likely that political relations with Iceland could have deterred them. People can be convicted and their extradition can take years. Soviet show trials were not hindered by a lack of evidence, as we will see in the cases of Oberländer and Talvar below. For propaganda purposes, it was even more useful if the convicted person was not extradited, because then the issue could be raised repeatedly if it was politically expedient, and not only the particular criminal but also the country shielding him could also be accused. Moreover, extradition could later lead to an uncomfortable situation, which we will consider below in the cases of Linnas and Talvar. In considering the possibilities for recruitment, we can only analyze the potential considerations of the Soviet side and the options available to them, since researchers have no access to any evidence whatsoever. Mikson’s anti-communist views naturally would not have made his recruitment any easier, but in such cases, other means of leverage were found to influence people. Evald Mikson’s son Atli has recalled that the attacks by Iceland’s communists in 1961 against his father lasted six months (from March to August). Evald Mikson kept a constant eye on his son, forbidding him to go to the port with his friends to see the Soviet tanker, because he was afraid the Soviets might try to kidnap him.116 Mikson, of course, was not the same category of Soviet opponent as Stepan Bandera, a controversial leading figure in the Ukrainian exile community, whom KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky (Bogdan Stashinskii) poisoned in Munich in October 1959, or the West German government minister Theodor Oberländer, whom

115 Ibid., p. 326. 116 ‘Saatan ei uinu kunagi’ (Satan Never Sleeps), Luup (1998), no. 12. Interview with Evald Mikson’s son Atli Edvaldson.

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the East German intelligence service tried unsuccessfully to kidnap after he was convicted in absentia. Yet it was not difficult for them to give someone a little scare. In any case, the ESSR KGB discontinued the preliminary investigation in September 1961, alleging that Mikson’s place of residence could no longer be ascertained, and his file was sent to Moscow for reasons not known to us, from where it was returned in April 1962.117 After May 1961, Moscow’s local mouthpiece in Iceland, Thjodviljinn, published nothing more about Mikson, except for one article (on October 6, 1961) primarily concerned with settling accounts with local right-wing publications.118 The silence was not broken even by Mikson’s death in 1993. Mikson, however, opened a popular Estonian sauna in Reykjavik on September 17, 1962. And as his son recalls: “All sorts of people went there—from ordinary people to employees of the Soviet Embassy and members of the Icelandic government.”119 Even in 1971 and 1983, the KGB stated that they still did not have specific information on Mikson’s place of residence.120 What can we make of all this? It is reasonable to assume that if the Soviet Union wanted to find suitable contact people in a small, isolated NATO member state like Iceland, it would be difficult, aside from local communists and socialists. They would have been the first to be suspected by the USSR’s Western opponents. A need could nevertheless have emerged for even a neutral site near the Keflavik U.S. Naval Air Station where people could meet discreetly. Villem Raid and Arkadi Valdin figured in the investigation of the activity of the Pärnu Omakaitse in connection with executions that had been carried out. According to Soviet investigative organs, they had been the commanders of the execution detachment and were declared wanted in the summer of 1962.121 Both men had escaped to Sweden at the end of the war, as the Soviet security organs knew. Captain Villem Raid had served with distinction in the summer of 1941 and was active in the Omakaitse during the war. At the end of the war, he allegedly served as the deputy head of one of the Waffen-SS Jagdverband schools for training sabotage units. We have no access to documents concerning any possible previous interest or activity by the KGB concerning Raid. Charges were not brought against him during this trial. Yet about a year later on September 13, 1963, the article “Hauptsturmführer Villem Raid and Others” appeared in the cultural weekly 117 118 119 120

Investigation file of Mikson, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28654, vol. III, l. 108–19. Thjodviljinn, 6 October 1961. ‘Saatan ei uinu kunagi’. Investigation file of Mikson, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28654, vol. III, l. 119; ibid., s. 28654, jv, l. 20. 121 ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 19, l. 1–10, 142–4.

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Sirp ja Vasar, comparing him to Adolf Eichmann. The article was disseminated among expatriates as well. The KGB writer Ervin Martinson continued with the same theme in 1970 in his book Elukutse – reetmine (Occupation—Betrayal). The search for Arkadi Valdin should not have been difficult for the KGB either. For 10 years after the end of the war, the KGB had engaged in intelligence and radio games across the sea with Valdin, who had worked for the Swedish, U.S., and British intelligence services. By 1956, it became clear to the Western intelligence services that the KGB had had the upper hand in those games for years, and intelligence games in that form were abandoned. Thereafter the KGB set out to recruit Valdin into its service. His brother, who lived in Estonia, was used for this purpose, and contact was made through him. We do not have access to documents that may indicate what came of that attempt at recruitment.122 As with Mikson, charges were not brought against Valdin within the framework of the trial. He was also not publicly pilloried along with Villem Raid in the KGB’s later propaganda campaigns.

Evidence and its Credibility Actual crimes formed the background of all the show trials discussed here: mass murders of local residents of Estonia and of prisoners brought from other countries to Estonian territory. The way evidence was gathered, however, and its use in show trials cast doubt on the direct connection between the defendants in a particular trial and the events under consideration, thus bringing into question their personal culpability. We do not have access to archival documents concerning the preparation of evidence in the security organs for the show trials held in Estonia. Let us consider, for the sake of comparison, the trial of Theodor Oberländer held in East Germany at the same time according to the instructions of the Soviet Union. The historical background and propaganda raw material for the trial was the bloodbath that took place in Lviv in Western Ukraine in 1941, where within a week, Ukrainian nationalists, thousands of Jews and, among others, 38 well-known Polish professors and politicians fell victim to one or the other of the belligerents. Oberländer served at that time as a political officer in the Nachtigall German battalion composed of Ukrainian volunteers, and this unit had been the first to enter Lviv. Oberländer later served in the Bergmann unit formed of Caucasians and the activities of this unit were also added to the charges. He was referred to as “Mass-Murderer Oberländer”

122 Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 134–5.

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in propaganda publications, which accused him of killing hundreds of thousands of people. The Soviet side had already repeatedly described the crimes committed in Lviv, but Oberländer’s possible participation in them had not come to light until then. This error had to be corrected. The Soviet Union’s KGB went to a great deal of trouble from the autumn of 1959 onward to construct the necessary evidence and to prepare witnesses.123 Regarding the events in Caucasia, three former combatants from that unit, two officers of Georgian origin and one German national, were prepared in the Soviet Union as the chief witnesses. One of the witnesses who continued to serve his sentence in the Soviet Union for “betrayal of the Soviet fatherland” earned his release by providing suitable testimony. The alleged German national who was also to be a witness did not even appear before the public; it is possible that this was a “phantom witness.”124 Oberländer was ultimately convicted of killing the professors executed in Lviv on the basis of the testimony of a Polish witness who, in 1959, claimed to recognize Oberländer in a photograph.125 Later research has shown that in the turbulent conditions of that time, it cannot be ruled out that some soldiers from the Nachtigallbattalion participated in crimes. Still, the responsibility for this does not fall on Oberländer. There is, however, clear evidence that the Einsatzkommandothat arrived in Lviv was responsible for the murder of the 38 professors. After the end of the Soviet regime and the reunification of Germany, Oberländer requested the review of this court decision and his rehabilitation due to lack of evidence (durch Freispruch wegen mangelden Tatverdachts). He was rehabilitated in 1998, one week after his death.126 The Oberländer case shows that evidence in Soviet show trials cannot be considered historically reliable. Of the trials that were held in Estonia, we will take a closer look at the MereGerrets-Viik trial, which is relatively well documented. The primary content of the accusation here was the September 1942 executions at Kalevi-Liiva of Czech and German Jews who had arrived in two trainloads at the Raasiku railway station near Tallinn and what was done with the surviving Jews at the Jägala concentration camp (officially named AEL no. 3). The Soviet side found out in detail about these events in November and December 1944, when the former financial manager of the camp was interrogated as a witness. The camp commandant was identified as Aleksander Laak, the mass executions were dated to September 1942, it was determined that the 123 Upravlenie Komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri Sovete Ministrov Ukrainskoi SSR, 6 May 1960 (http://memorial.kiev.ua/images/stories/2008/02/nachtigal/007.jpg, last accessed 24 November 2014). 124 Wachs, ‘Die Inszenierung’, pp. 30–56. 125 Weinke, Die Verfolgung, p. 149. 126 Wachs, ‘Die Inszenierung’, pp. 51–6.

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executed people originated from Czechoslovakia and Germany, and the number of executed people was established to be about 1,500.127 The ESSR’s Extraordinary Commission, in its report on the Kalevi-Liiva executions, counted 3,000 victims of the two executions. Including additional victims executed in the same place over the subsequent years, the commission arrived at a total of “about 5,000” victims.128 A book based on the work of that same commission established the corresponding number as “over 5,000.”129 It is possible that there were executions in the same location in 1943–44, when Aleksander Laak served as head of Tallinn’s central prison, but the likely number of people executed is an order of magnitude smaller.130 There is no concrete information concerning continued executions at Kalevi-Liiva after the closure of the Jägala camp in the summer of 1943. Henceforth we will not delve into the details of the materials and testimony gathered during the preliminary investigation. Instead, we will follow the development of the trial as such. On June 10, 1960, a week after criminal proceedings were initiated, Ralf Gerrets, the former adjutant of the camp commandant, who had lived reclusively in Estonia in the postwar years, was arrested. The security organs knew that he was living in Estonia, a fact that was not “suddenly” discovered as a result of the investigation, which is the impression left by the investigation file. In addition to him, for some incomprehensible reason, the former camp guard Jaan Viik was also arrested, even though he had already been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in 1946 for working as a camp guard and had served his sentence.131 Charges were also brought in the same case against the former head of the Estonian Security Police Ain-Ervin Mere and the camp commandant Aleksander Laak, both of whom lived abroad. After the charges were publicly disclosed, Laak committed suicide in Canada in September 1960. Gerrets confessed during the investigation that in 1943 he compiled a card file on 2,100–2,150 Czech and German Jews who had arrived in Estonia. About 450

127 Witness Kristjan Rääk, 9 November – 5 December 1944, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, vol. XIV, l. 301–6. 128 Overview of war crimes and damages caused by fascists in the Estonian SSR according to separate categories, ERA f. R-364, n. 1, s. 33, l. 14. 129 Laosson et al, Saksa fašistlik okupatsioon, p. 512. 130 Indrek Paavle, Eesti rahvastikukaotused II/1 Saksa okupatsioon 1941–1944: hukatud ja vangistuses hukkunud (Estonian Population Losses II/1 German Occupation 1941–1944: Executed Persons and Persons who Perished in Imprisonment) (Tartu, 2002). Mass executions took place in Estonia in the latter half of 1941, thus considerably earlier than the events at Kalevi-Liiva. 131 Jaan Viik, appeal for clemency. ERA f. R-3, n. 6, s. 8192, l. 2–3.

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of them initially survived, and some of them were sent to other detention centers in Estonia, while others were executed during the subsequent months at the Jägala camp. The summary of charges drawn up against Gerrets and the others considers the size of each of the arrived trainloads to be “around 1,500.” At the same time, the overall number of people executed at Kalevi-Liiva is given as “over 5,000 citizens of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and other countries” with reference to the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission.132 The numbers of victims were set out in the text of the court verdict in general conformity with the confession by Gerrets, only rounded slightly upward: “nearly 1,500” and “over 1,000.”133 The information gathered during the preliminary investigation relied primarily on the statements of the people under investigation themselves or the testimony of witnesses. Archival documents confirmed the connection of Ain-Ervin Mere as the head of the Estonian Security Police to the incident (the camp was under his jurisdiction) and proved that Laak and Gerrets were appointed to their positions in the camp. The carrying out of the crime and the basic circumstances (the arrival of the trains at Raasiku station, the selection of prisoners, and the execution of most of them somewhere nearby) are established in other sources aside from the materials of this trial. Descriptions of the executions and of numerous incidents in the camp were founded only on the testimony of witnesses. There is no documentary evidence for this case indicating that the KGB specially prepared the witnesses, but in the late 1990s, the recollections of older employees of the archives reached the author of this article orally. They recalled that in the early 1960s, there was a separate room at the ESSR October Revolution and Socialist Development State Central Archives134 where KGB employees introduced archival documents to witnesses who were to take the stand at show trials and prepared them to provide testimony. In reading the statements of witnesses and listening to the explanations of witnesses in radio interviews and recordings of court sessions, the clear structure, repeated key words, and details of what is said stand out, creating the impression of memorized testimony.135 Photographs of the executions where Czech witnesses recognized their family members were presented as 132 Investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, vol. XVIII, l. 204, 211, 221; Laosson et al, Saksa fašistlik okupatsioon, p. 512. 133 Investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, (II) jv, l. 137–45. 134 Currently the Estonian State Archives. 135 Explanations of witnesses on the radio: Estonian National Broadcasting Corporation archives, key word “sõjakuriteod” (war crimes): http://arhiiv.err.ee/marksona/4144/0/ date-asc/2.

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additional evidence. The photographs actually most likely originated from mass executions that took place in the Liepāja area of Latvia. The same photographs were used repeatedly in the Soviet Union (and in Soviet Lithuania and Latvia, too) as evidence of different mass executions. These photographs have also misleadingly made their way into other countries’ publications through Soviet sources.136 Nowadays it can be confirmed that 2,051 prisoners arrived in Estonia in the two trains under consideration, of whom about 1,600 were executed immediately after arrival. Some of the survivors were executed in small groups during the subsequent months at Jägala camp, and some were transferred to other camps. Over 70 of them managed to survive the war.137 In addition to Jews, local Roma were executed in the same place. Including the Roma, the total number of people executed at Kalevi-Liiva was about 2,000.138 But the effect of Soviet propaganda literature was unstoppable. The stone unveiled in September 2002 to mark the 50th anniversary of the mass execution at Kalevi-Liiva is a memorial stating that 6,000 Jews perished at this spot. An analogous number of victims canonized through the Soviet judicial system has been circulated in connection with the Tartu concentration camp (second case). In 1944, the Extraordinary Commission of that time conducted sample excavations at the place where the executed people from the Tartu concentration camp were incinerated. Based on the thickness of the layer of ash at a particular spot, it arbitrarily determined the number of victims to be 12,000. This became an accepted figure.139 During the preliminary investigation and the trial of the functionaries from the Tartu concentration camp, no attempt was made to ascertain the actual number of victims. Research work carried out after Soviet archives became accessible suggests that the number cannot be determined exactly but that it can be estimated at between 3,000–4,000 people.140 136 Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland, pp. 232–3. 137 Monica Kingreen and Wolfgang Scheffler, ‘Die Deportationen nach Raasiku bei Reval’, Wolfgang Scheffller and Diana Schulle (eds.), Buch der Erinnerung. Book of Remembrance, Vol 2: Die ins Baltikum deportierten deutschen, österreichischen und tschechoslowakischen Juden / The German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews Deported to the Baltic States (Munich, 2003), p. 866. 138 Maripuu, ‘Annihilation of Czech and German Jews’, pp. 705–16. 139 The total number of victims in Estonian territory was presented as 125,307 in the Extraordinary Commission’s summary, which is an arbitrary result, arrived at without concrete source material. At the end of the Soviet period, even the security organs were unable to explain to themselves what this figure was based on. This number of victims appears to this day in Russian-language publications. 140 Västrik, ‘Tartu Concentration Camp 1941–1944’, pp. 689–704.

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Organization of Trials The USSR constitution stipulated that: According to Section 111, the deliberation of cases was public in all of the Soviet Union’s judicial bodies to the extent that exceptions are not prescribed, whereas the defendant is guaranteed the right to defense; Section 112 stipulated the independence of judges and that they are subject only to the law; Section 117 stipulated that organs of prosecution carry out their functions independently of any local organs, subject only to the Soviet Union’s chief public prosecutor. Thus it could be claimed that formally, according to the constitution, the principle of separation of powers applied in the Soviet Union. The Communist Party’s exclusive leading role in Soviet society is not explicitly laid out in the constitution. Yet it is stated in Section 126 (Chapter X. Fundamental rights and fundamental duties of citizens): “[…] the most active and aware citizens from the ranks of the working class, the working peasantry, and the working intellectuals join together voluntarily in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is the foremost detachment of the workers in their struggle for building up a communist society, and the leading nucleus of all organizations, both social and state, of the working people.” Concerning Estonia, primarily the ECP CC Bureau can be seen as the “leading nucleus” mentioned in the constitution, since it was the local collective organ of power that ensured the implementation of guidelines from Moscow. The Party’s direct intervention in the work of the judicial branch was significant. In conducting the show trials examined here, the ESSR KGB and the Prosecutor’s Office first presented their proposals for holding the trials to the ECP CC Bureau. In connection with the Mere-Gerrets-Viik trial, the ECP CC, under the direction of First Secretary Johannes Käbin, handed down the decision on December 3, 1960: 1.  To assign the ESSR Supreme Court the task of carrying out the public trial, 2. To organize a press bureau (which included journalists employed by the KGB) to shed light on the progress of the trial, which would also see to the filming of the trial, 3. To assign the Union republic’s prosecutor the task of participating in the trial as the state prosecutor and to select the public prosecutors in cooperation with the ECP CC. 4. To request permission from the CPSU CC to introduce the summary of charges to the public in the press and to hold a public trial.141 141 ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 2508, l. 20–1; ibid., s. 2509, l. 91.

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The subsequent preparation of the trial also took place in accordance with the guidelines of Party organs. On December 6, 1960, the ECP CC Secretariat required the Estonian State Publishing House to publish a collection of materials concerning the events at Kalevi-Liiva by December 25 in cooperation with the press group that had been formed. The publication was to appear in both Estonian and Russian with a print run of 10,000.142 On January 6, 1961, ESSR Prosecutor Valter Raudsalu submitted a proposal concerning the lawyers participating in the trial to the head of the ECP CC Department of Administrative, Financial, and Trade Organizations.143 The candidates were coordinated between the Prosecutor’s Office, the KGB, and the Supreme Court. One of the three proposed lawyers was left out and replaced.144 On February 3, 1962, ECP CC First Secretary Käbin requested that the CPSU CC allow the disclosure of the summary of charges of the case under consideration and hold a public trial in Tallinn. The application refers to the investigation materials published in the Soviet Union as well as in Western countries, and to the suicide of one of the accused (A. Laak), which helped weaken the positions of Estonian emigrant organizations in Western countries. The entire trial was also tied in with the general foreign-policy interests of the Soviet Union, since it undermined the leaderships of countries that supported anti-Soviet emigrant organizations.145 On February 9, 1962, ESSR Deputy Prosecutor Karl Kimmel presented a recommendation (!) to Käbin to approve the public prosecutor. The candidate was agreed upon in advance with the ESSR KGB.146 A factory worker was approved as the public prosecutor instead of the proposed candidate, Major General Rihard Tomberg,147 a former fellow officer of the accused Ain-Ervin Mere. The accused were charged in accordance with Section 1 of the act “Concerning Criminal Responsibility for State Crimes” adopted on December 25, 1961. The 142 Vladimir Raudsepp, Inimesed, olge valvsad! (People, Be Alert!) (Tallinn, 1961). 143 Among his other tasks, the head of the ECP CC Department of Administrative, Financial and Trade Organizations was also responsible for supervising state security organs, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the courts. 144 ERAF f. 1, n. 218, s. 5, l. 1. 145 Ibid., l. 2–3. 146 Ibid., l. 5. 147 Major General Rihard Tomberg (1897–1982) served as the head of Estonian air defense since 1930. He was incorporated into the Red Army in 1940, along with the entire Estonian army, but was dismissed from active service in 1941. He was arrested in 1944 and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment plus five years of exile but was released in 1956 in an amnesty. He was the only Estonian general who was not killed or did not die in the Gulag.

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ESSR Criminal Code went into effect in 1961, and accordingly, the basis for the charges became ESSR Criminal Code Section 62, subsection 1. This remained the case after 1965 as well, when the Supreme Soviet Presidium enactment “Concerning the Penalization of Persons Guilty of Crimes Committed against Peace and Humanity and War Crimes Regardless of When the Crimes Were Committed” was adopted.148 This enactment was taken into account, but only in terms of the non-applicability of statutory limitations to the crime. Crimes committed against peace and humanity and war crimes did not constitute criminal offenses in the ESSR Criminal Code or in other criminal codes in the Soviet Union. All those accused in the show trials149 were convicted of “betrayal of the Soviet fatherland,” to which other sections of the code could be added, for instance, the same activity in organizational form. Based on the continuity of Estonian statehood, which is the basis for the international recognition of the Republic of Estonia, the accused people in this case were citizens of the Republic of Estonia, not of the Soviet Union, which had occupied and annexed Estonia.150 Thus these convicted people, along with all other people convicted under similar charges, were automatically rehabilitated according to the act rehabilitating extrajudicially repressed and groundlessly convicted people that went into effect in the Republic of Estonia in 1992, and verdicts handed down concerning them are null and void from the moment of their proclamation.151 The death penalty was abolished in the Soviet Union in 1947–50. Based on Section 6 of the principles of criminal legislation, the death penalty could not be applied in the later period, when the death penalty for the corresponding crime 148 USSR Supreme Soviet Act “Concerning Criminal Responsibility for State Crimes,” December 25, 1958; as of April 1, 1961, according to Section 62 of the ESSR Criminal Code. On March 4, 1965, the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium passed the enactment ‘Concerning the Penalization of Persons Guilty of Crimes Committed against Peace and Humanity and War Crimes Regardless of When the Crimes Were Committed’. 149 This applied to all similar charges, regardless of whether the trial was public or in camera. 150 After it occupied and annexed Estonia in the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union declared all citizens of the Republic of Estonia citizens of the Soviet Union through a unilateral act of legislation. This is contrary to the principle of the continuity of Estonian statehood, according to which citizens of Estonia retained their citizenship throughout the Soviet period. 151 ‘Act concerning the Rehabilitation of Extrajudicially Repressed and Groundlessly Convicted Persons’, 19 February 1992 (https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/22216, last accessed on 13 March 2014).

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was restored as punishment for crimes committed earlier (including 1941–44). It was instead to be replaced by the lesser term of punishment that was in effect in the meantime, meaning imprisonment. Thus current legislation and general judicial practice would have precluded the death penalty at the time when these trials were held. A way was found to make an exception in the case under consideration as well as in the analogous trial held the following year (fourth case: Edmund Kuusik, August Reinvald, Julius Viks and Teodor Kaldre). A regulation passed by the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium on the basis of applications made separately in each case by the KGB allowed the ESSR Supreme Court, as an exception, to waive the application of the provisions mitigating the penalty.152 State prosecutor at the Jüriste-Linnas-Viks trial and later ESSR State Prosecutor Karl Kimmel later described this situation: “This is why the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium adopted a special decision prior to this trial based on a petition from our republic according to which the court was granted the right to waive the law concerning the statute of limitations in this particular case if it was found that the defendants were guilty of the savage mass destruction of innocent people. This was confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt.”153 Concerning Kimmel’s commentary, it must nevertheless be noted that in the case of the centrally planned trials in the Soviet Union at that time, the petition that was submitted was definitely not an initiative of the Estonian SSR but rather a measure decided upon by the authorities in Moscow. Documents accessible to researchers do not help to answer the question of when and by whom the penalties were actually determined. The available source materials, however, suggest that the penalty (the death penalty in all cases under consideration) was already decided before the trial. The Jüriste-Linnas-Viks trial in January 1962 confirms this: an “overview” of the progress of the trial and the predetermined court verdict were mistakenly published in the USSR Prosecutor’s Office periodical Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ before the trial even began.154

152 Investigation file of Jüriste and others, ERAF f. 130SM, n. 1, s. 28195, vol. X, l. 172–3; investigation file of Gerrets and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28653, vol. XIX, l. 503; investigation file of Kaldre and others, ibid., s. 28668, vol. VIII, l. 140. 153 Arvo Kallas,‘Sõjaroimarile ei saa andestada: Eesti NSV prokuröri intervjuu’ (War Criminals Cannot Be Forgiven: Interview with the Estonian SSR State Prosecutor), Noorte Hääl, 14 May 1987. 154 Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’, January 1962; see Zumbakis, Soviet Evidence, pp. 13–4. On the role of the defense in Soviet show trials, see Juri Luryi, ‘The Role of Defence Counsel in Political Trials in the U.S.S.R.’, Manitoba Law Journal 7 (1977), no. 4, pp. 307–24.

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Nevertheless, State Prosecutor Kimmel recalled in 1987: “I want to point out that the trial was widely publicized. All evidence was very carefully examined with all the objectivity characteristic of our work and in strict conformity to the law—archival documents, the statements of witnesses.”155 Professor Ilmar Rebane, who participated in the trial as Linnas’s defense lawyer, later commented on the methodology of defense at that time. He stated, among other things: “Defense lawyers are patriots of their fatherland and cannot undertake the path of justifying a crime.156 […] In such trials, it would, in my opinion, be incorrect to focus attention on minor questions and details. […] The defense does not consider it possible to divert the attention of the court from the main question of the trial.” The main argument of the defense was that “Linnas was not a central political figure but rather a tool in the hands of Estonia’s more principal bourgeois-nationalist figures.”157 The minutes of the court sessions do not leave the impression that the defense lawyers—who were appointed by agreement between the Communist Party, the Prosecutor’s Office, the KGB, and the Supreme Soviet—sincerely represented the interests of their clients. Here and there, one is left with the impression that the defense lawyer competed with the prosecutor in presenting “juicier” charges. Unfortunately, one can only speculate whether the defense lawyers at that time knew about the court verdict “leaked” by the aforementioned periodical. Aside from this extraordinary circumstance, it can be asked to what extent defense lawyers had a real chance to defend their clients. A trial against members of the Viru County Omakaitse some 10 years later serves as an example. This trial concerned similar charges but was not turned into a show trial. The accused had 155 Kallas, ‘Sõjaroimarile ei saa andestada’. 156 The charges were presented on the basis of the section of the criminal code concerning the particularly serious state crime “betrayal of the fatherland.” 157 The abstract term “bourgeois nationalist” referred to the most important type of (domestic) enemy in the Soviet Union, combining the figure of the class enemy with the ethnic enemy. As a rule, “bourgeois nationalists” had to have both attributes. In the context of the Cold War, most expatriates could be considered bourgeois nationalists, especially if they had occupied a prominent government or social position in the independent Republic of Estonia. When it came to the war, any clear dividing line between bourgeois nationalists and “fascists” (the Soviet Union’s common term for persons who had cooperated with Germany) disappeared. N. Grigorjeva, ‘Karistusest ei pääse’ (Punishment Cannot Be Escaped), Rahva Hääl, 27 May 1987. Professor Rebane participated as a defense lawyer at a total of three show trials of that time.

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already been convicted and served his sentence on the basis of similar charges. Here the presentations by the defense lawyers give a different impression—even though this probably did not affect the court verdict. The defense lawyer stressed the principle that a person could not be penalized twice for the same crime, since no new significant circumstances had emerged during the investigation, and the new charge was even weaker than the previous one.158 Based on this example, there are grounds for concluding that the question of citizenship mentioned above, which from the standpoint of the Soviet Union did not exist, was not the only problem regarding the legality of the court verdict. Since the court verdict was not decided by the members of the court itself, the principle of the confidentiality of holding trials had been violated, and so on, the given court verdict was null and void based on the legislation of the Soviet Union itself, and this was so from the very moment that the verdict was announced.159 Section 3 of the legislation states that the Supreme Court of the Republic of Estonia has the right to declare persons guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity ineligible for rehabilitation and that the Supreme Court will review the criminal cases of such persons as prescribed by procedure for review of court verdicts on the basis of applications submitted by citizens, their organizations, local governments, or national governmental institutions.160 This means that the Supreme Court must rely on the materials of criminal cases and assess the evidence for the charges. Yet do the confessions and given statements in investigation files make it possible to assess this? In 1987, even the Soviet KGB did not trust the materials it had itself gathered enough to go before the court once again. In 1990, just before the Republic of Estonia regained its independence, the ESSR Supreme Soviet Presidium passed the enactment “Concerning the Rehabilitation of Extrajudicially Repressed and Groundlessly Convicted Persons,” according to which it was possible to submit the appropriate application and the ESSR Supreme Court was obliged to hand down the corresponding decision.161 A family member of at least one defendant who was sentenced to death in 1962 at a show 158 Defence lawyer H. Levin’s rebuttal at a court session on April 5, 1974. Investigation file of Ojavere and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 29070, vol. X, l. 307–8. 159 ESSR Criminal Trial Code, Section 261. Determination of court verdicts in chambers. 160 ‘Concerning the Rehabilitation of Extrajudicially Repressed and Groundlessly Convicted Persons’, 19 February 1992 (https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/22216, last accessed on 13 March 2014). 161 ESSR Supreme Soviet Presidium enactment, 19 February 1990, ‘Concerning the Rehabilitation of Extrajudicially Repressed and Groundlessly Convicted Persons’ (www.estlex.com/tasuta/?id=savedoc&aktid...1, last accessed on 13 March 2014).

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trial submitted an application in 1990 for rehabilitation. The ESSR Prosecutor’s Office declared that the actions of the person in question could be viewed only as counterterror for the acts of terror and groundless repressions committed by the Soviet regime in 1940–41, and therefore, the rules for rehabilitation did not apply.162 The questions that emerge here cannot be answered definitively. The materials described above make it clear that crimes that had actually taken place formed the basis for the investigations and trials considered here. These crimes have been qualified in the international judicial area as crimes against humanity or war crimes, and the accused persons were connected with them in one way or another. But investigation results and court verdicts are not acceptable under present legal norms. Judicial practice in the show trials did not even meet the Soviet Union’s own legal standards. The judiciary was in no way independent. Court sessions were primarily court performances, and the ascertainment of the personal guilt or innocence of the defendants was not the objective. The court performance held in East Germany against Theodor Oberländer shows that these examples were not exceptions but reflected the usual procedure for Soviet show trials. Considerably more of the preparatory documentation of the Oberländer trial has reached historians, and we can read the whole script of the court session with the participants and naturally also the court verdict fully in place, all of which was approved by the SED.163

Propaganda and Extradition After the conclusion of judicial formalities, such trials took on another life in propaganda, as the Communist Party had decided. The books Inimesed, olge valvsad! (People, Be Watchful!), about the executions at Kalevi-Liiva, and 12,000, about the Tartu concentration camp, were published.164 Both books appeared in English translation165 in 1962, and they were distributed through the Estonian 162 Investigation file of Kaldre and others, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28668, vol. VIII, l. 185. 163 Wachs, ‘Die Inszenierung’, pp. 51–6. 164 Raudsepp, Inimesed, olge valvsad!; K. Lemmik and E. Martinson (eds.), 12000: Tartus 16.–20. jaanuaril 1962 massimõrvarite Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnase ja Ervin Viksi üle peetud kohtuprotsessi materjale (Tallinn, 1962). 165 Raul Kruus (ed.), People, Be Watchful! Documents and Materials on the Trial of the Fascist Murderers A. Mere, R. Gerrets and J. Viik (Tallinn, 1962); K. Lemmik and E. Martinson (eds.), 12,000: Materials from the Trial of the Mass Murderers Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas and Ervin Viks, Held at Tartu on January 16–20 1962 (Tallinn, 1963).

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SSR State Security Committee’s First Department abroad until the end of the 1980s.166 The trials were covered in several other propaganda books and in numerous newspaper articles in Estonia and abroad. At the end of 1958, the newspaper Kodumaa (Homeland) began publication to spread propaganda among Estonian expatriates.167 As decided by the Party, a propaganda documentary film entitled Kalevi-Liiva süüdistab (Kalevi-Liiva Accuses) was made about the Mere-GerretsViik trial.168 This hackneyed propaganda film is but one example of how cinema was employed to portray the peoples of the Baltic republics as fascists. Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian actors assigned as a rule to play the roles of Nazis became an integral part of countless Soviet war films.169 In addition to film and literature, the trial provided an impulse for the development of a sort of foreign tourism in Soviet Estonia. In 1961, a memorial stone was erected at the Kalevi-Liiva execution site in memory of the “over 5,000” executed “Soviet citizens.” That same summer, the ECP CC and ESSR Council of Ministers secret joint regulation no. 259-25 was passed, approving the objects that foreign tourists were allowed to visit. Alongside the more than 100 progressive kolkhozes and sovkhozes, schools and industrial enterprises, the Kalevi-Liiva memorial stone was the only “historical site” aside from Tallinn’s museums. It should be noted that foreign tourism was still a new phenomenon in Soviet Estonia and completely under KGB control. In 1958, 53 foreign delegations visited Estonia—175 people from socialist countries and 215 from capitalist countries. The KGB recorded 46 contacts between local residents and foreign tourists during these visits.170 In addition to propaganda aimed at the masses, materials from the show trials reached investigative offices in Western countries. In the first wave, the informational materials and copies of documents distributed at the trials under consideration arrived in those offices through Western journalists accredited to Moscow who were invited to Estonia to observe the court sessions. In this way, the materials from the Mere-Gerrets-Viik trial were passed on to the Central Office of 166 ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 12, l. 30–4. 167 Analogous newspapers were started up at the end of the 1950s to influence Latvian and Lithuanian expatriates as well. 168 Kalevi-Liiva süüdistab, directed by Vladimir Parvel and Ülo Tambek (Tallinnfilm Studio, 1961). 169 The documentary film Fritsud ja blondiinid (Jerrys and Blondes), directed by Arbo Tammiksaar (2008) (www.efis.ee/et/filmiliigid/film/id/819/, last accessed on 20 February 2014). 170 Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 192–3.

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the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen) in West Germany. In the 1960s, this organization was also active in researching the execution of Jews carried out in Estonian territory with the participation of the German Security Police and SD. The number “6,000,” acquired via Moscow, also figured in its research materials as the possible number of victims executed at Kalevi-Liiva. However, during the investigation, they soon arrived at more realistic data.171 In the early 1960s, the Soviets started rendering direct “legal assistance” to investigative institutions of other countries: first to the countries of the Eastern bloc, starting from 1964 to West Germany, and later to the United States (primarily in connection with the case of Karl Linnas) and other Western countries.172 Soviet evidence, however, was viewed quite critically, as trials in the Soviet Union were obviously staged. According to Soviet security organs themselves, 80 persons were convicted in West Germany in 1968–73 with the help of the evidence that they provided. At the same time, they also admitted the major problem that there was no legal basis in West Germany for convicting anyone of “Nazi crimes.” Instead, “premeditated killing” had to be proved, and that required particularly thorough proof. In this respect, the greatest shortcomings of the Soviets themselves were admitted, which had also been used in anti-Soviet propaganda.173 The judicial system in the United States and in all Western countries differed significantly from the Soviet system. Evidence sent from the Soviet Union caused numerous justified suspicions and arguments over whether they proved guilt. An important part of the process following the show trials was the demand for the extradition of defendants convicted in absentia from their host countries. As a rule, Western countries refused to do so, and the Soviet side probably did not really expect their demands to be met. Refusal to extradite defendants convicted in absentia and the presentation of new demands from time to time made it possible for the Soviet Union to present “accusations of fascism” in the press against the governments of those countries. In terms of demands for extradition, the most noteworthy turned out to be the Karl Linnas case (second case), which combined first the tug of war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and 171 Der Massenmord an der jüdischen Bevölkerung Estlands während der Jahre 1941/42, Bundesarchiv, Außenstelle Ludwigsburg AR-Z 246/59, vol. VIII. 172 Materials associated with legal assistance provided through the ESSR KGB are preserved in Estonia in the National Archives: Collection of inquiries from foreign countries connected to the investigation of war crimes, ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 1–24. 173 Ibid., s. 5, l. 141–7.

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thereafter the domestic court saga in the United States for extraditing Linnas, the key issue in which was the U.S. citizenship that Linnas had acquired.174 The Soviet Union began demanding Linnas’s extradition during the preliminary investigation (November 11, 1961). It made a second attempt in 1962, without success. By the end of the 1970s, U.S.-Soviet relations had improved somewhat. International developments had changed the U.S. attitude towards punishing Nazi crimes. Moreover, changes in U.S. legislation in 1978 made it easier to extradite figures like Linnas.175 The Soviet Union passed some of the materials concerning Linnas to the United States in 1976, and a certain exchange of information began taking place. The Soviet side had to prove the authenticity and validity of the evidence that it had provided. The questioning of some of the witnesses in the presence of American representatives and defense attorneys was requested, or even permission for them to be brought to the United States to appear in court. The Soviet side was prepared to receive American representatives in Estonia from October 1980 onward, but they refused to conduct a new preliminary investigation. Charged with providing false information (he concealed his service in a concentration camp on his application form) concerning his activities during the war, Linnas was stripped of his American citizenship in 1981.176 After that important change, the Soviet Union presented another demand for his extradition, and against the protests of Linnas, a true propaganda war on both sides began. One of Linnas’s main counterarguments was the absence of due process in the Soviet Union: recall that the verdict handed down in absentia concerning Linnas was not made by the court. Opposition and various court actions continued for years, becoming part of domestic political arguments in the United States.177 After going through all stages of appeal, Linnas was extradited from the United States on April 24, 1987, and brought to the Estonian SSR, becoming the first person accused of war crimes to

174 The court cases of Karl Linnas and his extradition from the United States to the Soviet Union have been covered in several articles. See, for instance, Jerome S. Legge, Jr.,‘The Karl Linnas Deportation Case, the Office of Special Investigations, and American Ethnic Politics’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24 (2010), no. 1, pp. 26–55; Theresa M. Beiner, ‘Due Process for All: Due Process, the Eighth Amendment and Nazi War Criminals’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 80 (1989), no. 1, pp. 293–337. 175 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1978. 176 ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 5; translation of the diplomatic note from the U.S. Embassy, 26 October 1979, ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 8, l. 37; ESSR KGB letter to Volkov, ibid., l. 87–8; U.S. New York Circuit Court memorandum, 31 July 1981 (translation into Russian), ibid., s. 9, l. 103–21. 177 Legge, ‘The Karl Linnas Deportation Case’, pp. 40–4.

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be handed over by the United States to the Soviet Union against his will.178 Times had changed since the early 1960s, and new trends in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union apparently influenced this decision. At the same time as the Soviet demand for the extradition of Karl Linnas, the Soviet Embassy began a propaganda campaign in Canada and Sweden. Rodionov, the Soviet ambassador to Canada, complained about the activities of Baltic emigrants in Canada and the Canadian government’s reaction. As a countermeasure, he asked for information on potential war criminals, including those who could be compromised. There was nobody in Canada who was very well suited for this, but in Sweden, there was Ago Talvar, who had been sentenced to death in absentia in 1967. Immediately after the extradition of Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union in April 1987, the Soviet Union’s Prosecutor’s Office and the KGB set about considering the possibilities for demanding Ago Talvar’s extradition from Sweden. The relevant organs in the Estonian SSR had to present their positions. Karl Kortelainen, the head of the ESSR KGB, admitted that demanding Talvar’s extradition was not a good idea, because despite the death sentence handed down, his participation in executions could not be proven, a new trial was not possible on the basis of the available evidence, and so any action would have to be restricted to the use of currently existing material for propaganda purposes. In February 1988, Kortelainen no longer considered the transfer to the embassy of materials and trophy documents concerning Talvar advisable, even for propaganda purposes. It must be noted that the KGB kept this conclusion to itself. Articles were placed in the press just in case that reproached Sweden for not extraditing Talvar in 1967.179 It is unclear why the KGB discussed the possibility of holding a new trial when a valid court verdict existed concerning Talvar. One possibility is that they had 178 Fyodor Fedorenko was extradited from the United States in 1984 for concealing his wartime activities, yet he himself agreed to be sent to the Soviet Union. There was no court verdict concerning Fedorenko at that time. He was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1985 and sentenced to death in 1986. He was executed in July 1987. Felicity Barringer, ‘Soviet Reports It Executed Nazi Guard U.S. Extradited’, New York Times, 28 July 1987 (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/28/world/soviet-reports-itexecuted-nazi-guard-us-extradited.html, last accessed on 2 February 2014). 179 ESSR Minister of Foreign Affairs Arnold Green’s letter to Kortelainen, 3 April 1985, ERAF f. 133SM, n. 1, s. 12, l. 41. On March 5, 1987, the head of the Estonian SSR KGB, Kortelainen, wrote to Leonid Barkov in connection with war criminals in exile: “Ago Talvar lives in Sweden—he was sentenced to death in absentia in 1967. The necessary proof of his direct participation in the killings was not found.” Ibid., s. 13, l. 55; Kortelainen to the ESSR Prosecutor’s Office, 19 June 1987, ibid., l. 136–8; Kortelainen to Barkov, 29 February 1988, ibid., s. 15, p 11.

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in mind future court actions in Sweden in the event that the Soviets did start demanding his extradition after all, similar to the Linnas court sessions in the United States. The way the Linnas court case unfolded alludes to the second possibility. When he was brought to Estonia, Linnas was offered the opportunity to submit an appeal for clemency, but on April 23, he refused to sign any document whatsoever without a lawyer. A defense lawyer was appointed for him in Estonia on April 28. On the following day, Linnas submitted his appeal for clemency in which he referred to the expiration of the court verdict that had been handed down. In connection with the extradition of Linnas and his subsequent fate, an interview with USSR First Deputy Chief Prosecutor N. Bazhenov is instructive. It was published on May 8, and in it Bazhenov confirmed that Linnas would be given the opportunity to appeal the court verdict handed down in 1962.180 Some 10 days later, an interview of Estonian SSR State Prosecutor Karl Kimmel appeared in which Kimmel thoroughly analyzed the situation that had developed around the Linnas case—at least to the extent that he could do so publicly—and outlined four different solutions allowed by the law. First of all, Linnas could have submitted a petition for clemency, which he had done through the only document presented at this point. The second option, according to the prosecutor, was for Linnas to file an appeal concerning his court verdict according to judicial supervisory procedure;181 allegedly, the document referred to as Linnas’s appeal for clemency essentially amounted to this. That document also referred to the expiration of the statute of limitations. Referring to the defense’s request to apply the statute of limitations, Kimmel pointed out that only the court could decide on the expiration of death sentences. If the court did not find it possible to apply the statute of limitations, the death 180 V. Lapski, ‘Pärast väljasaatmist (intervjuu NSVLiidu peaprokuröri asetäitja N. Baženoviga. Seoses Karl Linnase väljaandmisega Nõukogude Liidule)’ (After extradition [in connection with the extradition of the war criminal Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union, Izvestiia correspondent V. Lapski spoke with USSR First Deputy Chief Prosecutor N. Bazhenov]), Rahva Hääl, 8 May 1987. 181 This refers to the ESSR Criminal Procedure Code, Chapter 30. Proceedings in the Supervisory Instance (Sections 340–51). A convicted offender or the lawyer defending him could not directly file an appeal on his own concerning court verdicts that had already entered into force in order to apply for initiation of judicial supervisory procedure. The right to file appeals in accordance with judicial supervisory procedure belonged to the organs of the court and prosecutor’s offices of the Union republic and of the Soviet Union, to which the convicted offender or the lawyer representing him submitted the corresponding application. A court organ higher than the court that had handed down the court verdict reviewed the appeals.

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penalty would be commuted to imprisonment, meaning that Linnas would have had to be sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.182 As a third option, the review of the court verdict could have been considered, but only in the event that essential new circumstances were found which were not known to the court at the time the verdict was handed down.183 The fourth option that Kimmel outlined was the principle that was ordinarily applied, that a sentence is not carried out if more than 15 years have passed since the verdict was handed down and no new crimes were committed in the meantime.184 Yet the prosecutor claimed that this kind of situation would most likely give rise to the justified objections of “the relatives of the people that had been killed and of the broad masses.”185 The “voice of the masses” resounded in the form of numerous letters to the editor in the newspaper Rahva Hääl (People’s Voice). It was a well-orchestrated mass chorus. The Soviet regime had practiced for decades how to organize these “spontaneous” outbursts of public opinion. Given the contemporaneous reports on growing public support for Estonian independence that were gaining increasing prominence in newspapers, this “voice of the masses” is unconvincing. On May 18, 1987, the lawyer submitted an application to the court to consider the 1962 court verdict on Linnas expired, due to the long period of time that had passed since then and the fact that steps had not been taken in that period to carry out the sentence. This appeal was made possible by a nuance in USSR legislation: the non-applicability of statutory limitations regarding “persons guilty of crimes committed against peace and humanity and war crimes” had indeed been established in 1965,186 but not the non-applicability of statutory limitations on

182 ESSR Criminal Code Section 54. Expiration of the execution of judgments of conviction. The Code prescribed only the principle that the death penalty was to be replaced by incarceration but did not stipulate the duration of incarceration. The 15-year penalty is the position stated by the prosecutor in regard to Linnas. 183 ESSR Criminal Trial Code Section 352. The basis for reopening a criminal case. 184 ESSR Criminal Code Section 54 (2). Expiration of the execution of judgments of conviction. 185 Kallas, ‘Sõjaroimarile ei saa andestada’. 186 It came to light in the 1960s that according to West German legislation, the statute of limitations on all crimes was 20 years, so the penalization of war criminals in West Germany would have had to be completed by 1965 at the latest. Poland protested this at the UN and was supported by the UN International Justice Codification Commission in 1965. The UN General Assembly unanimously decided that the punishability of war crimes must not be discontinued. The convention on the non-applicability of statutory limitations was completed by 1968. The enactment ‘Concerning

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the carrying out of a court conviction.187 The ESSR Criminal Code edition with commentary had in fact taken the position that the expiration of the execution of judgments of conviction prescribed in the Code was not applicable to Nazi crimes. The commutation of sentences handed down (including in absentia) for the death penalty to prison sentences was also not considered applicable.188 Yet the commentaries provided in this volume were nevertheless not law but rather interpretations of the intent of the law by relevant lawyers. This provided defense lawyers with a certain amount of room for maneuvering. The defense lawyer was also guided in filing the appeal by Section 336 of the ESSR Criminal Procedure Code, which, among other things, prescribed the participation of the convicted offender in the court deliberation.189 Acceptance of the appeal would have required a court verdict. It is not known what discussions took place in the KGB and the court organs regarding this issue. It would have been politically impossible to grant Linnas clemency or to consider the statute of limitations of his court verdict to have expired, because in both cases, such a decision would have meant his release from detention.190 It is also possible that the Soviets did not want to take the risk of reviewing the court verdict in a new political situation. The last option would have been to commute Linnas’s death sentence to 15 years imprisonment, but would this have looked like a defeat as well after all those years of struggle? A casual remark made by the prosecutor may shed some light on the considerations of the organs of power. On May 18, the same day that the defense lawyer submitted the petition to the court to acknowledge the expiration of the death sentence, ESSR Prosecutor Kimmel and Minister of Internal Affairs Marko Tibar visited Linnas in prison. Kimmel has claimed that what transpired was merely a conversation, with no judicial implications whatsoever. To Linnas’s question: “When will the court’s final decision be made? Apparently your laws no longer

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the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations for Crimes Committed against Peace and Humanity’ was previously adopted in the Soviet Union in 1965. Investigation file of Jüriste and others, ERAF f. 130SM, n. 1, s. 28195, vol. X, l. 175, 182, 186, 187–8, 225. ESSR Criminal Procedure Code. Edition with commentary Tallinn, 1972, Section 54(3), commentary 5. Expiration of the execution of judgments of conviction. ESSR Criminal Procedure Code Section 336. Resolution of questions arising from the execution of court verdicts. ESSR Criminal Code Section 54. Expiration of the execution of judgments of conviction. The wording of subsection (3) of the Code leaves the theoretical possibility open that if the court applies expiration in regard to death sentences, the convicted offender may escape punishment altogether.

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allow the death penalty to be carried out.” Kimmel replied: “Not so fast. The decision will be made in due course, and it will be in harmony with the law. By the way, the law can be changed.”191 This may mean that the option was considered of once again intervening in resolving the court case, as was done in 1962 through the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium, in order to prevent the application of some particular legal provision in the resolution of this case. The situation in the Soviet Union in 1987 was not comparable to 1962—the political atmosphere was simmering, it was the peak of Gorbachev’s glasnost, and the United States or Sweden would certainly have closely followed new trials. Previously the Soviets had refused to conduct a new preliminary investigation regarding the Linnas question in response to an inquiry from the United States. A couple of weeks after the appeal was submitted, the detention center disclosed that Linnas’s health had deteriorated and that he was being sent to a medical institution. Linnas died in Leningrad on July 2 after an operation in a Ministry of Internal Affairs Hospital.192 Instead of the courts, death resolved the delicate situation that had developed for the Soviet authorities.

Summary The show trials of Nazi criminals held by the Soviet regime in the 1960s had several attributes in common. Show trials started being held in the occupied Baltic countries simultaneously in 1961. Analogous events followed immediately in Ukraine and Belorussia, and somewhat later in western Russia. In addition to their timing, they had a common organizational outlook: Communist Party organs made a political decision and issued the necessary instructions to the security organs, which prepared evidence and formulated charges. The court organ had only a formal role in presenting the charges to the accused and formulating the convicting court verdict approved by the political leadership. The entire investigation and judicial proceedings were controlled by Party organs, which simultaneously coordinated the propaganda coverage in the press. Show trials of persons accused of Nazi crimes had multiple objectives. Both foreign and domestic policy goals had an impact. As a Cold War foreign policy objective, expatriate communities living in Western countries (or the East-West 191 Confidential statement from ESSR Prosecutor K. Kimmel to the ECP CC, 9 June 1987, ERA f. R-1038, n. 13c, s. 576, l. 22–8. 192 Investigation file of Jüriste and others, ERAF f. 130SM, n. 1, s. 28195, vol. X, l. 263–4. The specific reasons and circumstances of the death of Karl Linnas have left a number of questions and suspicions unresolved.

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relationship in Germany) were targeted, and attempts were made to discredit them both in their adopted homeland and in the host countries. Western politicians were accused of closing their eyes to Nazism (“fascism” in Soviet usage) due to their political support for the expatriates. The shaping of the perception of the Great Patriotic War was a priority. The “Soviet people” were portrayed as the main victim of World War II and the Soviet Union as the sole savior of the world and opponent of Western policy, which was depicted as the continuation of the aspirations of Nazi Germany. Show trials were put to use in domestic politics in the struggle that began in the Soviet Union against “bourgeois nationalism.” Media coverage of the show trials was conspicuously propagandistic. The propaganda campaign began in conjunction with (or even before) the beginning of the investigation and was of an international nature. In addition to the domestic media, the Soviet side got articles published through their confidants among Western journalists and left-wing publications in Western countries that were meant to incline public opinion toward the Soviet regime. Show trials held by the Soviet Union coincided with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, which in many respects became a pivotal and pioneering case. The media coverage of the Eichmann trial (press conferences, widespread international coverage, and television) has been regarded as setting an example for Soviet show trials as well.193 These trials happened simultaneously by chance; the Soviet trials were prepared before the Eichmann trial began. The first show trial held in Estonia, which brought the most extensive propaganda campaign of all the show trials conducted in Estonia, took place a month before the beginning of the Eichmann trial.194 The basis for the accusations was war crimes and crimes against humanity that actually happened. Owing to the nature of the events (the commission of the crimes was not documented or the evidence was destroyed), indirect evidence, especially the testimony of witnesses, was of particular importance. The manipulation of witnesses was relatively easy and widespread under Soviet totalitarianism. The key figures in the show trials were members of expatriate communities of peoples living under Soviet rule who were connected with crimes committed during the German occupation. Additionally, there were local residents among the accused persons who were actually present in court and available for punishment. The form of show trials provided the opportunity to influence accused persons and suspects living in exile through the press, and this could involve attempts to convince accused

193 Hirszowicz, ‘The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror’, p. 39. 194 The trial of Gerrets and others was held in the ESSR Supreme Court on 6–11 March 1961; the trial of Eichmann began in Israel on 2 April 1961.

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persons (suspects) to cooperate with Soviet intelligence organizations. The Communist Party (in the form of the ECP CC in Estonia) coordinated the organization of the trials, while the ESSR KGB, Prosecutor’s Office, and court institutions fulfilled the political task assigned to them. Witness testimony and the materials of the Extraordinary State Commission that operated in the Soviet Union in 1944–45 played a major role as evidential material during the investigations and trials. Information on actual crimes was often presented, but the details, their context, and the extent (number of victims) were distorted and have not been confirmed by subsequent research. There is practically no documentary evidence. Testimony provided by the accused themselves, the objectivity of which can be questioned, served as the primary evidence in proving the personal guilt of individuals. The testimony of codefendants played a major role in verdicts handed down in absentia. Legal norms and proceedings concerning crimes that internationally had no statute of limitations were used to serve the political aims of the Soviet regime. In domestic politics, they helped create the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the formation of a new policy on nationalities (as a result, the image of fascist peoples along the Soviet Union’s western border took root among the Russian-speaking population). In terms of foreign policy, the conviction in absentia of Estonian expatriates and those from other occupied western regions made it possible to discredit expatriate communities and the Western countries that supported them. Changes that took place at the same time on an international scale (the Eichmann trial and the conviction of Nazi criminals in Western Europe) supported the steps taken by the Soviet Union and made it possible for them to accuse the West of shielding and cooperating with war criminals. It was not the objective to ascertain which crimes were committed and who the culprits were. This meant that what took place in the courts turned into a farce. There are grounds for considering the announced court verdicts as quasi-verdicts behind which stood not the decision of a judge based on the facts, but rather an administrative order motivated by politics and propaganda. Therefore, the convictions of potential perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which undoubtedly had taken place, have to be considered null and void according to international legal standards. The number of people accused in the show trials discussed here was not large.195 The ESSR’s Supreme Court passed sentence on a total of 14 people. Five of these

195 Considerably more people were put on trial with analogous accusations and convicted in the 1960s and 1970s, but since these trials lacked the conspicuous attributes of show trials, they have not been covered in this article.

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accused persons lived outside of the Soviet Union and were sentenced to death in absentia; eight of these persons were arrested in Estonia and sentenced to death, and the sentences were carried out; one person was sent to psychiatric coercive treatment. The principle is far more important than the number of convicted persons. Given what has been described above, these verdicts cannot be accepted at face value. But how can they be critically assessed? If the case of a person who has been rehabilitated but was connected to crimes against humanity or war crimes, were to be challenged now in the Estonian Supreme Court, it would be practically impossible to come to a decision that would meet present-day legal standards. While most suspects or accused were associated with the crimes they were tried for, the unreliability of the evidence prevents a determination of their guilt or innocence.

Karin Veski and Anu Raudsepp

Images of the Enemy and the Hero in Stalinist Estonian-Language Textbooks Abstract: The article examines images used in Stalinist propaganda —that of the enemy and the hero —in postwar original Estonian-language textbooks in the late-Stalinist Estonian SSR. The authors argue that these images evolved into obligatory elements in textbooks.

Introduction It is said that education is the best remedy against propaganda. Although this viewpoint is generally accepted nowadays, it can be inverted by the claim that education is the prerequisite of propaganda, or more precisely, that “every politically oriented education that creates ‘specific values’ is propaganda.”1 Since the state is by its nature a political phenomenon,2 it might be claimed that education is always more or less politicized. The 20th century provides numerous examples of this, and not only in totalitarian systems. We can find sufficient past examples of strong ideological bias and propaganda language in history textbooks in democratic countries as well—for instance, in the United States in the 1950s.3 Another example, studied by Christina Koulouri, involves the defensive and aggressive nationalism revived in Greek school textbooks starting in the 1990s, reflected even in the terminology of geography textbooks.4 The boundary between propaganda and imparting knowledge can be rather nebulous at times. For this reason, we must differentiate between the actual objectives of propaganda and education. In 1 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York, 1973), p. 137. 2 Naturally, different aspects might be highlighted here. For instance, the historian Eero Medijainen presents geographic and social dimensions of the concept of the state, in addition to its political dimension, in his book Ajaloo ja poliitika piiridel: Mõisteid ja mõtisklusi (At the Boundaries of History and Politics: Concepts and Reflections) (Tallinn, 2008), p. 53. 3 See also Frances Fitzgerald, ‘Changing the Paradigm: Perceptions of American History after World War II’, Volker R. Berghahn and Hanna Schissler (eds.), Perceptions of History: International Textbook Research on Britain, Germany and the United States (Oxford-New York-Hamburg, 1987), pp. 17–25. 4 Christina Koulouri, ‘National Identity, Balkan Identity, European Identity: The Dilemmas of Teaching History in Greece’, Symposium “Facing Misuses of History” (Strasbourg, 16 June 1999), pp. 2–7.

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the words of the propaganda researcher Philip Taylor, “propaganda tells people what to think whereas education teaches people how to think.”5 The objective of this paper is to examine the occurrence of images of the enemy and the hero used in Stalinist propaganda in postwar original textbooks in Estonian in 1947–53. This article analyzes, among other things, the historical reasons for the construction and transformation of these images. This study does not deal with issues related to reception, since it is very difficult to measure objectively the effectiveness of propaganda. Jacques Ellul, for instance, has examined how problematic the existing research methodology is by focusing his attention on several potential hindrances: the determination of the relative proportion of people in society influenced by propaganda; the definition of the previous convictions and worldview of the persons under consideration, or finding the so-called zero point of the study; and the absence of reliable research results from a totalitarian regime’s rule.6 At this point, a certain elaboration on the terminology used in this article (image, stereotype, and myth) is in order. “Image” (imago in Latin) denotes a picture, vision, or idea (often illusory) that emerges after observing something or someone. This has a central role in the thinking process.7 The picture that emerges carries information in it on the world around us. At the same time, the message conveyed does not necessarily coincide with reality. An image is considered primarily as a mental construct in this study. Both the transmitter and the recipient of the picture play their part in developing it. This can cause a distorted representation, since in most cases the message passes through several social filters, ultimately creating a pseudo-reality.8 The premise of this article is that social contexts, including fundamental texts that circulate in society (such as textbooks), are created in institutions, and reality is continually constructed by different interest groups. In this study, “stereotype”9 means a fixed, preconceived generalization that can be either negative or positive and is based on simplification

5 Philip Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (Manchester-New York, 1995), p. 14. 6 Ellul, Propaganda, pp. 260–77. 7 See Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor, 1956). 8 Reality is a quality with the inherent phenomenon that it exists independently of our will. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1991), p. 13. 9 This concept made its way into social sciences via the American journalist Walter Lippmann, who first used the term “stereotype” in his popular book Public Opinion (New York, 1922). Lippmann says that stereotypes are “pictures in our heads”; in other

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and the denial of individuality. The aim of myth as a way of seeing the world is to explain the natural laws according to which the world functions. Hence, in this article, “myth” is understood as a rationally unsubstantiated delusive imagination aimed to creating and defending a “new reality.” Myth can, if necessary, be a means of political manipulation that evolves according to the relevant historical era and a specific environment.10 Thus images, stereotypes, and myths can be described as mental constructs that exist as a complex of generalized ideas that by their nature are simplified and distorted. Their purpose is to construct our identity through defining otherness, which unfortunately can be associated with the deformation of our knowledge of reality. In this article, stereotypes and myths are components of an image and its more radical and enduring elements. Even though school textbooks can be considered an important form of propaganda due to the systematic nature of education,11 not enough attention has been paid to this aspect of textbooks. For instance, the Russian historian A.V. Fateev, who deals with issues surrounding the image of the enemy, focuses more on means of propaganda such as newspapers, periodicals, literature, radio, and films.12 The ideological bias of Russian school textbooks has nevertheless been studied—including the occurrence of ethnic hierarchies in geography textbooks in the Russian Empire13 as well as the propagandistic use of language in Soviet history textbooks.14 The works of the historian David Brandenberger, which consider the intertwining of Soviet and Russocentric identities, are among the studies

10 11 12 13 14

words, we define first and only then do we see. His basic assertion is that people react not to objective reality but rather to ideas that they have created in their minds. See also Karin Hiiemaa, Aafrika retseptsioon eestikeelses trükisõnas (kuni 1917) (The Reception of Africa in Estonian-Language Print Media [until 1917]) (Tartu, 2006), pp. 26–7. Compared to operational means of propaganda in the mass media, textbooks have a slower impact, but it is that much more sustained. See Andrei Fateev, Obraz vraga v sovetskoi propagande. 1945–1954 gg (Moscow, 1999); idem, Stalinizm i detskaia literatura v politike nomenklatury SSSR (1930-e – 1950-e gg) (Moscow, 2007). Veronika Sušová, ‘Images of Domination: Representations of Ethnic Hierarchies in Russian Geography Textbooks in 1875–1918’, Imagology and Cross-Cultural Encounters in History (Rovaniemi, 2008). Vladimir Bukharaev, ‘Chto takoe nash uchebnik istorii: Ideologiia i nazidanie v iazyke i obraze uchebnykh tekstov’, Karl Aimermakher and Gennadii Bordiugov (eds.), Istoriki chitaiut uchebniki istorii: Traditsionnye i novye kontseptsii uchebnoi literatury (Moscow, 2002), pp. 13–45.

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that deal with the ideologization of Soviet society and education.15 Even though the figure of the enemy in Soviet propaganda has attracted more serious interest from Estonian researchers as well in recent years,16 Estonian school textbooks as historical sources from that period have thus far not been thoroughly examined. In Estonian research, the historian Teele Tulviste17 and the authors of this article have studied the propaganda aims of Estonian-language educational literature from the Soviet period. This paper is a kind of continuation of an article on the image of the enemy in Estonian-language textbooks in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s that appeared in the historical quarterly Tuna (Past) in 2013.18 Thorough changes took place in Estonia’s educational system after World War II, because education was reformed with each new system of government, including the “rewriting” of school textbooks. Education played an important role in the process of Sovietizing Estonia.19 Schoolchildren were indoctrinated in the interest of achieving communism and creating homo sovieticus. The contribution 15 See David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA-London, 2002); idem, ‘“...It Is Imperative to Advance Russian Nationalism as the First Priority”: Debates within the Stalinist Ideological Establishment, 1941–1945’, Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001), pp. 275–99. 16 See, for instance, David Vseviov, Irina Belobrovtseva and Aleksander Danilevskij, Vaenlase kuju: Eesti kuvand nõukogude karikatuuris 1920.–1940. aastatel (Image of the Enemy: Image of Estonia in Soviet Caricatures in the 1920s–1940s) (Tallinn, 2013). 17 Teele Tulviste, ‘Ameerika Ühendriikide kuvand nõukogude perioodi eestikeelsetes ajalooõpikutes’ (The Image of the United States in Soviet-Era Estonian-Language History Textbooks) (MA-thesis, Tartu, 2011). 18 Anu Raudsepp and Karin Hiiemaa, ‘Vaenlase kuvandi loomine 1920.–1930. aastate NSV Liidu eestikeelses õppekirjanduses’ (Creation of the Image of the Enemy in the Soviet Union’s Estonian-Language Educational Literature of the 1920s and 1930s), Tuna 16 (2013), no. 2, pp. 84–95; Anu Raudsepp and Karin Hiiemaa, ‘The Image of the Other: The Example of the Russians and Germans on the Basis of an Analysis of Estonian History Textbooks’, Joanna Wojdon (ed.), Kulturelle und relgiöse Vielfalt und ihre Auswirkungen auf den Geschichtsunterricht (2013), pp. 45–55. 19 Concerning the concept of Sovietization, see Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘“Sovetiseerimise” mõistest’ (On the Concept of “Sovietization”), Tõnu Tannberg (ed.), Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953. Sovetiseerimise mehhanismid ja tagajärjed Nõukogude Liidu ja IdaEuroopa arengutee kontekstis (The Estonian SSR in 1940–1953: The Mechanisms and Consequences of Sovietization in the Context of the Path of Deveopment of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) (Tartu, 2007); idem, Everyday Life in Stalinist Estonia (Frankfurt, 2012), chapter 1, “What is Sovietization?”

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of Estonian pedagogues, especially Estonians from Russia who came or were sent to Estonia after the war, in rearing the “new person” still needs to be clarified. One such individual was Aleksander Pint (1910–84). He defended his candidate’s thesis on communist upbringing in 1935 at Moscow’s Institute of Psychology and Pedagogy and was appointed the head of the University of Tartu Chair of Pedagogy and Methodology in 1945.20 For the purposes of this article, his textbook on education is of particular interest. Its main message was the importance of rearing Soviet patriots “who bear burning fury within them against the enemy and are prepared to sacrifice their lives for their homeland.” According to the textbook, socialism would be achieved through struggle in which anger against the enemy increased the will to win. Heroism in work and struggle was closely connected to cultivating attributes like manliness, courage, and boldness.21 Estonian-language textbooks compiled in Estonia during the early years of the Cold War are analyzed methodologically in this article. Even though the number of original Estonian-language textbooks was continually reduced during the postwar years, a relatively large number of them remained in use in Estonian schools until the end of the Stalinist era. In the 1952/1953 school year, 45 of 115 textbooks (songbook, Estonian language and literature, chemistry, and others) were compiled in Estonia. The remaining 70 (including all history textbooks), however, were translations of Russian SFSR textbooks.22 The point of departure for the selection of textbooks was the reflection of the enemy-hero theme in the school curricula of 1948, at the beginning of the Cold War. The lesson plans for the subject of the constitutions of the Soviet Union and of the Estonian SSR stressed the requirements for dealing with this theme most directly. In connection with the defense of the homeland, the “heroic struggle of the heroic Soviet army and victory over the enemy in the Great Patriotic War” (the USSR’s war against Germany in World War II) had to be explained,23 but the text-

20 Eesti Ajalooarhiiv (Estonian Historical Archives, EAA), University of Tartu collection, 20/54. Aleksander Pint, personal file 1945–1952. 21 Aleksander Pint and Aleksander Elango, Kasvatusteaduse alged: Õpik keskkooli XI klassile (Basics of Education: Textbook for Secondary School Grade 11) (Tallinn, 1946), pp. 39–42. 22 Anu Raudsepp, Ajaloo õpetamise korraldus Eesti NSV eesti õppekeelega üldhariduskoolides 1944–1985 (The Organization of the Teaching of History in Estonian SSR General Education Schools where the Language of Instruction Was Estonian 1944– 1985) (Tartu, 2005), p. 21. 23 Alg- ja keskkooli programmid: NSV Liidu ja Eesti NSV konstitutsioon. 1948/49. õ.-a (Elementary and Secondary School Programs: Constitution of the Soviet Union and the Estonian SSR. 1948/49 School Year) (Tallinn, 1948).

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books for this subject were translated textbooks. The programmatic requirements of the theme examined in this article were most associated with the teaching of Estonian, where texts on the Great Patriotic War had to be used starting from the first grade.24 As can be expected, the image of the enemy and the hero also occurred the most in Estonian language and literature textbooks, and this is reflected in the following analysis. In choosing which of those textbooks to sample, it was taken into consideration that several editions of the textbooks were reprints and contained no noticeable changes. It was important that the selection of authors be as diverse as possible. This article refers to a total of 17 Estonian language and literature textbooks from the elementary grades to secondary school. The question of enemy and hero was not reflected in the lesson plans of other subjects (such as Estonian SSR geography and mathematics), for which there were original textbooks during the period studied here. The same tendency emerged in the textbooks for the corresponding subjects, and for this reason, only isolated examples can be referred to in this study. The history textbooks for the period studied here had been translated from Russian. Estonian history was taught until the 1948/1949 school year, but a new treatment of Estonian history was not published until 1952. Teachers had to rely on their own knowledge in teaching Estonian history. Today it is very difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain how Estonian history was actually taught in school at that time. It can be assumed that teachers’ presentation of history was shaped by the era in which they completed their education and/or teacher training, whether in the era of Estonian independence or the postwar years. At the same time, it must be taken into account that an extensive turnover took place among teachers in Estonia in the late 1940s. Essentially, just as many teachers left school in 1944–50 as had started teaching in 1944.25 Eesti NSV ajalugu (History of the Estonian SSR), edited by Gustav Naan (1919–94),26 an Estonian from Russia with an education in physics who served as director of the Institute of History of the Estonian SSR Academy of Sciences, was not actually a textbook. It was, however, recommended for use as a teaching aid in secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Even though it was not used in school during the relevant period because Estonian history was not taught again until the mid-1950s, this book needs to be analyzed to comprehend developments in the image of the enemy and the hero. 24 Alg- ja keskkooli programmid: eesti keel (Elementary and Secondary School Programs: Estonian Language) (Tallinn, 1948). 25 Raudsepp, Ajaloo õpetamise korraldus, pp. 22–5, 63–5. 26 Gustav Naan, ed., Eesti NSV ajalugu: Kõige vanemast ajast tänapäevani (History of the Estonian SSR: From Earliest Times to the Present) (Tallinn, 1952).

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The Enemy Thanks to the Soviet government’s ideological propaganda, all spheres of life were intertwined with myths. Alongside the myths of a bright future and work for reorganizing life, the myth of the enemies of the Soviet state played an equally significant role.27 The enemy could be hidden anywhere—they could be foreign enemies (for instance, countries that wanted to attack the Soviet Union) as well as internal enemies (kulaks, spies, etc.). Fateev has referred to the image of the enemy as the antithesis of “Soviet patriotism.” He defines this as an ideological symbol with the following politicized messages at different stages of the state’s development: loyalty to Soviet power; pride in the achievements of one’s country; shock work under the conditions of an equalizing society. Its objective was the creation of a feeling of ideological unity in the citizens of the state and the preservation of the Soviet Union’s administrative command system.28 The images of domestic and foreign enemies found in Estonian textbooks are examined as follows. Reflecting the requirements of the educational program, fascism, associated mostly with World War II, appeared in school textbooks during the first postwar years as the primary foreign enemy. The Great Patriotic War was deified in the atheist Soviet society. This was not merely a war but rather an important thematic principle in mobilizing Soviet society (the themes of revolution and the civil war had previously borne this function) and a central symbol of Russian culture in the latter half of the 20th century.29 The war made it possible to create the missing point of contact between the people and their rulers—nothing could have accomplished this better than a common enemy could. Fascism as an enemy first appeared in Estonian-language textbooks published in the Soviet Union30 in the 1930s in connection with so-called “Estonian fascists.” 27 Svetlana Tulaeva, ‘“Zabota o geroiakh lesnogo fronta”: trud i sotsial’naia politika lesopromyshlennykh predpriiatii Komi ASSR v 1930-e gody’, Pavel V. Romanov and Elena R. Iarskoi-Smirnova (eds.), Sovetskaia sotsial’naia politika 1920–1930-kh godov: ideologiia i povsednevnost’ (Moscow, 2007), pp. 190–2. 28 Fateev, Obraz vraga, pp. 5, 6. 29 Lev Gudkov, ‘Ideologema “vraga”: “Vragi” kak massovyi sindrom i mekhanizm sotsiokul’turnoi integratsii’, idem (ed.), Obraz vraga (Moscow, 2005), p. 72. 30 Concerning the size of the Estonian community in the Sovet Union during the interwar period: Minorities in Soviet Russia were allowed elementary education in their mother tongue for the first four grades in the 1920s and 1930s. Consequently, 169 Estonian schools are known to have operated there in 1924. The Estonian population in Russia proper peaked at the time of the collapse of the tsarist state, at about 200,000, or nearly 18 percent of all Estonians, and declined to a still-sizable 154,666 by 1926. The number

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Estonians who fought against Russia to defend Estonia’s statehood in the Estonian War of Independence (1918–20) were called fascists in the Soviet Union as early as 1922.31 Fascist enemies remained a running theme in school literature published in postwar Estonia as well, associated overwhelmingly with textbooks for teaching the Estonian language. The concept of the fascist was arguably a synonym for the greatest danger in the late 1940s and early 1950s—fascists were the “most hideous enemies and the perpetual mortal enemies of Estonians” and were described as cowardly, brutal, arrogant, vicious, cunning, and overbearing.32 School textbooks exhorted pupils to fight enemies with “anger and the thirst for revenge,” for instance, quoting the words of the writer Eduard Männik: “May every bullet that hits the enemy, every killed German, be payback for injustice.”33 The killing of Germans was justified even in the elementary-school Estonian reader in the words of a 14-year-old polgupoeg (youngster accompanying a regiment): “What fun! We killed over 50 of them there. We mowed them down like cabbages.”34

of Estonians further declined later due to collectivization and the repressions that accompanied it, as well as the targeting of Estonians during the Great Terror. It also declined due to the closing of schools where Estonian was the language of instruction. By 1939 the number was about 140,000. See Raudsepp, Hiiemaa, ‘Vaenlase kuvandi loomine’, pp. 85–6, 91–2. 31 Ibid., pp. 91–2. 32 Kristjan Kure, Eesti keele grammatika süntaksi II osa ja semasioloogia keskkooli X klassile, õpetajate seminaridele ja õpetajate instituutidele (Syntax of Estonian Grammar Part II and Semasiology for Secondary School Grade 10, for Teachers’ Seminars and Teachers’ Institutes) (Tallinn, 1948), p. 66; idem, Eesti keele grammatika süntaksi II osa ja semasioloogia keskkooli X klassile, õpetajate seminaridele ja õpetajate instituutidele. III vihik (Workbook III) (Tallinn, 1948), p. 145; Karl Taev, Kirjanduslooline lugemik VII klassile (History of Literature Reader for Grade 7) (Tallinn, 1948), pp. 300, 342; Linda Vihalem, l. Eesti kirjandusloo lugemik: Keskkooli XI klassile. I osa (First History of Estonian Literature Reader for Secondary School Grade 11, Part 1) (Tallinn, 1948), p. 85; Edgar Arro, Harri Kõrvits and Aado Velmet, Laulik I (Songbook I) (Tallinn, 1953), p. 31; Ants Selmet, Kirjanduse õpik-lugemik V klassile (Literature TextbookReader for Grade 5) (Tallinn, 1950), p. 446. 33 Taev, Kirjanduslooline lugemik VII klassile, p.  305; Johannes Seilenthal, Emakeele lugemik algkooli II klassile (Mother Tongue Reader for Elementary School Grade 2) (Tallinn, 1948), p. 108. 34 Johannes Seilenthal, Eesti keele lugemik IV klassile (Estonian Reader for Grade 4) (Tallinn, 1951), p. 80. Ibid., pp. 80–1.

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The “mighty Red Army, the great army of heroes” that had fought the enemy emerged in the text as an antipode.35 The warriors of the Red Army were glorified and characterized as “brave,”36 “having a high political and moral character,” “undaunted by death,” and so on.37 This sort of rhetoric fit in perfectly with wartime Soviet propaganda texts.38 The aforementioned History of the Estonian SSR, however, was the first publication in Estonian that repeated the theme of fascism throughout the book. The first such reference is in connection with the so-called “Lithuanian fascist coup” of 1926. “Estonian fascists” are mentioned from the end of the 1920s onward.39 In the roughly 20 pages of coverage of the history of the Republic of Estonia in 1929–39, for instance, the word “fascist” is used over 50 times. In that text the expressions “Estonia’s fascist government” and “fascist dictatorship” were repeated constantly, even more than the phrase “fascist Germany” was used in the treatment of the Great Patriotic War. The postwar treatment of the theme of fascism preserved a sense of danger in society, thereby allowing the emergence of new foreign enemies in the next few years. The issues dividing the Soviet Union and the United States receded into the background during the war, due to the problem of fascism.40 These formal allies, however, became implacable enemies in 1947 due to mounting international tensions (the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the questions of Czechoslovakia and Poland). The new foreign enemy took shape in the consciousness of Soviet society in 1947–49 and continued almost unchanged until the mid-1980s.41

35 Kristjan Kure and Bernhard Sööt, Eesti keele grammatika keskkooli IX klassile. II jagu (Estonian Grammar for Secondary School Grade 9. Part II) (Tallinn, 1946), p. 11; Kristjan Kure, Eesti keele grammatika süntaksi II osa ja semasioloogia keskkooli X klassile, õpetajate seminaridele ja õpetajate instituutidele. Vihik II (Workbook II), p. 124; Rudolf Reiman, complemented by Kristjan Kure, Eesti keele õpik VII klassile. III vihik (Estonian Textbook for Grade 7. Workbook III) (Tallinn, 1949), p. 38. 36 Kristjan Kure and Bernhard Sööt, Eesti keele grammatika keskkooli IX klassile. I jagu (Part I) (Tallinn, 1946), p. 3; Kure, Eesti keele grammatika süntaksi II osa… Vihik III, p. 206. 37 Ibid. 38 See also Fateev, Obraz vraga, pp. 16–8. 39 Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, pp. 353–5. 40 Fateev, Stalinizm i detskaia literature, pp. 31, 269. 41 Fateev, Obraz vraga, p. 236.

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There is a long history of attempts to control society by warning of an external danger.42 The first ideological campaign in the Soviet Union that depicted the United States as an enemy began in June 1947, immediately after the announcement of the Marshall Plan.43 Relations between the two superpowers grew more tense as a result of atomic rivalry, and the stage was set for the Cold War. The Soviet Union responded to the aggression originating from the United States with provocative tactics from mid-1947 onward. Whether Soviet leaders could not or did not want to use diplomacy that would rule out confrontation remains a question.44 The Soviets initially attempted to alleviate tensions in the late 1940s and early 1950s through statements in the press by military specialists maintaining that war could not be won by the atom bomb alone.45 Alongside combat weapons, the Soviet secret weapon known from World War II rose again to the agenda in state rhetoric—“Soviet patriotism.” The deological shift regarding the image of the United States was reflected directly in the history programs of 1948 and, starting in 1950, in the Soviet history textbooks that were translated into Estonian as well.46 The Estonian textbooks published in 1948 initially still referred in general terms to the “enemies of socialism,” who sought to incite a new war against the Soviet Union and who were “finance capitalists” and “politicians of monopoly capital.”47 Yet this nebulous enemy had already taken concrete shape in the first Marxist treatment of Estonian history, published in 1952: “American imperialism.” This book discussed the danger posed by American and British imperialists, starting with the Russian Civil War and the Estonian War of Independence. Claims were couched in such language as this: “the imperialist camp led by the United States, which has become the world’s center of reaction and aggression, is making feverish preparations for a new world war.”48

42 Peter Englund, Mineviku maastikud: Ajaloolised esseed (Landscapes of the Past: Historical Essays) (Tallinn, 2005), p. 196. 43 Fateev, Stalinizm i detskaia literature, p. 133. 44 See also A.M. Filitov, ‘Kak nachinalas’ “kholodnaia voina”’, L.N. Nezhinskii (ed.), Sovetskaia vneshnaia politika v gody “kholodnoi voiny” (1945– 1985): Novoe prochtenie (Moscow, 1995), p. 65. 45 L.N. Nezhinskii and I.A. Chelyshev, ‘O doktrinal’nykh osnovakh sovetskoi vneshnei politiki v gody “kholodnoi voiny”’, Nezhinskii (ed.), Sovetskaia vneshnaia politika, p. 22. 46 Tulviste, Ameerika Ühendriikide kuvand, pp. 31–5. 47 Kure, Eesti keele grammatika süntaksi II osa… Vihik II, pp. 66, 113. 48 Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, p. 441.

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The semiotician Mikhail Lotman has pointed out that in the context of fears associated with identity (“one’s own kind vs. strangers”), it is not the visible enemies but the invisible ones that are actually more frightening—“someone from among us.” Moreover, even though spy mania is not at all unique to the Soviet Union, the concept of the “internal enemy” was put to use in the Soviet Union precisely during Stalin’s rule.49 Namely, the struggle in the Party against the internal opposition intensified after Lenin’s death,50 and “counterrevolutionary conspiracies” were more frequently announced in the late 1920s, such as the 1928 case of the Donets Basin coal mining experts.51 Unlike the Estonian-language textbooks published in the interwar Soviet Union, Estonian textbooks from the period studied here did not mention the internal enemy frequently.52 The kulak was, so to speak, the compulsory and most-discussed class enemy of Soviet artificial mythology in textbooks. The evolution of the image of the kulak as an internal enemy was connected to the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union. The negative image created in the 1920s was intended to justify forced collectivization and to support “the liquidation of kulaks as a class.” In postwar Estonia, Moscow started turning increasing attention to Sovietization, in part to establish the kolkhoz system. The Estonian SSR Council of Ministers issued a decree in 1947 on the taxation of farm holdings that prescribed higher tax rates for kulak farms, yet collectivization in Estonia was not achieved until after the mass deportation of March 1949.53 Propaganda necessary for the Soviet regime also extended to school textbooks. For instance, a 1950 literature textbook by Ants Selmet stresses the kulak in particular as the enemy of the people “who wants to obstruct kolkhoz affairs, is skilled and cunning, an active enemy of the Soviet state, because he sabotages the gathering of grain by the state, etc.”54 The Estonian bourgeoisie (“exploiter”)55 and bourgeois nationalists (“the greatest

49 Mihhail Lotman, ‘Hirmusemiootika ja vene kultuuri tüpoloogia. V. Kokkuvõtte asemel’ (Semiotics of Fear and Typology of Russian Culture. V. In Place of a Summary), Akadeemia 21 (2009), no. 6, pp. 1227–8. 50 This entailed, among other things, the expulsion of L.D. Trotsky from the CPSU Central Committee in 1927. 51 See Gudkov, ‘Ideologema “vraga”’, pp. 50–1. 52 Cf. Raudsepp and Hiiemaa, ‘Vaenlase kuvandi loomine’, pp. 90–1. 53 Aigi Rahi-Tamm, Teise maailmasõja järgsed massirepressioonid Eestis: allikad ja uurimisseis (Post-World War II Mass Repressions in Estonia: Sources and State of Research) (Tartu, 2004), p. 45. 54 Selmet, Kirjanduse õpik-lugemik V klassile, pp. 620–1. 55 Kure, Eesti keele grammatika… II vihik, p. 127.

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enemies of the Estonian people”) are also depicted as internal enemies.56 In some cases in relation to the internal enemy, “betrayal of the fatherland” was spoken of as “being useful to the enemy.”57 Apparently prompted by then-recent events in Estonia (such as the deportation of March 1949), Gustav Naan’s 1952 textbook gives more attention to internal enemies than do earlier textbooks. It asserted, for instance, that kulaks, bourgeois nationalists, and the henchmen of the fascists tried to obstruct the socialist reorganization of the agriculture of the Estonian SSR and that class enemies agitated among independent peasants to convince them to sell their animals and slaughter them. The textbook stressed that “bourgeois nationalists, as the most vicious enemies of the Estonian people, have tried to damage our culture and national economy in every way possible.”58 The term “cosmopolitan” referring to the internal enemy, which, according to Russian researcher A.V. Fateev, was brought into use by Soviet propagandists during the 1949 anti-cosmopolitanism campaign,59 nevertheless did not yet find its way into the Estonian textbooks of the period studied here. By the mid-1950s, the extreme forms of the image of the internal enemy started receding from Soviet propaganda.60 At the same time, it must be borne in mind that negative political images, stereotypes, and myths form a kind of barometer that can be used to measure changes of society. They do not disappear; instead, they recede and wait for their next opportunity to emerge. For instance, the stereotype of Estonians as fascists stubbornly persisted in social consciousness during the Soviet period and unfortunately has resurfaced in the political rhetoric of the 21st century.

The Hero The need for heroes who unite the people to either establish or preserve statehood was to be expected in the 20th century. Secularized forms of heroism can be found in recent history, and not only in totalitarian countries. Rhetoric on the theme of heroes is also found in Estonian pedagogy in the 1930s, which stressed the need for schools to cultivate young people’s national character (with love of the

56 Kure, Eesti keele grammatika, p. 42. 57 Kure and Sööt, Eesti keele grammatika, p. 11. 58 Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, pp. 431–43. 59 Fateev, Obraz vraga, pp. 21, 29, 95–122, and elsewhere. 60 Only one subclassification of internal enemy ultimately remained: the unenlightened Soviet citizen whose consciousness preserved the remnants of capitalism. This kind of ideologized image of the enemy was used to apply pressure to those citizens who expressed social discontent. Fateev, Obraz vraga, pp. 223, 226, 236.

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fatherland as the primary attribute). To this end, it was recommended to create a school anthology of role-model heroes altogether.61 The primary task of postwar Soviet propaganda was to create immortal “ideological fetishes” in the form of heroes,62 yet all too often, they lost their connection to reality in the process. This happened, for instance, with Pavlik Morozov.63 According to methodological instructions, teachers were supposed to inculcate love for the Soviet homeland, primarily by way of the “heroic Soviet past,” using the struggle of “heroes,” including especially “young heroes,” for their homeland in the Great Patriotic War as an example of “heroic courage.”64 The image of the hero was associated in school with the formation of “free, aware people who are developed in every respect, Soviet patriot-heroes.”65 These instructions noted that children already celebrated the fighter pilot, the tankman, the artilleryman, and the sailor as heroes. But the instructions recommended arousing interest in other occupations as well, so that young people “would be riveted by the pathos of building communism” and its “exceptional romance and heroism.” Texts dealing with the theme of heroism often employed war metaphors—combat and battle for a new, better life resembled the battles won in World War II. It was said that building up this new life required great heroism, that there were “heroic deeds in battle, but sometimes life as a whole is a heroic exploit.”66 War developed into a leitmotif in Soviet texts. At times, the manufacturing process also turned into a battleground, and Party leaders described it using war metaphors, such as “heroes of the forest front” or “heroic examples in the struggle for the forest.”67 61 Aleksander Vaigla, ‘Jooni karakteri kasvatamisest koolis’ (Outlines for Building Character in Schools), Eesti Kool (Estonian School) 4 (1938), no. 3, pp. 157–64. 62 Iurii Druzhnikov, Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova (London, 1988), pp. 251, 259. 63 Pavlik Morozov (1918–1932) was a Russian schoolboy who became a hero in Soviet mythology. He died under unclear circumstances. Soviet propaganda claimed that he was murdered by local kulaks and “enemies of the people.” Pavlik Morozov was later depicted as someone who exposed the enemies of Soviet rule. He is said to have denounced and turned in even his own father. Pavlik was turned into a heroic Pioneer of the Soviet Union shortly after his death. Numerous monuments were erected in his memory throughout Russia, works of fiction were written about him, and many institutions and organizations were named after him. 64 August Pint, Õpetaja autoriteet (The Authority of the Teacher) (Tallinn, 1948), pp. 10, 50, 53–5. 65 Ibid., pp. 10, 50. 66 Feodor Kretov, Uue inimese kasvatamisest (On Bringing up a New Person) (Tallinn, 1948), pp. 69–70. 67 Tulaeva, ‘Zabota o geroiakh lesnogo fronta’, p. 192.

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Heroes were discussed a great deal in literature textbooks and less frequently in textbooks for teaching Estonian. The most important hero of that period in those textbooks was unquestionably Stalin. Stalin’s personality cult grew to immense proportions after World War II. His retouched pictures could be seen everywhere. He was glorified in songs. His name could be found in practically every book, including cookbooks.68 Soviet propaganda created a paternalistic image of Stalin as the great leader to whom the people were indebted for all achievements.69 Yet a mythological society did indeed require a mythical leader—the idealized image created of him (including his physical appearance) was so different from his actual person that people who actually met the great leader had difficulty recognizing him.70 Stalin emerged as a hero in the context of World War II: “the leader of the Great Patriotic War,”71 “fearless, a powerful and smart giant who fought night and day for victory and inspired people to achieve heroic exploits.”72 Among the war heroes named were the propaganda war correspondent Iliia Ehrenburg, who was the “inciter of innumerable divisions and showed the enemy in all his brutalized barbarity and harmfulness”;73 Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia,74 “who died proudly with her head held high”; Aleksandr Matrossov,75 who “covered death with his chest,” and others.76 World War II heroes connected to Estonia were mentioned often in Naan’s history textbook: there was the “self-sacrificing

68 Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End (Cambridge, 1999), p. 172. 69 Fateev, Obraz vraga, p. 73. 70 Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union, p. 172; Fateev, Obraz vraga, p. 73. 71 Kure, Eesti keele grammatika, p. 35. 72 Seilenthal, Eesti keele lugemik IV klassile, pp. 3, 114. 73 Kure, Eesti keele grammatika… Vihik II, p. 102. 74 Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia (1923–41) – communist youth, hero of the Soviet Union. She joined a destruction battalion as a pupil in her last year of secondary school. She was sent to conduct reconnaissance in a settlement in the enemy’s rear area, where she set fire to a dwelling housing German soldiers. According to the Soviets, the Germans caught Kosmodem’ianskaia, tortured her, and finally executed her. See Reiman, supp. by Kure, Eesti keele õpik VII klassile. III vihik, pp. 14–18; Kure, Eesti keele grammatika, p. 66; Selmet, Kirjanduse õpik-lugemik, p. 520; Rudolf Reiman, Eesti keele õpik VII klassile (Tallinn, 1949), p. 75. 75 Aleksandr Matrossov (1924–43) – Soviet soldier, hero of the Soviet Union. According to the Soviets, Matrossov blocked with his own body the embrasure of a German machine gun bunker firing on Soviet forces during the Red Army offensive in Pskov oblast. 76 Selmet, Kirjanduse õpik-lugemik, p. 520.

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struggle” of the fighters of the destruction battalions (Karl Kangur, Nikolai Kolomiets, and others) and “their skill in striking at the enemy”; the “unforgettable heroic deed” of Evgenii Nikonov;77 and Jakob Kunder’s78 “immortal heroic deed.”79 Estonian heroes such as Comrade Laar,80 who threw himself in front of an enemy machine gun bunker, were mentioned even in textbooks on other subjects. Increasing Russocentrism emerged in the creation of Soviet heroes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, manifested in the mythologization of Russian history and in the overlapping meaning attached to the concepts “Russian” and “Soviet.”81 Although Soviet politicians quite frequently used examples from Russia’s heroic past in the 1920s and early 1930s, that heroic past initially attracted less attention in society. The fact that history was not a separate subject in school curricula until the early 1930s contributed to this. It was only later that the “new treatment of history” raised Russian history to a central position.82 Along with the restoration of the historical borders of the Russian Empire, the end of World War II also brought the Soviet Union an escalation in Russocentrist rhetoric. With this, Russia’s 19th-century ethnic hierarchy was reconstructed. At the same time, scholars have stressed that this strategy did not mean Russification.83 According to the historian Elena Zubkova, the period lasting until about mid-1947 was one of cautious Sovietization in the Baltic republics, meaning that the idea of a national path

77 Evgenii Nikonov (1920–41) – Soviet serviceman (sailor in the Red Flag Baltic Fleet), hero of the Soviet Union. According to the Soviets, Evgenii Nikonov was sent out on reconnaissance on 19 August 1941, near the town of Keila, where he was taken prisoner by the Germans, who burned him alive. Several Estonian schools and streets were posthumously named after Evgenii Nikonov. 78 Jakob Kunder (1921–45) – Estonian Soviet soldier, hero of the Soviet Union. Killed in battle; according to the Soviets, he covered the embrasure of an enemy blindage with his own body. 79 Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, pp. 405, 406, 420. 80 Joosep Laar (1905–43) – Estonian Soviet soldier, hero of the Soviet Union. According to the Soviets, Laar repeated Matrossov’s heroic deed by throwing himself in front of an enemy machine gun bunker in the Kuban near the village of Leninskoe. See Reiman, Eesti keele õpik VII klassile (1949), p. 55. 81 Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, p. 238. 82 David L. Brandenberger and Alexander M. Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931–1941’, Europe-AsiaStudies 50 (2007), no. 5, pp. 874, 880. 83 Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, ‘Introduction’, Suny, Martin (eds.), A State of Nations, p. 13.

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of development was supported; in other words, national themes were fostered.84 The analysis of Estonian SSR textbooks of the period 1947–53 also confirms this kind of approach—alongside the glorification of Russian heroes and history, the heroes of other peoples (including Estonians) were also highlighted. The intention was to support the multiethnic image of the Soviet Union, emphasizing friendship among peoples. Folklore rose to a noteworthy position in the creation of Soviet identity. The goal was to create a modern concept of us through the former identity; in other words, the old mythology spoke to the new. A great deal was said in Estonian literature textbooks about Russian and Estonian heroes created in folklore. The importance of folklore was stressed in helping to build up communism and educating the people in the spirit of communism, and in rousing workers to fight against domestic and foreign enemies.85 The Russian people with its heroic past was prioritized over other peoples on the basis of bylinas (Russian epic narrative poems).86 The best character traits of the Russian people (fervent love of their fatherland, complete devotion to serving the masses, love of work, resourcefulness, humaneness, selflessness, etc.) were manifested in the heroes of the bylinas. The heroes of the bylinas were glorified. Almost all of them accomplished great heroic deeds for the good of their people. Only Vassilii Buslaev, a true strongman, put his powers to use in a fistfight in Novgorod.87 The people are said to have reflected their ideas of heroism, valor, manliness, and daring in a typical way in the figure of the best-loved folk hero Ilia Muromets. Dobrynia Nikitich was literate; Mikula Selianinovich was handsome, industrious, and very good-natured. The heroes of the bylinas occupied such an important place in the creation of Soviet heroes that when the Russian poet and publicist Demian Bednyi’s satire of the legendary drunkenness of the bogatyrs was published in 1936, it cost him his career.88

84 Elena Zubkova, ‘Probleemne tsoon: Balti vabariikide sovetiseerimise iseärasused sõjajärgsel ajal 1944–1952’ (Problem Zone: The Distinct Characteristics of the Sovietization of the Baltic Republic during the Postwar Years 1944–1952), Tannberg (ed.), Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953, pp. 185–7. 85 Endel Sõgel (ed.), Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: Õpik keskkooli VIII klassile (History of Estonian Literature: Textbook for Secondary School Grade 8) (Tallinn, 1953), p. 5. 86 Viktor Ordlik, Linda Teder and Hella Jõerand, Eesti keele grammatika VI klassile (Estonian Grammar for Grade 6) (Tallinn, 1952), p. 126. 87 Bernhard Sööt and Juhan Väinaste, Kirjanduslooline lugemik VIII–IX klassile: Vene kirjandus (Reader for the History of Literature for Grades 8–9: Russian Literature) (Tallinn, 1948), pp. 3, 6. 88 Brandenberger, Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 878.

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The folklore of the Union republics was also emphasized alongside Russian folklore. The hero of the Estonian epic Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son)89 was found to share character traits with the heroes of the Russian bylinas,90 as well as of Estonian workers themselves: industriousness, courage, love of the fatherland, the struggle against nature, as well as against enslavers, and friendship with the great Russian people. Kalevipoeg as a “true folk hero”91 was “a righteous elder of the people, a brave warrior, a daring seafarer, and a simple workman.”92 Looking briefly at translated textbooks, for the sake of comparison, we find many texts about other mythological folk heroes from other peoples of the Soviet Union. The struggle for one’s homeland was emphasized in all of them. For instance, the epic Hero in a Tiger Skin told of the struggle of Georgian heroes against the Persians,93 and the epic David of Sassoun told of the exploits of Armenian heroes in their fight against the Arabs.94 The Estonian epic Kalevipoeg fit particularly well in this kind of scheme, because Kalevipoeg’s opponents were the “mortal enemies of the Estonian people, the German Teutonic knights.”95 The subject matter of Kalevipoeg arose in several other spheres in Estonian cultural life during the postwar years. For instance, motifs from the epic were used in competition entries for designing a monument commemorating victory in World War II.96 The restoration of the Estonia Theater, which had been destroyed in the war, was celebrated with the first act of the ballet Kalevipoeg, set to the music of Eugen Kapp on November 7, 1947. The entire ballet reached the stage in 1948.97 In terms of the creation of a nationalist identity for Estonians, Kalev’s 89 Kalevipoeg is an epic poem written by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald. The first version was published in a bilingual Estonian-German edition in several parts, starting in the mid-1850s. It turned into a national epic, like its model, the Finnish Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot. 90 Sõgel, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, p. 45. 91 Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, p. 211. 92 Endel Sõgel (ed.), Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: II. Õpik keskkooli IX klassile (History of Estonian Literature. II: Textbook for Secondary School Grade 9) (Tallinn, 1953), p. 46. 93 Anna Pankratova (ed.), NSVL ajalugu. I osa (History of the USSR. Part I) (Tallinn, 1945), p. 97. 94 Anna Pankratova (ed.), NSV Liidu ajalugu. I osa (History of the USSR. Part I) (Tallinn, 1946), pp. 35–6. 95 Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, p. 211. 96 Marie Alice L’Heureux, ‘Representing Ideology, Designing Memory’, Olaf Mertelsmann (ed.), The Sovietization of the Baltic States, 1940–1956 (Tartu, 2003), pp. 219–21. 97 Aime Leis and Ülle Ulla, Ballett sajandivanuses “Estonias” (Ballet in the Hundred-YearOld “Estonia”) (Tallinn, 2006), p. 13.

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Son symbolized the preservation of the Estonian spirit and hope for the future. The Soviet regime’s endorsement of the Estonian national epic and its use of Kalevipoeg in promoting patriotism was, according to researchers, highly unusual for a totalitarian regime.98 This action supports the argument that Russification was not the primary objective during the Stalinist era.99 The zealous use of folklore sometimes caused blunders—for instance, when a textbook author’s Russocentrism greatly exceeded his knowledge. Thus, using folk songs about the Crimean War as examples, textbooks told of the will of Estonians to destroy the enemy “in Russian style, meaning according to the example of the heroic struggle of the Russian people, taking revenge out on the enemy by building a Russian-style bed for them at the bottom of the sea.”100 Unfortunately, the author Endel Sõgel was not familiar with the term vene, which is the same as the Estonian word for “Russian” but which in this context means “boat.” Original Estonian textbooks also told of bylinas with Soviet subject matter “where the heroic figures of today’s Soviet life were recorded.” Folk singers are said to have created in them “folk tales of Lenin, Stalin, Chapaev, members of Papanin’s expedition to the North Pole, polar pilots, and other Soviet heroes.”101 The hero of labor was also harnessed to help haul the Stalinist ideology bandwagon. Figures in Russian education stressed the need to speak of heroes of labor alongside war heroes.102 According to the Russian researcher Lev Gudkov, it was not so much enemies that proved frightening in Soviet society. Rather, it was the danger of being left out of the enthusiastic collective game of building up a new society.103 The word “work” acquired a special meaning in that context. Work was sacred in the Soviet Union—even kindergarten children had to acquire the “natural habit of working” and experience the joy of collective work, for instance by being on “work duty” in the kindergarten cafeteria (setting the table, distributing bread, and so on).104

98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Walter C. Clemens, Jr., ‘Comparative Repression and Comparative Resistance: What Explains Survival?’, Mertelsmann (ed.), The Sovietization of the Baltic States, pp. 34–5. Suny and Martin, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. Sõgel (ed.), Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, p. 19. Sööt, Väinaste, Kirjanduslooline lugemik VIII–IX klassile, p. 7. Anastassia Adrianova, Kasvatustöö esimeses klassis (The Work of Upbringing in the First Grade) (Tallinn, 1949), p. 19; Kretov, Uue inimese kasvatamisest, pp. 67–73. Gudkov, ‘Ideologema “vraga”’, p. 68. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York-London, 2001), p. 73.

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Nevertheless, little was said about heroes of labor in Estonian textbooks from the period studied here. The few who were mentioned were, in most cases, women (milkmaids, tractor drivers, herdswomen, etc.), such as the heroes of socialist labor Hilda Kruusalu, Anni Mikomägi, Elmine Otsman, and Elise Blumenfeld.105 The emphasis on women in textbooks was part of the propaganda myth of emancipation and equality—the working woman is a member of society equal to men and participates in building up socialism—the objective of which was to put women to use in the workforce.106 The mythologization of work emerged on the agenda in textbooks from the spring of 1950 onward in particular. On this issue, numerous comments were made concerning textbooks that had already been published. For instance, it was said, M. Nurmik’s textbook paid little attention to the socialist economy,107 a shortcoming of K. Praakli’s Estonian language textbook108 was the absence of the concept of the Stakhanovite, and more “heroism of our time” was wanted from H. Maiste’s textbook. More examples on the subject of work were demanded even in the consideration of Kalevipoeg.109 Affective tonality, colorful language, and abundant metaphors, all intended to help create a heroic activist history, were inherent to Stalinist propaganda language.110 It can be said that the Soviet regime attempted to cover up its “ideological nakedness” with hero worship,111 thereby creating a new reality that did not have much in common with reality.

Summary For Estonia, the end of World War II meant the replacement of one totalitarian regime by another and the restoration of the devastated country in the spirit of Stalinist ideology. Education was one of the most effective means of Sovietization, due to its systematic nature. The images of the enemy and the hero became 105 Robert Rägastik, Eesti NSV geograafia IV klassile (Estonian SSR Geography for Grade 4) (Tallinn, 1953), pp. 89, 91; Naan (ed.), Eesti NSV ajalugu, p. 433. 106 Helena Pall, ‘Nõukogude naise kuvand ajakirjas “Nõukogude Naine” aastatel 1945– 1991’ (The Image of Soviet Women in the Periodical Nõukogude Naine [Soviet Woman] in 1945–1991) (MA thesis, Tartu, 2011), p. 48. 107 Criticism and reviews of the manuscripts of textbooks, 13 January – 14 December 1950, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. R-14, n. 4, s. 73, l. 5–6. 108 Karl Praakli, Eesti keele õpik V klassile (Estonian Language Textbook for Grade 5) (Tallinn, 1950), p. 16. 109 ERA f. R-14, n. 4, s. 73, l. 22, 33, 51. 110 Bukharaev, ‘Chto takoe nash uchebnik istorii’, p. 21. 111 Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union, p. 172.

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compulsory elements of textbooks. They were employed most often in Estonian language and literature textbooks, particularly those compiled by Kristjan Kure. Few of the nearly 20 authors of Estonian language and literature textbooks had previously written textbooks in the Republic of Estonia (as Johannes Käis and Rudolf Reiman did), in the Soviet Union (as Kristjan Kure did), or during the German occupation (as Bernhard Sööt did). Estonian language and literature textbooks had also been the most propagandistic of the textbooks in Estonian that had been previously published in the Soviet Union. It is probably not by chance that of the people who brought images of enemies into circulation and established those images, Kristjan Kure continued to compile textbooks in the Estonian SSR. The winners and losers of World War II had to find a new identity. The image of the enemy shaped a sufficient sense of danger that was necessary to mobilize Soviet society. Compared to the interwar period, emphasis shifted in the Soviet Union from the internal enemy to the foreign enemy, because a common enemy (fascism) united the regime and the people. Fascism persisted in original Estonian textbooks as the image of the greatest foreign threat until 1950. While the image of the enemy/fascist was ascribed to the Germans in translated textbooks, it was ascribed to both Estonians and Germans in Estonian textbooks. This image spread first in Estonian language and literature textbooks and thereafter in the 1952 Estonian history textbook. The trendsetters in this development were Estonians from Russia (Kristjan Kure and Gustav Naan). The foreign threat inevitably remained an important factor in the mechanism of social control during the Cold War, yet the image of the fascist as the enemy was now replaced with that of the United States. In the resulting, substantially more volatile international situation, attention was focused mainly on “American imperialism,” whose image remained essentially unchanged until the mid-1980s. Compared to the Soviet Union’s history textbooks on the front line of the ideological war, original Estonian textbooks lagged a couple of years behind. Gustav Naan’s 1952 treatment of history filled that gap. Internal enemies (kulaks, bourgeois nationalists, and henchmen of the fascists) were mentioned infrequently in Estonian SSR textbooks from the given period, unlike educational literature in Estonian published in the interwar Soviet Union. This theme was encountered most often in Naan’s book History of the Estonian SSR. The hero achieved equal importance with its antipode—the enemy—in postwar Stalinist-era textbooks. This can be explained by the Soviet state’s desire to recover from the economic hardship caused by the war while at the same time preserving the position of the ruling Party nomenklatura and the socialist system of government. The unified term created by propaganda for the necessary

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sentiment was Soviet patriotism. Mythological heroes fit into the abundant pantheon of Soviet heroes alongside heroes of labor and war heroes. Besides the latent Russocentrism manifested in the overlap of the concepts “Soviet” and “Russian,” increasing emphasis on nationalist subject matter can be traced in Estonian textbooks. The use of the Estonian epic Kalevipoeg to promote Soviet patriotism in the original Estonian textbooks of that period supports the positions of previous researchers who maintain that Russification was not Stalinism’s key objective. The images of the hero and the enemy had a very important role in Soviet ideological educational work. Nevertheless, ultimately Soviet ideology was a self-destructive system that “replaced rituals but was incapable of changing postulates.”112

112 Druzhnikov, Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova, p. 252.

Ivo Juurvee

KGB and Stasi Traces in Historiography: A Case Study of the Literature on the Estonian Prewar Military Intelligence Service1 Abstract: The paper demonstrates how the propaganda publications by the ESSR KGB operative Leonid Barkov were cited in the Soviet press in the 1960s to allege extremely close intelligence cooperation between Estonia and West Germany just before World War II and how this allegation was disseminated internationally with the assistance of Julius Mader, an operative of the GDR intelligence service.

It is likely that anyone interested in the subject of history has come across recurring claims in literature about some topic and found that the reference to the original source does not provide exact information, or worse, that there is no reference at all. Due to time constraints, lack of sufficient interest, or other reasons, it is not always possible to determine the original source, and frequently one can only take the claim for granted. If the same claim recurs in the works of established authors, it is only natural to believe it. This article focuses on the search for an original source that serves as the basis for two frequently recurring claims about interwar-era Estonian military intelligence. The article also examines more fundamental questions, emerging from the analysis of complex cross-references, that will hopefully be of interest even to people who are not interested in the history of Estonian military intelligence. Are the recurring claims credible? To what degree can the analysis of Estonian history be influenced by the “active measures” of the KGB discussed below? 1 This article is an abbreviated and revised version of a paper published in 2008 under the title ‘KGB, Stasi, and Estonian Intelligence History’ (‘KGB, Stasi ja Eesti luureajalugu’, Tuna 11 (2008), no. 2, pp. 32–53). It received an award for the best article of the year of the journal Tuna (Past) and was a major source of inspiration for the latest novel of well-known writer Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared (2012). The original version of the article appeared in a Finnish-language anthology (‘KGB, Stasi ja Viron tiedusteluhistoria’, Sofi Oksanen and Imbi Paju (eds.) Kaiken takana oli pelko: Kuinka Viro menetti historiansa ja miten se saadaan takaisin, eds. (Helsinki, 2009), pp. 131– 66) and was reprinted in the Estonian edition (‘KGB, Stasi ja Eesti luureajalugu’, Sofi Oksanen and Imbi Paju (eds.), Kõige taga oli hirm: Kuidas Eesti oma ajaloost ilma jäi (Tallinn, 2010), pp. 137–75).

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Monographs and articles published between 1966 and 2012 in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Russia, the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Canada, the German Democratic Republic, and Soviet Estonia have been researched and handled chronologically, starting with the newest and from there seeking references to earlier works. Finding biographical information on the authors and original sources required research in archival materials of the KGB of the Estonian SSR and the Communist Party held at the Estonian State Archives (Eesti Riigiarhiiv, ERA) in Tallinn and Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, Ministry for State Security, commonly known as Stasi) documents held at the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives (BstU) in Berlin. Two claims that are being followed from book to book concern the cooperation of Estonian and German military intelligence on the eve of World War II. These most frequently recurring claims about the history of Estonian intelligence are as follows: 1) Estonian military intelligence (the Second Department of Military Headquarters) and German military intelligence (the Abwehr) began to cooperate in 1935 or 1936 (dates cited by various authors differ) or concluded a joint operation agreement. 2) In cooperation with the Abwehr, photographic devices were installed in Estonian lighthouses to take photos of the vessels of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. The aim of the article is not to verify or refute the aforementioned claims. (For that, more thorough research is required. However, it is clear that in the 1930s, Germany, along with Finland and Great Britain, was among the closest cooperation partners of Estonian military intelligence). Instead, the aim is to observe which literature and sources have been used as references when such claims are made.

Historiography As the amount of source material proved to be greater than originally presumed, the initial plan to quote all of the authors was abandoned. The article would have been too long and repetitive, because the texts of various authors, when translated into the same language, are almost identical. Therefore, the bibliography is presented in a table, which also demonstrates which claims have been used in connection with specific analyses. If a given book cited in this article was published in several editions, then the first edition was used, when available. However, as the analysis demonstrated, until now these claims have not been updated with significant detailed information in newer editions. If the book has also been translated into Estonian, this is mentioned on a separate line. Trying to find all the books

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and articles that use the same claims going back to the same original sources would be a hopeless task, especially since the relevant literature is in numerous foreign languages. Coincidentally, during the writing of this article, a new book repeating the same claims was published, and other similar books may have been published in the meantime. The analyses have been organized based on the time of publication, starting from the most recent, since the research followed in the same direction (see table). Thus these claims have been repeated quite often and by various authors, many of whom are professionals and acknowledged historians. In books that do not provide a clear reference, a source in the given book’s bibliography has been taken as the possible origin of the claim, or the earlier writings of the same author were examined. When two dates are given, the first is the date of the Estonian version and the other of the original (see outline 1). The outline represents references only to earlier literature. Margus Ilmjärv is the only person to have referred to claims discussing archival sources, which are not presented in the outline, but will be discussed afterwards in more detail. Table 1.  The occurrence of claims presented in the beginning of the article in historiography. Author Oleg Cherenin Karl Heinz Gräfe Iuri Emel’anov Mikhail Krysin Richard Bassett Mikhail Kryssin Magnus Ilmjärv Magnus Ilmjärv Jari Leskinen Jari Leskinen Tiit Noormets A. Volkov, S. Slavin Jari Leskinen Magnus Ilmjärv Osmo Hyytiä (Author not indicated) Edgars Andersons Rein Kordes (alias Andrus Roolaht) August Ots

Year 2012 2010 2007 2007 2005 2004 2004 2004 2000 1999 1999 1998 1997 1993 1992 1986 1983

Place of publication Russia Germany Russia Russia Great Britain Russia Estonia (twice) Sweden Estonia Finland Estonia Russia Finland Estonia Finland Estonian SSR Canada

1981 1981

Estonian SSR Sweden

Claim 1 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

Claim 2 x

x x

x x x x

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Author Heino Arumäe Heinz Höhne

Year 1979 1976

Leonid Barkov Leonid Barkov Paul Vihalem L. Park (alias Leonid Barkov) Julius Mader Edgar Siegfried Meos Leonid Barkov

1974 1971 1971 1970

Place of publication Estonian SSR West Germany Estonian SSR (translation) Estonian SSR Estonian SSR Estonian SSR

1970 1969 1966

East Germany East Germany Estonian SSR

Claim 1 x x

Claim 2

x x x x

x x

x x x

x x x

x

The literature for the basis of this table.2

2 The literature starting from the most recent: 1. Oleg Cherenin, Shpionskii Kenigsberg: Operatsii spetssluzhb Germanii, Pol’shi i SSSR v Vostochnoi Prussii 1924–1942 (Moscow, 2012), p. 186. 2. Karl Heinz Gräfe, Vom Donnerkreuz zum Hakenkreuz: Die baltischen Staaten zwischen Diktatur und Okkupation (Berlin, 2010), pp. 67–8. 3. Iurii Emel’ianov, Pribaltika: Pochemu oni ne liubiat Bronzovogo soldata? (Moscow, 2007), p. 196. 4. Mikhail Krysin, Pribaltiiskii fashizm: Istoriia i sovremennost’ (Moscow, 2007), p. 47. 5. Richard Bassett, Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery (London, 2005), p. 159. 6. Mikhail Krysin, Pribaltika mezhdu Stalinym i Gitlerom (Moscow, 2004), p. 44. 7. Magnus Ilmjärv, Silent Submission: Formation of Foreign Policy of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; Period from Mid-1920s to Annexation in 1940 (Stockholm, 2004), p. 226. 8. Magnus Ilmjärv, Hääletu alistumine: Eesti, Läti ja Leedu välispoliitilise orientatsiooni kujunemine ja iseseisuse kaotus 1920. aastate keskpaigast anneksioonini (Silent Submission: Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian Foreign Policy Orientation and the Loss of Independence from the Mid-1920s until the Annexation) (Tallinn, 2004), p. 370. 9. Magnus Ilmjärv, ‘Eesti välispoliitika 1930. aastatel’ (Estonian Foreign Policy in the 1930s), Enn Tarvel and Tõnu Tannberg (eds.), Sõja ja rahu vahel. Eesti julgeolekupoliitika 1940. aastani, vol. 1 (Tallinn, 2004), pp. 70–71. 10. Jari Leskinen, Vendade riigisaladus: Soome ja Eesti salajane sõjaline koostöö Nõukogude Liidu võimaliku rünnaku vastu aastatel 1918–1940 (The State Secret of Brothers: Secret Military Cooperation between Finland and Estonia against a Potential Attack of the Soviet Union 1918–1940) (Tallinn, 2000), p. 49.

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11. Tiit Noormets, ‘Eesti sõjaväeluure tegevusest, meetoditest ja vahenditest aastail 1920–1940’ (On the Activities, the Methods, and the Means of Estonian Military Intelligence in 1920–1940), idem (ed.), Luuramisi: Salateenistuste tegevusest Eestis XX sajandil (Tallinn, 1999), pp. 58–9. 12. Jari Leskinen, Veljein Valtiosalaisuus: Suomen ja Viron salainen sotilaallinen yhteistyö Neuvostoliiton hyökkäyksen varalle vuosia 1918–1940 (Helsinki, 1999), pp. 53–4. 13. Aleksandr Volkov and Stanislav Slavin, Admiral Kanaris—“Zheleznyi” admiral (Moscow, 1998), p. 247. 14. Jari Leskinen, Vaiettu Suomen silta: Suomen ja Viron salainen sotilaallinen yhteistoiminta Neuvostoliiton varalta vuosina 1930–1939 (Helsinki, 1997), p. 169. 15. Magnus Ilmjärv, Nõukogude Liidu ja Saksamaa vahel: Balti riigid ja Soome 1934– 1940 (Between the Soviet Union and Germany: The Baltic States and Finland 1934–1940) (Tallinn, 1993), p. 30. 16. Osmo Hyytiä, Viron kohtalontie 1933...1939...1940 (Helsinki, 1992), p. 62. 17. Mineviku varjud (Shadows of the Past) (Tallinn, 1986), p. 43. This is a summary for Soviet readers of a compendium addressed to Estonians living abroad, published between 1964 and 1972 in Tallinn, titled Eesti riik ja rahvas Teises maailmasõjas ([vols. 11–15]. The name of the compiler is not included on the cover of the book, but it might be Andrus Roolaht.) 18. Edgars Andersons, Latvisjas bruņotie spēki un to priekšvēsture (Toronto, 1983), p. 708. 19. Rein Kordes, See, millest avalikult ei räägita: annotatsioon August Otsa uuele raamatule (That which Is Not Spoken about in Public: Annotation to the New Book by August Ots) (Tallinn, 1981), p. 8. 20. August Ots, Miks me kaotasime iseseisvuse: Eestluse probleeme eksiilis (Why We Lost Independence: Problems of Estonianness in Exile) (Stockholm, 1981), p. 90. 21. Heino Arumäe, Kahe ilma piiril (On the Borders of Two Worlds) (Tallinn, 1979), p. 111. 22. Heinz Höhne, Canaris: Patriot im Zwielicht (Munich, 1978), p. 234. (The original was published in 1976. Various authors have used various editions and translations into English when referring to him.) 23. Leonid Barkov, Abwehr Eestis (The Abwehr in Estonia) (Tallinn, 1974), p. 35. 24. Leonid Barkov, V debriakh abvera (Tallinn, 1971), p. 42. 25. Paul Vihalem, Eesti kodanluse üleminek Saksa fašismi teenistusse (The Transition of the Estonian Bourgeoisie into the Service of German Fascism) (Tallinn, 1971), pp. 30–1. There is an error in Vihalem’s references. He has cited Faktid ja kommentaarid (Facts and Comments) (Tallinn, 1965), p. 2. It is a collection of poetry, and that specific page is about the biography of poet Arno Vihalemm: Arno Vihalemm, Ühe Pärnust pärit poeedi palgepooli (Tallinn, 1965). Vihalem must have had in mind L. Park’s Faktid ja kommentaarid (Tallinn, 1970), where the information referred to exists (although not on the page Vihalem indicated).

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The First Authors Four leads remain after all the cross-references have been analyzed. Authors whom the references in the outline lead back to and who do not identify the source of their information are Julius Mader, Edgar Meos, and Leonid Barkov (the fourth lead is the archive source referenced by Magnus Ilmjärv that will be discussed below). A side-by-side analysis of the texts of Mader and Meos revealed, surprisingly, that Mader simply reworded Meos’s information. A comparison of the texts of Meos and Barkov resulted in the same conclusion—Meos had simply translated Barkov’s text into German and edited it. The party introducing these claims into research has thus been revealed. He is Leonid Barkov. However, it is necessary to clarify who these three authors were and whether Mader and Meos are guilty of plagiarism. Julius Mader was a prolific East German writer who enjoyed great popularity on the socialist side of the Iron Curtain. His books, which primarily discussed the topic of special services, were printed in great numbers, translated, and reprinted. Actually, to date he is one of the most published authors in the field of intelligence history. Generally, he did not reveal the source of his data. Thus there were only two options: either the data was fabricated or it originated from the Stasi, causing suspicion in the West that he was cooperating with them. In 1956, at the age of 27, Julius Mader defended his degree in economics at Potsdam. As a hobby, he used public sources to research U.S. intelligence activities in the world, planning one day to publish the work. As a result, the MfS became interested in Mader, and he started cooperating with them as early as 1958, when he was an editor at the publishing house Die Wirtschaft. Two years later, Mader left the publishing house and became an unofficial co-employee (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) of the MfS, working for the special services full-time but publicly remaining a freelance columnist. In 1962, Mader became a special task officer (Offizier im besonderen Einsatz) in the MfS agitation department (Abteilung Agitation),

26. L. Park, Hitlerlaste luure sulased: kui Eestis peremehetses abveer (The Servants of the Hitlerites: When the Abwehr Ruled in Estonia) (Tallinn, 1970), p. 6. 27. Julius Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus: Ein Dokumentarbericht über Aufbau, Struktur und Operationen des OKW-Geheimdienstamtes Ausland/Abwehr mit einer Chronologie seiner Einsätze von 1933 bis 1944 (Berlin, 1970), p. 306. 28. Edgar Siegfried Meos, ‘Hitlers Geheimdienst in Estland vor dem Überfall auf die Sowjetunion’, Mitteilungsblatt der Arbeitsgemeinschaft ehemaliger Offiziere 6 (1969), p. 10. 29. Leonid Barkov, Mõrvarid ei pääse karistusest (Murderers Do Not Escape Punishment) (Tallinn, 1966), p. 24.

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holding the rank of captain (Hauptmann). Mader was promoted to major in 1964, and he received his last military decoration on October 7,1989, one month before the Berlin Wall fell. In his books and articles, Mader dealt with two topics: revealing the “criminal” activities of the special services of the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany, and glorifying the work of the special services of the Eastern bloc. The success of Mader’s work is impressive. According to the MfS, he was the author, co-author, or editor of 32 books during his nearly 30 years of service. These books were translated into 18 languages and, including reprints, 121 editions, which had, according to the MfS, a total print run of 5.2 million copies by 1989. (Additional editions were published later.3) The MfS’s print-run figures are unreliable. Checking the data of the Russian edition shows that the MfS greatly overstated the figures, and the total print run will never be known, but it is surely over three million copies.4 In addition, he published numerous articles on both sides of the Iron Curtain and participated in many propaganda campaigns against many West German government officials, which led in some cases to their resignations.5 Besides his work in MfS, Mader defended a PhD thesis in political science (Dr. rer. pol.) titled “The Secret Services of the German Federal Republic [West Germany] and Their Subversive Activities against the German Democratic Republic [East Germany]” in 1965 and another PhD in law (Dr. sc. jur.) with a thesis

3 See Iulius Mader, Abver: shchit i mech Tret’ego reikha (Rostov-on-Don, 1999). The book has also been published on the Internet: http://militera.lib.ru/research/mader/index. html (last accessed May 17, 2014). The title of the publication translated for Russian readers is interesting. During its existence, the Abwehr was not referred to as the Shield and Sword of the Third Reich, but the official flag text of the MfS was “Shield and Sword of the Party” (Schild und Schwert der Partei). Socialist terminology is also applied to the Third Reich in the title of Volkov’s and Slavin’s book, referred to earlier (Admiral Kanaris—“Zheleznyi” admiral). In his lifetime Canaris was not referred to as the Iron Admiral, but the founder of the Soviet Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was referred to as Iron Felix. 4 Ivo Juurvee, ‘Idabloki eriteenistused Külma sõja ajaloorindel Andrus Roolahe ja Julius Maderi näitel’ (Eastern Special Services on the History Front on the Example of Andrus Roolaht and Julius Mader), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2009), nos. 1/2, pp. 70–1. 5 Paul Maddrell, ‘What We Have Discovered about the Cold War Is What We Already Knew: Julius Mader and the Western Secret Services during the Cold War’, Cold War History 5 (2005), no. 2, pp. 239–42. Mader’s personal file in the MfS is located at Die Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR (BStU), ZA, ZAIG, Nr. 16380.

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titled “Development, System, and Methods of the Imperialist German Secret Services” in 1970.6 Julius Mader became involved with the topic of history partially by accident. He co-authored a book with Albrecht Charius entitled Nicht länger geheim (No Longer Secret)7 that was published in 1969, discussing the special services of the FRG in detail. As the book drew many parallels with the wartime Abwehr, and the continuity of the services was insinuated, the logical continuation was the “exposing” of the Abwehr, which was realized with the publication of the book entitled Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Hitler’s Spy Generals Confess), which is interesting in the context of this article. Leonid Barkov was a Russian born in Estonia, in 1928, in Kavastu Rural Municipality, in Tartu County. In 1941, he evacuated to the rear area of the Soviet Union. In 1944, he returned to Estonia with the Red Army and, at the age of 17, joined the security authorities, more precisely the Department of the AntiBanditry Fight of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Estonian SSR. Barkov spoke both Russian and Estonian fluently. As an operational employee, he was wounded in 1946 in the line of duty. Barkov joined the Communist Party in September 1948.8 Leonid Barkov’s long-term career was beginning to take off. Between 1955 and 1958, he was the chief of the KGB Tartu department. Between 1958 and 1959, he was the assistant manager of the investigation department of the KGB of the Estonian SSR, and he became manager starting in 1959. Barkov left Estonia at the end of 1969 to work in the UKGB of Leningrad Province.9 The height of his career was the position of manager of the investigation department of the Soviet KGB, where he worked from December 1986 until his retirement in January 1989.10 In addition to his service, Barkov was also a student of history. Barkov’s main field of research was the collaborationism of Estonians during the German

6 Die Geheimdienste der Deutschen Bundesrepublik und ihre subversive Tätigkeit gegen die Deutsche Demokratische Republik (PhD-thesis, Potsdam, 1965); Entwicklung, System und Arbetsweise des imperialistischen deutschen Geheimdienstes (PhD-thesis, Berlin, 1970). 7 Albrecht Charisius and Julius Mader, Nicht länger geheim: Entwicklung, System und Arbeitsweise des imperialistischen deutschen Geheimdienstes (Berlin, 1969). 8 Barkov’s personal sheet for calculating personnel, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 12, n. 12, s. 100, l. 2–4v. 9 Bakrov’s file in ERAF f. 1, n. 6, s. 4967. 10 Аleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov (eds.), Lubianka. Organy VChK – OGPU – NKVD – NKGB – MGB – KGB 1917–1991 (Moscow, 2003), pp. 174–5, 222–3.

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occupation and their alleged crimes against humanity during World War II, and Estonia’s “transition to the service of the fascists” during the prewar period. There is no doubt that his topic was of significant political importance and that the research was approved by his superiors. This is proven by the fact that he was allowed to use then-classified Soviet KGB archival materials and publish works based on that data. In addition to the books mentioned in this article, he published numerous articles in the newspapers Kodumaa, Sovetskaia Estoniia, Kommunist Estonii, Kommunist Sovetskoi Latvii, and Kommunist.11 The height of his research was the defense of his Candidate of Sciences dissertation at the Faculty of Law of Tartu State University on March 27, 1968, entitled “Defection of the Estonian Bourgeoisie into the Sphere of Influence of Fascist Germany and Their Involvement in Crimes against Humankind in the Period of the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945.”12 Of course his dissertation is strongly ideologically biased, but it is thorough and, given the standards of the time, it is written very professionally. Hence, Julius Mader was a scientist who was drafted by the MfS and became an officer, and Leonid Barkov was a career officer who studied history as a hobby alongside his day job. According to writer Teet Kallas, who was imprisoned for political reasons and who was interviewed by Barkov personally, Barkov was more intelligent than his colleagues, but he also lacked erudition. For example, at that time Kallas was the editor of the journal Looming, and his employment record book also indicated some work with the series “Loomingu Raamatukogu” (Library of Creativity). Barkov thought that “Loomingu Raamatukogu” was an actual library. He wanted to know where it was located and what books were kept there, so that state assets would not disappear while Kallas was in prison.13 The personality and life of Edgar Meos were more complicated. Edgar Siegfried Meos (or Meus) was born on Christmas Eve, 1901, in Tartu. From 1910 until January 1919, he studied at the Hugo Treffner Gymnasium (secondary school),

11 See the list of publications in the abstract of Barkov’s dissertation (Leonid Barkov, Perekhod estonskikh natsionalistov v sferu vliianiia fashistkoi Germanii i ikh uchastie v prestupleniiakh protiv chelovechnosti v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny 1941–1945 gg. Avtoreferat (Tallinn, 1968), p. 24). 12 Leonid Barkov, ‘Perekhod estonskikh natsionalistov v sferu vliianiia fashistkoi Germanii i ikh uchastie v prestupleniiakh protiv chelovechnosti v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny 1941–1945 gg.’ (Diss. cand, Tallinn, 1967). 13 Teet Kallas, e-mail to the author on January 24, 2008. The writer has briefly described his recollections concerning meeting with Barkov: Teet Kallas, ‘41. Kong’ (The 41st Cell), Areen, 15 August 1997, and idem, ‘Proovisõidud mälupaadis’ (Trial Trips in the Boat of Memory) 48, Postimees, 30 October 1999.

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which he dropped out of on his own accord.14 Data about his activities before the end of World War II are unfortunately mainly found in court and investigation materials. In May 1923, Meos was the head of the Klementi guard post of the Petseri department of the Estonian Border Guard, holding the rank of corporal. He received an order from his direct superior, Ensign Pettai, to allow the inhabitants of Laura village to cross the border as necessary. Meos was later accused of making, and charging money for, “border permits” that netted him around 100 Estonian marks. In court, the allegations were not proven, and he was acquitted.15 In April 1924, Meos was a corporal non-commissioned officer in the Second Armored Train Regiment Exercise Company. As he served temporarily as the acting warranty officer, his tasks included carrying the mail from the headquarters of the regiment. In the mail, he found a money order to the Valga post office in the sum of 1,074 marks, addressed to the commander of the company, Second Lieutenant A. Lehtmets. Meos did not pass it on to the addressee, but instead, on the same day, produced an authorization document with the corner stamp and seal of the Exercise Company, using the fictional name of A. Kesse, and also forged Lehtmets’s signature. He used the forged authorization document to withdraw money from the post office and a year later was sentenced to eight months in prison.16 Edgar Meos did not learn any lessons from his punishment, because in 1929 he forged signatures on two 150-kroon bills of exchange and discounted both bills in the Tartu Loan and Deposit Association. Even though Meos wholeheartedly confessed to being guilty, he was still sentenced to three years in prison.17 Only that which Meos told the Soviet security authorities casts a light on his activities during World War II, because no other evidence against him was found. He was arrested by the 77th Anti-Aircraft Division Smersh, on December 28,, on suspicion of being involved with the Germans. According to the investigation, Meos was arrested by the German security police in November 1941. He began to cooperate and outed “communist patriots” working on the newspaper Noorte Hääl. In November, he signed a cooperation agreement with the Sicherheitsdienst 14 Statement of the principal who established the Hugo Treffner upper secondary school, 4 June 1921, Estonian Historical Archives (Eesti Ajalooarhiiv, EAA) f. 2022, n. 2, s. 1972, l. 3. 15 Decision of the Military District Court, 31 March 1925, ERA f. 927, n. 3, s. 3052, l. 20–20v. 16 Decision of the Military District Court, 28 March 1925, ibid., s. 3094, l. 21–2. 17 Tartu-Võru Peace Community Court decision, 19 August 1930, ERA f. 1947, n. 3, s. 3395, l. 34–34v.

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(SD), and in December he joined the German military voluntarily. He served as a battalion clerk and later calculated amounts of financial aid to be given to the family members of the soldiers of the police battalion. He also allegedly cooperated with the German secret military police (Geheime Feldpolizei). From February to June 1944, Meos was imprisoned for service-related crimes in the Tallinn concentration camp. Supposedly he worked there as the Gestapo’s “unofficial resident.” It is difficult to verify now whether Meos was a collaborator in three different German special services, but the fact is that in March 1945, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison under section 58-1-a of the RSFSR Criminal Code.18 Meos was released in September 1953.19 It is also known that before World War II, Meos worked as a translator20 and journalist and was a great aviation enthusiast. His passion was collecting autographs of famous pilots (the top pilots of World War I were true celebrities in their time) and aviation badges, and he also gained some recognition with this hobby. Some time later, probably in the early 1950s, Meos began to falsify his biography and claim that he was a pilot. Using his old skills, he forged many documents, such as a certificate from April 27, 1935, signed by J. Laidoner for Second Lieutenant Edgar Meos to carry the occupational badge of pilot (Meos’s military career actually peaked at the rank of corporal);21 a certificate for reserve Second Lieutenant Edgar Meos to carry the badge of the Eighth Infantry Battalion from January 25, 1935;22 a certificate signed by Lieutenant Colonel H. Weir Cook (a prominent U.S. pilot in both world wars) on behalf of American Airlines concerning 12 hours of flight training on various types of aircraft from December 1, 1935;23 an excerpt from a pilot’s journal purporting that in 1937, Meos had flown six different types of aircraft for 186 hours and 30 minutes on his own and 58 hours and 25 minutes as co-pilot from January 3, 1938 (the excerpt has the stamp of the aviation company Deruluft, which closed on March 31, 1937);24 and a portrait photo of himself wearing something similar to an officer’s uniform, with ribbons and the

18 Meos’s investigation file, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 24335. 19 Statement of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 25 September 1953, EAA f. T-956, n. 1, s. 1, l. 35. 20 For example, Meos translated into Estonian the following works: Seiji Noma, Minu elu (Tartu, 1938); Arthur C. Doyle, ‘Surm pilvedest’, Valikjutud: kogu valitud novelle ja lühijutte maailma ja eesti loetavamailt autoreilt (Tallinn, 1940). 21 Estonian Film Archives (Eesti Filmiarhiiv, EFA) f. 0, s. 190005v. 22 EFA f. 4, s. 7136. 23 EFA f. 4, s. 7137. 24 The author has a copy and thanks the aviation historian Johannes Tilk for it.

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occupational badge of a French pilot.25 There is also a negative of the same photo where, in addition to the badge from France, occupational badges of a military pilot of Estonia and Britain and the badge of the French fighter squadron Les Cigognes have been drawn on his chest.26 According to the legend Meos created, he graduated from Gatchina aviation school at the age of 16 in 1916 (actually he was a 14-year-old schoolboy in Tartu), and after that he was commissioned to serve in France. There he happened to become a pilot in the elite fighter squadron Les Cigognes (“The Forks”), and as a member of that squadron he shot down many German aircraft. From this point on, the stories he crafted were different for each side of the Iron Curtain. According to the version for the West, Meos served as an officer in the Estonian Air Force after the war. During his many visits to Germany, he met and befriended top World War I pilot Ernst Udet. When World War II broke out, Meos was a war correspondent in Estonia and was commissioned to report the activities of the Luftwaffe against the English and French. With help from his friend Udet, Meos was transferred to Jagdgeschwader Richthofen. Life had surprises in store for him, and before the end of the war Meos was supposedly invited to Great Britain by the Royal Air Force. After the war ended, Meos remained in the Soviet Union, leaving it only once, in 1945, when he was a special interpreter for the Red Army as it met with Allied units. This far-fetched story, with excerpts from Meos’s “journal” about air combat in France during 1916 and 1917, was published by his pen pal Vic J. Sheppard, based on information supplied by Meos himself, entitled “A Russian Stork: Edgar Meos,” in 1966, in Great Britain.27 The story in the Soviet Union was different: after successful activities in France, Meos returned to Russia, where he became one of the first pilots of the Red Army.28 The legend had taken this form by 1970; four years earlier, Meos had claimed that he had seen Lenin give a speech to the Izmail regiment on April 10, 1917.29 Nine years before this, Meos claimed to have seen Lenin for the first time when he was returning to Russia on April 3, 1917, at Petrograd’s Finland Station.30 In addition, Meos claimed that between 1935 and 1937, he had studied at the Andower Avia25 EFA f. 0, s. 190006v. 26 EAA f. T-956, n. 1, s. 21, l. 3 (negative in the envelope). 27 Vic J. Sheppard, ‘A Russian Stork: Edgar Meos’, Cross and Cockade Journal 7 (1966), no. 3. Draft of the article in EAA f. T-956, n. 1, s. 1, pages not numbered. 28 Edgar Meos, ‘Lendurid, lennundus...’ (Pilots, Aviation …), Edasi, 27 and 28 February 1970. (This five-part series was dedicated to the coming 100th birthday of Lenin.) 29 Edgar Meos, ‘Nägin ja kuulsin Leninit’ (I Saw and Heard Lenin), Edasi, 14 April 1966. 30 Edgar Meos, ‘Ma nägin Leninit’ (I Saw Lenin), Edasi, 16 April 1957.

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tion School in England.31 As Meos’s stories about his past changed constantly, it was not possible to compile an accurate life story in his biographical summary, compiled in 1980 and added to his personal file in the Tartu town archives, despite the fact that his widow was consulted.32 By 1958 at the latest, Meos started to publish articles in the West on aviation history.33 The most important of these was the 1962 article on female pilots in the air force of the Russian Empire.34 The article included many lies that many other authors believed and passed on.35 In that respect, it was similar to the work Meos published seven years later discussing military intelligence. Meos’s lies lived on long after he was gone. Despite spreading many lies, Edgar Meos was actually involved in researching aviation history. This is confirmed by his investigation file from the years 1964 and 1965, stored in the Estonian Historical Archives, which includes the titles of all requested files.36 The same file demonstrates persuasively that Meos did not investigate the relationship of Estonian military intelligence with the Abwehr during that period. And he could not have researched it because the relevant materials were available only to the most reliable researchers; Meos, having spent many years in a prison camp, would not have been considered one. His surviving correspondence demonstrates that Meos started researching aviation actively in the beginning of 1954, only a few months after his release. In addition to correspondence with individuals and institutions in the Soviet Union, he exchanged letters actively with people, universities, libraries, archives, and magazines in Great Britain, France, the United States, the Netherlands, East Germany, and other countries, ordering copies of photos and documents, asking for consumer goods from individuals, and arranging the publication of his articles. August G. Blume, who was in correspondence with Meos around 1970, thinks that in 31 Edgar Meos, ‘Inimene ja tiivad’ (Man and Wings), Pilt ja Sõna 15 (1960), no. 10, p. 17. The correct spelling would be Andover. 32 See EAA f. T-956, foreword to listing. 33 Edgar Siegfried Meos, ‘D.H. Treasure Ship’, Air Pictorial, August 1958. 34 Edgar S. Meos, ‘Russian Women Fighter Pilots’, Flight International, 27 December 1962. Later he wrote about female pilots of the Soviet Union: idem, ‘Soviet Women Fighter Pilots in WWII’, Aircraft Illustrated Extra 3 (1970), no. 2. One article on Russian female pilots was even published four years after Meos’s death: idem, ‘Amazon Pilots and Lady-Warbirds’, Cross and Cockade Journal 16 (1975), no. 4. 35 August G. Blume, who has specialized in researching World War I air combat and pilots, has come to this conclusion. According to him, Meos falsified data on many individuals, and it may take years to refute his lies. Blume’s e-mails to the author on 2 May 2007, and 29 June 2007. 36 Meos’s investigation file EAA f. R-271, n. 2, s. 1674.

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addition to royalties, the purpose of this activity was self-promotion, because Meos was involved in buying, selling, and exchanging aviation-related autographs, photos, and badges through the mail.37 Given the conditions of that time, Meos’s active exchange with the West could not have taken place without the KGB’s knowledge. The KGB became interested in Meos at the latest in 1956, when an agent, “Majak,” was enlisted to “process” him and who, according to reports, established a confidential relationship with Meos. Meos, who was living in Tartu, was suspected of espionage.38 This suspicion does not seem serious. Rather, it is an example of how the ESSR KGB counterintelligence had to struggle to justify its existence. The processing of Meos was sufficiently important that Moscow was also notified of it. (After Hans Toomla and Kalju Kukk were caught in the summer of 1954, foreign espionage on Estonian territory was actually more or less over.) At the end of 1957, Meos moved to Tallinn, and the following year, two agents, “Kamnev” and “Star,” were involved in his processing. Meos’s correspondence was subjected to a “TS” check,39 and suspicious correspondence was carefully processed through the third special division of the KGB. Preparations were made to involve an experienced agent, “Flight.” Meos was suspected of “being a member of the English military intelligence agency” because “in April 1957, Meos sent a document to Moscow addressed to the military attaché of Great Britain in which the Sixth Special Department of the KGB, located at the USSR Council of Ministers, found an outline which, according to specialists, is somewhat similar to the location of Tartu Airport.”40 Probably in relation to this, in April 1957, the all-Union KGB ordered Meos’s investigation file from the Soviet KGB archives.41 In 1961 Meos testified as a witness at a highly publicized tribunal concerning former SS officer Ain Ervin Mere held in Tallinn.42 The investigation was carried 37 Blume’s e-mail to the author, 10 April 2007. 38 Jaak Hion and Jüri Ojamaa (eds.), Aruanded Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee 2. ja 4. osakonna tööst 1956. aastal (Reports concerning the Agency and Operative Work of the Second Department of the KGB at the ESSR Council of Ministers in 1956) (Tallinn, 2000), pp. 8–9. 39 This probably means cryptographic-writing checking. 40 Jaak Hion, Indrek Jürjo and Jüri Ojamaa (eds.), Aruanded Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee 2. ja 4. osakonna tööst 1958. aastal (Reports on the Results of Agency and Operation Work of the National Security Committee’s Second Department at the ESSR Council of Ministers in 1958) (Tallinn, 2005), pp. 25–7. 41 See Meos’s investigation file, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 24335. 42 Vladimir Raudsepp, Inimesed, olge valvsad! (Be Careful, People!) (Tallinn, 1961), pp. 79–81.

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out by the KGB. However, in the court itself and in the press, Meos was presented as a “captain of the air force” who had studied in France and had been a fellow officer of Mere for four to five years prior to World War II.43 These allegations were false, as the KGB must have known at the time. There is no reason to think that the KGB believed he had been a pilot. During the time of the 1944–45 investigation, Meos had not yet created his past as a pilot, or at least had not shared this legend with his interrogators. Even if the KGB had no objections to the spreading of fictional stories concerning Lenin, the publication of his story about his service in Jagdgeschwader Richthofen could have ended badly for a man who had a dark past. Given the KGB’s usual methods, it is logical to assume that processing ended with the recruitment of Meos as a collaborator. We can only surmise what was specifically required from him and whether he actually offered what was required. For example, Meos’s correspondence with foreigners could have been shown as processing potential sources. Although it is unlikely, it is not impossible that Meos managed to establish a correspondence with some NATO-country air force employee who could mention a fact that would be of interest to Soviet intelligence institutions. It is possible that the target group could have been Estonian refugees, who might have been interested in a man who received a pilot badge from Laidoner. Meos’s publications could have been considered active measures. If this hypothesis holds, it would explain his 1969 article about the cooperation of Estonian military intelligence with the Germans. There is also a possibility that Meos provided some other services of local importance to the KGB, for which he was rewarded with the possibility to retain his contacts with the West.

Plagiarism or Cooperation with the KGB and the MfS? The similarity of Mader’s text with Meos’s article is not coincidental. Mader and Meos had been in correspondence since August 1963. Meos wrote the first letter, paying compliments to Mader’s recently published book44 (Meos used this method frequently to establish new contacts). Thereafter they exchanged information and useful contacts that enabled Edgar Meos to publish his writings in 43 Recording of the daily news, 9 March 1961, in the Internet archives of the Estonian National Broadcasting, https://arhiiv.err.ee/vaata/paevakaja-paevakaja-kalevi-liivamorvarid-kohtu-ees-3-saade/similar-158245 (last accessed 17 May 2014); Rauno Võsaste, Ain Mere: valel poolel (Ain Mere: On the Wrong Side) (Võduvere, 2014), pp. 198–200. 44 Mader to Meos, 21 August, 1963, EAA f. T-956, n. 1, s. 14, l. 64.

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East Germany and probably allowed Mader to try to do the same in Estonia. Mader never got his wish for some of his books to be translated into Estonian. However, some small articles were published in ESSR newspapers, such as a 1967 article in the newspaper Kodumaa about Alexander Cellarius’s wartime activities and his contacts with Estonian refugees after the war.45 A year later, there was a story about Otto Skorzeny in the newspaper Edasi.46 Although the KGB used correspondence under a false name as one active measure,47 in this case there is no reason to suspect this kind of activity. Meos’s possible assistance to Mader concerning the book Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus cannot be determined, since little relevant correspondence is available. Although Mader copied his Estonia-related text from Meos, it cannot be said that he did it maliciously or behind his back. (Incidentally, Mader does not refer to it in the book at all.) Immediately after the book was published, Mader sent a copy to Meos with a dedication in German: “from the author to Comrade E. Meos, with friendship.”48 During correspondence Meos might have been unaware that Mader was not only a doctor but also an MfS major. Julius Mader might have had direct contact with Leonid Barkov, too. For there is one claim in Mader’s book, introduced to research by Barkov, which is not in Meos’s article. Mader writes that in 1936, the Abwehr established intelligence center “Gruppe 6513” (“Die ‘Abwehr’ baut als Spionagezentrum in Estland die ‘Gruppe 6513’ aus”).49 By the time Mader’s book was published, Barkov had written about this group, not in connection with the Abwehr but in his candidate of 45 Dr. J. Mader, ‘Ülemspioon Cellarius resideerib Bonnis’ (The Leading Spy Cellarius Resides in Bonn), Kodumaa, 26 April 1967. The following paragraph is quite typical of Mader’s works: “At this point it could be pointed out that even today Cellarius has contacts in high places. Luxurious limousines from the Bonn Ministry of Foreign Affairs and München-Pullach of Gehlen’s Intelligence Center stop frequently in front of his house. Alexander Cellarius has very close contacts with the leaders of Estonian refugee organizations in Sweden, England, and the FRG.” Those who published the article probably assumed that readers would not wonder how a doctor living in Berlin could keep track of whose cars were stopping in front of Cellarius’s house in Bonn, and how often. 46 Julius Mader, ‘Hitleri SD-terrorist salaja denatsifitseeritud’ (Hitler’s SD Terrorist, Secretly De-Nazified), Edasi, 26 July 1968. 47 The KGB used Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s name to engage in correspondence with Russian refugee Vassilii Orekhov. See Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Washington, 1985), pp. 96–7. 48 EAA f. T-956, n. 1, s. 2. 49 Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus, p. 307.

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sciences dissertation in Russian. But considering Mader’s position and contacts, it cannot be ruled out that he had read one of the few copies of it. Meos could have also provided him with the information. It is possible that he was an intermediary, due to Barkov’s poor skills in German. Sources concerning Meos’s and Barkov’s possible contacts have not been found. Still, it is known that when Meos was processed in Tartu, Barkov was the head of the Tartu KGB, and the processing definitely did not take place without his approval. Indeed, he was directing it. Meos moved to Tallinn in 1957 and Barkov only a year later. It is unlikely that a man with such a checkered past as Edgar Meos would have dared to plagiarize a KGB officer deliberately and so blatantly, simply hoping that the latter would not find out. In the case of the 1969 article, perhaps it was thought that the name Edgar Siegfried Meos would be more credible for Germans than Leonid Barkov. In any case, thanks to Meos’s effort, the results of Barkov’s work spread outside the Eastern bloc during the Cold War: Heinz Höhne referred to Meos in his book in 1976. Höhne was cited in the Estonian SSR in 1986; the book enjoyed an ostensible authority, as it was published on the other side of the Iron Curtain.50 It is interesting that when speaking of “writers and Soviet historians with KGB relations,” Magnus Ilmjärv has mentioned Meos, Barkov, and Vihalem as examples.51

Were these active measures, and why did such claims emerge precisely in the 1960s? The KGB definition for active measures (aktivnye meropriiatiia) was “agencyoperative measures that are directed towards influencing interesting political life aspects of a target country, like foreign politics, solving international issues, leading the enemy astray, weakening the positions of the enemy, thwarting hostile plans and achieving other goals.”52 Active measures were used to show both 50 Koit, Mineviku varjud, p. 43. (The year of publication of Höhne’s book is given, erroneously, as 1971.) 51 Ilmjärv, Hääletu alistumine, p. 584. 52 Vasiliy Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook (London, 2002), p.  13. This definition was used in foreign intelligence or the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (for more, see Osnovnye napravleniia i ob’’ekty razvedyvatel’noi raboty za granitsei [1970], p. 51–77), and this should not be mixed up with active measures used in counterintelligence or the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB. To avoid confusion, the KGB, in the case of counterintelligence, changed the order of the words of the term (meropriiatiia aktivnye). For the definition, see Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’ (Moscow, 1972), pp. 161–2; or Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon, p. 251.

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countries and organizations (especially NATO and the special services of its member countries) and specific individuals in an unfavorable light. Sometimes specific goals were to be achieved, such as creating tension between countries or persons and influencing election results. Although the KGB definition was worded at latest by the early 1960s, the concept was not new. The Comintern was involved in undermining activities abroad, even before intelligence operations were properly established. (The Comintern was established in March 1919, but the predecessor of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB or INO [Inostrannyi otdel] was founded only in December 1920.) The Americans, looking back at the practices at the end of the Cold War era, have provided the following definition: “active measures is a Soviet term that refers to the manipulative use of slogans, arguments, disinformation, and carefully selected true information, which the Soviets used to try to influence the attitudes and actions of foreign publics and governments.”53 The principal difference between these two definitions is that while the KGB meant only the “active-operative measures” performed by the agency, the United States used the ambiguous term “Soviets,” thus incorporating the entire Soviet state apparatus under the term, beginning with the CPSU and ending with the national media and trade unions. There is a simple explanation for this contradiction that does not make either definition false. A special structural unit for active measures54 was established under the leadership of the head of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, at the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (intelligence) in January 1959. At the great intelligence conference that took place in May of the same year in Moscow, where the KGB’s priorities were reviewed, it was found that Department D needed to coordinate its activities with the CPSU Central Committee external relations department and executive authorities. (D is derived from the word “disinformation.” Later the unit became Department A, and after that it was changed to “Service”—this unit has become

53 Soviet Active Measures in the “Post-Cold War” Era 1988–1991: A Report Prepared at the Request of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations by the United States Information Agency, June 1992 (http://intellit.muskingum.edu/ russia_folder/pcw_era/index.htm, accessed 17 May 2014). 54 Concerning the activities of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB A-service, see Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London, 2000), pp. 292–321; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (London, 2006).

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famous under the name Service A.)55 This coordination was characteristic of active measures until the end of the Cold War. CIA Director William J. Casey believed the most important features of the Soviets’ active measures were probably their “centralization and integration.”56 The head of Department D, from its establishment until his death in 1968, was Ivan Agaiants. He was of Armenian origin and had lived in Paris between 1947 and 1949. Given the topic of the article, it is interesting that the reason for the commission was probably Agaiants’s successful sponsorship of many fabricated works, including the memoirs of Andrei Vlassov and correspondence between Stalin and Tito (in which the latter admitted supporting Trotskyism), published in the weekly Carrefour. Oleg Gordievsky, who defected from the KGB to Great Britain in the summer of 1985, thought that the active measures he came across in the 1970s and 1980s were quite crude compared to the aforementioned ones. The first large-scale and successful active measures campaign, led by Agaiants against West Germany, lasted from Christmas 1959 until mid-February 1960. The KGB carried out and encouraged (in cooperation with the MfS, or at least with their knowledge) anti-Semitic actions in West Germany that were also reported in the world press and did great damage to the country’s reputation. Even the New York Herald Tribune conceded, “Bonn cannot get rid of Nazi poison.”57 Minister of Defense Franz Joseph Strauss said in a press conference held in mid-January that “the anti-Semitic campaign was the work of communist agitators,” which Julius Mader immediately noted and referred to as “a bare-faced lie” (faustdicken Lüge) in his new book.58 According to an employee of the active-measures unit of the State Security of Czechoslovakia or StB (Státní bezpečnost), Ladislav Bittman (who defected to the West in 1968, after the quashing of the Prague Spring, and started his academic career there), similar units based on the active-measures structural unit that was

55 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 1990), pp. 463–4. 56 “An Address by William J. Casey, Director of Central Intelligence Agency, before the Dallas Council on World Affairs, Dallas, Texas, September 1985,” http://intellit.muskingum.edu/russia_folder/russiad&d_folder/russiad%26dcasey.html (last accessed 12 May 2014). 57 Andrew, Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 463–464. 58 Julius Mader, Die Graue Hand: Eine Abrechnung mit dem Bonner Geheimdienst (Berlin, 1960), p. 198. Two years later, the book was also published in Russian: Iulius Mader, Seraia ruka: Sekrety shpionskoi sluzhby Zapadnoi Germanii (Moscow, 1962), p. 230.

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established in the KGB in 1959 were established between 1962 and 1964 in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland.59 Given these circumstances, it is unlikely that the sudden surge of propaganda literature in the Eastern bloc in the 1960s was just a coincidence. On the one hand, it was encouraged by the establishment of corresponding institutions and coordination mechanisms. The initial success of active measures could have encouraged their wider use. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, which was not in anyone’s interest and which risked triggering nuclear war, the Soviet leadership probably did not want to emphasize military force, and this might have been the impetus for the use of different means in the Cold War. Explaining the timing of the emergence of Barkov’s claims seems quite easy or at least logical from an Estonian perspective. It could have been a counterblow against Estonian refugees. During World War II and immediately afterward, the refugees faced many pressing issues, including how to provide for themselves and their families, and whether they could soon return to their homeland. By the 1950s, their daily living needs were satisfied, and their hope of returning to Estonia had faded.60 They had time to write, resulting in a series entitled Estonian State and People in World War II61 and a great deal of recollections62 that all condemned the occupation of Estonia. It is logical to assume that the KGB and/ or the CPE deemed it necessary to organize a counterattack. In this case, disagreements among Estonian refugees were skillfully exploited. One of the greatest divides was between the supporters and opponents of the authoritarian coup of March 1934, and the “silent era” that followed. Second, in their literary works, the refugees themselves revealed to the KGB the possible disagreements between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was responsible for Estonian foreign policy, and military staff. Aleksander Varma was the first to do this, with his article in the Estonian Students Society anthology of 1955.63

59 Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation, p. 39. 60 Jaan Undusk, whose views have definitely influenced the author of this article, has understood the developments in the same way. See Jaan Undusk, ‘Ajalookirjutus Eestis ja eksiilis Teise maailmasõja järel. Võhiku mõtted’, Tuna 10 (2007), no. 1, pp. 8–9. 61 Richard Maasing et al. (eds.), Eesti riik ja rahvas Teises maailmasõjas, vols.  1–9 (Stockholm, 1954–1962). 62 E.g., Oskar Angelus, Tuhande valitseja maa (Land of Thousand Rulers) (Stockholm, 1957); Oskar Mamers, Kahe sõja vahel (Between Two Wars) (Stockholm, 1957); Oskar Mamers, Häda võidetuile (Woe to the Defeated) (Stockholm, 1958). 63 Aleksander Varma, ‘Eesti välispoliitikast 1939’ (On Estonian Foreign Policy 1939), Eesti Üliõpilaste Seltsi album 12 (Stockholm, 1955), pp. 81–6.

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A document that would demonstrate the active-measures target of Barkov’s and Meos’s writings, as discussed in this article, has not been found in the archives. These enemies can still be identified through analysis. Barkov’s writings, of course, criticize the German Reich but also attack “bourgeois Estonia.” Discrediting it justifies indirectly the Soviet occupation of Estonia. The second goal is to actively discredit foreign Estonians who were working against the Soviet Union (or promoting the cause of Estonia), such as former chiefs of military intelligence Richard Maasing and Villem Saarsen. The Soviet diplomatic service was engaged in finding these individuals. For example, Vsevolod Naidenkov, an attaché in the Stockholm embassy in 1959–62, who was also an operative representative and a major, wrote a detailed 63-page report of his work.64 Additional volumes of the complete work Estonian State and People in World War II that were published in occupied Estonia leave the impression that Naidenkov’s findings have been taken into account.65 Julius Mader had the interests of the GDR in mind, and the main political enemy of the GDR was the Federal Republic. Similarly, the main enemy of the MfS was the West German foreign intelligence service BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), which was easily vulnerable in public due to drafting specialists from the former Third Reich’s special services, especially from Fremde Heere Ost, whose head, Reinhard Gehlen, also became the head of the BND. Also, the book Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus was meant to discredit the BND, and Estonia was definitely not the central topic and could have been introduced into the book by accident or as a result of cooperation between the KGB and MfS. Similar books were actually published not only in the Estonian SSR and the GDR but everywhere in the Eastern bloc. Émigré Latvian scholar Andrievs Ezergailis has dealt with this problem in more detail. While researching the Holocaust within Latvian territory, he was unable to overlook a brochure published in 1962 in Riga, in 64 Eesti emigrandid Rootsis, ERAF f. 1, n. 254, s. 23, l. 62–125; see also Indrek Jürjo, Pagulus ja nõukogude Eesti. Vaateid KGB, EKP ja VEKSA arhiividokumentide põhjal (Exile and Soviet Estonia: Views Based on KGB, ECP and VEKSA Archival Documents) (Tallinn, 1996), pp. 70, 213–214. 65 Eesti riik ja rahvas Teises maailmasõjas, vols. 11–15 (Tallinn, 1964–1972). Naidenkov pointed out political, generational, and personal disagreements among foreign Estonians. Personal and political disagreements were dealt with in detail in volumes 11–13 (including volume 12, which was dedicated to military intelligence) and 15. Naidenkov dedicated volume 14 specifically to youth, whom he considered separate and to be the group of foreign Estonians with potentially the friendliest attitude towards the Soviet Union (ERAF, f. 1, n. 254, s. 23, l. 100–101). Along with (or instead of) Naidenkov’s report, these books were based on the systematic analysis of the foreign Estonian press and other publications.

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Latvian, and in 1963 in English, entitled Daugavas Vanagi: Who Are They?66 (A similar publication—1200067—was also published and translated into English at the same time in Tallinn, but its contents have not been analyzed in the same detail. One of the authors of the book, Ervin Martinson, was a former security services employee.68) All the authors of the book used pseudonyms. The only person who was credibly identified was Pauls Ducmanis, who hid behind the pseudonym J. Dzirkailis (E. Avotiņš and V. Petersons were probably the cover names of KGB operative employees who provided Ducmanis with confidential archive materials). Ducmanis, whose ideological beliefs changed many times during his life, received his propaganda training in Berlin, in 1942.69 His brochure contains even more lies than Barkov’s works. Therefore we cannot pin down only one reason for the timing of Barkov’s publications. It is likely that all the aforementioned reasons contributed, such as the politically suitable situation and the initiation of active measures in the central institutions of the KGB (the KGB of the Estonian SSR had to demonstrate that they were engaged in the same activities). Furthermore, one cannot rule out the possibility of coincidence—that that time happened to be when Leonid Barkov’s work was ready for publication.

The Original Source of Claims Thus Leonid Barkov is the person responsible for introducing into historical research the claims mentioned in the introduction. As the reference system in his books is unsatisfactory—irregularly appearing footnotes usually include only the words “investigation materials” (the value of such references is unclear)—one has to seek the answer from Barkov’s dissertation. Indeed, a passage familiar from another 66 E. Avotiņš, J. Dzirkailis and V. Petersons, Kari ir Daugavas Vanagi (Riga, 1962); E. Avotiņš, J. Dzirkailis, and V. Petersons, Daugavas Vanagi: Who are They? (Riga, 1963). Later, the book was also published in German, and a shorter version was published in Swedish. It discusses the members of Daugavas Vanagi (Daugava Eagles), an organization of Latvian soldiers who fought for Germany in the war and who were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. 67 Karl Lemmik and Ervin Martinson, 12000: Tartus 16.-20. jaanuaril 1962 massimõrvarite Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnase ja Ervin Viksi üle peetud kohtuprotsessi materjale (Tallinn, 1962); Karl Lemmik and Ervin Martinson, 12.000: Materials from the Trial of the Mass Murderers Juhan Jüriste, Karl Linnas and Ervin Viks, Held at Tartu on January 16–20, 1962 (Tallinn, 1963). 68 Jürjo, Pagulus ja nõukogude Eesti, pp. 141, 183. 69 Andrew Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation about the Holocaust in Latvia: Daugavas Vanagi – Who Are They? Revisited (Riga, 2005), pp. 65–78.

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of Barkov’s writings, about establishing relations with German intelligence and placing special photography equipment in the Gulf of Finland lighthouses, appears on page 60. Unfortunately, the reference at the end of the passage is missing. In the next passage, as in all of Barkov’s books, General Laidoner is quoted in relation to what information was exchanged with the Germans. There is also a reference here: the archives of the KGB of the Estonian SSR, f. 32, n. 20, s. 8, l. 90–1.70 As most of the ESSR KGB archives are not located in Estonia, and access is not available to researchers, the search for the original source might have ended here, inconclusively. However, there is also Ilmjärv’s reference to Laidoner’s interrogation report on October 8, 1941. In a side-by-side comparison of the report and Barkov’s citation, some parts of the texts actually overlap. And a few lines earlier, there is definitely some talk about cameras and the start of intelligence cooperation. Finally, we have found the original source, and it is time to cite what General Johan Laidoner said on October 8, 1941: “Then [1936 or 1937] it was determined how and which data would be transferred from the Soviet Union to each other and what interested which sides. The Germans promised to provide us with some assistance, including certain technical devices for intelligence, and we were offered cameras for long-distance photography of the sea. We thought about buying them, but as we did not have the resources, the Germans gave us one or two cameras, I cannot remember exactly, that were installed in our lighthouses. They remained operational for about a year.”71 Incidentally, Laidoner’s use of the pronoun “they” in the last sentence, and Barkov’s misinterpretation of it, could explain why Barkov thought that technical specialists from Germany came to install the equipment. Certainly, the question arises as to how reliable the interrogation reports of Soviet security institutions are as a source. Magnus Ilmjärv, who has analyzed Laidoner’s interrogation reports in great detail, has come to the following conclusion: “In the case of some interrogation reports, it can be said that the general was physically influenced.”72 As an example, he has included a report dated October 8, 1941. Considering the overlap of the texts and the difference in references, it seems likely that in his research, Barkov did not use the interrogation reports themselves but excerpts added to certain files discussing specific topics. Therefore, the amount

70 Barkov, Perekhod estonskikh natsionalistov (1967). 71 Laidoner’s interrogation report, 8 October 1941, ERAF f. 129SM, n. 1, s. 28797, 2. kd, l. 189v–190. 72 Magnus Ilmjärv, President ja ülemjuhataja NKVD ees: dokumente ja materjale (The President and the Commander-in-Chief before the NKVD: Documents and Materials) (Tallinn, 1993), p. 51.

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of work necessary to draw the same conclusion decreased significantly, and at the same time, Barkov was even more dependent on the work of his KGB colleagues. The second claim—that in cooperation with the Abwehr, cameras were installed in Estonian lighthouses to photograph the vessels of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet—is somehow narrower and easier to follow. It is a fact that Soviet military vessels were monitored from Estonian lighthouses. By the beginning of World War II, there were 11 sea communication posts, most of them in lighthouses located on the coast of the Gulf of Finland and on islands. As of 1940, there was a specific review of equipment in sea communication posts when the Soviet navy took them over. Back then everything was noted, starting from radio stations and optics to half-full paint cans and clothes racks. Cameras or other photo equipment (like tripods or means to develop film) were not found in any of the sea communication posts or headquarters.It is true that binoculars used in sea communication had been manufactured by German companies (mainly Zeiss). Some spyglasses had been manufactured by the British company Hughes.73 The claim that photography equipment was installed in Estonian lighthouses is based only on what General Laidoner said under interrogation.74 His statements have been significantly distorted: the general said that one or two devices operated for about a year, but the literature leaves the impression that there was more equipment and that it operated for longer. Neither the author of this article nor the authors referred to in this article have been able to find archive materials that would confirm Laidoner’s statements. This statement is, at the very least, distorted.

More about these two claims: The establishment of Abwehr intelligence center “Gruppe 6513” in Estonia and the infiltration of British intelligence by the intelligence services of the Baltic states in the interest of the Germans Historian Margus Ilmjärv has used this intelligence center repeatedly to illustrate the close relations between the Second Department of Estonian Military

73 Acts of transfer at ERA f. 527, n. 1, s. 1346. The first sea communication post was claimed on 8 July and the last on 25 November 1940. 74 In addition to the interrogation on 8 October 1941, he said similar things during an interrogation on 9 July 1941: “Certainly, the movements of Soviet vessels were monitored from the lighthouses, and as far as I can remember, there was an effort to take photos of them. However, it did not produce significant results, because we did not have cameras that were good and expensive enough.” See Ilmjärv, President ja ülemjuhataja, pp. 57–8.

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Headquarters and the German Abwehr, using the same wording each time,75 referencing Mader and not commenting on the subject in greater detail. The term “intelligence center” is not in everyday use, and it has no single definition; since the Abwehr is being discussed, one could ask if it was Abwehrstelle or Kriegsorganisation (types of regional sub-organizations of the Abwehr). Mader uses the aforementioned cited and referenced wording that was used later. The same paragraph includes some data from Barkov/Meos, and the reference, as in the whole book, is not there. Therefore, we must turn once more to Leonid Barkov, who introduced the claim. Barkov discusses the center, but in a completely different context: namely, when he proves that “the Baltic Germans were loyal Nazi allies” and insinuates that information about the center originates from the documents received after Germany surrendered. In his book Murderers Will Not Escape Punishment, published in 1966,76 and in his dissertation,77 it remains unclear what the “intelligence center” was and who established it and when. Beginning in 1970, when he published a brochure under the alias L. Park, the issue was explained quite clearly, and indeed an exhausting overview concerning the nature and activities of “Gruppe 6513” has been provided. Barkov cites a C2 report of the SD review VI (to which he does not refer, and whose authenticity is therefore uncertain), received during capitulation, concerning intelligence activities in Estonia and Latvia: After the arrival of the Russians, a thorough change of intelligence possibilities took place. Leading political figures disappeared from the political arena, and communication with them became difficult. We also had to change ways of transferring information. It was impossible to send our information with vessels, because the authorities checked the vessels carefully, and landing members were strictly observed. We had to abandon the idea of sending the data through the free port of Memel and by land. It was also impossible to use secret ink. We had to start developing new communication networks actively and to find new sources of information. Even so, Estonian resident No. 6513 was able to establish contacts with new people and rebuild contacts with old sources of information. Keeping regular contacts with one’s own agency was very dangerous and required great care and skill. Resident 6513 was still able to adapt very quickly to the situation, despite difficulties in gathering interesting data. Our man 6513 is a co-employee in the main executive authority. Previously, he worked in a municipality and was a burgomaster of one

75 Ilmjärv, ‘Eesti välispoliitika 1930. aastatel’, p. 71; idem, Hääletu alistumine, p. 370; “Subsequently Abwehr established a center for the intelligence service in Estonia – Group 6513”, idem, Silent Submission, p. 226; idem, Nõukogude Liidu ja Saksamaa vahel, pp. 30, 158. 76 Barkov, Mõrvarid ei pääse karistusest, p. 42. 77 Barkov, Perekhod estonskikh natsionalistov (1967), p. 98.

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of the towns in East Prussia. His work in Estonia is very valuable. It must be emphasized that he has skills to retain contacts with necessary people and skills to behave confidently during missions. Resident 6513 posed originally as a co-worker of DT (Deutsche Treuhandverwaltung). In January 1940 he was able to obtain a diplomatic passport and started working as a referent in the German Embassy in Estonia.78

What does this have to do with the Abwehr, 1936, or the intelligence center? Absolutely nothing. Nothing in this text refers to cooperation with Estonian authorities. On the contrary, such words like “very dangerous” are used to describe the work of the resident. It is described as very difficult, and according to the text, local authorities made it difficult (“it was impossible to send our information with vessels, because the authorities checked the vessels carefully”). Barkov’s citation discusses the period of time beginning with the arrival of the base forces in Estonia (“after the arrival of the Russians”). If and how much earlier the SD resident initiated his activities, unfortunately, remains unclear. Barkov has not written that the number 6513 is somehow connected with the Abwehr. This is either made up by Julius Mader or is a result of carelessness. However, the claim concerning the establishment of intelligence centers (in addition to Ilmjärv, e.g., émigré Latvian Edgars Andersons has used it in his book, published in Toronto in 198379) has withstood the test of time quite well and could therefore be considered an active measure. In Barkov’s case, one could interpret it as an urge similar to Leopold von Ranke to research history “as it was” or maybe just a need to connect Estonia not only to the Abwehr but also to the SD. Ian Colvin was the first to write about the cooperation of the intelligence agencies of the Baltic states and Germany. Before World War II he was a correspondent for the News Chronicle in Germany. Shortly after the war, he came up with the ambitious idea of writing the biography of the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Perhaps because Colvin was a journalist, he was not discouraged by the fact that there were few sources, and in 1951 his book was published under various titles simultaneously in London and New York.80 The project was realized largely because Colvin was able to find a former Abwehr officer, Richard Protze, whose information served as the primary material for the book. Although later research has repudiated most of Colvin’s conclusions, the writing was a great inspiration to Richard Basset in his new book. In Colvin’s book, one intriguiuing paragraph is linked with Estonia: “‘I am told that Canaris believed he had penetrated the British Secret Service,’ I told 78 Barkov, Abwehr Eestis, pp. 39­–40. 79 Andersons, Latvijas bruņotie spēki, pp. 708, 731. 80 Ian Colvin, Chief of Intelligence (London, 1951); idem, Master Spy (New York, 1951).

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Richard Protze. The old man nodded his white head. ‘Not everywhere, perhaps,’ he answered, ‘but more than you would easily suppose. It was quite simple in some cases. We had military intelligence agreements with the Baltic states before the war. We had merely to say: and we want to place agents of ours inside the British intelligence offices in Kovno, Reval, and Tallinn.’”81 It is unclear whether it was Protze or Colvin who thought that Reval and Tallinn were different cities, but that is not the point. The claim, if not entirely false, is at least highly exaggerated. How could the military intelligence agencies of the Baltic states have placed German agents in British residences so easily? Even if it had been possible, how much information of European-level importance could have been collected? How could this have happened during wartime? Concerning Richard Protze’s claims, it must be noted that there were indeed active British intelligence residents in Tallinn and Riga before the war (Chester Giffey and Leslie Nicholson, respectively), but back then, the British intelligence had no station in Kovno (Kaunas).82 Naturally, Colvin’s book was translated into Russian, and there Kaunas, Riga, and Tallinn were mentioned.83 Protze’s claim has not been widely repeated.

Conclusion Intelligence is a complex and politically sensitive topic, and thus source criticism concerning it is somewhat more difficult. As demonstrated before, there is a great reliance on previous authors in source criticism. In the case of in-depth research, it is understandable, because it is impossible to exhaustively research every claim made in literature. The two claims presented in the article were introduced by an employee of the KGB of the Estonian SSR, Leonid Barkov, and Julius Mader, an employee of MfS, helped spread those claims internationally and give them credibility in Estonia. Neither person has referenced his information. The claims were introduced in the 1960s, when, to counterbalance the memoirs and anthologies published by foreign Estonians, the Estonian SSR published a great deal of propaganda literature. Similar processes took place in East Germany. There is no doubt that Mader reported the publication of books to his superiors as work accomplishments, and Barkov probably did the same. At least he could not have repeatedly published claims that originated from then-classified materials without approval. Therefore 81 Colvin, Chief of Intelligence, p. 75. 82 Nigel West, MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909–45 (London, 1985), p. 21. 83 Ian Kolvin, Dvoinaia igra (Moscow, 1960), p. 138.

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it is no exaggeration to classify Mader’s and Barkov’s work as active measures. Yet even so, their work strongly influences historical writing even after 40 years. The claims appear in many works of numerous acknowledged researchers. This does not mean that their works should be deemed wholly unreliable. The author has used many works that appear in the historiography section of this article and has cited them before and will cite them in the future. Thus we come to the main conclusion: just because a claim has been published repeatedly does not make it reliable. One has to be careful in source criticism. Still, the sources have been evaluated. Two discussed claims might be distorted but might be truthful. In the works of Barkov, Meos, and Mader, there are additional claims that are even more flimsy and sometimes simply idiotic (e.g., the claim that the Abwehr sent intelligence-diversion units from Estonia to the Soviet Union between 1938 and 1940), and these have been discarded from historical writings in the last 40 years. The last claim that is still “alive” in the pages of books is that concerning the establishment of Abwehr intelligence center “Gruppe 6513,” in Estonia, in 1936. The fact that Mader and Barkov were officers of services that were notable for repressions does not make their works unreliable. That would be an ad hominem approach. Instead, it is mainly the absence or weakness of references in their works that makes verifying their claims difficult or impossible. Furthermore, source evaluation is essential. Lately, notable Estonian historians have demonstrated very different attitudes towards the mass of historical works written during Soviet times. Magnus Ilmjärv has said that he does not agree with claims that all historical writings published in today’s Russia or from the Soviet era are filled only with lies. He said that “even in those works there are many correct approaches.”84 It is undoubtedly true that top-level research is published in Russia. There are certainly many truths contained in works from the Soviet era and maybe even some correct points of view. How much there is, is a question for which there is no simple answer. A detailed check of Soviet-era analyses would be an immense task, which is probably why only unusual factual errors are corrected in the current literature, but the works from the Cold War period are approached by topic, and propaganda writing is not analyzed comprehensively. A rare but significant example of a comprehensive approach is a monograph by Andrievs Ezergailis, a former history professor of

84 Anneli Ammas, ‘Saksa dokument kinnitab koostööd Eesti luurajatega’ (German Document Confirms the Cooperation with Estonian Intelligence), Eesti Päevaleht, 4 October 2007. The article is an interview with Magnus Ilmjärv.

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Ithaca College, published in 2005. Ezergailis has researched in detail the truthfulness of claims presented in the 1962 brochure Daugavas Vanagi: Who Are They? and has written about it: “The more I have delved into the topic, the more lies the brochure has revealed.”85 Therefore, when looking for truthful statements, it cannot be forgotten that these publications also include numerous lies. Active measures, as mentioned before, mean “the manipulative use of slogans, arguments, disinformation, and carefully selected truthful information.” Toomas Hiio has aptly stated that “turning black into white, based on works dating from Soviet times, might have helped in the poor time of the 1990s to overcome the lack of serious historical analysis, but in the long term it is not sustainable. Unavoidably, such a working method adopts factual errors of Soviet writers and the concept behind it.”86 One can only add that even professional historians old enough to know the peculiarities of the Soviet regime are not always able to solve the problems arising from the use of Soviet sources. In the future, when a new generation of historians has emerged, historians who have no firsthand experience of Soviet times and thus have less context for source evaluation, the search for “many truthful statements” from propaganda literature that was produced through the active measures of the KGB can threaten the objectivity of research.

85 Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation, p. 77. He writes: “maybe around 10% of claims is true, the rest are lies.... At some point when writing a research paper entitled ‘The Holocaust in Latvia’, I was thinking and arguing that around 75% of the brochure is true. That was in the beginning. The more I have delved into the topic, the more lies the brochure has revealed: photos and documents have been identified incorrectly, both the guilty and innocent have been incorrectly connected with the places and times of described crimes. It is only an opinion, because there is no methodology to calculate the ‘percentage of truth.’ An opinion can be exaggerated (this could maybe be verified by a person who knows as much or more about the Holocaust in Latvia, but currently there is no such person) and certainly it cannot be applied automatically to all of the historic writing published in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.” Ezergailis has presented these percentages in footnotes to demonstrate that there were many more lies in the brochure than one would initially assume. 86 Toomas Hiio, ‘Arvustus raamatule Eesti ajalugu VI: Vabadussõjast taasiseseisvumiseni’ (Review of the Book Estonian History VI: From the War of Independence until the ReEstablishment of Independence), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2007), no. 2, pp. 233–4.

Tiiu Kreegipuu

The Press in Soviet Estonia: A Tool of a Closed Society Abstract: The press had a distinct role to play in establishing ideological control in Soviet society. In addition to disseminating domestic propaganda, the press was also used as a means of waging ideological struggle in the confrontation between the superpowers. The paper is dedicated to dissecting these themes; the author concludes that, despite everything, the Soviet regime did not manage to gain complete control over the media.

Understanding the Role of the Soviet Press: Some Theoretical Aspects After World War II, the press in Estonia was incorporated into the Soviet media system and was pushed to play an important role in the Cold War. The longlasting conflict and constant opposition to the West clearly affected the level of everyday journalism, but the dichotomous worldview appears in historiographic perspectives as well. The latter aspect deserves our attention, as it affects the ways of interpreting the media’s role in Soviet Estonia to this day. Conventionally, the Soviet media is still pictured as a propaganda tool of Soviet communist ideology, having hardly anything to do with “real journalism.” This concept has been a part of the Western interpretation of Soviet society as totalitarian since the early Cold War (e.g., the influential Four Theories of the Press1). For decades Western researchers have acknowledged, if not the entire concept of the theories by Siebert at al., then the understanding of Soviet media

* The article is based on my doctoral thesis ‘The Ambivalent Role of the Estonian Press in the Implementation of the Soviet Totalitarian Project’ (Tartu, 2011). The dissertation was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory, CECT), research grant No. 5715 “Soviet Estonia 1944–1953: Mechanisms and Consequences of Sovietization in Estonia in the Context of the Development of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe” from the Estonian Science Foundation and the target financed project SF018002s07 “Actual Complexity of Cultural Communication and Methodological Challenges of Cultural Research.” 1 Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm, Four Theories of the Press (Chicago, 1956).

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functioning as merely the Communist Party’s (CP) propaganda tool, without any other acceptable function. The press, characterized as the CP’s “sharpest weapon,”2 was, according to this approach, deprived of most of the functions it has in a democratic society—such as acting as a free arena for critical debates or offering possibilities for open self-expression.3 On the other hand, the concepts of Siebert et al. were severely criticized even in the Cold War years as being too normative and making excessive generalizations. Representing a bipolar worldview, the four models reflect the Cold War dichotomy rather than critically exploring the functioning of media systems in different societies.4 The most-criticized aspect of the theories of Siebert et al. is the overly theoretical and philosophical approach and the concepts’ distance from real practices and examples.5 Such criticism inspired scholars to look for alternative explanation schemes for conceptualizing Soviet journalism. Since the 1970s, several studies in the West were published that go beyond the constraints of the totalitarian model and reveal new aspects.6 They paid more attention to the practical side of Soviet journalism and the actual functioning of the Party-controlled media. Instead of strictly contrasting the Western and Soviet media systems, researchers have found many similarities between them. As a result, different frameworks have been brought up. For example, Natalia Roudakova suggests a “model of political activism” that reveals multiple roles of the press and combines entitlement and empowerment of the press and journalists, indicating a wider view of the role of Soviet journalists.7 2 Paul Lendvai, The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News (London, 1981), p. 17. 3 On the functions of a democratic press, see, e.g., Denis McQuail, McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (London, 2010), p. 4. 4 Karol Jakubowicz and Miklós Sükösd (eds.), Finding the Right Place on the Map: Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective (Bristol-Chicago, 2008), pp. 25–6. 5 John C. Nerone, ed., Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press (Urbana-Chicago, 1995); Kaarle Nordenstreng, ‘Beyond the Four Theories of the Press’, Juha Koivisto and Epp Lauk (eds.), Journalism at the Crossroads: Perspectives on Research (Tartu, 1997), pp. 47–64. 6 For instance, Mark W. Hopkins, Mass Media in the Soviet Union (New York, 1970); Ellen Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public (New York, 1981); Thomas F. Remington, The Truth of Authority: Ideology and Communication in the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, 1988). 7 Natalia Roudakova, ‘Imagining Soviet Journalism’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, Montreal, Quebec, Canada,

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Instead of viewing them as dutifully fulfilling the forced tasks of the propagandist and agitator, she also sees them as mediators in the communication processes between the regime and the public. Like Roudakova, other authors have claimed that the journalists working in the Soviet system were not just passive messengers or Party propagandists but active communicators who participated in or even shaped state politics. For example, Thomas Wolfe, analyzing and describing Soviet journalism in the 1960s, views Soviet journalists as agents of government, proceeding from the Foucauldian term of “governmentality.”8 The role of Soviet journalists as social activators forming public opinion and stimulating people to be active Soviet citizens was even a part of the official Soviet journalism theory.9 Indeed, the Soviet ideologists’ expectations about “activating the public” were clear—journalists had to motivate people to support Soviet rule and to teach them to act as loyal Soviet citizens. In reality, many journalists interpreted their role as an activator differently, sometimes challenging rather than supporting the Soviet system. The interpretation of the role of Soviet journalists as active participators in social and political matters, however, cannot be applied to the Soviet media in general but could be associated with certain periods (e.g., the 1960s as a relatively liberal period) or certain media channels (e.g., the youth and cultural press). Proof that many Soviet journalists were at least potentially political and social activators was the breakdown of Soviet society and the control systems. As soon as control over the media was eased, the press could start fulfilling its role as the “pre-eminent institution of the public sphere”10 and launch the process of opening up the closed society. As Yassen Zassoursky claims, the Soviet case has proved historically that the press and media were the most important vehicles of open society.11 Thus the Soviet media as a system in general, including journalists personally, have been ascribed a wide range of roles, from loyal propagandists of the CP to the demolishers of the pillars of the Soviet system.

8 9 10 11

21 May 2008), available at http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p232702_index.html (last accessed 25 September 2009). Thomas C. Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism: The Press and the Socialist Person after Stalin (Bloomington-Indianapolis, 2005), pp. 16–7. Evgenii Prokhorov, Vvedenie v zhurnalistiku (Moscow, 1989), pp. 23–4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (CambridgeOxford, 1996), p. 81. Yassen N. Zassoursky, ‘Media and Communication as the Vehicle of the Open Society’, International Communication Gazette 64 (2002), no. 5, pp. 425–32, here p. 427.

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The same can be said about the Estonian press and journalists during the Soviet era and the Cold War. On the one hand, the Soviet regime was trying to build up a closed society, to gain total control over the society—in other words, to implement a totalitarian project.12 At the same time, the Estonian press and journalists continuously fought ideological pressure and managed not just to ignore but also resist its goals. Concerning closed society: as explained by Karl Popper and George Soros, it is a kind of system that is characterized by strict supervision and control by the ruling class, censorship over intellectual activities, and continuous propaganda aimed at molding and unifying the minds of the governed people.13 A closed society was supposed to support the power system, legitimize the Party state, and suppress alternative or dissenting voices. The latter aspect is closely related to the aforementioned attempts to mobilize the citizens for active participation in totalitarian societies,14 in which the ultimate goal of the leaders was not only to get people to tolerate the system silently but to educate them in the spirit of the CP ideology and to turn them into loyal and active Soviet citizens, carrying the mentality of loyal homo sovieticus.15 A notable aspect of the latter project (raising a new type of people) is the development of Soviet language. It is a peculiar phenomenon full of ideology, military terms, exaggerations, and slogan-like expressions. Echoing Orwell, Françoise

12 The “totalitarian project” is a theoretical concept applied in the current article as a framework for analyzing the roles of the Soviet Estonian press. It will be explained in more detail below. 13 Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (New York, 2005; first published in 1945); George Soros, Opening the Soviet System (London, 1990). 14 Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (London, 2000). 15 The term homo sovieticus was coined by Aleksandr Zinoviev, Russian expatriate philosopher and author, who created a distorted prototype of Soviet man in his novel Gomo sovieticus, which circulated in samizdat since 1982. According to Libor Brom in Dialectical Identity and Destiny: A General Introduction to Alexander Zinoviev’s Theory of the Soviet Man (1988), http://www.zinoviev.ru/en/writings/zinoviev-brom.html (last accessed on 25 April 2011), Zinoviev’s homo sovieticus is a fragmented, atomized, reified, alienated, exploited, and dehumanized man who is capable of irreversible submission, enslavement, aggression, and destruction. Later on, the term received many ambivalent interpretations, sometimes losing its dark sides and original ironic meaning. Today homo sovieticus is generally understood as an individual who is under the influence of Soviet ideology without any deeper analysis or critical contemplation and who behaves like a loyal Soviet citizen.

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Thom has named it “Soviet newspeak.”16 As Michael Smith has shown, the press specifically was the main tool for developing a communist language since the very beginning of the Soviet state.17 In reality, the goals of developing a popular language in the press were not achieved. Instead of “touching the reader,” the newspaper language remained unattractive to readers, impersonal, boring, difficult, and full of clichés and propagandistic slogans. The ideological political discourse came to dominate the journalistic discourse. In Estonia this domination was unshakeable until alternative discourses gradually started to appear in less-controlled newspapers in the late 1960s. Returning to more general terms—in perspectives of power institutions, the Sovietization of Estonian economics, politics, culture, and society definitively served the goal of building up a closed society. This would have been a crucial premise of turning Estonia into a fully integrated and loyal part of the Soviet Union. In reality these utopian goals—to homogenize the culturally, economically, and socially very different regions of the Soviet Union into an empire with a psychologically uniform population—were, naturally, never achieved. To claim that Soviet society was thus a total failure would be unfair as well. Several scholars have pointed out that Soviet Union has to be seen through a much more nuanced perspective. Instead of analyzing its politics or society through clear dichotomies such as oppression and resistance, truth and lies, official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, etc., we would do better to take a more ambivalent position, accepting the paradoxes and contradictions within Soviet society. For example, in spite of economic problems and constant control, people were not necessarily unhappy and waiting for the end of the empire. And the fact that people appreciated low prices or some personal privileges, and may even have wished to preserve the general situation as it was, did not rule out criticism of the Soviet system.18 One opportunity is to look at Soviet society not in terms of a model or system but as a process, not to apply any normative framework but to build up a more flexible agenda encompassing certain characteristics and typical processes and 16 Francoise Thom, Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism (London-Lexington, 1989). 17 Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR 1917–1953 (The Hague, 1998), p. 38. 18 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford-New York, 2001), p. 27; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton, 2006), p. 283.

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practices. For example, it would be thought-provoking to conceptualize Soviet society not as being totalitarian but as constantly moving towards it—in other words, to look at the Soviet society as a totalitarian project. The term “totalitarian project” has been used by many authors to characterize the Soviet Union, but also Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.19 John Gray, in criticizing the traditional model of totalitarianism, has formulated one of the most compact concepts: The totalitarian project is constituted by a single objective—that of merging state and society in a new order from which the conflicts of interest, purpose and value which are found in all historic societies have been extirpated. (…) The totalitarian project is the project of suppressing civil society—that sphere of autonomous institutions, protected by a rule of law, within which individuals and communities possessing divergent values and beliefs may coexist in peace.20

In addition to many other aspects of Soviet society, this framework helps us to explain the ambivalent role of the Soviet press in Estonia. The press was supposed to assist the regime to fulfill the ultimate totalitarian goal—to achieve complete control over society at every level. On the other hand, the project experienced many difficulties in fulfilling the totalitarian aims, which were never entirely achieved. There are three main advantages of the “project approach” over the “model approach.” First, the project approach enables us to make a distinction between the goals and the realization of expectations of the “project managers”—the CP nomenklatura. Leaving aside the attempt to look at the aims and ends as a whole enables us to describe both the principles and utopian ambitions on one side and their unclear outcomes and sometimes ineffective power practices on the other side. This aspect in particular—contradictions between goals, means, and the outcomes of power practices—has been one of the most problematic aspects of traditional approaches to totalitarianism and led to certain qualifications being put on theories. For example, John Keep, analyzing Stalinism, has concluded that the term “totalitarian” is relevant only to the CP’s “totalizing” aspirations but not to

19 John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London-New York, 1996); Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Beyond Glasnost: The Post-Totalitarian Mind (London, 1991); Johann P. Arnason, ‘Totalitarianism and Modernity: Franz Bokenau’s Totalitarian Enemy as a Source of Sociological Theorizing on Totalitarianism’, Achim Siegel (ed.), The Totalitarian Paradigm after the End of Communism (Amsterdam, 1998). 20 Gray, Post-Liberalism, p. 157.

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other elements of power practices (mechanisms of rule and the extensive controls over society) even during the most rigid period of Soviet history.21 Second, conceptualizing Soviet society as a project refers to a constant process, to various ongoing ideological, political, and social changes and transformations in the Soviet system. Therefore, the project approach, as opposed to the rigid framework of a “totalitarian society,” enables us to better explain the different opportunities and practices the Soviet regime offered during the changes in the social, political, and ideological spheres. Third, the totalitarian project is a sufficiently wide framework for combining the different aspects. It can be implied in studies of Soviet society, economics, culture, etc. In short, the totalitarian project is an umbrella term covering the whole variety of Soviet society. While the project approach might be criticized as not systematic enough or too diffuse, allowing various generalizations, it nevertheless offers excellent opportunities to analyze the Soviet media system. The Soviet press in Estonia was a perfect example of an institution designed as a centralized hierarchical model under strict control that never actually functioned according to expectations. Having analyzed the roles of the press in Soviet Estonia, I have no hesitation in using the concept of a totalitarian project. This approach combines both aspects—the ambitious, aggressive aspirations of the communist rulers and the realizations of their ambitions in practice. The press was a tool of the totalitarian project, subjected economically, politically, and ideologically to the CP. Yet at the same time, it was also an instrument to undermine the project by providing an arena for the emergence of a public sphere and opening up the closed society. These two antagonistic roles the Soviet press played in Estonia during the Soviet era will be characterized in the next part of this article.

The Estonian Press as a Part of the Soviet Media System The implementation of the totalitarian project in Estonia started right after the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1940. Every sphere of Estonian society was subjected to the rule and control of Soviet power institutions, headed by the CP. Along with restructuring the political system and the economy, the Party set basic principles and methods of ideological propaganda. The press was expected to play a vital role in that process by promulgating the new ideology daily and by establishing and broadening the contacts between people and the regime, more 21 John Keep, ‘Old Controversies, New Approaches’, Alter Litvin and John Keep (eds.), Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of theMillennium (London-New York, 2005), pp. 98–9.

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specifically, the Communist Party. Therefore the Soviet press was subordinated to the Party in all aspects; everything from the name of the newspaper to the conditions of hiring and firing the staff was decided by the Party institutions. In addition, other authorities and public institutions, above all the Soviet censorship office in Estonia (ESSR Glavlit), established on October 23, 1940,22 and the NKVD, later the MVD, or the KGB were also in command of the press. In 1940–41 and after World War II, all journalists who had worked in the independent Estonian press and did not collaborate with the Soviets were fired (many of them were arrested, deported, or executed), and only those who demonstrated loyalty to the new regime were hired.23 The press was turned into a Party press, and up to 10 percent of the Estonian Communist Party (ECP) members, mostly without any journalistic experience or skills, started working as journalists and editors-in-chief.24 After World War II the construction of the Soviet media system in Estonia continued, involving the Sovietization of institutions, publishing processes, journalism education, ideological principles, and journalistic practices. The Estonian press was annexed to the Soviet media system, encompassing all institutions and persons working in the field of journalism. The main building blocks of this enormous system were overwhelming propaganda, centralization and the hierarchical nature of the Soviet media system, Leninist principles of the press, and constant censorship. Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm explain that after the rigid Stalinist period, in which there was nearly total control over the press, a model of five levels of control and canonization of the Soviet press took shape.25 Although it is debatable whether every single newspaper or journal printed in the Soviet Union can be fitted into this model, the model nevertheless exposes the main traits of the Soviet media system—the general hierarchies of newspapers and journals, as well as the levels of importance of topics, genres, and authors, proved that the Soviet media system was an organized mechanism. Subjected to the control and guidance of

22 Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Nõukogude unelaadne elu: Tsensuur Eesti NSV-s ja tema peremehed (The Dream of Soviet Life: Censorship in the Estonian SSR and the Masters) (Tallinn, 1996), p. 123. 23 Epp Lauk, ‘How Will It All Unfold? Media Systems and Journalism Cultures in PostCommunist Countries’, Jakubowicz, Sükösd (eds.), Finding the Right Place on the Map, pp. 193–212, here pp. 196–7. 24 Veskimägi, Nõukogude unelaadne elu, p. 84. 25 Peeter Vihalemm and Marju Lauristin, ‘Eesti ühiskonna ja meedia muutumine 1965– 2004’ (Changes of Estonian Society and Media 1965–2004), Peeter Vihalemm (ed.), Meediasüsteem ja meediakasutus Eestis 1965–2004 (Tartu, 2004), pp. 4–69.

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the CP and Glavlit, the media system was also designed to be self-directing. The press of higher levels of ideological importance with the all-Union party press on the top (at the peak of the newspapers’ hierarchy was Pravda, the organ of the VKP(b)/CPSU Central Committee) was entitled to guide, teach, and even control the newspapers and journals on the lower levels. Despite centralization, a unified appearance, and general ideologization, the Soviet press was not totally homogeneous. Even the media system itself allowed some differences. The newspapers and journals were not all equally ideologically important; nor were they all under the same strict control. The strength of control and ideological pressure also largely depended on the general shifts in Soviet politics and changes among the power leaders. During the “softer” periods like the 1960s, moderate deviations from the rigid ideological line in the press were tolerated. In Estonia the generations of journalists educated at the University of Tartu, where the study of journalism started in 1954, played an extremely important role in these new developments. Epp Lauk points out that allowing an Estonian-language journalism program at Tartu State University was a slipup by the ideological supervisors of the time, who underestimated the importance of the mother tongue as a means of national survival and maintenance of a spirit of opposition to the ruling regime.26 Several examples (e.g., Estonian local newspapers and the cultural press since the 1960s) prove that the press did not function as a perfect propaganda weapon in the hands of the Party but at times deviated from this task in various ways.27 As Thomas Wolfe argues, “The Soviet press was by no means the kind of perfectly orchestrated machinery of persuasion depicted in totalitarian anti-utopian fiction like Orwell’s 1984.”28 To understand and analyze the systems controlling and guiding the Soviet press in Estonia, I have studied the records of the two main leading power institutions—the ECP29 and the Glavlit of the Estonian SSR.30 To identify the ECP’s mechanisms and practices of control and guidance over the press, I analyzed the 26 Lauk, ‘How Will It All Unfold’, p. 197. 27 See Epp Lauk and Tiiu Kreegipuu, ‘Was It All Pure Propaganda? Journalistic Practices of “Silent Resistance” in Soviet Estonian Journalism’, Acta Historica Tallinnensia 15 (2010), pp. 167–90. 28 Wolfe, Governing Soviet Journalism, p. 31. 29 The documents of various ECP institutions are preserved mostly in the Branch of the Estonian State Archives (Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal, ERAF). 30 The documents are preserved in the Estonian State Archives (Eesti Riigiarhiiv, ERA) f. R-17.

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agendas of minutes and shorthand notes of the meetings of the leading institution of the ECP CC (Central Committee)—its Bureau throughout the Soviet period in Estonia (1940–91).31 It is worth noting some distinctive features of Soviet official documents. First, all of these texts are deeply imbued with Soviet ideology. Even everyday working documents of the CP are full of ideological, often hollow expressions and slogans. In fact, the official and public language usage was ideologized in every sphere of Soviet society. Françoise Thom describes Soviet communist language as a wooden language that lacks real content, includes very little information, and serves as a vehicle of ideology.32 Therefore researchers should be attentive to the typical ideological schemes and constructions and look for the contents and information behind the dogmas and canonized expressions. As Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi has argued, the deciphering of communist rhetoric deserves more attention than just the translation of a Party decision.33 Second, access to many Party documents has been restricted, as they were not meant for public use. The third general aspect of Soviet official documentation is that a great amount of it is very laconic and declarative; important information is often missing or might be falsified. For example, the ECP CC Bureau protocols are strikingly laconic and bureaucratic, mostly just reflecting the agenda and decisions made. A bit more information about backgrounds and processes of decision-making can be found from the shorthand notes reflecting the discussions and opinions of Bureau members, but unfortunately not very often. Indeed, whether and to what extent the protocols and shorthand notes reflect what was really discussed or said during the meetings remains arguable. However, at least during the first years of Soviet rule, when the Estonian Soviet institutions were under tight control and the “constant care” of controllers from Moscow (the Estonian Bureau of the VKP(b) CC, operating during 1944–1947, and the Second Secretary of the ECP CC were appointed directly from Moscow until Stalin’s death in 1953), it is unlikely that the ECP CC Bureau dared to falsify the documents. It would have been complicated, as the representatives from the Moscow Bureau (members of the referred Estonian Bureau) usually participated in the Bureau meetings; in 1944–47, they missed only 10 ECP CC Bureau meetings out of 233.34 During de-Stalinization the control over the ECP 31 ERAF f. 1, n. 4. 32 Thom, Newspeak, pp. 13–15. 33 Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti Eesti NSV-d (How the Estonian SSR was Governed) (Tallinn, 2005), p. 346. 34 Tõnu Tannberg, ‘Moskva institutsionaalsed ja nomenklatuursed kontrollimehhanismid Eesti NSV-s sõjajärgsetel aastatel’ (Moscow’s Institutional and Nomenklatura Control

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CC Bureau was no longer so tight (the Estonian Bureau was closed in 1947), but Moscow’s control over the ECP CC and its Bureau documentation persisted. In addition, not all the documents have been kept in the archives. Many of them, especially the censorship materials, were not meant for long-term preservation, and they were destroyed during the Soviet era. Others were removed from Estonian archives and sent to Russia during the collapse of the Soviet institutional system. For example, when the ESSR Glavlit was disbanded in 1990, most of the censorship documents from the period of 1974–90 were sent to Moscow, and they are no longer available to Estonian researchers.35 Soviet bureaucracy produced so many papers that even to this day the Estonian archives have not been able to systematize and organize the former Party archives completely. Many important documents are kept in Russian archives—the central archives in Moscow and Leningrad. Unfortunately, access to Russian archives is limited; since 1993, but especially after the passing of the Archival Law of 2004, the Russian archives have gradually been closed again.36 Given all those peculiarities of Soviet-era official texts and documents, alternative sources should also be sought and used for more analytical research. Excellent empirical bases for revealing the “other side”—responses and reactions to the orders, guidelines, and restrictions by Party officials and censors—are the memoirs and biographies of journalists and editors.37 Biographical sources have their own specific aspects that researchers should take into account, such as subjectivity, selectiveness, and possible patterns of blaming or justification. However, biographical texts become a rich and useful material for a historian able to critically analyze narrated stories against their historical backgrounds and in comparison with Mechanisms of the Estonian SSR in the Postwar Years), idem (ed.), Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953: sovetiseerimise mehhanismid ja tagajärjed Nõukogude Liidu ja Ida-Euroopa arengute kontekstis (Tartu, 2007), pp. 225–72, here p. 237. 35 Peeter Maimik, ‘Eesti ajakirjandus nõukogude tsensuuri all’ (Estonian Journalism under Censorship), Eesti ajakirjanduse ajaloost 9 (1994), pp. 85–107, here p. 91. 36 Birgit Kibal et al., Juurdepääsupiirangud arhivaalidele Euroopas ja Venemaal: Ajalooline kujunemine ja tänapäev (Restrictions of Access to Archival Documents in Europe and in Russia: Historical Development and Today) (Tartu, 2005), p. 140. 37 Many of them have already been published. The most interesting memoirs and biographies include the collection of Estonian journalists’ biographies from the 20th century in three volumes published by the Tartu University Institute of Communication and Journalism and the Estonian Life Stories Association in 2004–09: Anu Pallas and Sulev Uus (eds.), Meie jäljed jäävad (Our Imprints Remain) (Tartu, 2004); Teelised helisillal (Companions on the Bridge of Sound) (Tartu, 2006); Kuidas vaatad, nõnda näed (How You Watch Is How You See) (Tartu, 2009).

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other sources. By balancing the individual life stories with other narratives and alternative sources, we can see general tendencies and find possible explanations. Finally, the Soviet newspapers and journals are, of course, also important sources. As public texts, they reflect the Soviet newspeak described above. However, not all newspaper or journal texts are equally uniform in their form and ways of expression. Examples from different newspapers or journals (national versus local; cultural and youth press versus the ECP CC’s publications) and different periods express the differences resulting from either the ideological importance of the publication or the ideological shifts of the period. Newspapers and journals from the Soviet period remain an interesting and probably inexhaustible database, with a rich range of texts, approaches, and examples.

The Ambivalent Role of the Press in Soviet Estonia 1. The Press as an Ideological Tool Implementing the Soviet Totalitarian Project According to the Soviet concept, the press was supposed to “spread economic, scientific-technical, cultural, and political propaganda; to inculcate communist morality and a scientific-atheist worldview; and to fight against bourgeois ideology.”38 The press as propagandist and agitator was expected to educate people in the spirit of communism, to spread the Party’s ideology, and educate the Soviet people to be loyal Soviet citizens carrying the mentality of homo sovieticus. The ideological propaganda tasks of the press were to be fulfilled by following certain rules—the “Leninist principles” of the press. These principles are not directly accountable to Lenin but were derived from the Leninist-Marxist theory of journalism. Therefore the number and selection of principles listed by different authors may vary, although they usually emphasize six principles: party-mindedness (partiinost’), a high level of ideology (ideinost’), truthfulness (pravdivost’), popular orientation (narodnost’), criticism and self-criticism (kritika i samokrtika), and mass character (massovost’).39 Sulev Uus, Estonian journalist and lecturer of 38 Mikhail Skulenko, Zhurnalistika i propaganda (Kiev, 1987), pp. 42–50. 39 Translating those dogmatic Soviet terms is problematic, as the words reflect neither the real meanings nor the practical implementation of the principles. I have used English phrases following the translations of Mark Hopkins (Mass Media in the Soviet Union [New York, 1970]) and Brian McNair (Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Soviet Media [London-New York, 1991]). However, for partiinost’, I chose “party-mindedness,” as the translations of Hopkins (“party orientation”) and McNair (“partiality”) were too narrow and inaccurate given the focus of the current paper.

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journalism at Tartu State University, has added one more ­category—­transmitting information quickly (operatiivsus).40 This addition is, on the one hand, logically derived from the general Soviet journalism concept—the Soviet press was supposed to respond quickly and efficiently to every problem. On the other hand, this principle faces one of the paradoxes of the Soviet system—the combination of limited access to information, censorship, and multiple controls had the effect of slowing down the editing and publishing processes. The prominence Sulev Uus gave this subject in a textbook for university students may be interpreted as encouragement for future journalists to take initiative and write on everyday issues and not always wait for official decisions and solutions. The fact that the set of principles was not rigidly set can be illustrated by one more variation of the Leninist principles, given in a 1988 textbook of Soviet journalism. The list is longer, consisting of nine principles: party-mindedness, popular orientation, democratism (demokratizm), mass character, patriotism (patriotizm), internationalism (internatsionalizm), humanism (gumanizm), truthfulness, and objectivity (ob’’ektivnost’).41 Apparently all of the previously mentioned guidelines are represented (except the high level of ideology, probably because it had to be reflected in any other principle anyway). In addition, some new requirements are phrased to take account of shifts in the national and international politics of the Soviet Union (e.g., patriotism, internationalism) but also changes in journalism itself (e.g., humanism can be associated with the growing trend of publishing media texts representing an individual and personal focus, giving the “human” perspective). But still the one principle presiding over the rest is party-mindedness, which allegedly embraces all the other principles. Indeed, another Soviet author, Riabokliach, has stated that party-mindedness should not and could not be artificially separated from the other principles.42 The CP was always of overwhelming importance in controlling and supervising the press, both at institutional and personal levels. In Estonia, the most important Party institution governing the press was the ECP CC and its Bureau. The everyday work of controlling and guiding the press was assigned to the ECP CC Propaganda and Agitation Department. As is well known, the ECP CC exercised direct daily control over all kinds of media, 40 Sulev Uus, ‘Nõukogude ajakirjanduse teooria ja praktika’ (Theory and Practice of Soviet Journalism), Juhan Peegel (ed.), Ajaleht: Õppevahend ajakirjanike kvalifikatsiooni tõstmise kursustele (Tartu, 1970), pp. 24–86, here pp. 35–6. 41 Evgenii Prokhorov, Vvedenie v zhurnalistiku (Moscow, 1988), p. 144. 42 A. Riabokliach, Partiinost’ – osnovnoi printsip kommunisticheskoi i sovetskoi pechati. Avtoreferat (Kiev, 1955), p. 4.

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demanding work plans and monitoring them, commenting on the content of articles and programs, and adjudicating errors and complaints.43 Since I was more interested in details of how the ECP CC and its highest echelon—the Bureau—carried out their everyday work, I have studied the agendas, minutes, and shorthand notes of the meetings of the Bureau.44 In general, the documents show how the Bureau tried to use the press to achieve control over society, to work for the implementation of the totalitarian project, reflecting the routine everyday work of “guiding the press” but also revealing the Bureau’s reactions to problems and “ideological errors” of the Soviet Estonian press. On the basis of Bureau documentation, CP supervision over the press can be divided into two broad spheres: administrative and ideological (if considering the topic of discussed themes not the general ideological essence reflected in almost every routine practice of the Bureau). Comparing the time spent and quantity of the issues on the agenda, the administrative work (such as starting and closing newspapers and journals; and determining volumes, prices, and circulation numbers) clearly dominated the ideological work (such as formulating and sending out guidelines, and discussing the “political and ideological errors” in the press). In order to systematize the findings from the ECP CC Bureau documents, I have used the previously described Leninist principles of the press (presented in Table 1).

43 Svennik Høyer, Epp Lauk and Peeter Vihalemm (eds.), Towards a Civic Society: The Baltic Media’s Long Road to Freedom; Perspectives on History, Ethnicity and Journalism (Tartu, 1993), p. 186. 44 The materials of the ECP CC Bureau are preserved at ERAF f. 1, n. 4. The records of Bureau sessions have also been published: Tõnu Tannberg (ed.), EKP KK büroo istungite regestid I–III (Session Records of ECP CC Bureau I–III) (Tartu, 2006–2011).

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Table 1: The practices of implementation of the Leninist principles of Soviet journalism by the Bureau of the ECP CC Leninist principles*

General practices of the principles

Party-mindedness All newspapers and journals (partiinost’) were the “organs” of the CP.

Practices reflected in the documents of the Bureau of the ECP CC The Bureau guided and controlled all the press in Estonia—the newspapers and journals of the ECP CC itself directly, the rest of the press through the Party’s sub-institutions.

The CP directed and controlled the press ideologically and economically by giving orders and guidelines; if necessary, by prohibiting and punishing.

The supervision of the Bureau on two levels: routine work (approving and monitoring the work plans, reports, composition of editorial staff, circulation numbers, etc.) and casebased work (discussing “ideological mistakes,” certain newspapers, etc.).

Editors and journalists were expected to be members of the CP.

Editors-in-chief of the central press were included in the ECP CC nomenklatura. The Bureau nominated, hired, and fired editorsin-chief and organized meetings and courses for editors and journalists for ideological education. CP units of editorial offices were under the supervision of the Bureau (the Bureau approved the plans, controlled the reports, and so on). The Bureau was following the execution of the ideological directives of the ECP CC, the CPSU CC, and other important institutions by the Estonian press. The Bureau gave ideological content to the press by formulating decrees, etc. The Bureau of the ECP CC worked as a censor in ideological matters controlling Glavlit and supervising the CC Propaganda Department. Sometimes individual problematic cases were also discussed at Bureau meetings.

A CP unit was founded in editorial offices of every publication. High level of Party ideology was the most ideology (ideinost’) important feature in the content and appearance of the press; ideological slogans and symbols. The CP set the principles of ideological censorship and also did the practical censoring work.

264 Leninist principles* Popular orientation** (narodnost’)

Truthfulness (pravdivost’)

Tiiu Kreegipuu General practices of the principles

Practices reflected in the documents of the Bureau of the ECP CC All media in the Soviet Union The Bureau controlled and belonged to the people—i.e., distributed the economic resources it was nationalized and in the publishing process and press in controlled by the CP. general (such as the amount of paper, sizes of salaries, and honorariums). Each social group in the All changes in the settings of Soviet Union was supposed newspapers and journals published to have a newspaper or in Estonia were decided at the Bureau journal of its own. on the basis of regional and social principles. The press had to be easily The Bureau audited the volumes, accessible for masses of print runs, and prices of the press people. and controlled the subscription campaigns. The press showed close The Bureau controlled whether and contacts with the audiences. how the editorial boards worked Every newspaper had a net of with the correspondents. The Bureau correspondents. also organized “conferences for the readers” to educate the audiences of the press ideologically. The press was supposed The Bureau demanded from the press to present socialist reality the presentation of an ideal picture instead of what really existed. of reality. A great deal of information The press was to be close to was hidden, and some topics (e.g., real life: i.e., to seem realistic foreign news, the life of Estonian and not too philosophical. refugees) were distorted or forbidden. Access to information The Bureau regarded the cases was restricted; the press when information from TASS could only use controlled was misprinted or misinterpreted information channels (TASS as serious ideological errors. The and ETA). problems of the local information agency ETA were frequently discussed.

The Press in Soviet Estonia Leninist principles*

General practices of the principles

Criticism and self- Newspapers were obliged criticism (kritika i to criticize everything samokritika) ideologically wrong, antisocialist, harmful to the Soviet regime, etc., in society and the press.

265

Practices reflected in the documents of the Bureau of the ECP CC The Bureau closely monitored all critical comments about the Estonian SSR published in the central press (especially in Pravda) and demanded responses to the criticism. The Bureau demanded that Estonian newspapers, with Rahva Hääl at the top, be similarly critical.

Source: Agenda, Minutes and Shorthand notes of ECP CC Bureau of 1940–91, ERAF f. 1, n. 4. *As mentioned earlier, translating the principles into English is problematic. Therefore, the respective terms in Russian are presented in parentheses after the term in English. ** Because the practices implementing and reflecting the principles often intermingled and overlapped, I have included the sixth principle of “mass character” under the principle of “popular orientation.”

The third column of this table is a condensation of the most common practices that are reflected in the ECP CC archival documents. Possibly many routine or, for that matter, extraordinary practices were not documented at all. However, the amount of agenda points dealing with press-related topics proves that the Bureau constantly controlled and guided newspapers and journals as tools of realizing the totalitarian project. To explain how this was done, I will give some explanatory comments. • Party-Mindedness Most of the practices of the Bureau in guiding the press concerned the publications of the ECP CC itself—the Estonian-language newspaper Rahva Hääl (People’s Voice), the Russian-language newspaper Sovetskaia Estonia (Soviet Estonia), and the journal Eesti Kommunist (Estonian Communist). The most common press-related issue at the Bureau meetings was examining and approving the plans of ECP CC publications. The discussion of plans was listed in agendas on a regular basis: in the 1950s and 1960s it occurred monthly, and afterwards, as the process became more formal, it was gradually put on an annual basis. In addition to routine matters, the Bureau’s documents also reveal cases of what were called “ideological mistakes” in the press. The more problematic publications were those not directly subjected to the ECP—e.g., the cultural weekly Sirp ja Vasar (Sickle and Hammer), the organ of the ESSR Ministry of Culture; or Noorte Hääl (Voice of Youth), the organ of the ESSR Komsomol. Both these newspapers were repeatedly discussed at Bureau meetings, as they were accused of insufficient ideological content and a failure to address political mistakes. The

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representatives of the responsible institutions (ministry or Komsomol) were then called to the Bureau meetings, mostly to provide explanations but also to listen to the charges, admit the mistakes, and face punishments (usually Party punishments such as warnings, reprimands, and other bureaucratic means). Understanding that guidance and control was easier through the Party’s suborganizations, the CP recruited editors and journalists. In fact, CP membership was more an obligation than a choice for leading journalists and editors-in-chief of the all-republican press. In some cases editors managed to evade this pressure and did not join the CP, risking the loss of some privileges but preserving at least some independence from the Party. • High Level of Ideology The ideological pressure on the press was especially intense as the Soviet power structures and institutional system were being established in the second half of the 1940s. Since the VKP(b) decree “On the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad” of August 14, 1946, a series of ideological attacks against the intelligentsia and press were launched all over the Soviet Union, including Estonia. Soon afterwards, on August 28, the Bureau of the ECP CC issued a decree “On Improvement of the Ideological Work” with a plan of practical measures.45 According to this plan, the major ideological work in Estonia was to be done by the press and journalists as “workers on the ideological front.” The plan foresaw the organization of special meetings and courses on ideological topics and propaganda work for journalists. It obliged the Propaganda Department of the ECP CC to discuss as quickly as possible issues such as the working plans of all newspapers, contents of journals, and working practices in editorial offices. Similar decisions—setting ideological guidelines, giving assignments and obligations to journalists—were issued throughout the Soviet period. After the Stalinist years, the ideological attacks and campaigns launched by the Bureau became rarer and more tempered. However, the importance of maintaining the high level of ideology was constantly emphasized in practically every press-related discussion in the Bureau. • Popular Orientation The Soviet Union was governed according to the doctrine of “democratic centralism.” In governing the press, centralism manifested itself in a centralized

45 Appendix to protocol of ECP CC Bureau meeting from 28 August 1946, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 319, l. 29–44.

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hierarchical media system. Democracy was expressed in the slogan “A newspaper for every social group!” In reality, this slogan remained hollow—all newspapers and journals were quite uniform, and the dominance of political ideology in form, topics, and style was obligatory for every publication at least until the 1960s. Even at the meetings of the Bureau, participants occasionally complained that newspapers repeated each other and questioned if it was wise to cover the same topics (or even reprint the same texts) simultaneously in the all-Estonian and local press. For example, when deciding to close down Talurahvaleht (Peasants’ Paper) in April 1951, the main argument in the Bureau’s report to the CPSU CC was that the newspaper had lost its audience, as it was just repeating the materials published by the all-republican and local press.46 In fact, another aspect, not mentioned at the Bureau, was that calling the audience “peasants” was no longer appropriate in 1951, two years after the forced collectivization of agriculture. This social group was wiped out after years of psychological and physical repressions (including the mass deportation of 1949); instead of farms and peasants, the Soviet agriculture was built around kolkhozes and sovkhozes. Symptomatically of hypocritical Soviet democracy, the fact that an entire social group was almost eliminated was not mentioned; the Bureau just regarded the use of this word as inappropriate for a newspaper title. Gradually the variety of newspapers expanded. In parallel with the development of the hierarchy of newspapers and journals, the differences between the central and local press grew. The best example is the Tartu County and city paper Edasi (Forward), where various different styles and genres were used and less political, more human-interest topics were covered.47 Another frequent issue concerning popular orientation discussed at the Bureau was the distribution of Soviet newspapers. To ensure that people would actually buy and read the newspapers, their circulation numbers were large and their prices were very low. In addition to the regular auditing of these numbers, the Bureau also organized campaigns to distribute the newspapers. Indeed, during the initial months of re-establishing Soviet rule in Estonia, in November 1944, the Bureau decided that the CP county organizations had to organize a “month of distributing the newspapers in villages” and arrange a campaign called “A Newspaper for Every

46 Report to VKP(b) CC Secretary Comrade Malenkov. Appendix to protocol of ECP CC Bureau meeting from 2 April 1951, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 122, l. 96. 47 The case of Edasi has been analyzed in my article ‘Parteilisest tsensuurist Nõukogude Eestis’ (On Party Censorship in Soviet Estonia), Methis 7 (2011), no. 1, pp. 26–40.

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Family!”48 In subsequent years such massive campaigns were no longer organized, but promulgating and controlling the subscription and retail processes of the press was a recurring item on the Bureau’s agenda. The problem the Bureau faced was that people were more interested in the local press, while the central newspapers, especially the ones not in Estonian (including Pravda), were not read particularly eagerly. For example, the “worrying situation of Pravda subscriptions in Narva, Kohtla-Järve, and Tallinn” was discussed in 1967. The solution, according to the decision passed by the Bureau, was to “take much more decisive measures” and “to send comrade members of the ECP CC to the cities mentioned.”49 The clearest expression of a publication’s popular orientation was demonstrating close contacts with the readers. The Party tried to present the communicative role of the Soviet press as a bilateral one. On the one hand, the press had to cover the topics close to the “ordinary working people,” and journalists were obliged to have direct contacts with their readers. To fulfill the latter task, “readers’ conferences” were organized by the Bureau in order to bring together readers and journalists, but also to arrange ideological propagandistic education for both. At the same time the press had to acquire a “popular” image by involving its readers in journalistic work by building up a large network of correspondents. Problems with the network of correspondents, like contacts being too infrequent or a small number of contacts per editorial office, were often discussed at the Bureau. Analyzing those cases in retrospect, it should be noted that the Bureau made its conclusions mostly on the basis of reports and numbers sent by editorial offices that did not necessarily reflect the real situation. According to the journalists’ memoirs, the “direct contacts” were often fabricated, and the “readers’ letters” were edited thoroughly or sometimes even written by the members of the editorial staff, as the real problems or complaints in the readers’ letters often could not be published.50 • Truthfulness Truthfulness was probably the most hypocritical principle of the Soviet journalism concept. The task of the press was not to reflect authentic life but to show a picture of the ideal “socialist reality,” i.e., to distort (and sometimes hide) the truth instead 48 For more details, see Tiiu Kreegipuu, ‘Eesti NSV trükiajakirjanduse parteilise juhtimise üldised põhimõtted’ (The Foundations of Party Control of Print Media in the Estonian SSR), Ajalooline Ajakiri (2009), nos. 1/2, pp. 155–78. 49 Protocol of ECP CC Bureau meeting from 16 August 1967, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 3536, l. 105. 50 See Kreegipuu, ‘Eesti NSV trükiajakirjanduse’.

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of pursuing and presenting it. The “shortcomings” described or “revealed” in the press were often standardized and simplified cases brought up just as cautionary examples without deeper analysis. When journalists happened to dig too deep and came close to uncovering the reasons for the problems instead of skimming the surface, the censors had to intervene. The Bureau frequently discussed the “mistakes” and “distortions of reality” in the press—in fact often those cases when journalists had gotten too close to the truth. If the truth was not in sync with the Soviet ideology and criticized the shortcomings of the Soviet regime and system, it was labeled an ideological mistake. Information for publishing in the press had to come from accepted sources— the all-Union news agency TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union) and its local branch ETA (Estonian Telegraph Agency) in Estonia. All the international, central, and republican information was to be taken from controlled channels like these; searching for and using alternative sources was acceptable only regarding local news or problems. The Bureau constantly emphasized the importance of “selecting the sources carefully in order to present the truthful picture of reality.” Changing or condensing the information given by TASS or ETA sometimes resulted in serious consequences and even punishments. For example, when Noorte Hääl shortened a TASS announcement on 14 June 1947, the Bureau considered it a “brutal political mistake,” and the editor was reprimanded.51 • Criticism and Self-Criticism Criticism and self-criticism were important elements of the Soviet journalism concept. Through criticism the press was expected to help the Soviet regime fight its “enemies” both outside and inside the USSR. While the background idea of the “critical press” was definitely “to disclose hostile and detrimental elements,” journalists often exploited the “weapon of critique” in wider terms. Estonian journalists learned to use the criticism not just against something or somebody but also in favor of “the little man,” to help him to cope with his everyday life. For example, a journalist of the agricultural department of Edasi in the 1960s recalls: In these times, there were still many heads of collective farms and state farms whom the Party had appointed during Stalin’s time, and who were ignorant and incompetent and did not manage their jobs well. I think my articles contributed to their removal. It was necessary to get rid of them in order to go further.52

51 Protocol of ECP CC Bureau meeting from 18 August 1947, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 432, l. 165–6. 52 Ülo Kalm, ‘Agronoomina ajakirjanduspõllul’ (As an Agronomist in the Field of the Press), Pallas, Uus (eds.), Kuidas vaatad, nõnda näed, pp. 175–93, here pp. 182–3.

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An important aspect of the Soviet criticism principle was that the press could not criticize everything and everybody on an equal basis. It was definitely not allowed to criticize either the leading power institutions and their leaders or the principles of the Soviet system. For example, Glavlit banned two articles slated for publication in the satirical journal Pikker in 1972. According to the report by Arnold Adams, the then-head of the Estonian Glavlit, in those articles “the system of planning was criticized as a whole instead of aiming the critique against the low working discipline of the people and shortcomings that hold back the fulfillment of the plans.”53 The example above leads us to another important branch of the control system over the Soviet press. In addition to the Party institutions, the press was constantly controlled by the censors of Glavlit, who were actually doing most of the everyday censoring work. Similar to the CP, the censorship institutions constituted a multilevel hierarchical institutional system, with organizations at central and local levels. But the Party, known as the censor of censors, dominated and guided all institutions, including Glavlit.54 To conclude, the documents of the leading Party institution in Estonia, the Bureau of the ECP CC, clearly demonstrate how the Party was trying to stick to the totalitarian project by using constant ideological pressure and attempts to keep the press under control. The ideological party-minded press was supposed to help to build socialism in Estonia; to legitimate the Soviet power institutions; to preserve the regime; and to educate the people to behave, act, and think as loyal Soviet citizens.

2.  The Soviet Estonian Press as a Tool of Cultural Resistance Although the Estonian press was controlled and supervised by the CP, it would not be fair to describe the press just in terms of a communist propaganda tool, as the examples above show. A wider perspective should be applied, taking into consideration that the Estonian media was not totally uniform throughout the entire Soviet era. Even within the massive Soviet media system, some variations appeared due to the general ideological shifts and changes in the institutional system. For example, the easing of ideological pressure and the relative loosening of censorship rules during the Khrushchev era was crucial to the development of

53 Secret letter of A. Adams, head of ESSR Glavlit, to ECP CC secretary V. Väljas from 15 October 1973, ERA f. R-17, n. 13, s. 90, l. 8. 54 Kreegipuu, ‘Parteilisest tsensuurist’.

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the Estonian press. Journalists started to widen their roles and functions beyond the prescribed propagandistic-ideological one. Another set of factors enabling the Estonian press to broaden its functions resulted from distinct local and national circumstances, above all the preservation of the Estonian language in the press as a source of national resistance. One more aspect worth noting is that Estonia was more open to Western influence than the other Soviet republics were. Thanks to personal contacts (Estonian emigrants) and Western media channels that were partly accessible in Estonia (radio channels like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and Finnish TV), part of the population was able to broaden the limits of knowledge and experience the Soviet regime had set, and develop critical thinking.55 As a result, it became increasingly difficult for ideologists and controllers to force the press to fulfill the totalitarian project. Even the extensive hierarchically regulated Soviet media system could not put the Soviet press to work in the desired directions effectively enough. On the contrary, the system suffered from many weaknesses internally, leading to both unintentional and deliberate abuse of rules and ideological demands. The main feature that sometimes appeared to complicate or even impede the control and guidance system over the press was its massive size. Above all, the multiplicity of the institutions and growing bureaucracy made the system slow and sometimes ineffective. The institutional system controlling the media, giving orders to editorial offices, and calling journalists and editors to account consisted of several Party and government organizations on local, republican, and all-Union levels. The hierarchies and power relations between these institutions were not always clear. The multiple chains of command were often overlapping, and tasks given to the press might contradict each other. On one hand, the system of double control put a lot of pressure on the press; on the other hand, it left many loopholes in the system for the press to slip through.

55 The influence of the Western media in the Soviet Union, especially in its western parts, has been pointed out as remarkable by many researchers (e.g., Yurchak, Everything Was Forever; Kotkin, Armageddon Averted; Simo Mikkonen, ‘Radio Liberty: The Enemy Within? The Dissemination of Western Values through US Cold War Broadcasts’, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studie multiethnical Upsaliensia 18 (Uppsala, 2010), pp. 243–57; Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Trophy Films and Western Radio Broadcasting as a Window to the World in Post-War Estonia’, idem (ed.), Central and Eastern European Media under Dictatorial Rule and in the Early Cold War (Frankfurt, 2011), pp. 61–73; Mati Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek. 1978. aasta poliitilisest pööripäevast 1988. aasta Suveräänsusdeklaratsioonini (Kalevipoeg Returns Home: From the Day of Political Change in 1978 until the Declaration of Sovereignty in 1988) (Tallinn, 2008).

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Those weaknesses were used by Estonian journalists and editors quite successfully. Journalism that did not support the regime, but ignored or sometimes even questioned the supremacy of the ideology and the CP, appeared in the official press in Estonia. As this kind of behavior did not support but undermined the main purpose set by the regime—implementing the totalitarian project inside media and in society in general via media channels—those acts can be regarded as forms of “silent resistance.” That did not necessarily mean deliberately and clearly opposing the regime but often just ignoring the ideological aspects. Still, in most cases such testing of the borders of allowed and forbidden and looking for opportunities to evade the authorities’ scrutiny resulted in serious consequences for the journalists. Therefore, cases of challenging the control system were not particularly frequent. Judging by the Party documents and archival materials of Glavlit, cases of “mistakes and ideological errors in the press” seem to be relatively rare. Most likely, the sources do not reflect the complete range of practices. The controlling institutions could document only the cases that they caught. We do not know how many other cases of “silent resistance” slipped past the censors. Sometimes editors and journalists also got punished for unintentional errors. However, comparing the censorship documents, gathering additional data from other sources, and interviewing veteran journalists enables us to outline some typical practices used for expressing disagreement with the ruling regime. Journalists challenged the controllers by exploiting the imperfections of the censorship mechanism, by enlarging the amount of journalistic discourse at the expense of political discourse, and by writing between the lines. Various discursive and editorial practices confirm the earlier findings about journalists’ adaptation to the cumbersome conditions of the Soviet media system. Among the discursive practices, the more frequent were contrasting the journalistic discourse with the political one and using intertextuality by mixing the two; choosing the “right” voice acceptable to the censors; stressing the individual perspective instead of the collective one; and the use of Aesopian language and analogies to hide the meaning between the lines or to transfer sensitive topics to other contexts. The editorial practices include various factors: the “human factor,” the “time factor” of leaving sensitive articles and topics to the last minute, and the “format factor,” using the fact that censorship did not treat all newspapers and journals with equal strictness but prioritized them according to their ideological

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importance.56 In addition, the editors managed to play hide-and-seek with the censors and take advantages of the shortcomings of the huge bureaucratic system described above. One example that “constant control” was not necessarily so steady is that in February 1968, when Edasi was placed under closer supervision after irritating the control organs with its journalistic experiments, the newspaper was published without pre-publication censorship. The newspaper issues did not have the censor’s label. According to the memories of an old journalist working at the time in the editorial board, the censor was on her maternity leave, and for a short period, no replacement was found.57 The last example proves once again that the Soviet media system, although rigid, was not a perfectly functioning mechanism. Still, the basic principles of censorship were consistently strict and intolerant. At the same time, the variety of practices of resistance proves that not all journalists and editors dutifully followed the ideological demands. Alongside a small group of conformists and nomenklatura journalists, a remarkable number of editors and reporters dared to test the limits of what was allowed, and what was not, without openly confronting the system.58 Journalists tried to avoid a strong personal involvement in the system, preferring apolitical topics and emphasizing general human and moral values.59 In most cases, the main goal of journalists was not to attack the regime but to avoid contributing to propaganda journalism as much as possible and to follow their professional aspirations. An older-generation journalist recalls in his memoirs: We made an abrupt change in our newspaper and introduced a policy of following the readers’ interests and not those of the authorities. This “heresy” did not, however, extend to a mutiny against the almighty totalitarian system. We were inspired by the natural aspiration of a professional journalist to make a good newspaper that people read, value, and like.60

As this quotation suggests, journalists disliked imbuing their work with ideology, but they still had to obey the Party guidelines if they wanted to keep their jobs. 56 Those strategies are explained more closely in Lauk and Kreegipuu, ‘Was It Pure Propaganda?‘ 57 Sulev Uus, ‘Leheneegri leivas’ (In the Bread of a Hack Writer), Pallas, Uus (eds.), Kuidas vaatad, nõnda näed, pp. 218–60, here p. 244. 58 Epp Lauk, ‘Estonian Journalists in Search of New Professional Identity’, Javnost: The Public 3 (1996), no. 4, pp. 93–106. 59 Epp Lauk, ‘The Antithesis of the Anglo-American News Paradigm: News Practices in Soviet Journalism’, Svennik Hoyer and Horst Pöttker (eds.), Diffusion of the News Paradigm 1850–2000 (Göteborg, 2005), pp. 169–83, here p. 181. 60 Uus, ‘Leheneegri leivas’, p. 231.

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The most important cause for the emergence of alternative journalistic practices was the maintenance of cultural resources of resistance. Instead of mechanically adopting the Soviet ideological thinking models and behavioral schemes, people developed “double-thinking.”61 People learned not just to act but also to think differently in public and private spheres. This kind of “double-thinking” appeared in the press as well. As a result, the Soviet press in Estonia did not function purely as a Soviet “brainwashing machine” but was simultaneously a tool of cultural resistance, as pointed out by many researchers.62 Analyzing the documents of the controlling institutions allows us to identify some practices of “silent resistance” in the press. But it is necessary to point out that the documented cases of deviations from the “correct ideological course” were not particularly effective. In fact, they represent failed attempts, which resulted in the punishment of the journalists, editors, or censors. However, they attest to the existence of a certain amount of “silent resistance.” It is highly likely that many similar cases were not disclosed, since the limits between ideologically “correct” and “wrong” were not always easy to define even for the censors or Party ideologists. Still—without making hasty conclusions—it seems evident that a “silent resistance” (understood as not following uncritically the course set by ideologists) existed. This in turn confirms that the Estonian press did not perfectly serve the ideological purposes of the totalitarian project and, on many occasions, even undermined it.

Conclusion The Soviet regime managed to create an ideological party-minded press and an overwhelming Soviet censorship system that were used to implement the totalitarian project—an attempt to achieve total control over every sphere of Soviet life. Realizing that ambitious project in the media meant trying to turn the whole Soviet media system into a brainwashing mechanism. Given the various journalistic practices of either ignoring or even resisting those attempts, the results of this project remained questionable. Instead of becoming solely a propaganda

61 Aili Aarelaid, Cultural Trauma and Life Stories (Helsinki, 2006). 62 Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm, ‘Recent Historical Developments in Estonia: Three Stages of Transition (1987–1997)’, Marju Lauristin (ed.), Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian Post-Communist Transition (Tartu, 1997), pp. 73–126; here p. 75; Rein Ruutsoo, ‘Estonia’, Detlef Pollack and Jan Wielgohs (eds.), Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe (Hampshire, 2004), pp. 119–40, here p. 126.

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tool of the Communist Party and Soviet power, the press learned multiple roles. A certain silent cultural opposition developed, mainly from out of the Soviet system itself. Thus the totalitarian project was not successful, at least not in every aspect of Soviet society. Although the economic, political, and institutional systems were Sovietized, the ideological achievements in the cultural and psychological spheres were far less successful, if not a failure. It is easy to agree with John Gray, who argues that “whereas the totalitarian project succeeded in many instances, e.g., destroying civil society, it has nowhere forged a new humanity and the project turned out to be a stupendous failure in general.”63 Indeed, civil society in its classical form was suppressed under the Soviet regime. Instead of the public sphere being open for critical debates, a closed society was developed where public initiative was suppressed and all freedoms, including the freedom of the press, were seriously restricted. The ideological pressure and the terror of the Stalinist years definitely spread fear among the people but did not much contribute to reaching a uniform “communist awareness” and forming a united and loyal Soviet people. The failure of the totalitarian project in media became clearest during the perestroika period, when dissenting voices became public and the potential of the suppressed civil society was revived. During the breakdown of the Soviet regime, the potential of the Estonian press to play an active role in opposing Soviet rule became obvious. As Peeter Vihalemm argues: “… along with the traditional network of cultural associations, the media was the most important social mechanism used for the political breakthrough in the Baltic societies. Ironically enough, the Leninist concept of media as ‘a collective propagandist and organizer of the masses’ was implemented in full against the regime created by the Communist Party.”64 Thus the press gradually became an arena of dissenting voices in Soviet society. In conclusion, the press in Soviet Estonia simultaneously played two rather contradictory roles. First, it served as a propaganda tool for strengthening the power of the CP; and second, it indirectly resisted the same power.

63 Gray, Post-Liberalism, p. 157. 64 Peeter Vihalemm (ed.), Baltic Media in Transition (Tartu, 2002), p. 26.

Vahur Made

Cold War-Era Germany and Eastern Europe in the Reports by Karl Selter, Ludvig Jakobsen, and Elmar Reisenberg to the Estonian Consulate General in New York Abstract: The article expands the examination that has been conducted to date of Estonian expatriates’ foreign policy struggle. It considers the activity of Karl Selter, Ludvig Jakobsen, and Elmar Reisenberg, who represented Estonians in West Germany during the Cold War. Their views on international and European politics are analyzed. While major European countries served as models and sources of support in the interwar period, the USA and NATO were seen as Estonia’s primary allies during the Cold War.

The status of Karl Selter, Ludvig Jakobsen, and Elmar Reisenberg, the men who represented Estonians in West Germany during the Cold War years, has been interpreted in different ways. From the standpoint of Johannes Kaiv and Ernst Jaakson, Estonia’s consuls general in New York, as well as of Estonia’s other foreign representatives who operated in exile during the Cold War, these three men were “Estonia’s representatives in Germany”1—Selter in 1952–58, Jakobsen in 1958–61, and Reisenberg in 1963–88. The biographical encyclopedia of Estonia’s foreign service refers to Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg each as “unofficial representative to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.” The encyclopedia also mentions that the authorities of the German Federal Republic, primarily the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bonn, agreed to recognize the three men as the “protectors of the interests of citizens of the Republic of Estonia.”2 Tiit Matsulevitš, who was the first to take up the office of ambassador to Germany of the Republic of Estonia after the restoration of Estonian independence in 1991, fails to mention Reisenberg in his memoirs. Matsulevitš also does not indicate any sort of recognition or tradition of communication between Estonia’s 1 Estonian Consulate General in New York, correspondence with Estonia’s representatives in Germany K. Selter, L. Jakobsen, and E. Reisenberg, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. 1608, n. 7, s. 7, l. 7. 2 Triin Mulla et al. (eds.), Eesti välisteenistus: Biograafiline leksikon 1918–1991 (Estonia’s Foreign Service: Biographical Encyclopedia 1918–1991) (Tallinn, 2006), p. 26.

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representative and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bonn that would have emerged during the Cold War years.3

Continuity of the Image of West Germany in Estonian Foreign Policy This article focuses on the views of Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg concerning Germany in the context of the Cold War. More broadly speaking, the article looks at whether a continuity exists between the official foreign policy of the post-1991 re-independent Estonia and the activities, contact networks, and ideas on international developments of the Estonian diplomats-in-exile who operated during the Cold War years. Furthermore, it asks to what extent the Estonian exile diplomats’ understandings of the Cold War affect the worldviews with which Estonia’s sovereign foreign policy restarted in 1991. The Cold War-era Baltic question has traditionally been studied primarily from the legalistic viewpoint. The central theme has been the status of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian statehood during the Cold War. Attempts have also been made to consider the Baltic question as part of the Cold War ideological, propaganda, and intelligence struggle between the great powers.4 The existence and activity of exile diplomats representing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania also makes it possible to focus historical research on the views of Estonians on developments in international relations during the Cold War years (1945/48–1989/91). The shaping of the directions of Estonian foreign political thought did not terminate in the summer of 1940 but continued through the meetings and correspondence of exile diplomats until the early 1990s. Exile diplomats, particularly Ernst Jaakson, Estonian consul general in New York, had a definite influence on forming the visions and directions of thought of the newly established Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which began operating again in Tallinn in 1990–91. The reports on Germany by Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg also assume more important—semi-official—significance than ordinary private correspondence, particularly because Jaakson considered it necessary to preserve those reports as official reports in the consulate general’s archive in New York.

3 Tiit Matsulevitš, ‘Bonn 1991–1996’, Eeva Eek-Pajuste (ed.), Teine tulemine: Taasiseseisvunud Eesti välisesindused (The Second Coming: Foreign Missions of ReIndependent Estonia) (Tallinn, 2003), pp. 292–325. 4 John Hiden, Vahur Made and David J. Smith (eds.), The Baltic Question during the Cold War (London, 2008).

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The reports by Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg provide information on domestic political conditions in West Germany and its foreign policy through four decades (1950s–1980s). The quality of these texts clearly varies. As a former foreign minister and long-standing ambassador, Karl Selter sent rather traditional diplomatic memos to New York based mainly on meetings and conversations with West German diplomats, officials, and politicians. Among other things, Selter was in close working contact with Boris Meissner, a diplomat and internationallaw expert of Baltic German descent who dealt with issues concerning the Baltic countries in the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.5 At the same time, Selter’s reports focus on practical problems of the postwar period: the assistance of refugees of Estonian descent and their organizations, and helping to solve their problems; aspirations to organize an Estonian representation, if not a legation, in West Germany; the dissemination of information on Estonia; and cooperation with the Kersten Committee.6 The reports by Ludvig Jakobsen coincide with the years of the second and third Berlin crises (1958–61), when the Cold War German question was at its most tense. As a former officer, military expert, and defense attaché, Jakobsen strove to send sober analyses to New York that assessed the situation as realistically as possible, most likely based on good contacts in the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other administrative agencies. It is clear from the reports of Elmar Reisenberg—a lawyer who had no previous Foreign Service experience—beginning in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s that his contacts with official representatives of West Germany were much weaker than those of Selter and Jakobsen and gradually faded away. The content of the reports is no longer founded on information gathered from meetings and conversations; instead it is limited to summaries of the West German press. Subject matter from private life began to dominate, and thus the 1980s reports should be

5 Meissner also advised Chancellor Helmut Kohl on issues concerning Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. For nearly three decades he was one of the most productive scholars studying Eastern Europe and was a commentator in West German media. 6 A committee that operated in the U.S. Congress in 1953–54, studying Soviet aggression against the Baltic countries in 1940 and the incorporation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union. Republican member of the House of Representatives Charles J. Kersten chaired the committee. The committee interviewed Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who had fled to West Germany, as well as former diplomats of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, including Karl Selter. Selter helped members of the Kersten Committee to make contact with Estonians in West Germany and to interview them.

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categorized as purely private correspondence. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Matsulevitš could not rely on the formal and legal background created by his Cold War-era diplomatic predecessors in establishing the Estonian diplomatic mission in Bonn in autumn 1991.

The Birth of “CDU-Germany” In his study of Weimar Germany’s policy towards the Baltic countries, John Hiden indicates that the attitude of German politicians towards Estonia and Latvia (less towards Lithuania) in the 1920s and early 1930s depended mainly on where they originated from. The attitude of German politicians from Estonia and Latvia, and those who had lost property through land reform in those countries, was negative and critical as a rule. The attitude of German politicians who did not have direct personal contacts with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was more neutral. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was most clearly opposed to the policy of the Baltic German former landowners. The SPD was also extremely critical of the military mission in the Baltics and Finland headed by General Rüdiger von der Goltz. The other Weimar-era German parties had no clearly defined policy concerning the Baltic countries, and they limited themselves to adopting ad hoc positions on isolated issues.7 In fending off the criticism of Baltic Germans, Estonia and Latvia received direct support from Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, who belonged to the German People’s Party (DVP). Since he wished to improve Germany’s relations with the victors of World War I and to expand Germany’s trade and financial opportunities, Stresemann consistently suppressed the opposition activity of Germans from abroad (die Auslandsdeutschen), including Baltic Germans, against Central and Eastern European countries.8 Estonia did not focus on any particular political party of Weimar Germany in its foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s. After 1933, it was essentially impossible to distinguish between the central government and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which ruled Germany with absolute power. When the constitution of the German Federal Republic took effect in 1949, it did mean that Estonians had to start interacting with a new type of German state. The West German political system was deliberately designed to differ from that 7 John Hiden, The Baltic States and Weimar Ostpolitik (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 3, 12, 25–7. 8 Ibid., pp. 171, 195; minutes of the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) foreign policy commission session, 5 October 1927 (overview of the meeting between Estonian foreign minister Friedrich Akel and German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann in Geneva in September 1927), ERA f. 80, n. 3, s. 407, l. 144.

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of the Weimar Republic. This meant a parliamentary system that relied on three to four strong parties, balanced by a strong executive branch in the form of the institution of the chancellor and a strong judicial branch headed by the politically influential Constitutional Court. In seeking political support from West Germany, representatives of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania could now rely on strong, clearly delineated party structures and choose ideologically suitable parliamentary parties. Before World War II, the leaders of Estonia’s foreign policy tried to find support on a country-by-country basis. However, during the Cold War, this country-based orientation was replaced by the search for support from the political forces most critical of the Soviet Union. In West Germany, these forces were the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). For Estonians who settled in West Germany as the result of World War II, the statehood and foreign service of the “Bonn republic” looked quite unambiguously like the CDU. Konrad Adenauer was the chancellor who appeared to have not forgotten the fate of the Baltic countries. It was precisely during Adenauer’s rule that West Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs developed its position of refusing to recognize the Baltic countries as de jure part of the Soviet Union. The “unofficial” status that representatives of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania acquired at the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs also evolved during the rule of Adenauer and the CDU.9 The central elements of Adenauer’s Eastern policy—the hope for German reunification, the possibility of reopening discussion of the question of Germany’s eastern border, the repatriation of refugees and expellees from Germany’s Eastern regions—dovetailed well with the aspirations of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians for restoration of their countries’ independence. The same is true of the prewar memories of the Baltic Germans who had resettled from Estonia and Latvia to Germany. Thus even though the restoration of the Baltic countries’ independence was not among the aims of Adenauer’s Eastern policy, the wishes, emotions, and memories of people who had resettled or fled from the Baltic countries to Germany during World War II were suitable as propaganda elements supporting that policy. The rather active and relatively high-level interaction that the West German Foreign Ministry and CDU party organizations accorded to Baltic representatives 9 Kristina Spohr-Readman provides a thorough overview of the Adenauer administration’s attitude towards the representation of the Baltic countries in West Germany. See Kristina Spohr-Readman, ‘West Germany and the Baltic Question during the Cold War’, Hiden et al (eds.), The Baltic Question, pp. 100–33.

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had an effect of its own throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This surely left the Baltic representatives with the impression that the CDU—and CDU-led West Germany—regarded Baltic peoples’ desire for restored independence with sympathy and understanding, and, if circumstances permitted, was prepared to support that wish with foreign-policy steps. Konrad Adenauer, and later Helmut Kohl, were described in a clearly positive light in the correspondence that Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg conducted with New York. In these reports both CDU leaders were depicted as the guarantors of the freedom of West Germany—and eventually of Western Europe—vis-à-vis the Soviet threat. Thus, for instance, Ludvig Jakobsen wrote to Johannes Kaiv in 1959: “Adenauer is the guarantee that West Germany will remain stable, that no ‘new Rapallo’ will be signed,10 and that the Soviet Union will not repeat the scenario of Czechoslovakia in West Germany.11 West Germany led by Adenauer is tying itself to the United States and France.”12 And a year later: “Adenauer’s support among Germans is tied to West Germany’s rapid economic growth. If that should end, however, a serious political crisis could ensue.”13 Jakobsen most likely considered the rise to power of the CDU’s rival—the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the successor of the pre-1933 SPD—a “crisis.” This came to pass in 1969 when Willy Brandt became chancellor. Thus Reisenberg started expectantly following the political career of Helmut Kohl, who was elected leader of the CDU in 1973.14 When Kohl finally won Bundestag elections in 1982, Reisenberg wrote to Jaakson: “The election of March 6, 1982, brought a clear turn to the right in West Germany. Among other things: a) relations with the United States will improve, b) the reunification of Germany continues to be on the agenda, c) the aspiration to rise to the status of an equal 10 A reference to the agreement of mutual recognition and cooperation signed in Rapallo in 1922 between Germany and Soviet Russia. The signing of the agreement was followed by close economic, technical, and military cooperation between the two countries. As a result of the Rapallo agreement, both countries emerged from the international isolation imposed on them in the aftermath of World War I. For Germany, signing the Rapallo agreement was also a step towards the package of agreements signed in Locarno in 1925, through which Germany normalized its relations with the Entente countries and gained their permission to join the League of Nations in 1926. 11 A reference to the coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The Soviet-supported coup ousted Prague’s multiparty government and reinstalled the Czechoslovak Communist Party into power, where it stayed until 1989. 12 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 11 April 1959, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 198, l. 158. 13 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 23 April 1960, ibid., s. 199, l. 31. 14 Reisenberg to Jaakson, 17 June 1973, ibid., s. 204, l. 152.

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European great power alongside France and Great Britain.”15 Reisenberg died in 1988 and thus did not live to see what Kohl did when the restoration of the Baltic states’ independence became an actual issue for German foreign policy. In 1990–91 the reunification of Germany; the collapse of the communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary; and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Central Europe were the issues of overriding importance for Kohl. In order to achieve all this, the chancellor had to communicate closely with Mikhail Gorbachev, the president and Party leader of the Soviet Union, and his administration. For Kohl this meant generally keeping a low profile concerning the question of Baltic independence.16 Thus in 1990–91, Estonia’s foreign minister, Lennart Meri, and other Estonian diplomats realized that the tactic of securing German support solely through the CDU/CSU was too limited and ineffective. The need to apply pressure to Kohl and his administration was stressed. This was true in terms of both foreign policy— through Great Britain and France—indicating the danger of Kohl’s excessively good relations with Moscow, as well as domestic policy, aiming Estonia’s lobbying efforts at various German parties and their factions in the Bundestag, along with cultural institutions and funds associated with parties.17 Even in communication with the CDU/CSU, it was considered best to use their faction in the Bundestag.18

Demonized SPD, Detested FDP Insofar as the direct disseminator of the Soviet Union’s influence—the Communist Party of Germany (KPD)—became marginalized after the war in West German politics and was outlawed outright in 1956 by the Constitutional Court, the SPD— the party that gained the most from the failure of the communists—became the primary Soviet-friendly party. In the reports by Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which considered itself a liberal force—the preferred coalition partner for both the CDU and the SPD throughout the Cold 15 Reisenberg to Jaakson, 26 March 1982, ibid., s. 206, l. 40. 16 Kristina Spohr-Readman, ‘International Reactions to the Soviet Disintegration’, Frédéric Bozo et al (eds.), Europe and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal (London, 2008), pp. 220–32. 17 Memo from the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Baltic Bureau Urmas Vedom to Lennart Meri, 29 April 1991, Eesti Välisministeeriumi Arhiiv (Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, EVA) Minister. Correspondence with Estonian missions (September 1990–December 1991/1992). 18 Memo from Tiit Matsulevitš to Lennart Meri, 24 April 1991, EVA Germany 1990–95 (notes, memos, background materials).

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War period—was portrayed as an unprincipled party of bankers and industrialists that tended towards cooperation with Moscow. The criticism that the three Estonians directed at the SPD throughout the Cold War period was direct and uncompromising. In the 1950s and 1960s, they treated the SPD as an extension of the East German Communist Party. Jakobsen, for instance, did not hesitate to criticize the SPD and FDP in describing West Germany’s domestic and foreign policy in the context of the second Berlin Crisis (1958–59): “Both the SPD and the FDP are against Adenauer’s and the CDU/CSU Eastern policy. The SPD is organizing large rallies against arming the Bundeswehr with nuclear weapons. The FDP wants increased trade with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Both the SPD and the FDP want to establish diplomatic relations with Eastern Bloc countries [meaning abandoning the Hallstein Doctrine19].20… The SPD, however, wants to come to power at all costs, and it is not hard to see where a SPD government would take Germany [meaning joining the Eastern Bloc].21… West Germany’s days are numbered if the SPD comes to power there.22 If the SPD were to form the government in West Germany, then: a) West Germany would recognize the status quo that has taken shape in Eastern Europe; b) West Germany would be prepared for ‘all manner’ of agreements with the Soviet Union and Poland; c) the interests and aims of German refugees and their organizations would no longer be taken into account,”23 asserted Jakobsen in his letters to Kaiv. Jakobsen was also convinced that the SPD was closely connected to the East German and Soviet intelligence services: “The SPD is under the influence of communists and operates on instructions from East Germany.24 The Soviet Union has at the same time started ‘flooding’ West Germany with its own (and East German) agents.25 There are 60,000 East German agents in West Germany and another 19 A reference to the doctrine formulated by Adenauer’s foreign minister, Walter Hallstein, according to which West Germany was the only legitimate German state and Bonn was to break off diplomatic relations with every country that recognized East Germany (this was applied in the case of Yugoslavia and Cuba). According to the doctrine, West Germany was to avoid close contact with the Soviet Union’s satellite countries in Eastern Europe. The Hallstein Doctrine affected West German foreign policy in 1955–1970. 20 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 1 July 1958, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 198, l. 4, 5. 21 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 20 July 1959, ibid., l. 215. 22 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 23 April 1960, ibid., s. 199, l. 31. 23 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 18 September 1959, ibid., s. 198, l. 248. 24 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 12 August 1958, ibid., l. 34. 25 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 12 February 1959, ibid., l. 138.

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nearly 100,000 local communists who are just waiting for orders to take action.26 At the same time, the SPD has close ties to the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev. SPD leaders have met with Khrushchevin both East Berlin and Moscow.”27 In addition to the SPD’s overt Eastern orientation, Jakobsen saw danger for West Germany in the greed of the big industrialists who backed the FDP as well as in the continuing power struggle within the CDU between Catholics and Protestants. During the second Berlin Crisis, Jakobsen wrote to Kaiv that “the FDP wanted to open up new markets for German industry in the East in criticizing Adenauer concerning West Berlin, and anti-Adenauer opposition had already developed within the CDU.”28 By the time of the third Berlin Crisis (1960–61), this sort of opposition within the party had only strengthened, according to Jakobsen: “Dissent concerning the Eastern question has arisen within the CDU as well. For instance, Adenauer’s quarrel with Eugen Gerstenmaier, the leader of the CDU’s Protestant wing, which shows that West German Protestant circles are much more amenable toward the Soviet Union than Catholics. The CDU’s Protestant wing, led by Gerstenmaier, has begun very active agitation against Adenauer and supports signing a peace treaty with the Soviet Union.”29 In summarizing the consequences of the third Berlin Crisis, Jakobsen recognized that “the SPD succeeded in using the crisis that revolved around Berlin against Adenauer and to strengthen Brandt’s positions. The West German press used the crisis to extensively attack the Western Allies. The press tied the crisis more to the West German elections than to international relations.” Jakobsen also referred to rumors of more prosperous West Berliners and intellectuals fleeing to West Germany and Western Europe.30 According to Jakobsen, “West Berlin’s economy suffers from the loss of customers in East Berlin. Every day, 300–400 West Berliners leave for West Germany.”31 Jakobsen also found that the Berlin Crisis had caused the United States to doubt the CDU’s ability to retain its leading position in West Germany and that the Americans had started supporting the idea of a “grand” coalition consisting of the CDU and the SPD.32 Eventually the “grand” coalition led by Kurt Georg Kiesinger ascended to power in West Germany in 1966. 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Jakobsen to Kaiv, 23 April 1960, ibid., s. 199, l. 31. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 26 March 1959, ibid., s. 198, l. 142–3. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 4 November 1958, ibid., l. 78–9. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 17 July 1961, ibid., s. 200, l. 60. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 3 September 1961 and 14 September 1961, ibid., l. 77, 85. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 6 October 1961, ibid., l. 87. Ibid., l. 86.

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An SPD/FDP coalition led by Chancellor Willy Brandt ascended to power in 1969. Brandt’s “new” Eastern policy (die neue Ostpolitik) included warmer relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern European communist countries, the partial recognition of East Germany, and the participation of West Germany in the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) summit meeting in Helsinki. In Reisenberg’s opinion, the SPD had become more left-wing in the 1970s, cooperating more and more closely with communists. He founded this opinion on the emergence of increasingly radical left-wing groups within and based on the SPD: neo-communists and the SPD’s left wing emerged in West German politics in the early 1970s, and radical peace and environmental movements, from which the Green Party took shape, emerged in the late 1970s.33 This period, during the continuation of the SPD/FDP coalition led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, passed in anticipation of the CDU’s return to power, in Reisenberg’s assessment. Jakobsen and Reisenberg criticized the FDP as mainly two-faced and of dubious value in West German politics. At the same time, it is remarkable—and this comes clearly to the fore in Matsulevitš’s memoirs as well as in Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs archival documents—that it was primarily FDP politicians who played a decisive role in securing Germany’s support for the restoration of Baltic independence. Matsulevitš specifically emphasizes the important role of the leading FDP figures—German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, head of the Office of German Federal President Andreas Meyer-Landrut, and FDP leader Otto Graf Lambsdorff—in supporting Estonia and the other Baltic countries.34 Genscher’s role in supporting the Baltic countries in 1990–91 was probably even greater than it appears at first glance, and the reasons why Meri and other Baltic foreign policy leaders sought support from him in particular could run deeper. Genscher’s position in Kohl’s government was certainly more than merely filling the position of foreign minister; he also served as vice-chancellor from 1974 to 1994, the second most important person in the cabinet. William Smyser indicates that while serving as interior minister in the 1970s, Genscher contributed to Brandt’s resignation as chancellor in 1974 and to his being replaced by Minister of Defense Helmut Schmidt at the head of the SPD/FDP government coalition. Genscher did not inform Brandt that one of his closest advisors, Günter Guillaume, was an agent of the East German intelligence services. West German

33 Reisenberg to Jaakson, 3 April 1973, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 204, l. 145, and on 20 May 1977, ibid., s. 205, l. 62. 34 Matsulevitš, ‘Bonn 1991–1996’, p. 292.

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intelligence had known about Guillaume’s activity for some time already, but Genscher allowed the situation to snowball into the scandal that forced Brandt from office.35 Genscher continued as foreign minister in Schmidt’s government and helped Kohl to topple Schmidt in 1982 and to become chancellor at the head of the CDU/CSU/FDP government coalition. Thereafter Genscher continued as foreign minister in Kohl’s government. Kohl’s biographer Werner Maser has referred to Genscher as the “trademark of Kohl’s period as chancellor” and the only one who truly “tolerated” and supported Kohl at the head of the government coalition that he led.36 Genscher’s status as the eminence grise of Kohl’s government thus had to be clearly perceptible to Meri in 1990–91. This circumstance also made the link that connected many prominent Baltic Germans to the FDP (Graf Lambsdorff, Meyer-Landrut) and the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Berndt von Staden) so important. In other words, the lack of functional relations with Baltic Germans differentiates Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg most clearly from how Lennart Meri and once-again-independent Estonia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs communicated with West Germany. Regarding Estonia’s relations with German SPD politicians in 1990–91, interaction does not appear to have been as intense as with the FDP and CDU. A June 1991 memo from the Baltic Information Bureau located in Bonn does mention the serious interest of the opposition SPD in what was happening in Estonia. At the same time, conversations with SPD politicians are not extensively reflected in the correspondence of the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from that time. Marju Lauristin, the deputy speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Estonia at that time, is mentioned as the main contact-maker with the SPD from the Estonian side.37

The Ostpolitik Shock The Selter and Jakobsen reports show a fear that an SPD-led West Germany would be much more tolerant of the Soviet Union than the CDU was. Jakobsen observed with concern how the SPD established direct relations with the Polish and Czechoslovak governments. “Hopefully Poland’s Catholic Church will succeed 35 William R. Smyser, From Yalta to Berlin: Cold War Struggle over Germany (London, 1999), pp. 267–8. 36 Werner Maser, Helmut Kohl: Der deutsche Kanzler (Berlin, 1990), pp. 204–5. 37 C.A. Heilmann’s memo to Lennart Meri, 5 June 1991, EVA Correspondence concerning political questions (Germany), 1990–91.

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in preventing the recognition of Władisław Gomułka’s government by West Germany. West Germany would begin improving relations with Poland by opening a trade mission in Warsaw. If relations with Poland normalize, a restoration of relations with Czechoslovakia can also be expected,” wrote Jakobsen to Kaiv in August 1958.38 Jakobsen was nevertheless certain that even the SPD would not dare recognize Poland’s western border along the Oder-Neisse line.39 However, when Brandt’s West Germany nevertheless set about improving relations with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and establishing the status of West Berlin, Reisenbergfound that his worst expectations concerning West German foreign policy were coming true. He wrote to Jaakson in July 1970: “West Germany is clearly separating itself from the common front of Western nations with its Ostpolitik and is trying to use Ostpolitik to become the leading power in Western Europe and to displace France from that position. West Germany is also expecting the United States to withdraw from Europe in the next few years, which is why Germany wants to establish closer relations with the Soviet Union.”40 A year later, in October 1971, Reisenbergfound that the Ostpolitik agreements signed in Moscow, Warsaw, West Berlin, and Prague would lead to a situation in which the question of Germany’s eastern borders would be decided without a peace conference.41 Jaakson, in turn, interpreted Brandt’s Eastern policy as the wish of Great Britain and the United States; he thought it might result in a non-aggression pact and the signing of a general peace treaty.42 “Viewed from the United States, the situation nevertheless does not seem as bad as it looks from Germany: the Russians have not made any concessions concerning the question of Berlin, the Helsinki process is dragging on, the Soviet Union is rapidly expanding its armaments, and the situation is becoming increasingly restless in Poland,” wrote Jaaksonto Reisenberg.43 And a year later, skeptical that Baltic organizations in Western Europe could manage to tie the implementation of West Germany’s Eastern policy to Baltic themes and impede it with protests, Jaaksonrecommended instead not to ruin relations with the West German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “It is hardly likely that Baltic organizations are capable of hindering the ratification of Ostpolitik agreements in the Bundestag,” he wrote in July 1971.44 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Jakobsen to Kaiv, 12 August 1958, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 198, l. 35–36. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 20 October 1959, ibid., l. 262. Reisenberg to Torma, 17 July 1970, ibid., s. 204, l. 11. Reisenberg to Jaakson, 15 October 1971, ibid., l. 100. Jaakson to Reisenberg, 23 July 1970, ibid., l. 16. Jaakson to Reisenberg, 29 December 1970, ibid., l. 43. Jaakson to Reisenberg, 16 July 1971, ibid., l. 81.

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In analyzing the practical consequences of Brandt’s Ostpolitik in relation to the Baltic question, Kristina Spohr-Readmanargues that Brandt’s administration did not actually plan to change West Germany’s attitude towards the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries. While signing Eastern agreements and joining the Final Act of the CSCE summit meeting in Helsinki in 1975, Brandt did not retreat from the reservation (die Vorbehaltsschreibung) added to the Soviet-West German agreement of 1955, according to which West Germany distanced itself from recognizing the Soviet Union’s “territorial property” (including the annexation of the Baltic countries). Spohr-Readmanalso points out that West Germany’s Eastern policy, and especially the CSCE process, allowed Bonn to direct increasing attention to the subject of human rights concerning the Baltic question and to foster closer cooperation in cultural spheres with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, along with direct interpersonal contacts.45

Europe Will Stand as Long as Germany Stands The image of West Germany as the primary Cold War “front line” state in Europe emerges very clearly from the correspondence of the consulate general in New York. For these Estonians, memories of World War II, but also the tensions over West Berlin that lasted until the early 1970s, indicated West Germany as a potential Soviet military target. In a November 1958 report sent to New York, Jakobsen highlighted the Soviet Union’s possible motives in the mounting crisis over Berlin. He mentioned that the Soviet Union had several motives for escalating the crisis: the wish to intimidate Poland’s leader, Władisław Gomułka, who was seen as rebellious against the Soviet Union (Khrushchev issued his ultimatum to Gomułka during Gomułka’s visit to Moscow in November 1958); to undermine Adenauer’s positions; to impede the buildup of West Germany’s armed forces, including the deployment of American mid- and short-range nuclear rockets in West Germany; and to change the status of West Berlin. The question of West Berlin had, in Jakobsen’s opinion, become increasingly troublesome for the Soviet Union because people from East Germany fled there and also because Adenauer often visited West Berlin and the Bundestag occasionally held its sessions there.46 Jakobsen also stressed that Khrushchev’s objective was to use the crisis to pressure West Germany to leave NATO and declare itself neutral, causing NATO to 45 Spohr-Readman, ‘West Germany and the Baltic Question’, p. 124. 46 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 15 November 1958 and 4 December 1958, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 198, l. 96, 107–8, 116, 118.

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lose “sufficient room for maneuver militarily” in Western Europe. “The retreat of the Allies from West Berlin would mean the beginning of the disintegration of NATO,” Jakobsen stated.47 Yet at the same time, his faith in Adenauer was firm: “Adenauer’s position is that the question of West Berlin belongs to the jurisdiction of the four Western powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and West Germany). The position of the Soviet Union cannot form the basis for changing the status of West Berlin.”48 The correspondence conducted with the consulate general in New York makes clear that Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg held great hopes precisely in West Germany’s military capability, the size of its army, and its ability to defend Western Europe against possible Soviet attack. “If German soldiers are already enlisted, a new situation will ensue whose implications we are not yet able to define,” wrote Selter to Kaiv in 1955 when West Germany joined NATO.49 Selter also felt that the United States could not conduct a more radical anti-Soviet policy in Europe without rearming Germany and Japan. The Soviet Union’s response had to be taken into account, of course.50 Both Selter and Jakobsen considered West Germany’s military power to be a very effective deterrent to the Soviet Union. At the same time, they considered this—along with everything else that would strengthen West German statehood—contingent on Adenauer remaining in power. The reports sent to New York held that West Germans’ will to fight was also greater than that of the British or the French. In some respects, all three men filing the reports shared a vision of a World War II-style struggle with the Soviet Union, involving hordes of front-line soldiers. This notion emerges with particular clarity in the writings of Jakobsen, a former military man: “West Germany should form an army of half a million men by 1958. Yet the buildup of the army is proceeding slowly due to the U.S. wish not to irritate France and the Soviet Union. … At the same time, West Germany has invested in French colonies in the Sahara region and thus helped France to become a nuclear power.51 West Germany with its 300,000-man army is NATO’s strongest ally in Europe alongside the United States. France’s reliability has clearly declined as a result of the Algerian war.”5253

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Jakobsen to Kaiv, 24 January 1959 and 12 February 1959, ibid., l. 126, 138. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 18 January 1960, ibid., s. 199, l. 2. Selter to Kaiv, 28 June 1955, ERA ibid., s. 194, l. 99v. Selter to Kaiv, 20 December 1954, ibid., l. 67. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 4 November 1958 and 20 October 1959, ibid., s. 198, l. 79, 81, 261–2. The reference is to Algeria’s War of Independence in 1954–62. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 12 December 1960, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 199, l. 217.

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It would take half a million West German soldiers, in Jakobsen’s opinion, to counterbalance the Soviet Union’s ground troops deployed in Europe and prevent their advance. Yet America’s continued military presence in West Germany was also considered just as important. In the context of the second and third Berlin crises, Jakobsensaw a danger of military conflict breaking out before long. He wrote that “West Germany is indeed very strong economically but is still in the formative stage militarily. The United States has organized the defense of West Germany very well. The constant U.S. aerial reconnaissance is particularly important, since it precludes a surprise attack by the Soviet Union.54 … The Soviet Union wishes to use the election of young John Fitzgerald Kennedy as U.S. president to resolve the question of West Berlin in their favor. Even if they have to use force.55 The Soviet Union’s March 1961 diplomatic note declared that the administration of East Germany was being transferred to East Berlin. West Germany does not have the strength to start a war with East Germany to prevent that. At the same time, it is possible that East Germany will attack and capture West Berlin on orders from the Soviet Union, whereas the forces of the United States, Great Britain, and France in West Berlin are not able or willing to resist an East German attack.”56 The withdrawal of American troops from West Germany was frequently considered the main danger in Jakobsen’s reports after the third Berlin Crisis and especially in Reisenberg’s reports starting from the early 1970s. In Jakobsen’s opinion, NATO placed too much hope on nuclear weapons in planning West Germany’s defense. “At least 90 divisions” were needed to defend Western Europe.57 Such a formidable army, or even anything approximating it, was never formed in Western Europe during the Cold War. In 1977, Reisenberg informed Jaakson that “the Warsaw Pact’s superiority in conventional weapons is 1:5. In the event of a surprise attack, the Russians would be at the banks of the Rhine in 48 hours. The United States has 4.5 divisions in Western Europe. The Soviet Union has 20 divisions in Eastern Europe and is capable of bringing in an additional 60 divisions.”58 Reisenberg’s vision of 80 Soviet divisions ready to attack Western Europe—obviously originating from the West German press—had firmly established itself in NATO’s strategic planning documents even before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Thus the notion that a Warsaw Pact attack could not be resisted using ground troops and that the only alternative was a nuclear counterstrike spread extensively during the 1970s 54 55 56 57 58

Jakobsen to Kaiv, 1 July 1958, ibid., s. 198, l. 26–7. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 12 December 1960, ibid., s. 199, l. 215. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 8 March and 9 April 1961, ibid., s. 200, l. 13, 24. Jakobsen to Kaiv, 3 September 1961, ibid., l. 79–80. Reisenberg to Jaakson, 14 January 1977, ibid., s. 205, l. 43–4.

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among NATO military leaders, as well as Western European politicians. At the same time, it was hoped in the capitals of Western Europe that the Soviet leadership was “rational” and did not actually want to start a war.59 Reisenberg’s assessment of the international situation in January 1975, six months after the CSCE summit meeting in Helsinki, was as follows: “‘Détente’ and ‘normalization of relations’ means the West continually giving in to the Soviet Union and the economic and technological strengthening of the Soviet Union. The UN is an unsuccessful institution like the League of Nations. The United States is incapable of effectively using its superpower status and is incapable of defending Western Europe against Soviet invasion. China has the potential to be a world power but has thus far played a very modest role in world politics. At the same time, Soviet-Chinese relations are growing increasingly strained. The West German army is the surest guarantee of Western European security alongside the presence of the United States. Great Britain is becoming increasingly weak and should tie itself more closely to the European continent. France has ambitions of being Europe’s leading country. What will become of U.S. bases in Spain after Franco? Italy is very unstable in terms of its domestic politics with its large communist party. As one of the world’s largest industrial regions, Western Europe can be destroyed by a Soviet attack, but the Soviet Union does not actually want to attack Western Europe. Could the possible disintegration of NATO provoke the Soviet Union to attack [Western Europe]?”60

Poland: A Great Power that Has Lost Its Splendor, the Leader of Rebels Compared with its treatment in the Estonian foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s, the image of Central and Eastern Europe changes dramatically in Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg’s reporting. As countries that ended up in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, the communist countries of that region (such as East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) lost any status as independent subjects, at least in the Cold War reports sent to New York. Changes in the image of Poland were the most dramatic. In the Estonian foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s, Poland was one of the countries believed to have an important role in European politics, and it was considered a strong military power in its home region. In Estonia, Poland was considered the leader 59 Beatrice Heuser, NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000 (London, 1998), pp. 7–8. 60 Rough draft of Reisenberg’s report, 31 January 1975, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 204, l. 203–8.

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of the medium-sized and smaller countries in the Baltic Sea region within the framework of cooperation between border states in the early 1920s.61 Poland’s former positive image as a leading nation, however, vanished in the context of the Cold War. Poland, led by communists and with Soviet forces on its territory, was reduced in the view of Estonians into inconsequential status, like the rest of the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites. A very clear rift in image is also perceptible between West Germany and the communist Eastern European countries. The gulf widened as the difference in economic prosperity increased between West Germany and the Eastern European countries, especially Poland. In his reports sent to New York, Jakobsen stressed Poland’s economic problems as the central influence on Warsaw’s policy towards West Germany. He also stressed that the assistance and trade provided by the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist countries was not enough to keep Poland’s economy stable. Poland unambiguously needed West Germany’s economic support. Jakobsen wrote to Kaiv: “Poland has come up with the Rapacki Plan62 in order to attract West German investment. The Soviet Union needs East Germany to keep Poland under its control. The worst situation for the Soviet Union would be if Poland were to start bordering on an economically very strong Germany with a Catholic majority.”63 Two decades later, at the beginning of the 1980s, Reisenberg and Jaakson monitored what was happening in Poland with growing anxiety—and perhaps with hope as well. Poland had become Eastern Europe’s leader in rebellion. Poland had been the most restless of the Soviet Union’s allies throughout the Cold War. Uprisings and revolts had taken place in 1956, 1970, 1976, and 1980. The Soviet Union had not dared to intervene militarily in Poland until then. “The fact that the Poles had until then presented only economic demands has apparently impeded that course of action. Poland’s Catholic Church and the Pope’s Polish origin are also very important factors,” Reisenberg stated.64

61 Raimo Pullat, Versailles’st Westerplatteni: Eesti ja Poola suhted kahe maailmasõja vahel (From Versailles to the Westerplatte: Relations between Estonia and Poland between the Two World Wars) (Tallinn, 2001), pp. 47–129. 62 The plan presented by Poland’s foreign minister, Adam Rapacki, at the UN General Assembly in 1957 to turn Central Europe into a demilitarized and nuclear-free zone that was to include West Germany, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. NATO did not support the plan. 63 Jakobsen to Kaiv, 4 November 1958, ERA f. 1608, n. 2, s. 198, l. 82–3. 64 Reisenberg to Jaakson, 9 September 1980, ibid., s. 205, l. 251–2.

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In Jaakson’s opinion, a Soviet invasion of Poland would have significantly changed international politics. The West would not have confronted the Soviet Union militarily, but relations with Moscow would certainly have cooled considerably.65 “The Soviet Union has begun rhetorical preparations for invading Poland. It appears that the Brezhnev Doctrine will be implemented in Poland in the same way as it was in Czechoslovakia,” he wrote to Reisenberg in June 1981.66 Yet the Soviets ultimately opted not to invade. Reisenberg believed they were deterred because the war in Afghanistan, which began in 1979, had inflicted a high death toll on them, and an additional war in Poland promised only further losses. Additionally, in Reisenberg’s opinion, Moscow feared the costs that would accompany the occupation of Poland.67

Summary The views of international and European politics in the reports by Selter, Jakobsen, and Reisenberg differ decisively from the fundamental concepts of Estonian foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s. While major European countries served as role models and offered support during the interwar period, the United States emerged as the main ally during the Cold War. While Great Britain had been the ideal during the interwar period, West Germany took its place. While European countries had been homogeneous when viewed externally, competition between large parties based on ideology and the split in the bipolar world took their place. Where proud Eastern European nation-states had been established on the ruins of bygone dynasties, ludicrous communist puppet regimes that had lost any kind of positive reputation emerged in their place after World War II. A great deal of faith in NATO emerges from the reports. At the same time, it is noteworthy that the participation of the European Community and West Germany in processes of European integration is only mentioned in passing. If we can consider Karl Robert Pusta’s pan-European sympathies to be exceptional, then the dream held by Estonia’s diplomats-in-exile of an Estonia self-sufficient in world politics survived the Cold War.

65 Jaakson to Reisenberg, 3 April 1981, ibid., l. 274. 66 Jaakson to Reisenberg, 23 June 1981, ibid., l. 298. 67 Reisenberg to Jaakson, 19 August 1981, ibid., l. 314.

Oliver Pagel

Finnish Foreign Tourism in the Estonian SSR during the Cold War, 1955–1980 Abstract: The paper provides an overview of how the pleasure trips of Finns to the ESSR began, highlights the main points in this process, and analyzes the growth in tourism to Estonia and the social background of the tourists. The opening of a direct ferry line in 1965 had a large impact. This study ends with the year 1980, when the sailing regatta of the Moscow Olympic Games was held in Tallinn.

Introduction Countless articles and books have been written on the Cold War over the last 50 years. The subject has undoubtedly attracted a great deal of attention from historians. Various attempts have been made to define the Cold War, but a precise definition remains elusive. There is an analogous problem with the term “Iron Curtain.” Was it an impenetrable (psychological and physical) wall rigidly separating East and West, or was it permeable to the spread of people, ideas, and information? One possibility is to see the Cold War as a conflict on several levels where soft policy was used in parallel with hard policy in different crises, the arms race, and international politics. Cultural diplomacy was one form of soft policy. Multifaceted cultural diplomacy incorporated different cultural and social spheres, from mass media (television, radio), fashion, consumerism, and ways of thinking to international art and science exchange programs. One branch of cultural diplomacy was foreign tourism.1 Foreign, or in other words international, tourism and foreign policy share many contact points. One manifestation of this during the Cold War was the instrumentalization of foreign tourism and its implementation in the interests of the state propaganda of the United States and the Soviet Union. Allowing foreigners into the United States gave American authorities the chance to demonstrate the country’s economic prosperity and the superiority of the capitalist system over the communist system. Due to its democratic and open society, the United States was

1 Nigel Gould-Davies, ‘The Logic of Soviet Cultural Policy’, Diplomatic History 27 (2003), no. 2, pp. 193–214, here p. 193.

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able to use foreign tourism without political restrictions (e.g., travel restrictions),2 in contrast to the ideologically controlled USSR. The world’s first socialist country had to ensure, when allowing foreign tourists into the country en masse, that this process would not go too far. The “internationality” of foreign tourism provided the USSR with new opportunities to spread its ideology in the capitalist West, but at the same time, it jeopardized the state’s own ideological foundation, since cultural diplomacy afforded “access to their own society in return for allowing access to the society of the other side.”3 It is this last aspect in particular that gave the USSR, with its closed social system, something to think about. Only recently has the role of foreign tourism in this process gotten significant attention in the historical literature on the Cold War. Yet authors have primarily focused on trips abroad by Soviet tourists and their adventures in Western countries.4 Far less research has been conducted on foreign tourists who visited the USSR between 1955 and 1980 and/or their recollections. Even though academic research has rediscovered (or is rediscovering) the Baltic Sea as a unified historical space years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, regional foreign tourism has thus far not attracted any particular attention.5 This article analyzes the exchange of tourists between the USSR and the capitalist West, looking at the case of Finnish tourists who visited the Estonian SSR. Finland remained independent after World War II, but it became a Soviet-friendly capitalist country, a kind of bridge between East and West. In the 1920s and 1930s, Estonia and Finland cooperated closely in many fields, from sharing secret intelligence about the Soviet fleet in the Baltic Sea6 to cultural and economic ties. In

2 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2006). 3 Gould-Davies, ‘The Logic of Soviet Cultural Policy’, p. 203. 4 Recent scholarly publications on this topic support this position: Anne Gorsuch, All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin (Oxford, 2011); Benedikt Tondera, ‘Der sowjetische Tourismus in den Westen unter Nikita Chruščev 1955–1964’, Zeitschrift für Geschichstswissenschaft 61 (2013), no. 1, pp. 43–64. 5 Cord Pagenstecher, ‘Von der Strandburg zur Bettenburg. Zur Visual History des bundesdeutschen Ostsee-Tourismus’, Nordost-Archiv 20 (2011), pp. 146–73, here p. 153. 6 Jari Laskinen, Veljien valtiosalaisuus: Suomen ja Viron salainen sotilaallinen yhteistyö Neuvostoliiton hyökkäyksen varalle vuosina 1918–1940 (Porvoo-Helsinki, 1999).

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1939, 13,000 Finns visited Estonia,7 nearly half of whom arrived by airplane.8 The brisk exchange of tourists between these two neighboring countries ended with the beginning of the Soviet occupation in Estonia. Before World War II, practically no tourists traveled between Finland and the USSR,9 but after the war, Finnish tourists started visiting the Soviet Union in larger numbers. Soon Finns made up the majority of Western tourists who visited the USSR. In this paper, the author tries to answer the following questions: What was Finland’s position as a tourism country for the USSR? What kinds of Finnish tourists visited the Estonian SSR, and what kinds of qualitative and quantitative changes took place in this process from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1970s? The author examines developments in foreign tourism until 1980, when two events of significance occurred: the Tallinn sailing regatta of the Olympic Games was held, and the Olympia Hotel was opened. This was accompanied by an increase in the number of foreign visitors in the ESSR. At the same time, the large number of Finns visiting in the Estonian SSR was seen as a growing ideological threat, which started to concern the local KGB in the early 1980s. Primarily Estonian and Finnish archival sources have been drawn upon in writing this article. Of these sources, the archival records of the ESSR Council of Ministers Foreign Tourism Administration (collection R-2288)10 and Intourist’s Tallinn Department (collection R-2136)11 deserve special mention, along with archival materials at the Finnish National Archives12 and the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

7 Torkel Jansson, ‘Estland – Schwedens erstes Mallorca in den 1930er Jahren’, NordostArchiv 20 (2011), pp. 111–145, here p. 111. 8 Lentoliikenne Helsingin ja Tallinnan välisellä reitillä, not dated, Ulkoasiainministeriön arkisto (Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, UMA), 87C, archival record ‘Niirala–Värtsilän rayanylityspaikka (Neuvostoliitto)’, p. 3. 9 A.A. Fedulin, V.E. Bagdasarian, I.B. Orlov and I.I. Shnaidgen, Sovetskoe zazerkal’e. Inostrannyi turizm v SSSR v 1930-1980-e gody (Moscow, 2007), p. 52. 10 For instance, correspondence between the local leadership and the USSR Council of Ministers Main Administration of Foreign Tourism, various regulations and orders, and statistical overviews. 11 For instance, reports on the local serving of foreign tourists and statistical overviews. 12 Materials concerning the activity of the Finnish-USSR Friendship Society and its Estonian department.

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The Situation before Finnish Mass Tourism 1955–65 Before the late 1930s, ordinary tourists were able to visit the USSR on rare occasions, along with official foreign delegations and idealistic Western European fellow travelers who admired socialism. However, conditions changed from 1937–38 onward.13 In the Great Terror, many representatives of ethnic minorities were labeled traitors and executed. This went hand-in-hand with a more widespread xenophobia and stricter bans on foreign influence along with a focus on domestic politics (reflecting the principle of “building socialism in one’s own country”). In this climate, it was made much more difficult for citizens of foreign countries to visit the USSR. Under Stalin, ordinary Soviet citizens were not allowed to visit foreign countries. At the end of the 1940s, tourism started being defined as “sport” or “physical activity,” as the state’s chief ideologist, Andrei Zhdanov, perceived it.14 The aim of Stalinist policy was to reduce the USSR’s foreign contacts to the minimum to maintain strict and complete control over the thought and mentality of Soviet citizens.15 After Stalin’s death, “peaceful coexistence” became the USSR’s new official foreign policy. However, this did not mean the end of competition between the United States and the USSR. The Soviet authorities attempted to reach the public in capitalist countries and to influence them ideologically through international tourism. The first visits abroad of representatives of the Soviet elite (scientists and artists) took place in 1954. A supplementary resolution passed a year later made it possible for Soviet citizens to travel abroad with the aim of strengthening the USSR’s international influence.16 Allowing Soviet citizens to go to foreign countries, however, also meant that foreign tourists gained the right to enter the USSR. The first period of tourist exchange between Finland and the Estonian SSR started under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. That period began with the opening of the USSR to foreign tourists and the gradual easing of the previous strict travel restrictions.17 In the mid-1950s, the first Estonian tourists received permis-

13 Michel David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 89–97; Fedulin, et al., Sovetskoe zazerkal’e, p. 47. 14 Anne E. Gorsuch, ‘There Is No Place Like Home: Soviet Tourism in Late Stalinism’, Slavic Review 62 (2003), no. 4, pp. 760–85, here p. 760. 15 Gould-Davies, ‘The Logic of Soviet Cultural Policy’, p. 198. 16 Gorsuch, All This is Your World, p. 13. 17 Ibid.

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sion to visit Finland, and the first Finnish tourists arrived in Tallinn. In 1954, Helsinki and Moscow signed a friendship-cities agreement, and Kotka and Tallinn followed suit in 1955. The following year, Vaasa became Pärnu’s friendship city.18 In 1959, a local department of the State Joint Stock Company on Foreign Tourism (Intourist) was set up in Tallinn.19 Only a few Finns visited the Estonian SSR during this period—300 to 400 Finnish tourists visited Tallinn annually—but even fewer ESSR tourists traveled to Finland.20 A total of 556 foreign tourists visited Tallinn in 1960, and 618 foreign tourists visited in 1961, of whom 352 were Finns.21 Finns constituted the largest segment of tourists from capitalist countries who visited the town. Finnish tourist groups consisted primarily of official delegations, communists, trade union leaders, left-wing intellectuals, cultural activists (musicians, chorus singers), and “groups of specialists” (representatives of a particular occupation like farmers, teachers, doctors, or technicians). The latter groups were offered “special excursions” consisting of visits to noteworthy kolkhozes, industrial complexes, and new government and communal buildings. They also visited their Estonian colleagues. A common cultural background and closely related languages helped ease interaction between Estonian and Finnish colleagues. Ideas were exchanged during such get-togethers, and through them, local specialists found out about new developments and trends in their field on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The use of new trends in modern architecture in the ESSR in the 1950s and 1960s stands out as an example of this.22 18 Suomalais–Neuvostoliittolainen kauppakamari, not dated, Kansalisarkisto (Finnish National Archives, KA), collection Suomi-Neuvostoliitto Seura (SNS), archival record 56, pp. 5–6. 19 ESSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics report from 1971 on foreign tourism in the Estonian SSR, not dated, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 8. 20 Mati Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek (The Return of Kalevipoeg) (Tallinn, 2008), p. 149. 21 Overview of the movements of foreign tourists and how they were served for the period of March to October 1961, 31 October 1961, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 9, l. 8, 21–21v, 32. 22 This included cornice architecture, summer houses, and gardening cooperatives (imitating the Northern European Schrebergarten movement). See also Mart Kalm, ‘Saunapidu suvilas: Nõukogude eestlased Soome järgi läänt mängimas’ (Sauna Party in the Summerhouse: Soviet Estonians Pretending to Be Western according to Finland), Kirikiri (Internet periodical), 2 July 2006 (http://www.kirikiri.ee/article.php3?id_article=299, accessed 22 September 2013). At the same time, single-story modernist small dwellings influenced by Finnish detached houses were built in Tallinn. See also, for example, Epp Lankots, Tallinna nõukogudeaegne ehituspärand: Välitööd ja

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Since Finnish specialists were able to familiarize themselves with various facilities outside of Tallinn as well during these special excursions (at first, ordinary tourists were not permitted to leave the capital), the security organs watched them more closely than they did ordinary Finnish tourists. The fear of undesirable contacts between locals and foreigners could have been part of the reason why the daily agenda of Finnish specialists and delegates was completely filled with activities: the day began as a rule at 10 a.m. and ended with a festive dinner at a restaurant at 8 p.m. Visitors often complained that the agenda was too jampacked with activities, tiring them out and causing them to fall ill.23 Finnish historian Auvo Kostiainen has described official delegations and special excursions as examples of political tourism.24 The primary objective of special excursions was to display the USSR as a progressive and technologically developed state, as numerous new postwar construction projects showed.25 This propaganda device functioned well in the context of Estonia, which was indeed a Soviet republic yet, at the same time, was more affluent than other regions and was known among residents of the USSR as the “Soviet West” (Sovetskii Zapad), “Russia’s West,” or “our near abroad.”26 Soviet authorities saw the aforementioned groups as an important means for political influence in their home country, since they (or at least some of them) could potentially spread a positive, Soviet-friendly viewpoint in Finland based on what they heard and saw in the Estonian SSR. A delegation consisting mostly of Finnish Communist Party functionaries from the city of Kotka was in Tallinn in November 1958. During their excursion, they visited the Uus Elu (New Life) kolkhoz, and the foreign guests were offered beer in its grocery store. Next they toured the Kalev candy factory, where they “tasted the factory’s products, and the visitors were given large quantities of sweets to take home.”27 After the candy factory, an interview was given at the state radio station, during which the foreign

hinnang objektidele (Tallinn’s Soviet Architectural Heritage: Field Work and Appraisal of Objects) (Tallinn, 2009). 23 Trip schedule for Finnish tourists in Tallinn, 7–9 July 1961, not dated, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 8, l. 7. 24 Auvo Kostiainen, ‘Mass Tourists, Groups and Delegates: Travel from Finland to the Soviet Union from 1950 to 1980’ (http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article242e.htm, accessed 22 September 2013). 25 Gorsuch, All This is Your World, p. 89. 26 Ibid., p. 50. 27 Delegation from the city of Kotka, 5–11 November 1958, not dated, ERA f. R-2206, n. 1, s. 23, l. 17.

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visitors talked about their positive impressions. Every interviewee was given 153 rubles; the Finns “were surprised to be given such a large fee.”28 In July 1960, the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society’s mixed chorus Kullervo came to Tallinn. Officials in the Estonian SSR considered the visit a success in every respect in terms of propaganda: “It became clear to everyone, including those who were here on their second visit and those who were here for the first time, that serious cultural work is being done south of the Gulf of Finland and that many old ‘cultured countries’ have nothing comparable to offer in terms of choral singing and musical culture. Everyone had the chance to ascertain how much support the state provides for this. The only conclusion can be that the roots of cultural work have to be deep here and those roots find support in every respect from the entire people and government organizations. At any rate, everyone’s expectations were exceeded.”29 Alongside all of this, however, local tourism officials reported with disappointment that the groups of Finnish specialists and leftist activists spent little money while in Tallinn, and thus the influx of foreign currency (Finnish marks) was less than anticipated.30 This was a problem, because the central institutions of tourism in Moscow wanted to earn as much hard currency from foreign tourists as possible. The reason for this lay in the fact that the USSR depended permanently on hard foreign currency. Because the Soviet economy was planned, the Soviet ruble could purchase little and had no actual value on the world market. Thus, the Soviet state needed hard foreign currency to pay for Western technology and raw materials. The establishment of military bases in Third World countries and the support of the USSR’s foreign partners continually increased the state’s expenditures and increased its demand for hard currency. One way to obtain hard currency was from foreign tourists spending it locally. Vladimir Ankudinov, head of Intourist from 1947 to 1968, supported the idea of using foreign tourism to earn money. He viewed tourism as a miracle industry that could contribute to Soviet economic growth in many ways and add millions of dollars to the state budget each year.31

28 Ibid. 29 Report on the visit by the Finland–Soviet Union Society mixed chorus Kullervo to Tallinn on 18–22 July 1960, 31 July 1960, ibid., l. 44. 30 See, for instance, ERA f. R-2206, n. 1, s. 23, l. 17. 31 Shawn Salmon, ‘Marketing Socialism: Intourist in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s’, Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (eds.), Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, (Ithaca, 2006), pp. 186–204, here pp. 191–2.

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There were about 25 million tourists worldwide in 1950. By 1960, their number had grown to 71 million.32 The phenomenon of mass tourism had developed worldwide by the 1960s. Tourists were important consumers globally and spent money on various activities and services. The USSR wanted a share of that income.33 Soviet economists pointed out that tourism was closely associated with capitalism and the market economy, and if the USSR wanted to participate in this global business, it had to play by the established rules. According to Soviet economists, “there is sharp competition in the tourism industry in today’s world. The country that manages to offer tourists better services has the advantage.”34 In the Stalinist era, tourism was referred to as a nonproductive sector, but in the late 1960s, experts started studying the productive nature of the work of the services sector. Academics referred to Karl Marx’s assertion that “in addition to raw materials existing in the form of goods, there is a certain amount of objects in the form of services as well.”35 Soviet planners decided to develop the “tourism economy” in order to initiate mass tourism in the USSR.36 The Eastern European “people’s republics” also participated in the worldwide competition for tourists. State travel agencies tried to earn as much profit (hard currency) as possible from foreign tourism, and if this did not succeed, then they at least tried to minimize their economic losses.37 Nevertheless, in the context of the USSR, the small influx of hard foreign currency meant that Moscow was not interested in allocating additional finances through the all-Union budget to modernize tourist infrastructure (new hotels, restaurants, bars, and other such facilities) in all of its Union republics. This was the case in the Estonian SSR as well. In the early 1960s, the ESSR Council of Ministers wanted to build a new 500-bed Intourist hotel in Tallinn by 1967, but 32 Katariina Korpela, ‘Etelänkuumettä’: ruotsalaisen ja suomalaisen Italiaan ja Espanjaan suuntautuneen massa turismin alkuvaiheet’ (MA thesis, Turku, 1998), p. 1. 33 ERA f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 6. 34 Ibid, l. 16. 35 Yuliya Zhizhanova, ‘Tourism in the USSR in the Second Half of the 20th Century: Experience of Travelling and International Tourism Exchange’ (http://t2m.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/09/Zhizhanova_Yuliya_Paper.pdf, accessed 23 December 2012). 36 Christian Noack, ‘“You Have Probably Heard about This….” Baltic Seaside Resorts as Soviet Tourist Destinations’, Nordost-Archiv 20 (2011), pp. 199–221, here p. 200. 37 Jerzy Kochanowski, ‘“Wir sind zu arm, um den Urlaub im eigenen Land zu verbringen.” Massentourismus und illegaler Handel in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren in Polen’, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Jerzy Kochanowski and Joachim von Puttkamer (eds.), “Schleichwege.” Inoffizielle Begegnungen sozialistischer Staatsbürger zwischen 1956 und 1989 (Cologne, 2010), pp. 135–51, here p. 139.

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Moscow rejected this proposal.38 The deputy head of Intourist in Moscow wrote to the head of Intourist in Tallinn: “we inform you that a small number of foreign tourists currently visit the city of Tallinn, and their entry is of a seasonal nature (only during the summer months), for which reason the leadership of Intourist does not feel that adding a new hotel under the aegis of Intourist would serve our purposes.”39 The ESSR Council of Ministers had to use its own financial resources to build new residential buildings instead, since many homes were destroyed during the war and there was high demand for new apartment buildings. The USSR as a whole had become bogged down in restoring the postwar housing stock, and in the mid-1950s, the Party decided that a separate apartment had to be built for every Soviet family.40 Given its scant resources, Moscow was more willing to finance the development of tourist infrastructure in the region of the Black Sea and Caucasia, since those regions were more popular travel destinations than the Baltic region in the early 1960s41 and because, during World War II, their tourist facilities had suffered many times more damage than the infrastructure in the Baltic republics.42 As a rule, ordinary tourists tend to consume more than official delegations do. But there were relatively few ordinary tourists among the Finns visiting the Estonian SSR. Finns primarily visited Leningrad, Moscow, and the Black Sea region. In order to get to Tallinn, they had to take a train via Leningrad.43 Rail was the most widely used type of public transportation in the USSR. But arriving at one’s destination by that means was often inconvenient (involving connection transfers, crowded passenger cars, and complicated procedures for crossing the border). Considering that Soviet trains rarely stayed on schedule in the late 1950s, and it took a long time to travel from one city to another, it is clear that such a trip was inconvenient and tiring for the ordinary tourist. Tallinn was an unattractive destination for foreign tourists in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. A total of 168,088 foreign tourists visited the USSR in 1963 (of 38 V. Ankudinov to the ESSR Minister of Construction S. Samoilenko, 11 November 1964, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 28, l. 73. 39 V. Vishniakov to E. Liim, 28 June 1961, ibid., s. 7, l. 17. 40 Kalm, ‘Saunapidu suvilas’. 41 Caucasia was more of a travel destination for domestic Soviet tourists, and the Black Sea was more for foreign tourists. 42 Noack, “‘You Have Probably Heard about This…’”, p. 200. 43 Intourist route number 1 (44) Leningrad-Tallinn, 10 October 1959, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 2, l. 56.

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whom 76,362 were from capitalist countries), and the most popular cities among tourists were Moscow (118,247 tourists), Leningrad (82,721), Kiev (36,721), Odessa (30,133), Sochi (29,128), Yalta (24,060), Minsk (15,402), Sukhumi (13,155), Batumi (8,270), Lvov (7,565), Kharkov (6,039), Tbilisi (4,464), Volgograd (2,489), and Samarkand (987).44 Tallinn was not among the most visited Soviet cities.

The Situation after 1965 The chief functionaries of Intourist and the USSR Council of Ministers Main Administration of Foreign Tourism knew that attracting international tourists to visit the USSR depended on the existence of reliable transportation. In order to demonstrate its technical innovations to foreigners, the USSR launched regular flights to several foreign countries in 1956, and the number of those flights rose considerably from year to year. A new international airport (Sheremet’evo) opened in Moscow in 1960. Regardless of the development of international flights, air transport clearly lagged behind other means of transportation in bringing foreign tourists to the USSR. The railroads remained the most-used means of transportation for most international as well as domestic travel. While official propaganda treated railway transportation as a sign of the Soviet Union’s modernity and peaceful coexistence, the reality was entirely different: in 1960, the journey by train from Moscow to Berlin took about 54 hours, and Soviet tourists who traveled from Italy to Leningrad had to change trains five times.45 The same applied to Finland. Finland started building its welfare state in the 1950s. The 40-hour workweek was established in the early 1960s, and unemployment benefits were doubled. People’s incomes increased as welfare grew, domestic consumption increased, and Finns started visiting foreign countries ever more frequently as part of tourist groups.46 A total of 122,986 Finns visited foreign countries in 1950. They mostly traveled to Sweden or Norway. By 1955, the number had risen to 323,396. As of 1962, 68,190 Finnish tourists traveled beyond the Nordic countries, and in 1965, 140,014 did so.47 While only 2,887 Finnish tourists visited Spain in 1955, 27,781 did so 10 years later.48 In 1974, an estimated 1.9 million Finnish citizens visited foreign countries, of whom: 44 Overview of catering to foreign tourists who visited the USSR in 1963, not dated, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 7, l. 11–12. 45 Gorsuch, All This is Your World, pp. 140–1. 46 Henrik Meinander, Soome ajalugu (Finnish History) (Tallinn, 2012), pp. 218, 220. 47 Korpela, ‘Etelänkuumettä’, p. 140. 48 Ibid., p. 156.

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169,000 visited the USSR;49 160,000 visited Italy 146,000 visited Spain 22,000 visited Greece

Sweden and Norway were probably the most-visited countries, but no separate statistics were kept for those trips, some of which were connected to working and shopping there.50 Despite the growth in the prosperity of Estonia’s northern neighbors, there were few Finnish tourists in the ESSR in the early 1960s. One of the reasons for this was the absence of a proper transportation connection. The tiring trip by rail via Leningrad was the only regular connection between the two countries, and it involved a complicated procedure for crossing the border. “Only those (Finns) who really needed to go to Tallinn undertook that journey.”51 In May 1962, the journey by train from Leningrad to Tallinn took five-and-a-half hours.52 In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Finnish tourists who wanted to visit Tallinn faced a six-day journey: nearly one day for the return trip to Leningrad, three days in Leningrad with an excursion to nearby settlements, and less than two days for actually visiting Tallinn. In Tallinn, tourists had to visit designated museums, kindergartens, and Soviet industrial enterprises.53 It was a package tour worked out by Intourist that included two cities in two Union republics54 and allowed Soviet tourism officials to earn hard currency from tourists at various geographical destinations. Needless to say, this kind of organized trip did not suit vacation-oriented Finnish tourists. The chief functionaries of Intourist and of the USSR Council of Ministers Main Administration of Foreign Tourism understood that the number of Finnish tourists visiting Leningrad and Moscow was continually increasing, thus generating more revenue. Moscow, in its hunger for hard currency, tried to offer foreign tourists new destinations and to expand the range of services for extra charge. 49 50 51 52 53

Of these, 43,000 Finns visited the Estonian SSR. Suomalaisten ulkomaanlomat (1976), pp. 3–4, 11. Sakari Nupponen, Viru hotel ja tema aeg (Viru Hotel and its Time) (Tallinn, 2007), p. 3. Eero Salmi and Uuno Salminen, SN-Seuran piiritoimikunnille, 18 May 1962, KA, SNS, 54. List of sights to be shown to foreign tourists in Tallinn, 19 July 1961, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 9, l. 10–1. 54 Analogous package tours that included different Union republics were also organized for domestic Soviet tourists, who were brought by train from the USSR’s less developed regions in Asia to the USSR’s more developed western regions (the Baltic republics, Belorussia, Ukraine) to motivate them to eliminate their economic and cultural backwardness. See Noack, ‘You Have Probably Heard about This…’, p. 216.

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The Kremlin realized that the attraction of international tourists to the USSR depended on the existence of reliable transportation. At that time, passenger and cruise ships were the only comfortable transport option for foreign tourists. At the end of the 1950s, Soviet cruise ships started sailing to many of Europe’s capitals: London, Copenhagen, Athens, and other destinations.55 The opening of those new passenger shipping lines must have prompted preparations for the Tallinn–Helsinki line. Tallinn mayor Johannes Undusk, visiting the city of Kotka in 1962 for a festival celebrating friendship between the two cities, mentioned to his Finnish colleagues that there were plans to begin renovating Tallinn’s passenger port and that construction was to be completed by the end of 1965 at the latest. Thereafter, Tallinn would be ready to receive tourists, including travelers from Helsinki. During President Kekkonen’s visit to Estonia, Valter Tuhk, an employee of Intourist’s Tallinn Department, said, “Tallinn will be ready to receive tourists in the coming years.”56 The desire to earn foreign currency was the main reason why the USSR Council of Ministers decided to open a direct ferry connection between Helsinki and Tallinn. The service opened on March 6, 1965.57 The ship sailed between the two cities daily, and the period of navigation lasted from the beginning of May to the end of September.58 This new means of transportation soon increased the number of Finnish tourists traveling to the Estonian SSR. According to the Estonian Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics, about 80 percent of all foreign tourists traveled to Tallinn by ship.59 About 9,000 Finns visited Estonia in 1965, and almost all of them (8,894) came by passenger ship.60 By 1967, their number had grown to 15,325,61 and by 1975, to 61,700. These numbers amount to mass Finnish tourism to the ESSR. In 1971–75, 182,400 Finns visited the Estonian SSR, accounting for 59 percent of all foreign

55 Gorsuch, All This is Your World, pp. 140–1. 56 Pekka Lehtonen, ‘Raha ratkaisi Tallinnan ja Helsingin laivayhteyden’, Kansan Uutiset, 12 April 2013. 57 Nupponen, Viru hotel ja tema aeg, p. 10. 58 Tilastollinen päätoimisto, not dated, UMA, 87 C, archival record “Niirala–Värtsilän rayanylityspaikka (Neuvostoliitto)”, p. 68. 59 ERA f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 11. 60 E. Liim’s overview of the development of foreign tourism in 1965 for V. Boichenko, 7 January 1966, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 12, l. 1. 61 Overall table concerning foreign tourists who visited Estonia in 1967 (overview of work with foreign tourists in the ESSR in 1967), 9 January 1968, ibid., s. 23, l. 4.

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tourists there. A total of 261,200 Finnish tourists visited the ESSR in 1965–75.62 The number of Finns decreased by almost half in 1968, as a result of the suppression of the Prague Spring and a recession in Finland (which saw the devaluation of the Finnish mark).63 In the first half of 1972, 113,984 tourists from capitalist countries visited Moscow, 99,916 visited Leningrad, 14,075 visited Tallinn, and 12,369 visited Kiev.64 Thus, Tallinn had become one of the more popular foreign tourist destinations, ranking third among Soviet cities in terms of visits by foreign tourists. In terms of the number of foreign tourists per capita, however, Estonia was in first place among Union republics. In 1970, six foreign tourists visited the USSR per 1,000 residents. The figure for Soviet Estonia, however, was 21 foreign tourists per 1,000 residents.65 Even though the direct ferry connection between Tallinn and Helsinki increased Finnish tourism to Soviet Estonia, it soon became evident that the first Soviet passenger ship Vanemuine (built in Bulgaria in the early 1960s) was not the best choice, due to its limited capacity. According to its specifications, the Vanemuine could accommodate 250 passengers, yet in practice, there was only room for up to 120 passengers. Despite the risk to passengers’ lives, the ship always sailed with at least 250 passengers on board. The lack of space meant that there was no coat check or any place to store passengers’ personal belongings. The bar and restaurant were also too small. Because there was not enough seating for 250 passengers, some tourists had to stand for the entire trip, even in stormy weather. Finnish tourists complained about the cramped and shoddy conditions on board and preferred to travel on Finnish ships. The Soviet side was spared from failure only because the Finnish shipping company discontinued its ferry service on that line.66 In 1965–67, one Soviet vessel (the Vanemuine) and three Finnish passenger ships (Wellamo, Ariadne, and Silja II) ferried passengers between Tal-

62 The general nature of foreign tourism in the republic in 1975, 17 February 1976, ibid., s. 51, l. 7. 63 R. Nittim to J. Käbin, 24 December 1968, ibid., s. 21, l. 30. Nittim, head of the ESSR Foreign Tourism Administration, noted the following concerning the decrease: “Initial summaries of the tourism season indicate that the number of tourists that visited our republic this year has decreased significantly. The incomes of currency to the state via our republic have also decreased as a result of this.” 64 Overview of visits made by foreign tourists grouped by Union republic and city for the first half of 1972, 7 September 1972, ibid., s. 35, l. 39. 65 ERA f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 18. 66 E. Liim’s overview of the development of foreign tourism in 1965 for V. Boichenko, 7 January 1966, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 12, l. 2.

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linn and Helsinki, yet Finland discontinued its regular passenger ship connection in 1967, since the undertaking was not profitable for the Finnish shipping company.67 It was far more profitable for Finnish enterprises to operate on lines connecting Finland and Sweden, where the ferrying of passengers increased and the flow of goods grew.68 After the Finnish travel company abandoned the Tallinn–Helsinki line, ESSR shipping achieved a monopoly there. The resulting influx of money pleased local tourism authorities. In 1967, the Vanemuine was replaced by the motor ship Tallinn (built in Leningrad in 1960), which had a capacity of 247 passengers. The additional money that the Soviets earned from foreign tourists was connected to the fact that many Intourist prices were overinflated. Thus, for instance, a four-day trip to the ESSR cost 230 Finnish marks in 1968, at a time when a two-day trip to Copenhagen cost 240 Finnish marks.69 A round-trip ferry ticket from Helsinki to Tallinn (a distance of 80 km) cost 47 marks, while a return-ticket from Vaasa to Umeå (in Sweden, distance 90 km) cost only 32 marks.70 Soon after the Tallinn–Helsinki ferry line was opened, Toivo Karvonen, head of the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society, complained that a ticket to Tallinn cost more than a ferry ticket on the Turku-Stockholm line. He said that because of the ferry’s high prices, few members of the Society who lived in central and northern Finland could participate in trips to Estonia. At the same time, Karvonen praised the speed of the travel connection between the two cities.71 Prices were high because Intourist had a monopoly on the Soviet tourism market and the regime wanted to generate hard currency quickly. Since the ESSR had not earned much revenue from foreign tourists in previous years, it can be assumed that every possible effort was made to profit from the increased influx of tourists. The surviving data indicate that the growing number of Finnish tourists significantly increased the influx of foreign currency to the Union republic. While the ESSR earned hard foreign currency worth 912,500 valuta-rubles from foreign

67 Nupponen, Viru hotel ja tema aeg, p. 10. 68 Meinander, Soome ajalugu, p. 215. 69 In 1963, a Finnish tourist had to pay 226 marks for a four-day trip to Moscow. A threeday trip to Leningrad cost 116 marks, and a two-week trip to Yalta on the Black Sea cost 464 marks. See: K. Rautavaara to Raoul Viies, not dated, KA, SNS, 88. 70 R. Nittim to J. Käbin, 24 December 1968, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 21, l. 31. 71 Toivo Karvonen to the Suomen Höyrylaiva OY, 17 December 1965, KA, SNS, 69.

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tourists in 1966,72 that amount had grown to 950,600 valuta-rubles a year later.73 Most of this increase was due to the Finns. The indicators pointed out above are Intourist’s official figures, and thus we can assume that the actual profit was even greater. Central tourist organs located in Moscow ordinarily used and distributed financial resources,74 and local authorities did not have much say in that respect. Tallinn’s Intourist department was subordinate to the central office in Moscow and received its orders directly from there.75 Since the influx of foreign hard currency to the Estonian SSR increased from year to year, the central tourism authorities in Moscow decided to allocate additional resources to develop and modernize the local tourism infrastructure in order to attract even more foreign visitors. With that in mind, a new first-class 463-room Intourist hotel named the Viru Hotel, erected by Finnish builders in 1969–72, opened in Tallinn in 1972.76 Quality Finnish workmanship and building materials that were in part imported from the West meant that the hotel offered its guests comfort and quality at an international standard. Only foreigners were allowed to stay at Tallinn’s two Intourist hotels (the Viru and the Tallinn).77 This restriction was lifted at the end of the 1980s, when Soviet citizens also started being accommodated in both hotels.78 The opening of the ferry line between Tallinn and Helsinki helped increase the number of Finnish tourists traveling to Estonia. At the same time, the authorities in Estonia soon anxiously noticed that the local tourism infrastructure was hopelessly outdated and too limited to serve the increasing number of foreign tourists. 72 Foreign tourism earned foreign currency worth 42.6 million valuta-rubles for the USSR in 1966. 73 Economic results (overview of work with foreign tourists in the ESSR in 1967), 9 January 1968, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 23, l. 31. The valuta-ruble is a bookkeeping unit using the official and severely overvalued Soviet exchange rate of the ruble to foreign currencies. Depending on which scarce goods could be obtained on the world market, one valuta-ruble was worth much more than a ruble. The “real” value could be four or even 10 times higher. 74 R. Nittim to V. Ankudinov, 13 February 1967, ibid., s. 19, l. 3. 75 The Intourist head office in Moscow was in turn subordinate to the USSR Council of Ministers Foreign Tourism Administration: ibid. 76 Gorsuch, All This Is Your World, p. 67. 77 Nupponen, Viru hotell ja tema aeg, p. 3. 78 This change immediately attracted visiting prostitutes to the scene from republics in the interior of the USSR; they arrived in Tallinn as part of official tourist groups. See Kalle Klandorf, Jälitaja ja jälitatav (The Pursuer and the Pursued) (Tallinn, 2010), p. 81.

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The greatest problems were connected to accommodations and the scarcity of hotel rooms. ESSR authorities repeatedly pointed this out to Finnish representatives as well.79 This problem was summarized in a study by the ESSR Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics: “Relatively few foreigners visited our republic during the first years, because (Intourist’s Tallinn) department did not have its own material base and qualified personnel.”80 Before the Viru Hotel opened, Tallinn had a total of four hotels, two of which were built in the 19th century (the Toome and Baltic hotels).81 A third was built in 1937 (the Palace), and the last opened in 1963 (Hotel Tallinn).82 The Palace and Tallinn were the largest hotels.83 Hotel Tallinn was directly subordinated to Intourist. Foreigners were always given preference in terms of accommodations, and visitors from elsewhere in the USSR or from the Eastern bloc had to settle for more modest conditions. If they complained that they were treated like secondclass citizens, nobody listened to them, since only foreign tourists brought the needed hard foreign currency.84 The poor quality of tourism infrastructure and the shortage of accommodations throughout the USSR eventually led to a decline in tourist numbers. Soviet tourism administration noticed this trend starting in the mid-1960s. Deputy Director of Intourist Vladimir Boichenko demanded in writing that all construction projects in progress be completed on time, without delays or mistakes.85 Before the Viru Hotel was completed, Intourist had to make agreements with Finnish tourism companies that for Tallinn hotels, three people would be assigned to two-person rooms with amenities.86 The opening of the Viru Hotel significantly alleviated the scarcity of hotel accommodations in Tallinn and helped increase Finnish tourism to Soviet Estonia.

79 Toivo Karvonen’s letter, May 1960, KA, SNS, 88. 80 ERA f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 8. 81 These hotels were renamed at the beginning of Soviet rule. Their original names were the St. Petersburg and the Imperial. 82 Gorsuch, All This is Your World, pp. 66–67. 83 E. Liim to A. Müürisep, 13 April 1961, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 9, l. 9. 84 This sort of discrimination was also encountered a great deal in other regions of the USSR, as well as in socialist Central Eastern Europe. 85 Order no. 25 issued by the deputy head of the Council of Ministers Administration of Foreign Tourism, 5 May 1965, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 9, l. 24. 86 Economic activity of the Viru and Tallinn hotels, not dated, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 161, l. 120.

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However, the permanent ferry connection and the opening of the Viru Hotel were not the only factors in this increase. Mass tourism of Finns to the USSR started gathering steam in that period, and compared to other Union republics, Soviet Estonia gained a large part of it. According to Finnish historian Auvo Kostiainen, the foundation for Finnish mass tourism to the USSR was laid in the 1960s, and at the beginning of the 1970s, mass tourism became an independent phenomenon.87 While about 2,000–3,000 Finns visited the USSR annually in the 1950s, that figure had risen to 50,000–60,000 people by the latter half of the 1960s. At the end of the 1960s, mass tourists accounted for 90–95 percent of all Finnish tourists in the USSR. This tendency paralleled global trends in tourism, in which standardized package tours, charter flights, and mass travelers became routine.88 In 1971, charter flights accounted for 63.4 percent of all flights within Europe.89 While there were about 71 million tourists in the world in 1960, the number had risen to 160 million by 1970.90 The Foreign Tourism Administration was created under the ESSR Council of Ministers in 1966 as a Union-republic organ for developing tourism more rapidly. The Intourist’s Tallinn department was subordinated to it.91 The head of Intourist’s Tallinn department became one of the deputies of the head of the local Foreign Tourism Administration. The Foreign Tourism Council was established under the government to resolve problems. The Council was composed of representatives of Union-republic institutions and ministries (including the deputy head of Estonian Shipping, the head of the USSR’s foreign commerce bank Tallinn department, the first deputy of the ESSR KGB, the deputy ESSR minister of internal affairs, the deputy ESSR minister of foreign affairs, and the secretary of Tallinn’s Executive Committee).92 Along with organizational infrastructure improvements, Intourist also tried to improve customer service. Customer service was generally poor in the USSR. Employees of Intourist bars and restaurants had little knowledge of foreign languages.

87 Auvo Kostiainen, ‘The Vodka Trail: Finnish Travellers’ Motivation to Visit the Former Soviet Union’ (http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article263e.htm, 26 December 2012). A total of 50,000 Finnish tourists visited the USSR in 1966. By 1974, the figure was 178,000. 88 Kostiainen, ‘Mass Tourists, Groups and Delegates’. 89 Korpela, ‘Etelänkuumettä’, p. 59. 90 Ibid., p. 1. 91 ERA f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 8. 92 Decree no. 39/4 on the approval of the composition of the ESSR Foreign Tourism Council, 25 November 1976, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 51, l. 59–60.

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On top of that, they were impolite and felt contempt towards foreigners. Some service staff abused alcohol, and others tried to shortchange Finns.93 Finnish tourists had to wait for almost 50 minutes to receive their food orders in the Tallinn ferryboat restaurant, and the quality of the food was poor. They were offered warm beer, and the barmen did not know how to operate the coffee-maker or how to mix cocktails. Finnish guide and interpreter Eva H. submitted an official complaint to the Estonian tourism authorities and expressed skepticism that Finns would use the ferryboat Tallinn at all, since stories of poor customer service spread quickly.94 Over time, the quality of customer service improved, but problems nevertheless remained. Attention was continually drawn to unpleasant cases that had come to light at meetings of the board of the ESSR Foreign Tourism Administration. Here is one example: M. Põder (member of the board): “At the time of our inspection, food was on the table in the Viru restaurant. At the same time, the curtains were taken down, releasing clouds of dust into the air in the presence of the restaurant’s administrator.” L. Mark (manager of the Viru restaurant): “We accept the criticism. We focused our main attention on the kitchen and tables. We were not focusing on the restaurant’s dining rooms. We exterminated cockroaches at night many times each month.”95 As the number of tourists increased, foreigners were allowed to visit the cities of Pärnu, Tartu, and Viljandi, all of which had previously been off limits, beginning July 1, 1966. Tourists were nevertheless only allowed to visit those cities by bus and accompanied by an Intourist guide. They were not permitted to spend the night in Tartu.96 In addition to the increase in the quantity of foreign tourists, a qualitative change also took place in Finnish tourist groups. Finnish tourists who traveled to the ESSR generally fell into one of four categories: transit tourists, groups of specialists, expatriate Estonians, and mass tourists (the majority). Representatives of all these categories used Intourist services to some degree. 93 E. Liim’s directive to Intourist’s Tallinn department for improving work discipline among restaurant employees, January 29, 1964, ERA f. R-2136, n. 1, s. 30, l. 9–11. 94 R. Nittim to the Estonian Communist Party Central Committee (ECP CC) and the Baltic Shipping Administration of the Estonian Shipping Fleet, 7 May 1967, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 16, l. 1. 95 Board meeting minutes, 11 May 1979, ERA f. R-2288, n. 1, s. 153, l. 28. 96 Informational work with foreign tourists and cultural services, not dated, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 19, l. 20.

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Intourist itself did not use this kind of strict categorization. Instead, it differentiated in its statistical reports between foreign citizens on extended stays in the USSR who did not use Intourist services (diplomats, construction workers, students, and seamen) and foreign tourists who used the tourist services of either Intourist or the youth tourism association Sputnik. Since only a few foreign youth visited the ESSR through Sputnik—1,500 young people from capitalist countries visited Tallinn in 1978 and 1,052 in 197997—the main burden of serving foreign tourists lay with Intourist. Intourist’s Tallinn department sometimes stressed in its annual reports the profit potential of groups of unaffiliated tourists. The destination of Finnish transit tourists was not Tallinn but rather other Soviet cities or the vacation centers along the Black Sea. They traveled to Tallinn by ship and continued on to other destinations.98 Intourist was not interested in this category of traveler, since transit tourists as a rule used few local tourist services. Since Intourist did not keep a permanent record of the movements of transit tourists, no reliable data is available concerning what proportion of Finnish tourists they constituted. The second category was groups of specialists (including left-wing activists and official delegations), mentioned above. These tourists visited their Estonian colleagues and noteworthy agricultural99 and manufacturing enterprises.100 At the enterprises to be visited, posters and display stands had to be set up indicating the success of the USSR and the Estonian SSR in that field of production and introducing the history of the enterprise, the living conditions of the enterprise’s employees, and their achievements in socialist competition.101 Soviet authorities saw these groups as an important vehicle for political influence in their home 97

Overview by the head of the ESSR Foreign Tourism Administration for the ESSR ECP CC on the entry of foreign tourists to the republic in 1978–1979, 28 January 1980, ibid., s. 68, l. 38–9. 98 ERA f. R-2347, n. 3, s. 1068, l. 12. 99 Thus, for instance, Finnish specialists and trade union functionaries visited the Saku model sovkhoz and the animal husbandry and veterinary research institute at the Tartu model sovkhoz in May 1970. See also the overview prepared by the Foreign Tourism Administration for the ESSR Council of Ministers on foreign tourists staying in the ESSR during the period 8–30 June 1970, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 817, l. 265. 100 The guests visited the Marat textile factory and the Tallinn residential construction integrated plant. Overview prepared by the Foreign Tourism Administration for the ESSR Council of Ministers on foreign tourists staying in the ESSR during the period 1–20 July 1970, ibid., l. 297. 101 ESSR Council of Ministers Foreign Tourism Administration overview of 1969, not dated, ibid., l. 27.

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countries, since at least some of them could express pro-Soviet views in Finland based on what they saw and heard in the USSR. It can be presumed that Soviet propaganda focused more on delegations than on ordinary Finnish tourists.102 While the number of ordinary tourists continually grew, the number of groups of specialists remained stable through the years.103 After the Soviets suppressed the Prague Spring in 1968, numbers of Finnish tourists dropped, as people in Finland avoided interacting too closely with the USSR. Over time, personal contacts that developed through professional interests between Finnish and Estonian intellectuals often became family friendships.104 Even though official delegations were important politically, this group of tourists was not particularly important to the ESSR authorities economically, since they did not spend much hard foreign currency and often left Intourist empty-handed.105 Estonian expatriates (mostly from Sweden, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and West Germany) formed the third category. These were people who had left Estonia at the end of World War II but now visited Estonia via Finland as tourists. In 1967, 512 Estonian expatriates visited the Estonian SSR (2.9 percent of all foreign tourists): 262 of them were from Sweden, 88 from the United States, 69 from Finland, 45 from Canada, 34 from West Germany, and 14 from the United Kingdom.106 In May–September 1970, 691 emigrants visited the ESSR, most of whom came from Sweden.107 Many emigrants had previously applied for a Soviet visa in order to visit relatives in Soviet Estonia, only to be rejected by the consul at their country’s Soviet embassy. These emigrants then tried a simpler solution: they turned to Finnish travel agencies, bought an Intourist travel package to Estonia, and thus received their visa (since the Soviet Embassy in Finland issued the visa to the respective travel agency). This situation appeared at the beginning of the 1960s.108 102 103 104 105

Serving foreign tourists in terms of visiting excursions in 1969, not dated, ibid., l. 29. Kostiainen, ‘Mass Tourists, Groups and Delegates’. Kalm, ‘Saunapidu suvilas’. Overview of foreigners staying in the ESSR, 2 July 1968, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 22, l. 82; E. Liim’s overview for V. Boichenko on the development of foreign tourism in 1965, 7 January 1966, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2c, s. 12, l. 9. 106 Participants in special groups (overview of work with foreign tourists in the ESSR in 1967), 9 January 1968, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 23, l. 27. 107 Foreign Tourism Administration overviews for the ESSR Council of Ministers on foreign tourists in the ESSR during the period 1 May–30 September 1970, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 817, l. 191, 197, 203, 236, 244, 253, 258, 264, 271. 108 E. Liim to V. Boichenko, 30 November 1962, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 4, l. 20; E. Liim to S. Nikitin, 6 July 1961, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2c, s. 3, l. 29.

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Soviet bureaucrats used the term “ordinary tourists” to describe mass tourists whose aim while abroad was to relax, enjoy themselves, and consume local goods. Starting in the late 1960s, ordinary tourists formed the majority of Finns traveling to the ESSR. In other words, ordinary tourists meant mass tourists. The emergence of the black market and “vodka tourism” accompanied the growth of Finnish mass tourism to the ESSR. These phenomena became endemic in the 1980s. “Vodka tourist” was a popular epithet for a Finnish tourist who came to the Estonian SSR to enjoy the city’s cheap bars and restaurants and consume vodka and buy it from black market “dealers” (fartsovshchiki) for foreign currency and Western clothes or products (primarily jeans, sneakers, and ladies’ stockings).109 Vodka was cheaper in Soviet Estonia than it was in Finland (the most popular brand was Stolichnaya), and that strong liquor was widely consumed in both countries.

Summary This paper focuses on two stages in tourist exchange between Finland and the USSR. The first stage in the exchange of tourists between the two countries took place in the 1950s and 1960s. The formerly strict travel regulations were eased after Stalin’s death, and the borders of the USSR were opened up to foreigners. Finnish tourists who visited the Estonian SSR during the first stage were mostly from left-wing organizations, Soviet-friendly groups, or cultural figures and activists. Even though the number of Finnish tourists in the ESSR exceeded the number of Estonian tourists visiting Finland, other regions of the USSR (Leningrad, Moscow, the Black Sea region) nevertheless attracted more Finns. The second stage in the exchange of tourists began in the mid-1960s. Alongside the members of official Finnish delegations and friendship organizations, more and more ordinary Finnish tourists found their way to Tallinn as well. Mass Finnish tourism to the USSR, much of which was received by the Estonian SSR, was partly responsible for this increase. Another cause was the modernization of the local tourism infrastructure (Intourist’s Viru Hotel) and better transportation connections (direct ferry connection between Tallinn and Helsinki). Finnish mass tourists brought Western consumer culture with them to the Estonian SSR: they liked to spend weekends in Tallinn sitting in the city’s cheap bars and restaurants and shopping in the foreign-currency shops. 109 See, for instance, Order no. 68c issued by the head of the USSR Council of Ministers Foreign Tourism Administration, 14 December 1965, ERA f. R-2288, n. 2, s. 9, l. 89–91.

Marek Miil

The Communist Party’s Fight against “Bourgeois Television” 1968–1988 Abstract: The article provides a comprehensive overview of how and why the Communist Party implemented measures in an attempt to reduce the influence of Finnish TV in the ESSR in the context of the Cold War’s ideological struggle. Since it was impossible to prevent the reception of Finnish TV, the Party focused instead on exposing “bourgeois propaganda” in Soviet mass media and developing Soviet television programming as the way to keep people away from independent, uncensored information.

No sooner had Germany capitulated to the Allies in 1945 than a new confrontation emerged in international politics—the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War. Relations between the two superpowers and their satellite countries alternated between tense periods that threatened to culminate in nuclear war and periods of détente. Throughout it all, however, neither side was prepared to retreat from its ideological positions. By the mid1950s, atomic weapons, along with the means for conveying them to any part of the globe, had put all the countries of the world in danger. Thus one of the most important causes of previous wars in Europe, namely the defense of territory, lost its meaning.1 Consequently, the Cold War has been described as “a war on the mind, a contest of ideologies, a battle of nerves which, for the next forty years or so, was to divide the planet into a bi-polar competition that was characterized more by a war of words and the threatened use of nuclear weapons rather than their actual use” where the global information environment had become the battleground.2 It would also be erroneous to interpret the confrontation between East and West as merely a series of “conflicts without weapons.” Instead, the Cold War should be viewed as a war between two sides with different ideologies, in which one side considered conflict to be a normal condition between countries.3 For during the Cold War, Soviet Party functionaries and scholars endlessly repeated Lenin’s observation on ideology: “Any kind of reduction in the importance of 1 John L. Gaddis, Külm sõda (The Cold War) (Tallinn, 2007), p. 276. 2 Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (New York, 1995), pp. 250, 267. 3 Terence H. Qualter, Propaganda and Psychological Warfare (New York, 1962), p. 125.

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socialist ideology … also means the strengthening of bourgeois ideology.”4 In the context of this “Leninist principle,” Soviet propaganda theoreticians explained that the historical class struggle between two antagonistic world views and social systems—capitalism and communism—would continue until the collapse of capitalism. The “ideological struggle,” which was considered to be a “historical argument about social value orientations and one or another path leading to the benefit of society and progress for mankind,” was considered a natural part of this class struggle.5 According to Soviet theoreticians, ideological struggle was supposed to be manifested in propaganda spread by the press, radio, and television that compared “opposing social systems, the idea of socialism and capitalism, facts, processes, and other such matters.”6 Soviet propaganda theorists believed that the side with the more effective propaganda would win the ideological war. Thus the mass media was considered the most important weapon in that war. The postStalin Soviet leadership felt that war with the United States was not unavoidable, and for this reason, a “new foreign policy” set as its goal “peaceful coexistence” between the two countries. Yet at the same time, ideology was not abandoned. Soviet leaders continued to subscribe to the revolutionary-imperialist paradigm.7 Yet the confrontation based on mutual assured destruction did not paralyze scientific or technological progress on either side of the Iron Curtain. This development was manifested in the mass media through the spread of radio and television. While there were over seven million radios and over one million television sets in Soviet households in 1956, by 1968 the number of radios had grown to an estimated 46 million and the number of televisions to 23 million.8 While 3.5 million radios and nearly half a million television sets were manufactured in 1955, by 1968, seven million radios and 5.7 million television sets were manufactured.9

4 ‘ÜLKNÜ 50. aastapäev ja noorsoo kommunistliku kasvatamise ülesanded. NLKP Keskkomitee otsus’ (50th Anniversary of the All-Union Communist Youth Society and the Tasks for Communist Education of Young People: CPSU Central Committee Decision), Rahva Hääl, 6 October 1968. 5 Arno Kirt, Ideoloogiline võitlus ja välispoliitiline propaganda (Ideological Struggle and Foreign Policy Propaganda) (Tallinn, 1983), p. 4. 6 Ibid. 7 Vladislav M. Zubok, Luhtunud impeerium. Nõukogude Liit külmas sõjas alates Stalinist kuni Gorbatšovini (Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev) (Tallinn, 2010), p. 423. 8 Mark W. Hopkins, Mass Media in the Soviet Union (New York, 1970), pp. 248, 250. 9 Ibid., p. 252.

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There were only nine television stations in the Soviet Union in 1955, but there were 121 television stations by 1965.10 On the other hand, this very same development of technology and mass media, and the international situation, put the leadership of the Communist Party into a new situation. Namely, while Stalin managed to keep the Soviet Union isolated, Khrushchev’s thaw meant that the Soviet leadership increasingly had to deal with Western radio broadcasts; direct contacts with Westerners; and foreign books, magazines, and films imported into the country both legally and illegally.11 It is estimated that one-third of adult Soviet citizens living in cities listened to Western radio stations in the 1950s.12 The Soviet regime thus tried to “protect” its citizens from Western ideas and information, since it feared that they would “pollute the socialist environment and ultimately fill the thoughts of their citizens with anticommunist ideas.”13 This new situation gave rise to the need for counterpropaganda.14 In the context of the Cold War’s ideological confrontation and the ongoing propaganda war, however, the situation in the Estonian SSR, which sat on the western border of the Soviet empire, presented the Communist Party with an extraordinary challenge. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, signals from Western radio transmitters reached Estonia. Soviet attempts to block those signals partially, but never completely, succeeded. Hundreds of transmitting stations were erected in the Soviet Union to transmit jamming signals. For instance, while 17 million dollars was spent in 1953 to manage the technology for jamming Western radio stations, 70 million dollars was invested in developing that technology—all of this in a situation where the entire U.S. budget for supporting the work of anti-Soviet radio stations was only 22 million dollars.15 The Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies had an estimated 2,500–3,000 stations jamming radio waves.16 The 10 Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (London, 2011), p. 185. 11 Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Public Opinion and Ideology: Mythology and Pragmatism in Interaction (London, 1986), p. 43. 12 A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, ‘Cold War International Broadcasting and the Road to Democracy’, A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta (eds.), Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; A Collection of Studies and Documents (New York, 2010), pp. 345–51, here p. 345. 13 Ladislav Bittman, ‘Introduction’, Ladislav Bittman (ed.), The New Image-Makers: Soviet Propaganda and Disinformation Today (Washington, 1988), pp. 3–10, here p. 6. 14 Shlapentokh, Soviet Public Opinion, p. 43. 15 Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War 1945–1961 (London, 1988), p. 51. 16 Rimantas Pleikys, Jamming (Vilnius, 1998), p. 6.

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resources and efforts that the Party dedicated to jamming signals from Western radio stations indicate its determination to keep out unofficial sources of information.17 Yet in addition to those “radio voices,” Finland’s “bourgeois television” was accessible in northern Estonia since the 1960s. The Party considered this “uncontrolled media channel” broadcasting from a capitalist country a potential danger. Finnish TV, which reached residents of the Estonian SSR, provided alternative and independent information, and up-to-date news about events throughout the world. The news coverage and the accompanying commentary was altogether different from that offered by Soviet television and radio broadcasts. Additionally, Finnish TV broadcast scenes of everyday life in the West, showing the standard of living and abundance of goods there. These scenes completely contradicted Soviet propaganda about the imminent collapse of capitalism and the triumphal progress of the socialist economy. From the Party’s viewpoint, the fact that Estonians could understand broadcasts on Finnish TV without much difficulty made the situation even more complicated, along with the strong historical and cultural kinship between Finns and Estonians. Unlike the peoples of several other republics of the USSR, Estonians had experienced national independence, freedom of speech, and a free press. Nevertheless, the Estonian SSR leadership tried to counter the “ideological sabotage” of the bourgeoisie through television, radio, and the press. The Communist Party adopted a series of decisions that intensified the role of the press in counterpropaganda activity and tightened censorship. The atmosphere of mistrust and the constant emphasis that the Party, security institutions, and the censorship administration placed on “personal responsibility” fostered self-censorship among journalists. Many innovations and developments in mass media (such as improvements in technology, working conditions, and the quality and content of broadcasts) was often motivated solely by the Party’s objective to win Cold War propaganda campaigns and battles. In recent years, a number of authors have published studies on the Cold War-era propaganda war between the capitalist and socialist blocs. However, these focus only on radio stations and the Communist Party’s struggle against the “radio voices.”18 Simo Mikkonenhas studied in detail how that struggle was 17 Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (Oxford, 1988), p. 21. 18 See, for instance, Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, KY, 2000); R. Eugene Parta, Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War: A Study Based on Audience Research

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waged specifically in the Soviet Union’s Baltic republics.19 Mati Graf and Heikki Roiko-Jokelahave, in a 2004 Finnish-language publication, examined the struggle against Finnish TV—in considerably more detail than this author—in the context of cultural and tourist contacts between Soviet Estonia and Finland and the actions of the KGB.20 Yet Mati Graf ’s book Kalevipoja tagasitulek (The Return of Kalevipoeg), published in Estonian in 2008, nevertheless provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the Communist Party’s struggle against Finnish TV.21 Unlike the study published four years earlier with Roiko-Jokela, Graf has analyzed in greater detail how events in the Soviet Union and the Estonian SSR affected the Communist Party’s policy and actions taken regarding Finnish TV. The greatest shortcoming of Graf ’s book, however, is that it lacks a comprehensive bibliography. For this reason, it remains unclear which statements in his study are supported by documentary archival material, which are people’s memories or opinions, and which are the author’s own personal assessments. Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma provide an entertaining yet cursory overview of the role of Finnish TV in Soviet Estonian society and the countermeasures adopted by the ECP against “bourgeois television” with abundant authentic visual material in their documentary film Disko ja tuumasõda (Disco and Nuclear War).22 Nevertheless, this is a popular treatment of the subject, without source references. In examining the role of Estonian Television (hereinafter referred to as ETV) in the struggle led by the Communist Party against Finnish TV, it turns out that there are essentially no contemporary academic studies of ETV during the Soviet Findings 1970–1991 (Stanford, CA, 2007); Richard H. Cummings, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989 (London, 2009); A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford, CA, 2010); Johnson Parta (eds.), Cold War Broadcasting; Simo Mikkonen, ‘Radio Liberty: The Enemy Within? The Dissemination of Western Values through US Cold War Broadcasts’, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studie multiethnical Upsaliensia 18 (Uppsala, 2010), pp. 243–57; Heiner Stahl, Jugendradio im Kalten Ätherkrieg: Berlin als eine Klanglandschaft des Pop (1962–1973) (Berlin, 2010). 19 Simo Mikkonen, ‘Stealing the Monopoly of Knowledge? Soviet Reactions to U.S. Cold War Broadcasting’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11 (2010), no. 4, pp. 771–805; idem, ‘Die gefährlichen Republiken: Moskaus Medienpolitik im sowjetischen Baltikum’, Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte 5 (2010), pp. 184–204. 20 Mati Graf and Heikki Roiko-Jokela, Vaarallinen Suomi: Suomi Eestin kommunistisen pouleen ja Neuvesto-viron KGB:n silmin (Jyväskylä, 2004). 21 Mati Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek (The Return of Kalevipoeg) (Tallinn, 2008). 22 Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma, Disko ja tuumasõda (Disco and Nuclear War) (Eetriüksus and Helsinki Film, 2009).

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era. Hagi Šein, in 2004 and 2005, published in separate works the most thorough studies in Estonian of ETV’s history in that period. These studies, however, are practically identical.23 Alongside Šein’s writings, Voldemar Lindström’s study, published in Estonian, offers the only alternative treatment of the history of ETV during the Soviet era.24 Yet neither Šein nor Lindström examines the topic of the struggle against Finnish TV in any particular detail, instead merely stating that such a struggle took place. Šein’s and Lindström’s comprehensive treatments of ETV history during the Soviet period are supplemented by some chronologies published in Estonian describing the development of Soviet Estonian television.25 Indrek Treufeldt has briefly touched on the development of ETV in the 1950s, including relations between the Estonian SSR and the Republic of Finland and the transmission of Finnish-language broadcasts, in his study published in Estonian on the journalistic creation of facts under different social conditions.26 The development of individual ETV television shows in the Soviet era has also been studied.27 Additionally, various aspects of the ETV working environment and individual memories of contacts with and the struggle against Finnish TV in the Soviet era can be found in a number of memoirs and biographies published in Estonian.28 The author of this article has studied how the struggle against Finnish 23 Hagi Šein, ‘Televisioon Eestis 1955–2004’ (Television in Estonia 1955–2004), Peeter Vihalemm (ed.), Meediasüsteem ja meediakasutus Eestis 1965–2004 (The Media System and the Use of Media in Estonia 1965–2004) (Tartu, 2004), pp. 121–208; Hagi Šein, Suur teleraamat. 50 aastat televisiooni Eestis 1955–2005 (Big Television Book: 50 Years of Television in Estonia 1955–2005) (Tallinn, 2005). 24 Voldemar Lindström, Matk telemaailma: Eesti Televisiooni näitel (A Trip through the World of Television with Estonian Television as an Example) (Tallinn, 2010). 25 See Voldemar Lindström, Eesti Televisioon. Arvud. Faktid. Sündmused (Estonian Television: Numbers. Facts. Events) (Tallinn, 1995); Hagi Šein, Eesti Televisoon arvudes 1955–1994 (Estonian Television in Numbers 1955–1994) (Tallinn, 1993); Renita Timak and Heiki Meeri, Eesti Televisioon. Arvud. Faktid. Sündmused. 1955–2004 (Estonian Television: Numbers. Facts. Events 1955–2004) (Tallinn, 2005). 26 Indrek Treufeldt, Ajakirjanduslik faktiloome erinevates ühiskondlikes tingimustes (Journalistic Creation of Facts in Different Social Conditions) (Tartu, 2012). 27 See, for instance, Katrin Pirn, ‘Balletisaated Eesti Televisioonis aastatel 1955–1990’ (Ballet Broadcasts on Estonian Television in 1955–1990) (Diploma thesis, Tartu, 1991); Piret Mürk, ‘Uudistesaadete teke ja areng Eesti Televisioonis’ (Emergence and Development of News Broadcasts on Estonian Television) (Diploma thesis, Tartu, 1994). 28 See, for instance, Georgi Morozov, Arnold Raag and Henno Ustav, Kui kaugused kaovad: Meenutusi ja mälestusi raadio ja televisiooni arengust Eestis (When Distances Disappear: Recollections and Memories of the Development of Radio and Television in

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TV fit into the framework of the propaganda war and the ideological struggle led by the Communist Party, and which countermeasures the Party adopted to reduce the influence of Finnish TV.29 The following paper examines how the Communist Party tried to reduce the influence of Finnish TV in the Estonian SSR in the context of the ideological struggle in the Cold War. The primary source materials used are the minutes of the ESSR State Television and Radio Committee Party Organization from the Party Cell Organizations in the ESSR People’s Commissariats, Ministries and State Committees Collection (Collection no. 51 at the Estonian National Archives) in the Party Cell Organizations in State Committees sub-collection, and materials from the Estonian Communist Party Central Committee collection (Collection Estonia) (Tallinn, 1990); Voldemar Lindström, Kas mäletad? Fragmentaarium piltide, proloogi ning epiloogiga (Do You Remember? Fragments with Pictures, a Prologue, and an Epilogue) (Tallinn, 2001); Georgi Morozov, Tallinna teletorn 20 (20 Years of Tallinn’s Television Tower) (Tallinn, 2003); Enn Anupõld, Euroopan ikkunalaudalla. Suomesta ja suomalaisista virolaissilmin (Jyväskylä, 2004); Anu Pallas (ed.), Meie jäljed jäävad (Our Traces Remain) (Tartu, 2004); Enn Anupõld, Vana telemasti varjus: Lugusid raadioja teletegijatest 1960–2005 (In the Shadow of the Old Television Mast: Stories about the People in Radio and Television 1960–2005) (Tallinn, 2005); Bruno Saul, Meie aeg (Our Time) (Tallinn, 2006); Anu Pallas (ed.), Teelised helisillal: ringhäälingurahva lood (Wayfarers on the Sound Bridge: Stories about Broadcasting People) (Tartu, 2006); Anu Pallas (ed.), Kuidas vaatad, nõnda näed (How You Watch Is How You See) (Tartu, 2009); Uno Maasikas and Hillar Peep, Vaata muigel tagasi ehk kuidas me 1978. aastal Mosvale aruandesaadet tegime (Look Back Smiling, or How We Made a Report Broadcast for Moscow in 1978) (Tallinn, 2010); Ene Paljula, Kuldne aeg: Fragmentaarium (Golden Age: Collection of Fragments) (Tallinn, 2011); Hillar Peep, Eesti Televisioon 1955–1990 (Estonian Television 1955–1990) (www.hot.ee/e/etvajalugu, accessed on May 3, 2012); Kulle Raig, Pikk teekond lähemale (Long Journey Closer) (Tallinn, 2012); Ene Hion, Valdo Pant—aastaid hiljem (Valdo Pant—Years Later) (Tallinn, 2013); Aare Laanemäe, Kümme aastat Valges majas: Ausalt ja avameelselt (Ten Years in the White House: Honestly and Frankly) (Tallinn, 2013). 29 Marek Miil, ‘Ideoloogilisest sõjast ei pääsenud keegi. EKP võitlus “kodanliku” massimeediaga’ (Nobody Escaped the Ideological War: The ECP’s Struggle against ‘Bourgeois’ Mass Media), Eesti Sõjaajaloo Aastaraamat 2 (2012), no. 8, pp. 238–83; idem, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest Soome TV “katmisel”. EKP võitlus “kodanliku televisiooni” vastu’ (Estonian Television’s Difficulties in “Covering” Finnish TV: The ECP’s Struggle against “Bourgeois Television”), Acta Historica Tallinnensia 18 (2012), pp. 108–41; idem, ‘Kommunistliku partei propagandastrateegiad ja “kodanliku televisiooni neutraliseerimine” Eesti NSV-s 1968–1988’ (The Communist Party’s Propaganda Strategies and the “Neutralization of Bourgeois Television” in the Estonian SSR 1968–1988), Ajalooline Ajakiri 143 (2013), no. 1, pp. 79–110.

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no. 1) in the Propaganda and Agitation Department Ideology Section and Minutes Sector 1940–91 sub-collections. The period under consideration begins with 1968, when the hitherto friendly cooperation between ETV and Finnish TV was abruptly discontinued, since the ECP found unacceptable the way Finnish TV had reported on the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. The period under consideration ends with 1988, when the Estonian Communist Party Central Committee (hereinafter referred to as the ECP CC) Propaganda and Agitation Department announced that it was no longer supervising the implementation of its decisions for combating “bourgeois television.”

The Window in the Iron Curtain Providing Information and Entertainment In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Finland was a bridgehead to the West for the Soviet Union in terms of foreign policy as well as in economic relations. Officially, good relations between the two countries were emphasized as a model for peaceful coexistence between countries with different social systems.30 Descriptions of high-level reciprocal visits between Finland and the USSR, and the speeches and joint statements dedicated to “friendship,” “trust,” “cooperation,” and “mutual assistance” made by the heads of state during those visits were published in Soviet Estonian newspapers. Summaries were also made of the proceedings at Finnish Communist Party congresses and plenary sessions, reciprocal greetings from the communist parties of the two countries were printed on the occasion of red-letter days, and cooperative events of the USSR-Finland Association that operated in the USSR and its Finnish counterpart, the Finland-USSR Association, were written about. Additionally, Soviet Estonian newspapers also published overviews of economic, scientific, and cultural ties between Finland and the Soviet Union as part of descriptions of different events promoting mutual cooperation or descriptions of carefully selected aspects of everyday Finnish life. Nevertheless, alongside articles about friendship between the two countries, there were also isolated exceptions, such as the Soviet Union’s reaction to the article “The Baltic Question in the Contemporary World,” written by Asko Vuorjoki and published in the Finnish newspaper Uusi Suomi on April 25, 1971. The article referred to Estonia as an occupied country. The Soviets labeled this a provocation and demanded that the Finnish government condemn such expression, as indeed, the Finnish

30 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 142.

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Minister of Foreign Affairs subsequently did.31 Yet the treatment of such topics in the press was a conspicuous exception. Soviet propaganda attributed all such cases to the “machinations of right-wing circles” in Finland, who were allegedly in the minority and reportedly wanted to “undermine” friendly relations between the Soviet Union and Finland.32 The USSR leadership’s policy of friendship towards Finland was also an unconditional dictate to the ECP and official institutions in the Estonian SSR. This policy of friendship was expressed in Soviet Estonia through cooperation in the sphere of television. While the transmission of television broadcasts began in the Estonian SSR in 1955, it started in Finland in 1957. Yet due to the friendly relations between the two countries, Finnish technicians were able to familiarize themselves with television technology in the Estonian SSR before starting their own television broadcasting system.33 Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium Kliment Voroshilovvisited Finland in 1956. Finnish Prime Minister Urho Kaleva Kekkonen told him how interested Finns were in Estonian television and asked whether those broadcasts could be translated into Finnish.34 A Finnish-language broadcasting department was created at Estonian Television that same year through a directive issued by the USSR Minister of Culture, and Finnish-language broadcasts began. These hour-long broadcasts introducing Soviet lifestyle and Estonian cultural life were initially transmitted once a week, and later twice a week.35 These television shows, produced until 1974, became both propaganda and counterpropaganda aimed at Finns; in other words, they were used on the one hand for promoting Soviet “life and achievements” and on the other for “exposing bourgeois ideology, morals, and reactionary propaganda.”36 Along with demonstrating various achievements of Soviet society, broadcasts targeted at Finns also tried to shape a positive impression of the Estonian SSR.37 Finnish-language broadcasts were discontinued in 1974 in 31 TASS, ‘Soome ajalehe provokatsioon’ (Finnish Newspaper Provocation), Rahva Hääl, 14 May 1971. See also TASS, ‘V. Leskineni avaldus’ (V. Leskinen’s Announcement), Rahva Hääl, 16 May 1971; K. Tammistu and V. Raudsepp, ‘Miks püüab “Uusi Suomi” rikkuda heanaaberlikke suhteid’ (Why Uusi Suomi Is Trying to Ruin Good Will between Neighbors), Rahva Hääl, 21 May 1971. 32 Ibid. 33 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 161. 34 Lindström, Matk telemaailma, p. 37. 35 Lindström, Eesti Televisioon, p. 16. 36 Šein, Suur teleraamat, p. 30 37 Indrek Treufeldt, ‘Constructing Alternative Nationhood: Television of Soviet Estonia against Finnish Capitalism’, Nico Carpentier et al. (eds.), Communicative Approaches to Politics and Ethics in Europe (Tartu, 2009), pp. 193–206, here p. 193.

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connection with the Helsinki Final Act, since the Party wanted to avoid accusations that the USSR was broadcasting programs meant for the citizens of another country.38 The transmission of Finnish-language broadcasts that began in 1956, in turn, laid the foundation for cooperation between ETV and Yleisradio, the Finnish Broadcasting Company. This led to a number of joint broadcasts, such as the first live broadcast from Finland of the national athletic competition between Finland and Estonia (1957), Suvesündmusi (Summer Events) (1965), the television quiz show Naapurivisa (1966–70), an hour-long broadcast of the Song Festival from Tallinn to Helsinki (1965), the children’s shows Onni Klouni and Fakiiri Tallinnassa (1968), Küsi julgesti!—Kysy pois! (Don’t Be Afraid to Ask) (1976, 1979) and the music show Õhtutäht—Iltatähti (Evening Star) (1979), which later became Sõpruslinnade laulud (Songs of Friendship Cities). In parallel with the expansion of cooperation between ETV and Finnish TV, the number of television viewers, and in turn the number of viewers of Finnish TV, grew in the Estonian SSR. There were 160,800 television sets in the Estonian SSR in 1965, yet the actual size of the television audience is estimated at 38 percent of the population.39 There were 270,000 television sets in the Estonian SSR in 1970.40 The size of the potential television audience was estimated at 68.4 percent of the population.41 Between 1966 and 1971, Finnish TV programs were available to at least a fifth of the population of the Estonian SSR.42 When a new television tower opened in Helsinki in 1971, 560,000 Estonians—half of Estonia’s potential television audience—were able to watch Finnish TV.43 A 1983 study indicated that 24.2 percent of the television audience watched Finnish TV every day.44 According to the sociologists on the Soviet Estonian Television and Radio Committee, an average of 5.5 percent of the Estonian SSR television audience and an average of 16.14 percent of television viewers in Tallinn watched Finnish TV between 1972 and 1986 (see Table 1).

38 Lindström, Eesti Televisioon, p. 37. 39 Lindström, Matk telemaailma, p. 84. 40 Šein, Eesti Televisoon arvudes, p. 16. 41 Šein, Suur teleraamat, p. 29. 42 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 167. At the same time, according to Lindström, Eesti Televisioon, and Šein, Suur teleraamat, Finnish TV was available to 18 percent of the television audience. 43 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p.  163; Lindström, Eesti Televisioon, p.  58; ETV. Eesti Televisioon. Arvud. Faktid. Sündmused 1955–2004 (http://etv.err.ee, accessed on 28 January 2011); according to Šein, Suur teleraamat, Finnish TV became accessible to one-third of the television audience of the Estonian SSR. 44 Lindström, Eesti Televisioon, pp. 88, 90.

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1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

1980

1979

1975

1978

1974

1977

1973

1976

1972

Table 1. Percentage of the Finnish TV audience in relation to the entire audience in the third quarter45

ESSR

5

4

4

3

6

6

5

5

6

5

4

6

6

5

7

Tallinn

11

9

11

9

16

14

16

11

17

17

13

18

23

19

22

Regarding Estonians’ reasons for watching Finnish TV, it has been suggested that they were fascinated by their kindred nation’s independence, by Finland’s democracy and political culture, Western lifestyle and well-being, by and the highbrow culture, entertainment, and popular scientific programs.46 People could also have watched Finnish TV to learn Finnish, but this motivation probably applied only to people in Soviet Estonia who needed to know Finnish for work, such as guides and service staff.47 Yet one reason why Soviet citizens turned to Western media sources in the first place was definitely their hunger for information.48 At the same time, those people were not necessarily dissidents. Indeed, even leading figures in the Communist Party used foreign media to obtain important information for themselves.49 Studies that Soviet sociologists conducted in the 1970s among those listening to Western radio stations indicated that 60 percent of listeners sought music and entertainment from foreign radio stations, 33 percent sought information that differed from official viewpoints, 27 percent sought exclusive information, and 20 percent sought “up-to the-minute” news.50 In 1985, when Soviet citizens were asked why they listened to Western radio stations, 77 percent of respondents said they wanted to hear the latest news, 70 percent wanted un-

45 ‘Audience of Estonian Radio and Estonian Television Broadcasts in the Third Quarters of Different Years’, ESSR State Television and Radio Committee IAK (Information Computation Center), Informatsioonileht (Information Sheet) (1985), no. 10 (51), p. 15; ‘Audience of Estonian Radio and Estonian Television Broadcasts in the Third Quarters of Different Years’, ESSR State Television and Radio Committee IAK, Informatsioonileht (1986), no. 8 (61), p. 15. 46 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 167. 47 Interview with Andrus Saar, 26 September 2012, conducted by the author of this article, author’s private archives, digital recording. 48 Mikkonen, ‘Stealing the Monopoly of Knowledge’, p. 790. 49 Mikkonen, ‘Die gefährlichen Republiken’, p. 202. 50 Elena Bashkirova, ‘The Foreign Radio Audience in the USSR during the Cold War: An Internal Perspective’, Johnson, Parta (eds.), Cold War Broadcasting, pp. 113–20; here p. 113.

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censored news, and 62 percent wanted to know what was taking place outside the Soviet Union.51 Soviet sociologists found in the 1970s that 20–30 percent of Soviet citizens seriously doubted the reliability of the Soviet Union’s own mass media.52 In Soviet Estonia, for instance, it was determined in 1984 that slightly more than 53 percent of the audience “generally” trusted ETV and Estonian Radio and over 22 percent trusted them “completely.” At the same time, 48 percent of television viewers in the area where Finnish TV was available trusted Yleisradio “generally”, and 20 percent trusted it “completely.”53 The timeliness and attractiveness of “bourgeois television” also played a part in drawing a Soviet audience. Thus, for instance, the analysts of the Soviet Estonian Television and Radio Committee concluded that Finnish TV news programs were considerably more interesting for television viewers in both content and form, since they used more photo and video material, live on-the-scene reports, and in-depth commentaries.54 For instance, it turned out that 14.6 percent of the broadcast time of the Finnish news program 10 Uutiset(Ten News) was presented outside of the television studio, 12.6 percent of the broadcast time was dedicated to studio commentary and reporting, and only 4.2 percent used studio commentary alone. By comparison, in the ETV news program Aktuaalne Kaamera (Topical Camera), 1.7 percent of broadcast time consisted of presentation outside the studio, 5.4 percent studio commentary and reporting, and 12.1 percent commentary in the studio alone.55 The decline in Aktuaalne Kaamera’s popularity among Tallinners was seen as a direct effect of Finnish TV. While it was estimated in 1985 that Aktuaalne Kaamera’s audience was 180,000 and the viewers of the Finnish information program Uutiset ja Säänumbered 53,000 outside the capital of the republic, in Tallinn only 77,000 television viewers watched Aktuaalne Kaamera and nearly 180,000 watched the program Uutiset ja Sää.56 Overall, television viewers’ 51 R. Eugene Parta, ‘The Audience for Western Broadcasts to the USSR during the Cold War: An External Perspective’, Johnson, Parta (eds.), Cold War Broadcasting, pp. 67–101, here p. 85. 52 Bashkirova, ‘The Foreign Radio Audience’, p. 115. 53 Minutes no. 1 of the Estonian SSR Television and Radio Committee Party Organization general meeting on 9 February 1984, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 51, n. 1, s. 1922, l. 116. 54 Miil, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest’, p. 117. 55 Margit Riit, Renita Timak and Salme Rannu, Eesti Televisiooni ja Eesti Raadio infosaadete võrdlev analüüs (Analysis of Estonian Television and Estonian Radio Information Programs) (Tallinn, 1983), p. 172. 56 Minutes no. 3 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Elementary Party Organization meeting on 23 April 1986, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1933, l. 51–2.

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interest in ETV information programs dropped from 49.8 percent of the audience in 1970 to 36.7 percent in 1986.57 Another reason why the Estonian SSR television audience was interested in “bourgeois television” was that viewers wanted considerably more variety than local television channels offered. For instance, a 1973 study found that Finnish television programming filled needs for information, culture, and entertainment.58 In 1979, sociologists found that 70 percent of the Estonian SSR population was interested in the discussion of problems related to youth. At the same time, ETV television programs with related content were of interest to only 7 percent of that group. The gap between the audience’s actual needs and ETV’s offerings was obvious.59 Interest in programs on and for young people decreased among the target audience as well: while 55.5 percent watched them in 1970, the proportion of viewers from the target audience had dwindled to 17.5 percent in 1986, and university students were no longer interested in them at all.60 Soviet sociologists confirmed that since ETV offered relatively few popular scientific and documentary programs, viewers turned once again to Finnish TV to satisfy their c­ uriosity.61 One study from 1983 indicated that 24.1 percent of television viewers used Finnish TV as a source of information on environmental themes.62 A total of 34.2 percent of the television audience watched nature films on Finnish TV.63 People in Tallinn also preferred to watch films and music programs on Finnish TV, since ETV offered less of such programming than people wanted.64 For instance, Finnish TV competed with ETV in introducing the cultural sphere outside the Soviet Union. Thus in 1987, 50.5 percent of the Estonian-speaking television audience considered Finnish TV a very important or important source of information on cultural happenings abroad, while the corresponding proportion for ETV was 69

57 Margit Sutt, ‘ENSV teleauditooriumi uurimise tulemuste (1970. a.–1986. a.) võrdlev analüüs’ (Comparative Analysis of the Results of the Study of the ESSR Television Audience [1970–1986]) (Diploma thesis, Tartu, 1987), p. 59. 58 Šein, Suur teleraamat, p. 174. 59 Minutes no. 6 of the open general meeting of the ETV elementary Party organization on 12 June 1979, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1900, l. 67. 60 Sutt, ‘ENSV teleauditooriumi’, p. 59. 61 ‘The Youth Audience and ETV and Central TV Programs’, ESSR State Television and Radio Committee IAK, Informatsioonileht (1985), no. 3 (44), p. 8. 62 ‘About Estonian Television and Estonian Radio Propaganda Programs’, ESSR State Television and Radio Committee IAK, Informatsioonileht (1985), no. 4 (45), p. 3. 63 Ibid., p. 5. 64 ‘The Youth Audience and ETV and Central TV Programs’, p. 8.

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percent.65 In 1987, the Estonian-speaking audience considered feature films (39.8 percent), pop music concerts (26.9 percent), and entertainment programs like dance and music shows (36.1 percent) the best parts of Finnish TV programming. On the other hand, on the basis of surveys, viewers also “most definitely” wanted to watch comedy shows (83.4 percent), entertainment programs (80.8 percent), and feature films (81 percent) on ETV as well.66 Unlike the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty, Finnish TV programs that were accessible in Soviet Estonia were not designed to influence Soviet people or undermine the authority of the Communist Party. More likely, the opposite was true: the Soviet Union influenced Finnish media to toe the line. Studies have concluded that between 1968 and 1991, Finnish journalists wrote about the Soviet Union and Soviet Estonia in a more friendly way, less critically, applying self-censorship, and that they generally remained silent about the problems of occupied Estonia.67 On the other hand, the inevitable influence of Finnish TV on Soviet society cannot be ignored. Several authors have written about how, in the 1960s, ordinary Soviet citizens started desiring the benefits of new technologies and aspiring to middle-class living standards, and started adopting a consumer mentality.68 Yet at the same time, television played an equally important role in increasing consumer desires in both Western and Eastern-bloc countries.69 Yet radio, television, and film are considered to be the media that spread Western consumer culture to the Soviet

65 Kersti Raudam and Epp Tasa, Kultuur, raadio, televisioon ja meie (Culture, Radio, Television, and Us) (Tallinn, 1989), p. 29. 66 Ibid., p. 32. 67 See, for instance, Esko Salminen, ‘The Struggle over Freedom of Speech in the North: The Finnish Press Gave Obeisance to Moscow, but Did Not Succumb to the Kremlin’s Propaganda Programme during the Cold War Years 1968–1991’, Scandinavian Journal of History 23 (1998), no. 3–4, pp. 239–51; idem, The Silenced Media: The Propaganda War between Russia and the West in Northern Europe (New York, 1999). 68 See, for instance, Romuald J. Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, Balti riigid: sõlteaastad 1940–1990 (The Baltic States: The Years of Dependence 1940–1990) (Tallinn, 1997); Hixson, Parting the Curtain; Lauri Vahtre, ‘Stagnatsioon ja venestamiskampaania’ (Stagnation and the Russification Campaign), Sulev Vahtre, Ago Pajur and Tõnu Tannberg (eds.), Eesti ajalugu VI. Vabadussõjast taasiseseisvumiseni (Estonian History VI: From the War of Independence to the Restoration of Independence) (Tartu, 2005), pp. 303–19; Sabina Mihelj, ‘Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe: Between Cold War Politics and Global Developments’, Anikó Imre, Timothy Havens and Katalin Lustyik (eds.), Popular Television in Eastern Europe during and since Socialism (London, 2013), pp. 13–29. 69 Mihelj, ‘Television Entertainment in Socialist Eastern Europe’, pp. 25–6.

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Union and increased the consumer desires of Soviet people.70 Considering that after 1971, approximately a third of the Estonian SSR television audience was in Finnish TV’s broadcast area, “bourgeois television’s” daily television picture of the Western consumer lifestyle and the accompanying abundance of goods had to have an effect on people in Soviet Estonia. Direct contact between Finns and Estonians, especially Estonians living in Tallinn, certainly “supplemented” and “affirmed” the images on television promoting consumer desire. The ferry line between Tallinn and Helsinki that started in 1965 made possible these kinds of contacts. On the other hand, the Finnish and Estonian languages are very similar, and Estonians were able to improve their command of Finnish thanks in particular to Finnish TV. While only 212 foreigners visited Estonia in 1956, by 1966 the number rose to 15,400, of which 14,800 came from Finland. By 1983, this figure grew to 97,000, of which 80,000 came from Finland.71 Tourism from Soviet Estonia to Finland, however, was not allowed to become massive—up to a couple thousand Soviet citizens were allowed to cross the Gulf of Finland annually.72 Yet it was through tourist contacts in particular that a certain type of Finn emerged, known as “personal Finns” (also “domestic Finns” or “domesticated Finns”)—who made friends with Estonians and thus started to interact with them regularly. Thanks to these personal contacts, some Estonians received foreign consumer goods unavailable to the vast majority of Soviet people. Finnish-Estonian tourist contacts and the arrival of foreign tourists in Tallinn led to the Westernization, so to speak, of the Estonian SSR’s capital: foreign-currency shops and bars were established for tourists; restaurants, cafés, and tourist accommodations were spruced up with an eye to Western standards; variety shows opened; and new hotels were built such as the Viru Hotel, and later, the Olympia Hotel.73 Illegal peddling of clothing and consumer items to foreign tourists around hotels became common. Estonian fashion designers, in turn, learned about the latest Western fashions by observing the foreign clothing that appeared in Tallinn’s streets.74

70 Hixson, Parting the Curtain, p. 230. 71 Vahtre, ‘Stagnatsioon ja venestamiskampaania’, p. 307. 72 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 160. 73 Ibid., pp.  149–150. Concerning the ‘Westernization’ of Tallinn, see also Sakari Nupponen, Viru hotell ja tema aeg (Viru Hotel and Its Time) (Tallinn, 2007); Margit Kilumets and Andres Lepasar, Viru: Vabaduse saatkond (Viru: Embassy of Liberty) (Tallinn, 2013). 74 Anu Ojavee, ‘Moemängud infosulus: 1950.–1960. aastate Eesti noortemood’ (Fashion Games in an Information Blackout: Young People’s Fashion in Estonia in the 1950s and 1960s), Eha Komissarov and Berit Teeäär (eds.), Mood ja külm sõda (Fashion and the Cold War) (Tallinn, 2012), pp. 196–209, here pp. 198–9.

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Regardless of the seemingly good relations between the Soviet Union and Finland, as far as the Communist Party was concerned, Finland still remained part of the capitalist bloc. Thus the “uncontrollable” foreign “bourgeois” television accessible in Soviet Estonia and its effect on Soviet citizens became a serious problem for the Communist Party starting in the late 1960s.

Ideological Struggle and Finnish Television At the April Plenum of 1968, First Secretary Leonid Brezhnevof the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (hereinafter referred to as the CPSU CC) warned that since the imperialists no longer dared to openly attack socialism on the battlefield, class enemies tried to undermine socialism internally, to weaken and demoralize the socialist camp. Brezhnevstressed that for this reason, it was more necessary than ever before to strengthen the work of the Party, above all ideological work.75 After the speech by the CPSU’s first secretary, the Plenum passed a decision noting an “intensifying ideological struggle” and commenting that a “vast apparatus of anticommunist propaganda” had begun to operate. For this reason, the Plenum declared war on that hostile ideology, formulating as strategic tasks the uncovering of “the machinations of imperialism,” as well as improving the effectiveness of its own Party organizations’ ideological activities.76 The suppression of the Prague Spring and “socialism with a human face” in 1968 prompted various protest actions in the Estonian SSR as well, from underground meetings and passing out leaflets to an open protest letter written by intellectuals.77

75 Leonid Brezhnev, ‘From His Speech at the CPSU CC Plenum on 9 April 1968’, NLKP ideoloogiatöö aktuaalseid küsimusi I (Topical Issues on the CPSU’s Ideological Work) (Tallinn, 1979), pp. 190, 192. 76 CPSU CC Plenum decision ‘On Topical Problems in the International Situation and the CPSU’s Struggle for the Total Uniformity of the Worldwide Communist Movement’, NLKP kongresside, konverentside ja keskkomitee pleenumite resolutsioonid ja otsused VI, 1966–1968 (Resolutions and Decisions from CPSU Congresses, Conferences, and Central Committee Plenums, Part VI) (Tallinn, 1975), p. 384. 77 The following have written about the resistance movement in Soviet Estonia: Sirje Kiin, Rein Ruutsoo and Andres Tarand, 40 kirja lugu (The Story of the Letter with 40 Signatures) (Tallinn, 1991); Viktor Niitsoo, Vastupanu 1985–1995 (Resistance 1985– 1995) (Tartu, 1997); Mart Laar, Urmas Ott and Sirje Endre, Teine Eesti; Eesti iseseisvuse taassünd 1986–1991 (The Second Estonia: The Rebirth of Estonia’s Independence 1986– 1991) (Tallinn, 2000); Mart Raun, ‘Tallinna demokraatide põrandaalused ajakirjad 1971–1972’ (The Underground Periodicals of Tallinn’s Democrats in 1971–1972), Tuna 5 (2002), no. 2, pp. 66–72; Vahtre, ‘Stagnatsioon ja venestamiskampaania’, pp. 303–19;

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Yet the ECP and the KGB saw Finnish TV and the Republic of Finland behind these kinds of “acts of ideological sabotage,” Moreover, the ECP and the KGB saw the Finns as the tools of the intelligence services of the major Western powers in their subversive activity against the Soviet Union.78 While most Soviet citizens’ awareness of the events in Czechoslovakia depended on the Party’s propaganda apparatus, Finnish TV provided Soviet Estonians with alternative information. It is true that the commentaries of Finnish TV were later evaluated as “objective” and “cautious” by researchers.79 Finnish TV also played an important role in showing the citizens of Soviet Estonia what was actually happening on the streets of Prague. Information obtained from Western radio stations supplemented those scenes. The events in Czechoslovakia led to increased centralization in all the Baltic republics. The propagation of the concept of a unified Soviet people began, the teaching of Russian began in kindergartens, and the ratio of Russian language lessons to Estonian language lessons in school increased.80 Ideological control was strengthened over media, cultural, and educational institutions. Many expressions of opinion and ways of conduct that had been permissible until then were prohibited.81 In the Soviet Union this control was most extensive in the Baltic republics.82 It is true that repressions were much milder than in the 1950s, and only people who were openly rebellious were imprisoned. Yet even so, the Mart Laar, ‘Vastupanuliikumine’ (The Resistance Movement), Vahtre, Pajur, Tannberg (eds.), Eesti ajalugu VI, pp. 320–37; Andres Tarand, Kiri ei põle ära (Text Does Not Burn) (Tallinn, 2005); Kaarel Piirimäe and Peeter Kaasik, ‘Hirvepargi kõnekoosolek ja Eesti vabanemine’ (The Meeting at Hirve Park and the Liberation of Estonia), Tõnu Tannberg (ed.), Hirvepark 1987: 20 aastat kodanikualgatusest, mis muutis Eesti lähiajalugu (Hirve Park 1987: 20 Years since the Citizens’ Initiative that Changed Estonia’s Recent History) (Tartu, 2007), pp. 5–45; Arvo Pesti, Dissidentlik liikumine Eestis aastatel 1972–1987 (The Dissident Movement in Estonia in 1972–1987) (Tallinn, 2009). 78 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, pp. 24, 49, 143. 79 Ibid., p. 162; Rein Ruutsoo, ‘Vana kuld: 1968. aasta august: lootus ja kibedus’ (Old Gold: August 1968; Hope and Bitterness), Eesti Ekspress, 8 December 2012. 80 Magnus Ilmjärv, ‘Die tschechoslowakische Krise 1968 und die estnische Gesellschaft’, Stefan Karner et al. (eds.), Prager Frühling: Das Internationale Krisenjahr 1968: Beiträge (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2008), pp. 897–908, here p. 907. 81 Peeter Vihalemm and Marju Lauristin, ‘Eesti ühiskonna ja meedia muutumine 1965– 2004’ (Changes in Estonian Society and Media 1965–2004), Peeter Vihalemm (ed.), Meediasüsteem ja meediakasutus Eestis 1965–2004 (The Media System and Use of Media in Estonia 1965–2004) (Tartu, 2004), pp. 1–22, here pp. 2, 7. 82 Magnus Ilmjärv, ‘Chekhoslovatskii krizis 1968 goda i estonskoe obshchestvo’, Aleksandr Chubar’ian et al. (eds.), ‘Prazhskaia vesna’ 1968 goda i sovetskie respubliki. Reaktsiia vlasti i obshchestva (Moscow etc., 2009), pp. 6–23, here p. 23.

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authorities tried to rule society through ideological control based on a system of taboos, orders and bans.83 Since information from the Western media about events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 leaked into Soviet Estonia through Finnish TV, contradicting Party propaganda, the ECP CC Bureau also had to discuss in their secret sessions the danger of bourgeois propaganda to Soviet citizens. As the first step, the Party began by stressing the responsibility of journalists and people working in the field of culture. The ECP CC Bureau concluded during its session on April 29,1969, that instances had come to light of a “lack of political principles and of political awareness” and “political unscrupulousness,” as a consequence of which immature publications, films, literary works, and radio and television programs had been made public.84 In its decision, the ECP CC Bureau noted that the ability of people working in the press and in the fields of literature and art “to strike a blow against whatever manifestations of bourgeois ideology” and their skill in exposing “petit-bourgeois and revisionist trends’ became particularly important precisely under the ‘conditions of the intensification of ideological struggle.”85 The “particular responsibility” of the heads of organizations, agencies, editorial offices, and Party organizations for the publications issued and for the ideological and political orientation of works was also emphasized.86 The selection of cadres and their education, the reminders to leading employees about their personal responsibility, and the creation of “orientation to principles” and an “atmosphere of self-criticism” in editorial offices were seen as the solution.87 Yet as the next step, the Party focused on what was going on in the Estonian SSR television system. At the ECP CC Bureau session on 28 April 1970, the television system was accused of superficiality, producing programs that “do not meet the requirements for the communist indoctrination of the population,” using information acquired from foreign sources without the “necessary political evaluation,” and having “ideological and artistic deficiencies.”88 The ECP considered the primary cause of these deficiencies to be shortcomings in the selection, placement, and

83 Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm, ‘The Period of Stagnation (1969–1986)’, Svennik Høyer, Epp Lauk and Peeter Vihalemm (eds.), Towards a Civic Society: The Baltic Media’s Long Road to Freedom; Perspectives on History, Ethnicity and Journalism (Tartu, 1993), pp. 211–26, here p. 211. 84 ECP CC Bureau 29 April 1969, session minutes no. 109, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 3783, l. 29–30. 85 Ibid., l. 29. 86 Ibid., l. 30. 87 Ibid., l. 31. 88 ECP CC Bureau 28 April 1970, session minutes no. 147, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 3902, l. 95–6.

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indoctrination of staff “according to increased demands.”89 The ECP CC Bureau demanded that the Television and Radio Committee, the ETV leadership, and the Party organization focus on improving the ideological-political and professional quality of television programs and tasked them with waging an “uncompromising struggle against the effect of manifestations of hostile ideology and bourgeois morals among television journalists, regardless of what form they take and to what extent they are expressed.”90 In the 1970s ETV began being structurally altered from an organization that relied mainly on the initiative of creative personalities into a technical production organization that operated according to a central plan. This change was accompanied by the strengthening of Party and ideological control, along with a tightening of censorship.91 While in 1969 the Party only emphasized journalists’ responsibility in the context of the propaganda war, it soon began paying more attention to the “ideological quality” of television personnel. The CPSU CC passed one of the most important decisions guiding television and radio personnel policy on August 28, 1974 (the decision “Concerning the Work of the Belorussian Party Organization in Selecting and Indoctrinating the Ideology Cadre”). It acknowledged the work done in selecting and indoctrinating the ideology cadre for the Belorussian Party organizations. At the same time, it stressed that in the context of the ongoing ideological struggle, even greater demands would be made of the ideology cadre, like the ability to evaluate social phenomena from the viewpoints of MarxismLeninism and the consistent and substantiated uncovering of hostile ideology.92 A discussion of that same CPSU CC decision in the Estonian Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization concluded that there had been no consistency in analyzing its own personnel, in creating conditions for maximizing people’s capacities, and in preparing personnel.93 The aging of the Party organization, scant participation in Party meetings, frequent lack of follow-up on the fulfillment of ratified decisions, and deficiencies in the educational background of communists (only two-thirds of the more than 200 editors had higher education) 89 Ibid., l. 96. 90 Ibid. 91 Šein, Suur teleraamat, p. 74. 92 CPSU CC decision ‘On the Work of the Belorussian Party Organization in Selecting and Educating the Ideology Cadre’, 28 August 1974, NLKP kongresside, konverentside…, pp. 406, 408–9. 93 Minutes no. 13 of the Council of Ministers State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization general meeting, 29 October 1975, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1874, l. 16.

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were listed as problems.94 As a solution, it was decided to increase “Party influence” in personnel decisions, in planning the work of editorial offices, in “all links” of creative work and in increasing the responsibility of every communist, and to pay attention to the professional qualifications, Marxist-Leninist education, and ideological tempering of employees.95 On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, the CPSU CC characterized the world situation as a stage in which class struggle had intensified in the international arena and anti-socialist reactionary circles were organizing acts of ideological sabotage and slander campaigns against communism.96 Given this situation, the CPSU CC repeated that in all political organizational work and ideological indoctrinational work, bourgeois ideology and revisionist concepts had to be criticized, falsifiers of history had to be exposed, and a “resolute counterblow” had to be delivered against anticommunism, anti-Sovietism, and all manner of opportunism.97 At the CPSU CC November Plenum in 1978, Brezhnev reprimanded Party organizations for ineffectively using the propaganda apparatus and demanded that international information be distributed and commented on with facts more promptly and that in doing so, new forms and methods of propaganda be adopted.98 The first secretary also announced that the Politburo was to form a special commission for planning new means for improving ideological work and mass political work. On November 27, 1978, the CPSU CC Plenum approved a decision obligating Party organizations to “steadily enhance the forms and methods of organizational work and mass political work to make it as specific, expert, and timely as possible.”99 One specific step for improving ideological and propaganda work was the creation of the Estonian Radio Press Bureau on January 1, 1979, from the former

94 Ibid., l. 33. 95 Ibid., l. 34. 96 ‘CPSU CC Decision “On the 60th Anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution”’, 31 January 1977, NLKP ideoloogiatööst: Dokumentide kogumik (On the CPSU’s Ideological Work: Collection of Documents) (Tallinn, 1987), p. 217. 97 Ibid., p. 223. 98 Leonid Brežnev, Kõne NLKP Keskkomitee pleenumil, 27. novembril 1978; NSV Liidu majandusliku ja sotsiaalse arengu 1979. aasta riikliku plaani ja NSV Liidu 1979. aasta riigieelarve projektidest. NLKP Keskkomitee pleenumi otsus (Speech at the CPSU CC Plenum on November 27, 1978: About the Draft State Plan for the Soviet Union’s Economic and Social Development in 1979 and the Soviet Union’s Draft State Plan for 1979; CPSU CC Plenum Decision) (Tallinn, 1979), p. 22. 99 Ibid., p. 28.

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foreign information editorial office.100 The task of this structural unit was to monitor “uncontrollable” foreign information channels and to increase the counterpropagandistic influence of Estonian Radio and especially its foreign information programs.101 A six-to-seven-page news bulletin started being issued daily with programming information (including programs in Estonian) of the most important foreign channels, and the Infobülletään (Information Bulletin) was issued once a month. The monthly bulletin provided information about the main trends in propaganda hostile to the Soviet Union, along with the respective conclusions and generalizations.102 According to the Press Bureau’s editor-in-chief, the Bureau prepared about half of the information associated with ideological work.103 In addition to Estonian Radio, the Press Bureau forwarded its materials to the ECP CC, its rayon committees, and ideology institutions.104 Along with the Estonian Radio Computational Center, the Press Bureau also carried out public opinion surveys to identify important events in foreign politics or new anti-Soviet “hostile campaigns.” The selection of topics for radio programs, the transmission and treatment of information, and the structure of programs were adjusted on the basis of the survey results.105 While the Press Bureau had 33 employees in April 1980, it had 44 by February 1982.106 The new strategy that Brezhnev promised at the CPSU CC Plenum in November 1978 was formulated on April 26, 1979, with the decision “On the Further Improvement of Ideological Work and Work in Political Indoctrination.” Based on the Leninist principle that “the state is strong through the awareness of the masses,” this document was an attempt to “resolve all aspects” of problems associated with the quality of ideological work, propaganda, and agitation. The CPSU 100 Minutes no. 4 of the Estonian Radio Party elementary organization general meeting on 5 June 1980, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1912, l. 65. 101 Ibid., l. 66. 102 Ibid., p. 66; Minutes no. 7 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization reporting and election meeting, 23 October 1980, ibid., s. 1910, l. 90. 103 Minutes no. 6 of the Estonian Radio Party elementary organization reporting and election meeting, 5 June 1980, ibid., s. 1912, l. 69. 104 Minutes no. 9 of the Estonian Radio Party Bureau meeting, 10 April 1980, ibid., l. 14. 105 Minutes no. 7 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization reporting and election meeting on 23 October 1980, ibid., s. 1910, l. 91. 106 Minutes no. 9 of the Estonian Radio Party Bureau on 10 April 1980, ibid., s. 1912, l. 13; minutes no. 5 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party organization general meeting on 25 February 1982, ibid., s. 1914, l. 94.

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CC stressed that the state’s economic, social, political, and cultural development— thus all spheres of life—depended on ideological work and work in political indoctrination. These in turn were supposed to determine the fate of building up a “developed socialist society.” In this context, Western acts of ideological sabotage had strategic consequences, and thus the enemy had to be dealt a counterblow by strengthening the “attacking nature” of propaganda and agitation and exposing the methods and lies of imperialist propaganda.107 The 15th ECP CC Plenum was held on July 10, 1979, and the discussion there centered on the tasks of the Estonian SSR’s Party organization in implementing the CPSU CC decision “On the Further Improvement of Ideological Work and Work in Political Indoctrination.” At that plenum, ECP CC First Secretary Karl Vaino listed different possibilities for how hostile propaganda reached Estonia using the geographic location of the Estonian SSR: radio, television, tourism, economic ties, personal correspondence, and other such channels. Vaino indicated that 14 hostile Russian-language radio stations could be listened to in the Estonian SSR along with 2.5 hours per day of the Voice of America and Radio Liberty in Estonian. As for Finnish TV, it was reportedly accessible in one-third of Estonian territory, and according to one survey, one out of every two Estonian-speaking citizens, and one out of five Russian-speaking citizens, of the group under consideration in this territory watched it regularly. Karl Vaino stated that it was one thing if “politically mature” adults watched and listened to those programs since they could process them critically, but it was altogether different if young people who “are inexperienced in life and accept much of what they hear and see as being true” watched and listened to them—and most of those who watched Finnish TV were under 30.108 The Plenum passed a decision that stated that the ideological activity of Party organizations and state institutions did not fully meet the requirements set down in the CPSU CC’s April 26, 1979, decision, and approved measures for improving the situation. By virtue of the strategy “of an attacking nature” formulated by the CPSU CC, the Plenum also assigned the task of exposing “the instigators of the imperialist ‘Cold War’ and the arms race, revealing the anti-humanist nature of capitalism that is hostile to the people, and the true countenance of the hypocritical defenders of ‘human rights’ and ‘human freedoms’” to the ECP CC Ideology Department, the editorial offices of newspapers and periodicals, and the 107 Ideoloogiatöö ja poliitilise kasvatustöö edasisest parendamisest. NLKP Keskkomitee otsus (On the Further Improvement of Ideological Work and Work in Political Education: CPSU CC Decision) (Tallinn, 1979), p. 6. 108 Minutes of the 15th Plenum of the ECP CC, 10 July 1979, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 5484, l. 28–30.

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Television and Radio Committee.109 It was also necessary to expose the “spiritual and intellectual degradation of bourgeois lifestyle and bourgeois society.” Additionally, analysis was to begin of bourgeois radio propaganda received in the Estonian SSR and the content of “television programs not subject to control.” A methodology council was to be formed under the ECP CC to work out recommendations for the propaganda and counterpropaganda of ideology institutions and the press. At the same time, the propaganda war and competition with “bourgeois television” were an impetus for procuring technical equipment for the Estonian SSR’s local propaganda apparatus. For instance, bringing the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games Sailing Regatta to Tallinn was considered an act of propaganda that was supposed to show “how wonderful and useful it was to belong to the Soviet Union.”110 The Olympic Games in the Baltic republics was also supposed to substantiate the legitimacy of the Soviet regime in Estonia.111 This, in turn, explains why one of the structures built for the Olympic Games was the Tallinn television tower, with its unique apparatus for television broadcasts intended for both the West and the East.112 In connection with the Olympics, a regional television center was built in Tallinn, and the ETV sports programming department was created. Soviet television used state-of-the-art Western technology to record the competition. The regatta was recorded using entirely electronic equipment for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games.113 After the Olympic Games, ETV succeeded in keeping for itself the television equipment brought to Estonia for the competition.114 Events in Tallinn in September 1980 added impetus to the process of improving personnel policy and the propaganda apparatus that had been started at the CPSU CC level. A September 22 football match between the Estonian SSR’s radio and television employees ended with masses of young people attacking the militia and yelling anti-Soviet slogans. As a first step, on September 23, 1980, the ECP CC Bureau ordered the ECP Tallinn Municipal Committee, the Television and Radio Committee, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to identify the persons responsible, and a number of agencies were tasked with improving the quality of 109 15th ECP CC Plenum decision on the tasks of the Republic’s Party organization in implementing the CPSU Central Committee decision ‘On Further Improvement in Ideological Work and Work in Political Indoctrination’, ibid., s. 5486, l. 10. 110 Vahtre, ‘Stagnatsioon ja venestamiskampaania’, p. 312. 111 Misiunas and Taagepera, Balti riigid, p. 276. 112 Saul, Meie aeg, p. 111. 113 Timak, Meeri, Eesti Televisioon, pp. 47–8. 114 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 171.

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ideological and political indoctrination carried out among young people.115 At the beginning of October, the Party was forced to admit that despite the measures adopted on September 23, incidents against the social order continued to occur among young people in Tallinn.116 At the same time, the ECP CC Bureau realized that there were shortcomings in the indoctrination of young people elsewhere in the republic as well.117 The behavior of the young people involved on September 22, 1980, was interpreted as a catalyst that brought out the inner feelings of young people. The Party considered it an “alarm signal” for television and radio in the Estonian SSR.118 The Party believed that one of the causes of the problems was the poor cultural and ideological quality of the local television and radio programs. Thus in addition to improvement in those areas, the chairman of the Television and Radio Committee was also required to improve the selection of personnel and their indoctrination.119 A decision was therefore adopted at the Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization meeting on October 23, 1980, to continue to improve ideological work and political indoctrination, developing the “attacking nature” of television and radio programs and thus ensuring their high scientific quality, making them more businesslike and specific.120 Despite these attempts by the Television and Radio Committee, the ECP CC Bureau concluded on December 16, 1980, that its leadership and Party committee had not organized their work in accordance with the CPSU CC decision of April 26, 1979, and of the 15th ECP CC Plenum (the decision “On Deficiencies in the Work of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee in Implementing the CPSU CC Decision ‘On the Further Improvement of Ideological Work and Work in Political Indoctrination’”). The Television and Radio Committee was reprimanded for the perception that television and radio programs were copying the ways of bourgeois journalism, for using too much foreign and domestic music, and for the perception that the ideological content and effectiveness of programs did not meet contemporary requirements (that is, the requirements of ideological struggle).

115 Minutes no. 155 of the ECP CC Bureau session, 23 September 1980, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 5700, l. 17–8. 116 Minutes no. 156 of the ECP CC Bureau session, 9 October 1980, ibid., s. 5702, l. 19. 117 Ibid., l. 22. 118 Minutes no. 8 of the ESSR Television and Radio Committee Board and Party Committee joint session, 24 September 1980, ibid., s. 1290, l. 132. 119 Minutes no. 156 of the ECP CC Bureau session of 9 October 1980, ibid., s. 5702, l. 20, 22. 120 Minutes no. 7 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization reporting and election meeting, 23 October 1980, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1910, l. 107.

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The Party demanded that the Television and Radio Committee resolutely put an end to “apoliticality, ideological vagueness, and unscrupulousness” and that the organization channel all its efforts towards the Marxist-Leninist indoctrination of the Estonian SSR’s population.121 At the 26th CPSU Congress in 1981, Brezhnev warned that the enemy’s propaganda was becoming more and more active.122 At the same time, Brezhnev noted again that the Soviet Union’s own propaganda still did not yet use all the “immense means” at its disposal and demanded the “reorganization of many sectors and spheres” of ideological work guided by the CPSU CC decision of April 26, 1979.123 Karl Vainoalso took the floor at that congress and declared that the Estonian SSR was on the front line of the ideological struggle and that a genuine psychological war was raging in the Estonian SSR.124 Vaino reported to the congress that as a result, a number of measures had already been implemented in the Estonian SSR for making propaganda work and mass agitation work “more combative and attacking” and that the elucidation of events on television and radio had become more timely and thorough. At its December 1981 session, the ECP CC Bureau found that the primary shortcoming of ideological and political indoctrination in the republic was its “insufficient connection to the actual problems of life that interest people, manifestations of formalism, and empty talk on the subject.”125 The CC Bureau singled out the “imperialist propaganda” against the Estonian SSR as one reason for the need to quickly eliminate these problems, and on this basis, a 36-point plan was approved for the “further improvement of work in ideological indoctrination and Party organizational work.” In order to expose the “acts of ideological sabotage by Western subversive centers” much more convincingly than before and to strengthen counterpropaganda, the CC Bureau decided to hold a number of seminars and conferences on ideological and propaganda work.126

121 Minutes no. 161 of the ECP CC Bureau session, 16 December 1980, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 5713, l. 56. 122 Leonid Brezhnev, NLKP Keskkomitee aruanne Nõukogude Liidu Kommunistliku Partei XXVI kongressile ning partei järjekordsed ülesanded sise- ja välispoliitika valdkonnas, 23. veebr. 1981. a. (CPSU Central Committee Report to the 26th CPSU Congress on 23 February 1981, 26th CPSU CC Congress Materials) (Tallinn, 1981), p. 91. 123 Ibid. 124 ‘Speech by ECP CC First Secretary Comrade K. Vaino’, Rahva Hääl, 28 February 1981. 125 Minutes no. 23 of the ECP CC Bureau session, 29 December 1981, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 5910, l. 2. 126 Ibid., l. 20–30.

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Yet the actual reasons for the unrest after the 1980 football match in Tallinn were believed to lie beyond the omissions of the Television and Radio Committee. The disturbances were linked to an “act of ideological sabotage” against the Estonian SSR and to an attempt to turn the Estonian SSR into a “firing range for hostile forces,” where methods of ideological sabotage were to be tested.127 Since “foreign channels not subject to control” transmitted “information extremely falsely” about events, it was assumed that some sort of organization and “dangerous enemy operating under the aegis of human rights” was behind the unrest.128 For instance, Finnish TV had already earned the displeasure of the Party and the KGB in 1979 for publicizing secret documents deriving from the CPSU CC’s 1978 decision “On the Continuing Enhancement of the Learning and Teaching of Russian in Union Republics.” Namely, Finnish TV news exposed the ECP CC’s secret plans for the more extensive use of Russian, essentially entailing the Russification of Estonia.129 The hysteria against Finnish TV was such that the most commonplace television commercials were considered dangerous “acts of ideological sabotage” by “bourgeois television.” For instance, on political instruction days, journalists were told that commercials on Finnish TV were propaganda intended especially for Soviet television viewers, using models of foodstuffs and plastic replicas of meat products.130 On the other hand, there were top-level officials in the ECP CC who sincerely believed the selection of meat shown in Finnish TV commercials to be part of a plot hatched by American intelligence services.131 On June 15, 1982, the ECP CC Bureau passed the decision “On Neutralizing the Effect of Bourgeois Television on the Residents of the Republic.” This document can be considered the beginning of the ECP’s struggle to resolve the problem of 127 Minutes no. 7 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization reporting and election meeting, 23 October 1980, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1910, l. 78. 128 Minutes no. 6 of the Estonian Radio Party elementary organization reporting and election meeting, 14 October 1980, ibid., s. 1912, l. 115. 129 Laanemäe, Kümme aastat Valges majas, pp. 200–1. 130 Enno Tammer, Nõukogude piir ja lukus elu (The Soviet Border and a Closed Life) (Tallinn, 2008), p. 246. 131 Interview with Toomas Leito, head of the ECP CC Propaganda and Agitation Department (1985–87), 6 November 2012;interview with Ain Soidla, head of the ECP CC Propaganda Department (1980–85), 28 November 2012; interview with Tõnu Laak, deputy head of the ECP CC Propaganda Department (1983–86), 29 November 2012; interview with Enn Anupõld, head of ETV (1974–86), 26 October 2012, all interviews conducted by the author. All digital recordings in the author’s private archive.

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“bourgeois television” in the Estonian SSR once and for all.132 There were three sets of measures in the decision for the war against Finnish TV: technical, “covering,” and counterpropaganda measures. As countermeasures, this decision prohibited watching Finnish TV in public institutions in the Estonian SSR. More active measures were taken against the copying and distribution of Finnish TV’s programming schedules, and it was forbidden to install the sound adapters necessary for watching Finnish TV in television sets in retail stores and workshops.133 In order to “cover” bourgeois television, television audiences had to be studied, and based on the results, Soviet Estonia’s local television was supposed to start producing television programs that would compete with Finnish TV in terms of both content and quality. The Informatsiooni- ja Arvutuskeskus (Information and Computation Center, hereinafter referred to as IAK) was created as part of the Television and Radio Committee to learn more about the audience and thus to obtain recommendations and proposals for coordinating and organizing counterpropaganda and neutralizing the effect of bourgeois television. The Television and Radio Committee now had to start taking the interests of different segments of the television audience into account and to “more boldly use the method of ‘covering’ bourgeois television programs of interest to television viewers with interesting and popular programs from Estonian television and USSR-wide television” while at the same time improving the timeliness and content of informational television and radio programs and precisely coordinating television and radio broadcasts.134 It was also decided to give ETV more resources.135 As the third counterpropaganda measure, mass media, lecturers, propagandists, and political informers were tasked with exposing acts of ideological sabotage committed by bourgeois television in a timely and substantiated manner and with fighting back against the enemy’s attempts to exploit the difficulties and shortcomings of the Soviet system.136

Technical Countermeasures and the “Exposure” of the Enemy Implementing the ECP CC’s June 15, 1982, decision, however, proved far more complicated than expected. One of the key indicators of the success of the Party’s campaign was undoubtedly, whether it reduced the number of television sets 132 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 172. 133 Minutes no. 37 of the ECP CC Bureau session, 15 June 1982, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 6067, l. 7–8. 134 Ibid., l. 8–9. 135 Ibid., l. 9. 136 Ibid., l. 8.

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that could receive Finnish TV—in other words, to what extent technical countermeasures succeeded. Local Party structures within the Finnish TV broadcast area started reporting to the ECP CC in August 1982 that Finnish TV was no longer shown in public places and that the sound adapters necessary for viewing it had been removed from televisions in public institutions.137 However, “bourgeois television” continued to be viewed on privately owned television sets.138 The reason was that a factory in Tallinn manufactured those sound adapters, and they could be legally installed in the workshops of the Elektron state concern, which sold and repaired home electronics.139 The Elektron concern repaired an average of 160,000 televisions annually between 1976 and 1985, along with over 11,000 antennas, and it installed over 4,000 collective and 400 individual antennas.140 If repair shops also refused to install sound adapters, television technicians could install them unofficially in private homes for extra income. Since installing the sound adapter was relatively simple, practically all radio amateurs also knew how to do it, and it was not illegal. Materials for fashioning sound adapters could be obtained on the black market if necessary as well. The fight against the antennas necessary for watching Finnish TV was just as unsuccessful. Even if the antennas on some communal apartment buildings were removed or redirected, most houses’ antennas remained in place. Similarly, the authorities did not dare start removing antennas from the roofs of private houses. Just as with the sound adapters, people with technical knowledge could make antennas for themselves as well as for sale on the black market. Thus the Party and the KGB planned to obstruct the reception of Finnish TV using jammers as well, according to the example of jamming Western “radio voices.”141 They considered building a network of jammers about 100 meters high on Naissaare, a northern Estonian island.142 However, given the available technology and the island’s location, that gigantic network

137 Reports concerning the implementation of the ECP CC decision of 15 June 1982, ibid., s. 7156, l. 13–31. 138 The Soviet Union used the SECAM system to transmit and receive television signals. Since Finland used the PAL system, however, Soviet citizens had to obtain a sound and color adapter for their sets in order to watch Finnish TV. 139 Report by the Minister of Internal Affairs to the ECP CC, 21 November 1983, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 7156, l. 37. 140 Annual reports of the Radio and Television Set Repair Concern ‘Elektron’, ERA f. R-2287, n. 1, s. 1428; s. 1702; s. 2312; s. 2580; s. 2806; s. 3022; s. 3160; s. 3360; s. 3557. 141 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 176. 142 Kilmi, Aarma, Disko ja tuumasõda.

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would at most have jammed Finnish TV only at Tallinn’s western boundary.143 The fact that there was no technology for jamming television signals also proved to be a problem, and thus the expenditures involved would have been unpredictably large.144 There were other hindrances as well. The military was concerned about the impact on its radars and technical fixtures. Moreover, the Soviet ministries of foreign affairs and of communications did not wish to violate international agreements and conventions to which the USSR had committed itself.145 A jamming station powerful enough to cover Tallinn could have interfered with the operation of television masts in Helsinki as well.146 Concern over the international scandal that might ensue was one of the main reasons why the idea of erecting stations to jam Finnish TV could have been abandoned at the ECP CC level.147 A similar case occurred in the Lithuanian SSR: the local Party Committee wanted to use jamming stations to prevent Lithuanians from watching Western adventure and erotic films on late-night Polish television. This idea was abandoned on orders from Moscow; officials feared disturbing the transmission of their “friendly neighbor’s” television programs.148 Since the technical measures against Finnish TV were not effective, the Party had to resort to “exposure” and “covering” television that it saw as hostile. There was nothing new in and of itself in the fact that the Soviet propaganda system used the mass media to “expose” hostile propaganda. For decades, the ECP CC Bureau demanded that the Soviet Estonian press consistently “expose” the acts of ideological sabotage, anti-socialist campaigns, revisionist henchmen, machinations, fabrications, falsifications, and slandering tricks of bourgeois propaganda.149 Yet in the Party’s 1982 campaign against “bourgeois television,” 143 Interview with Rein Ruudi, Estonian SSR Republic Radio and Television Broadcast Center chief engineer (1971–92), 7 November 2012, conducted by the author. Digital recording in the author’s private archive. 144 Interview with Ruudi; interview with Leito; interview with Toomas Sõmera, first deputy minister of communications of the Estonian SSR (1975–90), in 2012; interview with Voldemar Lindström, ETV program director (1976–88), 9 September 2012, all interviews conducted by the author. Digital recordings in the author’s private archive. 145 Graf, Kalevipoja kojutulek, p. 176. 146 Interview with Ruudi. 147 Ibid.; interview with Soidla; interview with Leito; interview with Anupõld; interview with Sõmera; interview with Peeter Sookruus, head of the ECP CC Propaganda Department and Journalism Sector (1984–89), 11 February 2013, conducted by the author. Digital recording in the author’s private archive. 148 Pleikys, Jamming, p. 59. 149 Miil, ‘Ideoloogilisest sõjast ei pääsenud keegi’, p. 257.

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all manner of efforts were made to try to increase the effectiveness of “exposure.” The local Party structures within the broadcast area of Finnish TV organized forms of mass political work as counterpropaganda, like political instruction days and training, conferences, lectures, discussions, and seminars. Moreover, sections and groups dealing with counterpropaganda work and indoctrination were formed.150 A USSR-wide scientific-practical conference entitled “The Exacerbation of Ideological Struggle on the World Arena and the Political Indoctrination of Employees” was held in Tallinn in October 1982. The importance of this event was emphasized by a dispatch sent to it by Leonid Brezhnev himself, where he wished the participants “fruitful creative work” in seeking to make propaganda more effective and to expose imperialism’s hostile nature towards humanity.151 Secretary of the CPSU CC Konstantin Russakovgave the main presentation of the conference, declaring that socialism was on a “historical offensive” and naming the rapid reaction of the Soviet propaganda apparatus to every act of Western ideological sabotage as the most effective countermeasure.152 At the same conference, Karl Vaino spoke about ECP experiences in ideological and political indoctrination work, concluding that people were constantly disturbed in questions of counterpropaganda.153 The Estonian SSR society Znanie (Knowledge)154 organized “Youth and Ideological Struggle” training sessions for municipal and raion committee representatives of the Estonian Leninist Communist Youth League (Komsomol) in

150 Reports on the implementation of the ECP CC decision of 15 June 1982, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 7156, l. 13–31. 151 ‘Üleliidulisest teaduslik-praktilisest konverentsist “Ideoloogiavõitluse teravnemine maailmaareenil ja töötajate poliitline kasvatamine” osavõtjaile’ (For Participants in the USSR-Wide Scientific and Practical Conference Intensification of the Ideological Struggle in the World Arena and Political Indoctrination of Employees), Rahva Hääl, 13 October 1982. 152 “Ideoloogiavõitluse teravnemine maailmaareenil ja töötajate poliitiline kasvatamine. NLKP KK sekretäri K. V. Russakovi ettekanne” (Intensification of the Ideological Struggle in the World Arena and Political Indoctrination of Employees: CPSU CC Secretary K.V. Russakov’s presentation), Rahva Hääl, 13 October 1982. 153 ‘Eesti parteiorganisatsiooni kogemused töötajate ideelis-poliitilisel kasvatamisel tänapäeva tingimustes. EKP KK esimese sekretäri K. Vaino ettekanne’ (Estonian Party Organization Experiences in Indoctrinating Employees Ideologically and Politically under Today’s Conditions: ECP CC First Secretary K. Vaino’s presentation), Rahva Hääl, 13 October 1982. 154 For the sake of clarity, the Russian name of the society is used, as it is customary in English-language publications on Soviet ideology. The name of the Estonian branch was actually Teadus (Science).

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March and May 1983. These training sessions focused on themes like “sociological propaganda as channels and forms of lifestyle propaganda,” “way of life and ideological struggle,” “psychological war in the struggle of ideas,” “counterpropaganda and political indoctrination,” “Western foreign policy propaganda campaigns in ideological war,” “forms and methods of bourgeois propaganda in propagating Western lifestyle and discrediting socialist achievements,” “problems of culture in ideological struggle,” “foreign policy propaganda: tendencies and distinct traits under the conditions of ideological struggle,” and “cinema and art in ideological struggle.”155 A number of books and brochures explaining ideological struggle, anti-Soviet propaganda, psychological war, and other such themes were published in Estonian in the 1980s. Znanie prepared lecture outlines that specifically dealt with “bourgeois television” and the situation of the Estonian SSR “on the front line of the ideological struggle.”156 Five themes that Soviet propagandists focused on the most in “exposing” enemy propaganda emerged clearly in the Estonian SSR press: the lies of bourgeois propaganda, distortions of Marxism-Leninism in ideological issues, the propagation of low morality, the ideological ruination of Soviet young people, and the instigation of nationalist conflicts in the Soviet 155 Instructions for holding a course on the theme ‘Young People and Ideological Struggle’ for improving the qualification of the group of Komsomol raion and municipal committee lecturers, ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 1862, l. 8–11. 156 See, for instance, Jaan Napa, Vastupropaganda vormidest ja meetoditest (On Forms and Methods of Counterpropaganda) (Tallinn, 1984); Arno Kirt, Ideoloogiline võitlus ja välispoliitiline propaganda (Ideological Struggle and Foreign Political Propaganda) (Tallinn, 1983); Ralf Mikenberg, Ideoloogiline võitlus ja psühholoogiline sõda (Ideological Struggle and Psychological War) (Tallinn, 1985); Gabriel Hazak, See väike keeruline maailm (This Small Complicated World) (Tallinn, 1987); Sergei Popov, Antikommunism—imperialismi ideoloogia ja poliitika (Anticommunism: Ideology and Politics of Imperialism) (Tallinn, 1987); Nail Bikkenin, Sotsialistlik ideoloogia (Socialist Ideology) (Tallinn, 1982); Gabriel Hazak, Propaganda, informatsioon ja ideoloogiline võitlus (Propaganda, Information, and Ideological Struggle) (Tallinn, 1984); Ilse Ševtšuk, Kasvatame klassipositsioonilt (Indoctrination from the Position of Class) (Tallinn, 1986); Ralf Mikenberg, Imperialistlike riikide kultuuripoliitika ideoloogilises võitluses (Cultural Policy of Imperialist Countries in Ideological Struggle) (Tallinn, 1982); Ilse Ševtšuk, Õppiva noorsoo ideelis-poliitilisest kasvatusest (On the Ideological and Political Indoctrination of Pupils) (Tallinn, 1988); Ahto Vellemaa, Kujundada patrioote, internatsionaliste (To Develop Patriots, Internationalists) (Tallinn, 1985); E. Keerberg, Ideelis-poliitiline töö kaasaja nõuete tasemele (Raising Ideological and Political Work to the Level of Contemporary Requirements) (Tallinn, 1984); Jaan Napa, Eesti emigratsiooni natsionlistlike vaadete ja tegevuse kriitika (Criticism of the Nationalist Views and Activity of Estonian Emigrants) (Tallinn, 1982).

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Union.157 When considering these themes, Soviet propagandists tried to “expose” the dangers of bourgeois propaganda and at the same time to justify why hostile radio and television channels, including Finnish TV, had to be fought against. For instance, the Estonian SSR daily newspaper Õhtuleht“exposed” U.S. propagandists as directly using Finnish TV in cooperation with Finland’s “top capitalists” against the ideas of socialism and to propagate bourgeois ideology and the Western lifestyle. “Bourgeois propagandists” allegedly crafted Finnish TV programming with the Soviet audience in mind and intentionally broadcasted mainly U.S. films on Finnish TV. Thus there was allegedly nothing random in the Finnish TV program. Everything was planned ideological sabotage: “Young people are shown popular music programs that are hardly chosen by chance, intellectuals are shown seemingly politically neutral scientific and technology programs, while religious people are shown religious ‘spiritual treasures.’”158 According to Õhtuleht, however, the fact that U.S. companies helped Finland erect a new 350-meter television mast characterized the ideological sabotage led by the United States and conveyed by Finnish TV. The technical systems and broadcasting area of that new television mast were calculated to correspond to the receiver systems of Estonian SSR television sets. Even during glasnost and perestroika in 1987, the critical exposures of Yleisradio editor Esko Seppenän were translated into Estonian and published. The author described Finnish television and mass media as a whole as becoming “Westernized” and the system as bearing the value orientation of American society, which was a “mindless anti-Soviet value orientation.”159

Difficulties in “Covering” Just as with “exposing,” there was nothing new in and of itself in “covering” for Soviet propagandists. The penetration of foreign media signals through the Iron Curtain was one factor that forced the Communist Party to improve the quality of domestic programs.160 By the 1960s at the latest, the Party’s top leadership realized that they had to compete with Western media, and for that reason, they began pressuring Soviet mass media to convey information in a more timely manner

157 Miil, ‘Ideoloogilisest sõjast ei pääsenud keegi’, p. 261. 158 E. Kraavi, ‘Ideoloogise võitluse rinne’ (Front Line of the Ideological Struggle), Õhtuleht, 5 October 1982. 159 Esko Seppenän, Soome: Ida ja Lääne vahel (Finland: Between East and West) (Tallinn, 1987), p. 180. 160 Mikkonen, ‘Stealing the Monopoly of Knowledge’, p. 804.

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and to improve the format and quality of its programs.161 Thus, for example, Soviet media analysis also admitted that the influence of ETV’s own information programs would remain uncertain as long as Finnish TV news surpassed them “in the abundance of timely visual material, speed, geographical scope, and the diversity of commentaries.”162 In order to compete with Finnish TV, ETV would have had to gain access to visual and news material from Intervision and Eurovision, and in order to acquire timely information about what was taking place in the Soviet Union itself, it was recommended in this analysis that ETV create its own information service. It was also found that ETV’s skillful operation with interesting feature and documentary films and serials would reduce the influence of Finnish TV, if ETV could manage to acquire those films.163 Regarding the “covering” of Finnish TV that began in Soviet Estonia in 1982, the chairman of the Television and Radio Committee Allan Kullaste presented his first report on the matter to the ECP CC in December 1983. This report listed programs used to fulfill the task of propaganda and counterpropaganda posed by the Party “on completely different levels and in different directions.” Kullaste reported that ETV took into account the audience within the Finnish TV broadcast area in its planning. To change the behavior of the audience, the committee chairman promised to “cover” popular bourgeois programs with even more popular Estonian television programs. These programs were supposed to be scheduled for broadcast just before the competing Finnish TV programs whenever possible. The broadcast of television performances, theater evenings, popular films, information programs, entertainment programs, and other such programs was planned on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, taking into account conclusions drawn from audience surveys.164 Kullaste stated that the timeliness and quality of information programs had improved. The news program Aktuaalne kaamera was broadcast three times a day—at 6:00 p.m., 8:30 p.m., and 9:40 p.m.—instead of the previous

161 R. Eugene Parta, ‘The Audience of Western Broadcasts to the USSR during the Cold War’, Johnson, Parta (eds.), Cold War Broadcasting, pp. 98–9. 162 Rein Varrak and Hagi Šein, Organisatoorsetest abinõudest Eesti Televisiooni programmi parendamisel (On Organizational Measures for Improving Estonian Television’s Programming), Tallinn, 13 November 1975. Voldemar Lindström’s private archive, p. 2. 163 Ibid., p. 3. 164 Presentation by the chairman of the Television and Radio Committee to the ECP CC Propaganda and Agitation Department, 5 December 1983, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 7156, l. 41.

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once-a-day showing. Additionally, news briefs started being broadcast four times a day: at 9:00 a.m., 2:25 p.m., 7:30 p.m., and late at night.165 However, ETV encountered problems in fulfilling the Party-mandated task of “covering.” Five interconnected factors made “covering” Finnish TV complicated: ignoring the audience, deficient technical equipment and working environment, a lack of information among journalists, ideological and political restrictions, and personnel problems.166 ETV started collecting feedback from the audience on television programs for the first time in 1963 through letters from viewers.167 Yet the effects of “bourgeois media” were precisely why the Party started paying greater attention than before to media surveys of the audience in order to improve its counterpropaganda. One important step aimed at improving the quality and importance of those surveys was the formation of the IAK as part of the Television and Radio Committee according to the ECP CC decision of June 15, 1982. The IAK was formed by combining the Estonian Radio Computational Center (founded in 1968) and the Press Bureau (founded in 1979), both of which had dealt with public-opinion surveys regarding important foreign political events or for “identifying” new anti-Soviet “campaigns.”168 To improve counterpropaganda, the IAK started studying 1) the social and social-psychological needs for information of various segments of the population and the forms and channels for satisfying those needs; 2) the audience’s patterns of use of various channels of mass communication; 3) the viewing and interests of the audience, the situation in which programs were received, and other such factors; 4) the communicative and non-communicative behavior of young people as a specific audience of mass information channels; 5) the attitude of various segments of the population towards music programs and their consumption of music.169 In addition to analyzing the Estonian-language broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Liberty radio stations, the IAK also monitored news broadcasts on Finnish TV. Analysis was prepared once a week because of these observations of how different foreign channels reported certain events. At the same time, predictions were made of

165 166 167 168 169

Ibid., l. 43–44. Miil, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest Soome TV “katmisel”’, pp. 108–41. Šein, Suur teleraamat, p. 173. Miil, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest Soome TV “katmisel”’, p. 112. Presentation by the chairman of the Television and Radio Committee to the ECP CC Propaganda and Agitation Department, 5 December 1983, on the measures adopted in the struggle against the influence of bourgeois television, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 7156, l. 45.

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what topics hostile propaganda might focus on in the future.170 Each quarter, the IAK put together an overview that analyzed the methods of hostile propaganda and recommended how to handle problems.171 The ETV programming and the content of its broadcasts were indeed changed and some TV series were started due to sociological studies and the analysis of the content of programs. Nevertheless, these results were not always taken into account.172 It was determined that the results of surveys did not reach program editors, to say nothing of ordinary journalists, Even so, some once again questioned to what extent an ideological institution working to indoctrinate people should be guided by the audience’s opinions in the first place. Many television employees realized that some ETV programs really were “dull and boring” and that that was why television viewers switched to Finnish TV. In 1983, for instance, the chief producer of programming for young people and children explained why ETV was losing the youth audience: “All programs for young people and children are essentially propaganda programs for young people. We have to talk about what we do not like among young people (consumerism, their attitude towards fashion, their interests in music, dances and young people’s traditions). But what can we offer them instead of that? We do not have anything to offer. There is a void here. And something will come along to fill that void.”173 Television employees themselves were also able to suggest how to compete with Finnish TV, but the implementation of those proposals got bogged down for a number of other reasons. One factor that made “covering” Finnish TV difficult was ETV’s unsatisfactory working environment and technical equipment. Even the size of the ETV building was unsatisfactory. For example, it was not until 1965 that ETV moved into a purpose-built television building. For its first 10 years, ETV used Radio Building rooms that had been adapted for television. The studio complexes in the Television Building that was opened in 1965 had a projected production capacity of 600 hours per year of ETV’s own programs.174 Only a year later, ETV was producing 651 hours per year of its own programs, and by 1975 that figure was 1,203 hours per year. ETV had to continue operating in cramped conditions until 1986, when an extension of the building was completed. Thus, for instance, one ETV senior producer in 1984 noted that while information programs were sup170 171 172 173

Ibid., l. 45. Ibid., l. 46. Miil, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest Soome TV “katmisel”’, pp. 123–4. Minutes no. 1 of the ETV Party organization general meeting on 30 November 1983, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1920, l. 125. 174 Timak, Meeri, Eesti Televisioon, p. 28.

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posedly “on the front line” of the ideological struggle, in practice, there was only one desk for every 2.5 employees.175 Similarly, the quality and timeliness of the television journalist’s everyday work could suffer from deficiencies in film stock and videotape, proper lighting, studio furnishings, means of communication and transportation, fuel for cars, and so on.176 Another set of problems at ETV was a shortage of professional television employees, the limited skills of the existing staff, and issues with their work discipline and attitude. ETV had a few “television stars” beloved by the audience. At the same time, there were also numerous “internal reserves” who arrived late for work and left early, spent hours in the canteen, ignored work plans and regulations, and drank on the job.177 By the 1980s, even the communists in the ETV’s Party sub-organizations no longer bothered to fulfill their obligations. For instance, the ETV Party Bureau secretary admitted in 1987: “When we held a meeting on the theme ‘Young People and Responsibility’ at the end of 1985, we were startled to find that the decision passed at a meeting on the same theme in 1982 had gone unfulfilled point by point. So we talked about shaping a feeling of responsibility among young people, and we ourselves did not really dare to look up.”178 A lack of information also made “covering” Finnish TV complicated for television journalists, and ideological and political restrictions could hinder the use of existing information. Newsworthy information moved slowly, or not at all, between the Television and Radio Committee’s different production desks. At the same time, information often did not reach production desks on time from Party structures, state institutions, and even from the USSR-wide information agency, TASS, or the Estonian SSR’s own information agency, ETA. For instance, ETA materials were criticized for being “out of tune with local life, generally worded, and drily written” and for not arousing reader interest due to their writing style and “poor journalistic craftsmanship.” Timely information was reportedly almost never received from ETA.179 ETA photographs were seldom used, since they had a “weak storyline,” they were “not in the least timely,” and too few pictures were 175 Minutes no. 2 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization general meeting, 19 March 1984, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1922, l. 133. 176 Miil, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest Soome TV “katmisel”’, pp. 126–9. 177 Ibid., pp. 135–8. 178 Minutes no. 8 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party elementary organization general meeting, 26 February 1987, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1935, l. 9. 179 Statement from the editor of the newspaper Pärnu Kommunist (Pärnu Communist) to the ECP CC, 5 November 1983, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 7156, l. 33–4.

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provided even of major ESSR events.180 The internal problem of the Television and Radio Committee was the inability of different production desks to exchange information between themselves systematically and consistently and to coordinate activity in meeting the objectives set by the Party. The committee failed to create a preliminary information system that would centrally coordinate the gathering of information for both radio and television production desks.181 ETV as an ideological institution operated, like the rest of the Soviet media, under the strict supervision of the Party. This put fetters on journalists’ creativity and aspirations to professionalism and objectivity. As mentioned earlier, many television journalists understood why the audience of specific programs dwindled, or even worse, switched to “bourgeois television.” Yet it was precisely because of ideological and political restrictions that television journalists faced a conundrum. On the one hand, journalists wanted to offer innovative solutions, taking into account the actual interests of the audience even amid material and technical difficulties. On the other hand, the Party’s political guidelines, which required the total re-education of the audience and the alteration of its taste and preferences, hindered innovations that could take audience interests into account. From its revolutionary origins until the late 1980s, the Party clung to its Leninist principles, which saw the press as merely a means for (re)educating the masses in the spirit of class struggle. For instance, journalists in the spring of 1986 searched for the reasons why meat was not getting to shops in Tallinn. At the same time, statistics emerged indicating that in Belorussia and the Lithuanian SSR, there was enough meat even for tourists. Since even the leadership of the ECP CC dodged giving answers in interviews, journalists realized that unanswered questions intensified discontent and thus also increased ETV’s reliability.182 But the consequence was that ETV itself was subjected to pressure. The ECP CC Bureau found on October 22, 1987, that ETV and the local newspaper Edasi (Forward) had stirred the people up and were directly responsible for the consequences.183 The journalists in turn complained that the leading organizations of the Estonian SSR were opposed to public disclosure, as shown in their unwillingness to admit to problems or seek solutions, keeping silent, classifying documents, giving orders to the press “from a position 180 Ibid., l. 34. 181 Miil, ‘Eesti televisiooni raskustest Soome TV “katmisel”’, pp. 129–32. 182 Minutes no. 5 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party organization open meeting, 27 August 1986, ERAF f. 51, n. 1, s. 1932, l. 105–6. 183 Minutes no. 36 of the Estonian SSR State Television and Radio Committee Party Committee session, 27 October 1987, ibid., s. 1934, l. 116.

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of strength,” criticizing individual television programs, and, when problems were exposed, to blame the messenger.184 The Party’s 1982 campaign to “neutralize” the effect of “bourgeois television” lasted only a few years until CPSU CC First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev announced his glasnost policy. For the first time, journalists were able to seek answers to the questions that actually interested Soviet citizens after the 27th CPSU Congress in 1986. For this reason, the Party no longer had the time or strength to deal with the bourgeois foreign enemy. Instead, it had to start reacting domestically and answering questions raised by its own citizens. Nevertheless, action aimed against Finnish TV ended officially only on November 3, 1988, when the head of the ECP CC Propaganda and Agitation Department announced in his classified letter that “arising from changes in the political situation in the international arena, the USSR, and the Estonian SSR,” his department considered it possible to stop supervision of the implementation of the ECP CC decision of June 15, 1982.185 Yet in any case, Finnish TV had already started losing its position among the Estonian SSR television audience as a result of the political situation. Thanks to the public-disclosure policy, ETV was transformed in viewers’ eyes from an ideological institution into a reliable journalistic organization. The viewer ratings and audience share of local television rose above 80 percent among Estonians for at least some of the 1987–91 period.186

Conclusions Sovietization is defined as the process of adopting, transferring, and enforcing elements of the Soviet model, which involved institutional and structural changes in society, the economy, and the state, as well as the reorganization of cultural, intellectual, and everyday life.187 At the same time, measures implemented in Estonia were not simply a case of ideological pressure and control by a totalitarian regime as part of a forced assimilation. The measures implemented also stemmed directly 184 Ibid., l. 117, 124. 185 Letter dated 3 November 1988, from Silvi-Aire Villo, head of the ECP CC Propaganda and Agitation Department ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 7156, l. 57. 186 Šein, Suur teleraamat, p. 178. 187 Olaf Mertelsmann, ‘Sovietiseerimise mõistest’ (On the Concept of Sovietization), Tõnu Tannberg (ed.), Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953: Sovietiseerimise mehhanismid ja tagajärjed Nõukogude Liidu ja Ida-Euroopa arengute kontekstis (The Estonian SSR in 1940–1953: Mechanisms and Consequences of Sovietization in the Context of Developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) (Tartu, 2007), pp. 13–29, here p. 22.

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from the needs of the Cold War propaganda war. Namely, as a part of the Soviet empire, Soviet Estonia was dragged into the propaganda war between the capitalist and socialist blocs after World War II. For this reason, the Soviet regime essentially established martial law in Estonia for decades. This propaganda war used MarxistLeninist ideology in exactly the same way as that ideology had designated total warfare through class struggle as one of the regime’s permanent spheres of activity. Namely, Lenin had already recognized that the communist struggle had to apply ever more new and diverse methods of defense and attack and that no form of struggle would be cast aside.188 And all interests had to be subordinated to that struggle.189 Thus, the Party implemented classical practical countermeasures that were part and parcel of propaganda war, such as the attempt to keep information under its own control. The number of classified instructions issued as part of this propaganda war, as well as the amount of decisions, speeches, interviews, presentations, and other such material that inundated the mass media, demonstrates the scale and complexity of this war. All “comprehensive measures” in media, cultural, and educational institutions and elsewhere ultimately had to ensure that the Party itself remained in power and that the Soviet system was maintained. The decisions and processes described above also indicate that more and more elements of the Soviet system of government and organization of society were adjusted in the Estonian SSR during the propaganda war. For this reason, it can be claimed that this war played an important part in the Sovietization of Estonia. Since the Communist Party was not able to prevent the reception of Finnish TV and its viewing in thousands of homes in the Estonian SSR, the Party had no choice but to try to convince people that watching “bourgeois television” was inadvisable and dangerous for several reasons and that it was an unreliable form of media. The exposure of “bourgeois propaganda” was used in Soviet mass media to convince people. For instance, films, literature, explanatory work in Party elementary organizations, propaganda in the form of lectures, conferences, and other such means were put to the same purpose. The Party’s aim was to immunize people in Soviet Estonia against Western ideas, lifestyle, independent information, and other such influences by shaping the image of the enemy through “exposures.” According to the Party’s vision, a proper Soviet person was not supposed to follow Western media channels at all. If this happened nevertheless, the Party believed that preventive “exposure work” was useful, since it was supposed to raise people’s awareness of, and vigilance against, “bourgeois propaganda,” where imperialist

188 Lenin, Teosed (Works), vol. 11 (Tallinn, 1952), p. 190. 189 Lenin, Teosed, vol. 31 (Tallinn, 1955), p. 261.

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conspiracy and “ideological sabotage” could be concealed in what seemed to be the most innocent details. Thus figuratively speaking, in the Cold War the Party tried to turn citizens of the Estonian SSR into ideological soldiers. They were supposed to take cover in the event of a propaganda attack by the enemy (by switching the radio or television channel). Even if the attack struck him, the citizen soldier was supposed to put up resistance independently, that is, to dismiss everything on Western channels as disinformation. However, it is impossible at this point to assess how effective this kind of “exposure” was, and whether and to what extent people in Soviet Estonia related critically to what was broadcast, for instance, on Finnish TV. The “covering” of Finnish TV by broadcasting more interesting and timely programs on Soviet Estonian television was hampered by the neglect of audience wishes, ETV’s deficient work environment and technical equipment, personnel problems, journalists’ lack of information, and ideological and political restrictions. Because of its Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Party saw the media primarily as a means of indoctrinating the people. This argument—that on certain questions the ETV, as an ideological institution, had to remain true to “principles” without regard to the opinion of television viewers—made it possible to ignore the television audience. This, however, meant the production of programs that bored viewers. On the other hand, the loss of television viewers in this way did not affect ETV’s budget (including the wages of television employees) or jeopardize ETV’s existence. The Soviet administrative and economic systems enabled ineffective organizations to exist, to say nothing of propaganda institutions that were absolutely necessary for maintaining the legitimacy of the Party itself. Yet the system as a whole, where the Party made all the important decisions and the planned economy ignored the actual relationship between supply and demand, had to become ineffective sooner or later. The resulting economic underdevelopment affected television work, as it affected everything else in society. In addition to deficient working conditions, political and ideological restrictions also hindered television employees’ actual creative potential, watchdog stance, and determination to seek the truth that are absolutely necessary for journalists. This in turn encouraged a sense of hopelessness among television employees and the proliferation of mediocrity where the guiding principle for “survival” among employees was to follow orders given from above and not to demonstrate initiative. In that way, employees tried to avoid mistakes that could hurt their careers. Thus alongside outstanding employees and television stars, the staff also included passive and indifferent people. Incompetence, an endemically poor attitude towards work, and violations of work discipline were not foreign to this ideological institution.

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Yet ETV undoubtedly also made progress in fulfilling the Party-assigned task of “covering,” since new series were created, existing shows improved, and broadcast times changed based on the interest of television viewers and the programming of Finnish TV. These were the positive consequences for ETV of competing with “bourgeois television.” Competition meant the need to compare ETV’s offerings to those of Finnish TV. What the television audience in Soviet Estonia expected of ETV was also researched; in other words, it was acknowledged that television viewers had to be won over with interesting and engaging programming. At the same time, learning from “bourgeois television”—what was done differently in those programs and how—and applying what was learned, where possible, in their own programs also played an important role in ETV’s development. Yet since Finland kept up with developments in the television studios of other Western countries, “bourgeois television” also transmitted Western television culture to ETV. The “covering” assignment also provided the opportunity to come up with new ideas and solutions and was also a cogent argument in applying for resources to implement those proposals. Soviet Estonia’s leading officials began citing the Estonian SSR’s exceptional situation and the needs of counterpropaganda when applying for material resources and special conditions from the authorities in Moscow.190 Aadu Slutsk, the head of Estonian Radio, used just such an argument when the Estonian Radio Computational Center (the predecessor of the IAK) was founded in 1968 and sociological surveys were started, and when the Press Bureau was created in 1979 and it was supplied with contemporary technology and access to the most confidential materials of TASS.191 The popularity of programs such as Täna 25 aastat tagasi (Today 25 Years Ago), Reklaamiklubi (Commercial Club), Jupiter, and Viljaveski (Grain Mill) confirm the fact that regardless of the problems involved in “covering,” ETV managed to attract Estonia’s television audience. Yet at the same time, the television staff were not necessarily striving deliberately to contribute to the Party’s ideological struggle or provide competition for bourgeois Finnish TV. It could simply have been the success of dedicated television professionals, presented to the Party as progress on the ideological front. On the other hand, the “covering” of Finnish TV by ETV took place on unequal terms from the very beginning. Paradoxically, in 190 Interviews with Sookruus, Soidla, Anupõld, and Lindström; Peeter Sookruus, ‘Vastandjõudude mõjuväljas’ (In the Force Field of Opposing Forces), Pallas, Teelised helisillal, pp. 379–401, here p. 386; Toivo Tootsen, Minu elu RAMETO-s ehk kuidas me meelt jahutasime (My Life in RAMETO, or How We Entertained) (Tallinn, 2012), p. 136. 191 Ibid., p. 386; interviews with Sookruus and Laak.

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this Party-initiated campaign, capitalist rules applied: viewers who had the chance to choose between two products—ideological Soviet programming or “bourgeois television”—chose according to their tastes. Both programs were free, and all one had to do to switch television channels was to turn the dial. Yet ultimately, the war against “bourgeois television” was nevertheless lost. One of the reasons for this was the Party’s self-deception and belief in the “monolithic family of Soviet peoples.” People in this society masked their true convictions; many had long since lost their faith in the bright future of socialism and the imminent collapse of capitalism. Finnish TV, with its influential pictures of everyday capitalist well-being, only helped to strengthen those convictions. The speed and scale of popular support for the perestroika processes of the late 1980s demonstrated just how susceptible to Western ideas the “immediate rear area” of the ideological front line—in other words, the majority of the population of the Estonian SSR—actually was and how hollow the ideological institutions were. Most of the employees of ideological institutions that had served the Soviet propaganda apparatus in Estonia and participated in the propaganda war then set about operating in the spirit of free and independent journalism, thus paradoxically copying the Western democratic media system against which they had recently fought. The majority of citizens of Soviet Estonia, however, were victims of the propaganda war. In this war, lies were told, history was rewritten, and myths and enemies were created—reality was consciously distorted. In the process, for decades Soviet citizens were deprived of their right to freedom of speech and to independently search for answers to their questions from different sources. The only version of the truth that was supposed to reach them was the version approved by the Party. Typically, in assessing the consequences of a war, one calculates the physical and material damage to civilian society: how many civilians perished, how many of them were deported, how many fled, how many were left homeless, how many were mobilized into foreign armies. Yet contemporary treatments of the information age and information wars, and of contemporary conflicts, should encourage us to consider and analyze the consequences of the propaganda of ruling regimes or occupying forces. These might include the memory trauma of a people (the consequence of rewriting and falsifying history), the patriotic awakening of another people, or the spontaneous extinction of some former political mass movement.

Atko Remmel

(Anti)-Religious Aspects of the Cold War: Soviet Religious Policy as Applied in the Estonian SSR Abstract: The author demonstrates that the implementation of state policy on religion was not particularly effective in the Estonian SSR. It was mild compared to several other regions of the Soviet Union, and particular campaigns “on the religious front” frequently depended on the discretion of local officials. Soviet policy on religion directed a great deal of attention toward new secular Soviet ceremonies and managed rather effectively to graft new rites into society.

The Baltic republics were the “Soviet West” for the people of the Soviet Union. At the same time, those republics were presented to the West as a kind of display window where quite a few things could take place that would be unthinkable elsewhere. This also meant a somewhat more lenient attitude concerning religion, which led some to believe that Estonia was a testing ground for a more lenient religious policy.1 This position seems to be incorrect, but it does indicate that, despite the centralized Soviet system, there was some room for different interpretations of religious policy in the USSR. The prerequisite for this, however, was a complicated system that had developed rather randomly, the fundamental nature of which was the attempt to solve problems using organizational means—“if there is a task, then create an agency to resolve it.”2 Thus, the apparatus for antireligious work was intertwined with different interests and chains of command. It was far from effective and relatively eloquently proved Stalin’s claim that “cadres decide everything.”

* The article was written with the support of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, targeted financing project SF0180026s11, and of the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT). 1 Toivo Pilli, ‘Towards a Revived Identity: Estonian Baptists, 1970–1985’, Sheryl Corrado and Toivo Pilli (eds.), Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives (Prague, 2007), p. 143. 2 Leonid Mletšin, Brežnev (Tallinn, 2011), p. 11.

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Historiography After Estonia regained its independence, the religious history of the Soviet period did not begin attracting more serious interest until around the turn of the millennium. Vello Salo’s State and Churches 1940–1991,3 the only general survey of the topic to this day, was soon joined by studies conducted using archival sources. These include Riho Altnurme’s The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Soviet State 1944–1949,4 Jaanus Plaat’s Religious Movements, Churches, and Free Congregations in Lääne County and Hiiumaa: Processes of Change in Religious Associations from the Mid-18th Century to the End of the 20th Century and his Saaremaa Churches, Religious Movements, and Prophets in the 18th–20th Centuries,5 Toivo Pilli’s Dance or Die: The Shaping of Estonian Baptist Identity under Communism (Milton Keynes, 2008), Andrei Sõtšov’s The Estonian Orthodox Eparchy under the Influence of Soviet Religious Policies in 1954–1964,6 Riho Saard’s Spirit of Tallinn,7 and Atko Remmel’s Anti-Religious Struggle in the Estonian SSR 1957–1990: Main Institutions and Their Activities.8 The anthology History of Estonian Ecumenism9 provides an overview of the internal life of churches and the relations between them. One of the most recent works on Soviet-era religious life is a collection of articles and memoirs, Belief in Freedom,10 published under the aegis of the Lutheran Church. Even though they are not expressly dedicated to religious questions, researchers of the resistance movement also shed light upon the collaboration of churches with the authorities and repressions that befell believers, for instance Indrek Jürjo’s The Exile and Soviet Estonia;11 Arvo Pesti’s The Dissident Movement in Esto-

3 Vello Salo, Riik ja kirikud 1940–1991 (Tartu, 2000). 4 Riho Altnurme, Eesti Evan­geeliumi Luteriusu Kirik ja Nõukogude riik 1944–1949 (Tartu, 2001). 5 Jaanus Plaat, Usu­liikumised, kirikud ja vabakogudused Lääne- ja Hiiumaal: usuühenduste muu­tumisprotsessid 18. sajandi keskpaigast kuni 20. sajandi lõpuni (Tartu, 2001); idem, Saa­remaa kirikud, usuliikumised ja prohvetid 18.–20. sajandil (Tartu, 2003). 6 Andrei Sõtšov, Eesti Õigeusu piiskop­kond nõukogude religioonipoliitika mõju­väljas 1954–1964 (PhD-thesis, Tartu, 2008). 7 Riho Saard, Tallinna vaim (Tallinn, 2010). 8 Atko Remmel, Religioonivastane võitlus Eesti NSV-s aastail 1957–1990: tähtsamad institutsioonid ja nende tegevus (Tartu, 2011). 9 Riho Altnurme (ed.), History of Estonian Ecumenism (Tallinn-Tartu, 2009). 10 Anne Velliste (ed.), Usk vabadusse (Tallinn, 2011). 11 Indrek Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti: vaateid KGB, EKP ja VEKSA arhiividokumentide põhjal (Tallinn, 1996).

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nia in 1971–1987: Collection of Documents,12 and Viktor Niitsoo’s Resistance, 1955–1985.13 Research literature published during the Soviet period also cannot be entirely set aside. Though heavily slanted ideologically, it can still be useful in drawing attention to otherwise obscure topics and facts. Most notable is Lembit Raid’s monograph From Freethinkers’ Circles to Mass Atheism: Marxist Atheism in Estonia in 1900–1965.14

Historical Overview Even though a commitment to atheism remained a constant in Soviet religious policy, its implementation depended primarily on the political needs of the day, which differed from one period to another. Stalin’s religious policy involved limited cooperation with “official” churches (primarily the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) but also other major confessions). “Sectarians” were regarded more severely, and various repressions befell them (for instance, the deportation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1951).15 However, the situation became more acute shortly after Stalin’s death, for two reasons. First, when the atmosphere of fear that prevailed during Stalin’s lifetime collapsed, a religious renaissance of sorts followed, alarming leading figures in ideological work. Second, Nikita Khrushchev’s clique in the Party gave increased attention to ideology and the “scientific-technical revolution.” As a result, the decision “On Major Shortcomings in Scientific-Atheistic Propaganda and Measures to Improve It” was pushed through in July 1954, leading to a boom in atheist propaganda that lasted nearly three months. Excesses that followed throughout the Soviet Union, domestic and foreign policy considerations, and a power struggle within the Party led to the discontinuation of the campaign in November of the same year, marked by the decision “On Errors in

12 Arvo Pesti, Dissidentlik liikumine Eestis aastatel 1972–1987: dokumentide kogumik (Tallinn, 2009). 13 Viktor Niitsoo, Vastupanu, 1955–1985 (Tartu, 1997). 14 Lembit Raid, Vabamõtlejate ringidest massilise ateismini: marksistlik ateism Eestis aastail 1900–1965 (Tartu, 1978). 15 Aigi Rahi-Tamm and Andres Kahar, ‘The Deportation Operation “Priboi” in 1949’, Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle (eds.), Estonia since 1944: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2009), pp. 382–3.

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the Conduct of Scientific-Atheistic Propaganda among the Population”, adopted by the CPSU Central Committee (CC).16 The ongoing power struggle between Khrushchev, Georgii Malenkov, and Viacheslav Molotov delayed the “final solution of the religious problem” for a few years. In the meantime there was a substantial increase in religious ceremonies (such as confirmations and christenings), largely to meet the needs of people returning from prison camps and internal exile in Siberia, who had not had such opportunities while they were away. Yet by 1957, when the scales of power tipped in favor of Khrushchev, religious questions once again became the focus of attention. Official ideology stressed the utopian plan to create a new “Soviet man” and to achieve communism over the course of the next couple of decades. “Religious vestiges” that still persisted despite the “severing of religion’s social roots” and had even started reviving were seen as the biggest obstacle. Thus, an unprecedented antireligious campaign was started in 195817 and lasted (with ups and downs) until 1964. The campaign had three primary thrusts: the atheist propaganda war; the development of new Soviet rituals such as secular equivalents of religious ceremonies; and “administration”, or the suppression of churches by tightening and consistently applying laws governing religion. After Khrushchev was toppled in October 1964, religious policy was re-evaluated. It was clear that regardless of the colossal blow dealt to religion, an atheist state could not be created all at once by shutting down churches. Several religious associations now operated underground and had become hostile towards the state. For this reason, the state preferred to maintain control over their activities by seemingly moderating its stance while at the same time implementing a long-term policy of choking them off. Thus the principle according to which churches and 16 Mikhail Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov v XX veke (Moscow, 2010), p. 350. 17 Many authors (such as Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov, p.  382; John Anderson, ‘The Archives of the Council for Religious Affairs’, Religion, State and Society 3 [1992], pp. 399f) also place the antireligious campaign in the years 1958–64, yet its first signs can be found in Estonian archival materials in 1956–57. Kristina Burinskaitė also makes the same claim for Lithuania in ‘KGB tegevuse eripärast Leedus aastatel 1954–1990’ (Specific Aspects of the Activities of the KGB in Lithuania 1954–1990), Tuna 15 (2012), no. 4, p. 82. It is not likely that this activity derived solely from local enthusiasm, especially given such coincidences, yet the actual reason for this activity can only be guessed at (for instance, the wake of the decisions of 1954 or instructions relayed by higher-ranking persons employing “telephone law” [a practice by which persons with political power issued orders over the phone instead of using conventional bureaucratic channels, and such orders had to be obeyed] and other similar factors).

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the state operated for practically the entire Brezhnev era was the Taoist aphorism, “if you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.” The possibilities for churches to stand up to state policy and atheist propaganda in this kind of position warfare were rather limited, and the numbers of congregation members dwindled quite consistently. Ideological questions came to the fore once again in the late 1970s, and a brief atheist campaign was unleashed in the early 1980s. While the aim of the previous campaign was to bring churches in line and evangelize believers in the atheist spirit, it became clear by the end of the 1960s that people had not turned into militant atheists. Instead, they displayed indifference towards both religion and atheism—since religion had been forced to the margins of society,18 atheist activism seemed like tilting against windmills. Thus the new campaign had two objectives. On the one hand, it sought to convert an indifferent population to a committed atheist worldview. On the other hand, it sought to bring into line clergymen and believers who had become active at the end of the 1970s, who had made themselves conspicuous, and who had developed closer ties with the dissident movement in various places in the USSR (albeit to no particular extent in Estonia).19 There was no particular enthusiasm in this campaign—compared to the previous one, it remained weak and faded away by 1984–85. Fresh breezes started blowing in religious policy in 1987–88. The reason for this was the need to gain widespread support for the new perestroika policy. Yet the 1,000th anniversary of the ROC in 1988 was also of no small importance. The beginning of that year can also be considered pivotal in Estonia in terms of the attitude towards religion.20 Raion and town authorities gained considerably more freedom in their dealings with churches, and state religious policy coordinated from Moscow became increasingly less relevant.

18 Riho Altnurme, ‘Eesti Evangeelne Luterlik Kirik Nõukogude Liidus (kuni 1964)’ (The Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Soviet Union [until 1964]), Siret Rutiku and Reinhart Staats (eds.), Estland, Lettland und westliches Christentum (Kiel, 1998), p. 230. 19 Pesti, Dissidentlik liikumine Eestis, pp. 22–4. 20 Priit Rohtmets and Ringo Ringvee, ‘Religious Revival and the Political Activity of Religious Communities in Estonia during the Process of Liberation and the Collapse of the Soviet Union 1985–1991’, Religion, State and Society 41 (2013), no. 4, pp. 356 ff.

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Party Decisions concerning Atheism The initiator of antireligious activities throughout society in both the USSR and Estonia was the Communist Party. Atheism was one of the fundamental principles of its program. In 1953–89, the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party (hereinafter referred to as the ECP CC) touched on questions of atheism and religion in its decisions 24 times. Nearly a third of them copied CPSU CC decisions and were adopted only out of bureaucratic necessity for source documents in reference to which action could be taken. The most important of these documents were the 1959 decision “On the Measures to Improve Antireligious Propaganda” and the 1982 decision “On the Strengthening of Atheist Upbringing in the Republic”, both of which unleashed an antireligious campaign. Another third of the decisions were associated with local activism (for instance, the 1968 decision “On the Methods for Improving Scientific-Atheist Propaganda in the Republic”, which led to the creation of new units for antireligious work). The remainder, however, were associated with keeping an eye on the first two groups and providing them with guidelines (for instance, “On the Atheist Work of the Narva Municipal Party Committee among the Population,” 1986).21 In sum, the vast majority of religious policy was dictated in Moscow, but local authorities retained the right to decide on minor details. At the same time, the ECP CC’s attitude towards atheism and religious questions was relatively passive. This topic was less important than other ideological issues. Most decisions of this type were adopted routinely, and their function was largely to act simply as reminders of the struggle against religion. Communication within the Party on the theme of atheism between Moscow and Tallinn, as well as between Tallinn and local cities and raions, was quite infrequent, and aside from campaign periods, activity on the theme of atheism mostly faded away in “localities” within the first year after the CC decision. This is no surprise, considering the barrage that units working in ideology were subjected to. They were constantly bombarded with new propaganda themes—red-letter days and foreign policy questions, communist upbringing, Soviet patriotism, proletarian internationalism, and so on.22 For this reason, antireligious activity was merely a tedious obligation for many people to earn brownie points from higher-ranking organs, because churches were so marginal that there was no visible enemy. The fact that 21 Remmel, Religioonivastane võitlus, pp. 47 ff. 22 Peeter Kaasik, ‘Vabadus on orjus: Proletaarsest internatsionalismist’ (Freedom Is Slavery: About Proletarian Internationalism), Akadeemia 25 (2013), no. 7, pp. 1184–225.

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to a great extent, all atheist work took place on a “social basis”23 also played a role in this. Thus, many decisions remained on paper and were not implemented, and all effectiveness ultimately boiled down to the enthusiasm of a few activists (Estonia’s core atheist activists numbered about 20–30 people throughout the entire period covered here). Nevertheless, not everyone associated with the topic of atheism should be considered merely a henchman of the state—there were quite a number of people whose personal agenda coincided with that aspect of state policy.

The Legal Framework for Discouraging Religion After Estonia was occupied, the USSR’s laws on religion went into effect. The regulation “On the Separation of Church from State and School,” issued on 23 January 1918, banned the teaching of “religious dogmas” in school, meaning that religion was reduced to the private sphere and that churches lost the right to own property, as well as losing the status of a legal entity. The religious code adopted in 1929 banned private prayer, church work among youth, and religious propaganda but created “freedom to engage in antireligious propaganda.” It also prohibited clergymen from wearing their habiliments in public, or from engaging in activity outside their congregational building. At the same time, the state’s rights to interfere in church life increased: clergymen had to be registered by the state in order to obtain an “operational license,” but the state had veto rights. Clergymen were forbidden to join congregational boards of directors on 16 January 1931, in order to reduce their influence in the congregation.24 In Estonia, the “Temporary Guideline” available to the public drawn up in 1945 by the commissioner of religious affairs, Johannes Kivi, regulated the activities of religious associations. It was compiled in accordance with instructions received from Moscow, but its disclosure was in fact a slip-up arising from a miscommunication.25 With the exception of this guideline, religious legislation manifested almost no local initiative. Existing legislation copied the laws of the USSR or the Russian SFSR.

23 Work on a “social basis” meant work done through personal initiative (that is, free of charge) for the good of the entire Soviet state. It was often an additional duty that was part of certain salaried jobs that had to be done, if only to avoid trouble. 24 William van den Bercken, Ideology and Atheism in the Soviet Union (Berlin-New York, 1988), pp. 93–7. 25 Altnurme, Eesti Evangeeliumi Luteriusu Kirik, pp. 62 f.

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In the course of the antireligious campaign at the end of the 1950s, a number of confidential or semi-confidential regulations and instructions were added to publicly disclosed legislation to create the framework necessary for discouraging religion. Three USSR Council of Ministers regulations date from 1958. The first of these called for reducing the land belonging to abbeys, banning the payment of wages to church employees, and seeking ways to reduce the number of abbeys. The second regulation increased the income tax levied on monasteries and spiritual centers. The third regulation sought to put an end to pilgrimages.26 The most important regulation, however, was unquestionably the regulation “On Strengthening Control over Religious Organizations” adopted on 16 March 1961 (the ESSR Council of Ministers equivalent was adopted on 13 April of the same year)27 and the confidential instructions for its implementation. The regulation stressed that it was inadvisable to register congregations with “fanatical and antistate viewpoints”—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists-Reformists, and others—and required a one-time USSR-wide statistical census of congregations to be carried out. The data thus obtained was used in the subsequent campaign to shut down congregations.28 The instruction, in turn, added restrictions to nearly half of the articles of the 1929 law.29 Criminal and administrative penalties for violation of the religious code were also made more severe. The policy of gradually choking off congregations implemented after Khrushchev’s campaign brought what seemed to be concessions. For instance, the requirements for registering congregations were relaxed in 1968 by a decision of the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA), which also permitted religious associations to own automobiles and real estate.30 The objective was to regain state control over congregations that had gone underground during the campaign. At the same time, however, several Criminal Code articles concerning religion

26 John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 34 f. 27 Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. R-1961, n. 1, s. 103, l. 7 ff. 28 Sõtšov, Eesti Õigeusu piiskopkond, p. 117. 29 Philip Walters, ‘A Survey of Soviet Religious Policy’, Sabrina Petra Ramet (ed.), Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 2005), p. 20. The text of the instructions can be found at ERA f. R-1, n. 15, s. 547, l. 9 ff. 30 Walter Sawatsky, ‘Secret Soviet Lawbook on Religion’, Religion, State and Society 4 (1976), no. 4, p. 28; Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov, p. 385.

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were once again tightened, as was administrative responsibility for violation of religious legislation.31 The new policy required that believers understand the applicable legislation based on more than just hearsay. The intervening confidential regulations were formulated into a public Statute for Religious Associations, which the Russian SFSR Supreme Soviet approved in 1975. The corresponding Estonian equivalent was publicly disclosed through the ESSR Supreme Soviet Presidium decision of 22 April 1977.32 The adoption of the statute confirmed the status quo and did not actually change anything. A new religious code was issued in the USSR in 1990 due to additional changes in religious policy in 1987–88, but this no longer affected the situation in Estonia.

Institutions Associated with Religious Policy Diagram 1. Institutional Diagram of the Struggle against Religion This diagram outlines hierarchical relationships rather than mutual influences between institutions, which were much more complicated. Units that trained propagandists in atheism are not considered in this article and so are also not included in the diagram. Agencies associated with atheist propaganda 1. ECP Central Committee (initiation and guidance of all activity) 1.1. Propaganda and agitation department 1.1.1. Press, radio, and television sector 1.1.2. Estonian SSR Atheism Commission 1.1.3. ECP Central Committee lecturers’ group atheism lecturer 1.2. Municipal and raion Party committees 1.2.1. Propaganda departments 1.2.1.1. Ideology/atheism commissions 1.2.1.2. Groups of lecturers (not on the regular staff) 2. Leadership of the Znanie Society (guidance of practical atheist activity, holding lectures) 2.1.1.  Scientific-Methodological Council of Atheism 2.1.2. Atheism sections of the Znanie Society’s regional organizations 3. Estonian Leninist Communist Youth League (ELCYL) Central Committee (organization and development of youth summer days) 3.1. Secretariat

31 ENSV Ülemnõukogu ja Valitsuse Teataja (ESSR Supreme Soviet and Government Gazette) 31 (1966). 32 ENSV Ülemnõukogu ja Valitsuse Teataja 19 (1977).

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3.2. Regional committees 4. Council of Ministers 4.1. ESSR Ceremonies Commission (central organizational work associated with ceremonies) 4.1.1. Regional executive committees 4.1.1.1. Ceremonies commissions 4.1.1.2. Marital status bureaus, happiness palaces 4.2. Ministry of Culture 4.2.1. Council of Adult Education Courses 4.2.2. Council of Adult Education Courses in Culture and Atheism (atheist propaganda) 4.2.2.1.1.  Atheism and culture universities 4.2.2.1.2. Adult education courses associated with ceremonies 4.2.3. ESSR Centre for Folk Creative Work (development of new ceremonies) 4.2.3.1. Estonian SSR Folk Creative Work and Cultural Work ScientificMethodological Center 4.3. ESSR Ministry of Higher and Vocational Secondary Education 4.3.1. Various universities 4.3.1.1. Faculties of “Red subjects” (courses in “scientific atheism”) 4.4. ESSR Ministry of Education 4.4.1. General education schools (atheist teaching in school lessons) 4.5. ESSR Council of Ministers Radio and Television Committee 4.5.1. Radio 4.5.2. Television 4.6. ESSR Council of Ministers State Publishing, Press and Book Trade Committee 4.6.1. Publishing of books 4.6.2. Various newspapers 5. ESSR Central Council of Trade Unions 5.1. Cultural centers, libraries, etc. (rooms for atheist work, exhibitions, and other such matters) 5.2. Trade union functionaries in institutions (sending people to study at atheist adult education courses) Agencies that dealt with “administration” 1. USSR Council of Ministers 1.1. Commissioner(s) of religious affairs (mediation between churches and the state, coordination of administration) 1.2. Control commissions that operated under the executive committees (LCRC) (supervision of religious laws) 2. State Security Committee (KGB) 2.1. Fifth Department (repression of clergy and believers, subjugation of leading clergy)

Institutions and organizations that dealt with questions of religion and atheism could be divided up into the administrative line connected to the government

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(Council of Ministers) and the ideological line connected to the Party. Yet since relations of subordination were complicated and all activity was based on Party ideology, this kind of distinction was only conditional in practice. In addition to this, the Party system duplicated executive power to a great extent,33 as well as the activity of different organizations associated with ideology (such as the Znanie Society). At the republican level, the ECP CC guided all activity related to ideology; the questions related to atheism were under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD). The PAD’s group of lecturers (whose primary function was to provide consultation to CC members in their area of expertise) also included a lecturer on atheism. The corresponding position was created in 1959 in connection with the atheism campaign34 and was done away with in 1988. Even though the ideology secretary who headed the CC’s PAD officially approved decisions, the lecturer certainly had a significant role in forming attitudes. The lecturer was the link connecting the CC and other units associated with the field of atheism. He dealt with correspondence and resolving questions on religious themes, represented the Party apparatus at supplementary training sessions for employees, participated as a guest at youth summer days, and organized atheism seminars himself. The lecturer could be considered the local coordinator in the field of atheism. In reality, coordination should instead have been the work of the ESSR Atheism Commission that was created in 1962. The idea for forming the commission came from Jaan Kanter, commissioner of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.35 Its aim was to provide people in leading positions, interested persons, or people familiar with the theme of atheism with the opportunity for joint discussion. However, it was also intended to stimulate people in important positions in different agencies to bring up questions of atheism from time to time, because at the lower levels, and at higher levels as well, practically nothing took place in this field without personal initiative. This was a unit that was born halfdead and spent most of its time in suspended animation; it was truly active only during the atheism campaign of the early 1980s. A few documents were indeed published under the name of the commission (for instance, the guidelines for

33 Olev Liivik and Raili Nugin, EKP kohalikud organisatsioonid 1940–1991 (ECP Local Organizations 1940–1991) (Tallinn, 2005), p. 213. 34 Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 1, n. 6, s. 12518, l. 17. 35 Sõtšov, Eesti Õigeusu piiskopkond, p. 146.

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the struggle against the celebration of Christmas in 1982),36 but this was due not to the activity of the commission but that of more active individual members. Atheism commissions or atheism sections were controlled by ECP municipal and raion committees. They were formed as a result of the 1962 ECP CC Bureau decision “On the Methods for Improving Scientific-Atheist Propaganda in the Republic”.37 Their aim was also to bring together activists; to coordinate, stimulate, and control the activity of activists in enterprises, schools, and institutions of higher education; to carry out and inculcate Soviet ceremonies; to analyze the activity of churches; and in the 1960s also to look after the content of the atheism column in local newspapers.38 However, their activity and reports to higherranking organs leave the impression that the commissions were created primarily to demonstrate the diligence of the local ECP committees in regard to atheism. Their actual activity was quite meager.39 The last (or first) instance in the Party hierarchy was the Party cell organizations created at places of employment. They were responsible for controlling all ideological activity taking place in the corresponding institution. Other organizations that likewise dealt with “communist upbringing” included the Komsomol and trade union organizations, clubs, libraries, Znanie Society lectures, the group of political informers, the collective of agitators, schools from the system for political and economic education, discussion groups, and seminars.40 The number of different units alone already inspires awe, but this was typical of the Soviet system’s attempts to compensate for quality with quantity. Thus, the ideological work carried out depended greatly on how active the propagandists of a particular institution were, as well as on the mentality of the institution’s leaders. Generally speaking, according to archival material, there was almost no atheism-related activity by propagandists at the level of Party cells. In connection with work, trade unions cannot be left unmentioned. Their role in the USSR differed somewhat from known practices in democratic societies. Instead of being an organization for representing workers, trade unions operated more as an extension of the Party.41 Trade unions had wide-ranging authori36 ERAF f. 1, n. 32, s. 106, l. 3ff. 37 ERAF f. 1, n. 295, s. 5, l. 6. 38 ERAF f. 148, n. 77, s. 11, l. 52. 39 ERAF f. 1, n. 10, s. 210, l. 1. 40 Ülo Nõmm, Ideoloogiaküsimused parteitöö praktikas (Questions of Ideology in Practical Party Work) (Tallinn, 1980), p. 11. 41 See also Donald D. Barry et al. (eds.), Soviet Law after Stalin: Soviet Institutions and the Administ­ration of Law (Leiden, 1979), p. 277; Lembit Kiik, Ametiühingud võõra

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zation in personnel policy, which was why “comrade courts” functioned under their aegis. The aim of such courts was to root out various improprieties such as absenteeism, drunkenness, and immoral behavior, including the personal issues of religious co-workers. The author of this article has a tape recording of an event billed as an “expanded trade union meeting” where the discussion of the behavior of an employee who belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses (an officially banned sect) lasted nearly three-and-a-half hours. Since clubs and cultural centers were under the jurisdiction of trade unions, they also dealt with inculcating Soviet traditions and the festive commemoration of various red-letter days within the working collective. They also sent employees to different supplementary training and education programs—some also on the theme of atheism—at adult education courses. The Znanie42 (Knowledge) Society, however, played the most important role in atheist propaganda. It took the teachings of the Party to the people under the guise of popular scientific lectures. Since the activity of the society was not particularly popular due to its ideological orientation, institutions and enterprises were obligated to order a certain number of lectures and to guarantee an audience for them. Such lectures were held at places of employment after work or at lunch hour, and attendance was semi-compulsory. Thus Znanie lectures were sometimes used even as a kind of disciplinary penalty—absenteeism, tardiness, or other such sins could be redeemed by attending a generally edifying lecture.43 The other branch of its activity was the network of adult education courses that was subordinated to the society, where alongside “supplementary education” in atheism, propagandists were trained. The first adult education courses in atheism in Estonia were set up in Tartu in 1959.44 The Scientific-Methodical Council of Scientific Atheism (SMC) operated under the leadership of the Znanie Society and coordinated questions of atheism. Like the ESSR Atheism Commission, it brought specialists from different occupations around one table and met four or five times a year. The first references to the

võimu all (1940–1990) (Trade Unions under Foreign Rule (1940–1990)) (Tallinn, 2000), pp. 6 f, 113–21. 42 For the sake of clarity, the Russian name of the society is used here, as it is customarily used in English-language publications on Soviet ideology. The name of the Estonian branch was actually Teadus (Science). 43 Ants Sild, ‘Mälestusi ning küsimusi loengulise töö kohta’ (Memoirs and Questions on the Work of Lectures), Kultuur ja elu (2001), no. 4, pp. 30 f. 44 For a case study of atheist adult education courses in Tartu, see Remmel, Religioonivastane võitlus, pp. 269 ff.

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activity of the SMC date from the early 1950s,45 though more serious work began in the late 1950s in connection with the atheist campaign. The function of the Council was to coordinate popular scientific lectures on atheism held within the framework of the Society, to monitor the quality of the lectures, and to publish new methodological materials. However, it was relatively ineffective, and the SMC did not have a very precise overview of the atheist work conducted in the ESSR. Still, the SMC had a unique position in atheistic propaganda—to a certain extent, the SMC functioned in the early 1960s as the institution that directed atheistic propaganda, since other units for atheistic propaganda work had not yet been created and the ESSR Atheist Commission had not justified the hopes placed in it. In later years, when these functions were taken over by new working units, the SMC became a discussion group that brought together the republic’s atheist activists. At the same time, the SMC had practically no rights or opportunities to implement its decisions, and many of its plans never went beyond the discussion stage. Atheism sections were subordinate to the SMC in the Znanie Society’s municipal and raion organizations. The SMC recommended that they be formed of “people who are interested in scientific atheism and who are capable of giving lectures and presentations”.46 The level of activity in the sections and the quality of the lectures varied widely—sections functioned better in larger cities (Tallinn, Tartu) and more poorly in rural localities. Overall, atheism was a low priority among the society’s relatively broad range of lecture themes (about 3 percent of the overall number of lectures).47 Municipal and raion ceremony commissions were formed in the early 1960s alongside the Znanie Society and the Party line of activity. The aim of these commissions was to inculcate new, secular Soviet ceremonies. At first, they operated “from one random occasion to another”;48 thus the idea of creating a central state organization to deal with the question of Soviet traditions was raised at the Znanie SMC meeting in 1963.49 The ESSR Ceremony Commission, however, was not set up until the end of 1969, when it was formed under the aegis of the Council of Ministers. The aim of the new unit’s work was formulated thus: “Conditions must

45 46 47 48

ERAF f. 1, n. 148, s. 16, l. 1. ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 1680, l. 5. ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 1950, l. 76. Riigiarhiivi Rakvere osakond (Rakvere Department of the State Archives, LVMA) f. 2iv, n. 1/1, s. 21, l. 7. 49 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 589, l. 35.

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be created to incline people’s emotional life towards secular ceremonies.”50 Regional ceremony commissions were also formed in the first half of 1971, which often meant merging different units that operated in the same field of activity, mostly under quite peculiar names (such as the Inter-Kolkhoz Ceremonies Council).51 Regardless of the importance of new ceremonies in discouraging religion, this field of activity was extremely underfunded, which often led to curious situations. For instance, it was discovered that the funeral orchestras that served under the commissions performed with equal eagerness at both secular and religious funerals.52 There were also serious problems in obtaining rooms and transportation, as a report from Jõgeva County indicates: “Our rooms are in very poor condition, and we have been freezing in them for three winters. Even believers have felt sorry for us because of how awful our rooms are in the cold of winter. Around 20 funerals for individuals were not held last year due to our lack of means of transportation. Thus about 1,000 rubles that we could have earned were lost, and on top of it all was the ideological side of the question, because most of the people whose funerals we could not accommodate turned to a priest.”53 The situation nevertheless improved during the 1970s, and modern vital records bureau registry offices or “happiness palaces” were built in many places, where local activists who dealt with ceremonies converged. The Council for Religious Affairs located in Moscow (formed in 1965 by uniting the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, founded in 1943, and the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, founded in 1944) was the most important of the units that dealt with administering religious life.54 The council was represented by commissioners in the republics. The primary function of the commissioners was to mediate between the state and the churches—first and foremost so that the implementation of repressive policies would leave a legally correct impression, primarily due to foreign policy considerations. They were also responsible for gathering and analyzing information, shutting down congregations (and, on rare occasions, opening them), exercising control over cadre politics concerning clergymen, guiding the “patriotic activity” of churches, and resolving complaints. Even though commissioners were treated as equals of ministers and 50 ERA f. R-1, n. 10, s. 800, l. 36. In Latvia, by comparison, this kind of organization had already been formed in 1964. Sergei Kruk, ‘Profit Rather than Politics: The Production of Lenin Monuments in Soviet Latvia’, Social Semiotics 20 (2010), no. 3, pp. 273 f (note 20). 51 ERA f. R-1, n. 10, s. 800, l. 5. 52 ERA, f. R-1, n. 10, s. 733, l. 44. 53 Ibid., l. 65. 54 Tatiana Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia (New York, 2002), pp. 15 ff.

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they undoubtedly had a great deal of influence on the overall religious climate locally, the appointment as a commissioner was essentially a form of banishment. Almost all commissioners in Estonia came from some more important official position, and they had to steer a middle course in the spheres of influence of very disparate lines of force as they did their work. Estonia’s commissioner had a relatively small staff, consisting of an assistant, a secretary, and two or three inspectors, among whom different religious associations were divided up. Thus the supervision of religion rested on the shoulders of the executive committees in cities and raions.55 Executive committees, however, often saw this as an additional task that interfered with their primary activities.56 Pre-planned activities did not initially take place in executive committees, and problems were resolved as needed.Yet during Khrushchev’s campaign, five-to-20-member Local Committees for Religious Control (LCRC, literally “commissions for assistance for observance of religious legislation”) were formed in association with executive committees throughout the USSR in 1963 to improve the situation.57 Their aim was to ensure the lawfulness of the activity of congregations and the loyalty of clergymen, as well as the prevention of violations of the law. Since this work also proceeded on a “social basis”, no noticeable change in quality resulted—the work of the committee often consisted merely of the report from its chairman to the commissioner, which was why “it has not been infrequent that local authorities have, on quite a few occasions, found themselves in awkward situations locally.”58 The KGB’s antireligious line of action was relatively distinct. It included massive coercion, the creation of a network of agents (it was interested primarily in collaboration with leading clergymen), and the neutralization of rebellious persons during the Stalin era. By the beginning of the Khrushchev era, however, the “official” churches (the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church [EELC] and the ROC) were already under the control of the “organs” to such an extent59 that the management of churches was directed at specific people—suppression was limited only to individuals who stood out the most from the general masses, or alternately, such persons were forced to become agents. The state paid greater 55 See Indrek Paavle, ‘Administrative Sovetisation of ESSR at the Local Level in 1944– 1953’, Estonia since 1944, pp. 17–35. 56 ERA f. R-1961, n.1, s. 141, l. 119. 57 See Atko Remmel, ‘Religiooniseaduste kontrollimise kaastöökomisjonid Nõukogude Eestis’ (Local Committees for Religious Control in Soviet Estonia), Ajalooline Ajakiri 2011, no. 1, pp. 85–104; idem, Religioonivastane võitlus, pp. 102–62. 58 ERA f. R-1945, n. 1, s. 570, l. 2. 59 Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 157 f.

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attention to the monitoring and control and, if necessary, the neutralization of those religious associations or “sectarians” that were less submissive.60 The KGB had a major influence on the CRA61—and reasonably close cooperation took place with the commissioners in Estonia as well. In fact, the rooms of the commissioner and of the KGB front organization Iniurkollegiia (Judicial Collegial Body)62 were located in the same building.

Essential Features of Antireligious Activity 1. Administration For religious associations in the USSR, administrative requirements that might otherwise seem natural were used in a repressive manner. For instance, the aim of registering the congregation was not so much the creation of a legal entity along with corresponding rights and duties (religious associations had only limited rights) but instead better control over its activities. Unregistered religious associations were declared illegal. Three conditions had to be met for registration: the dvadtsatka, a clergyman accepted by the state, and rooms for meeting. Meeting these three conditions, however, was not so simple. The dvadtsatka denoted the minimum number of people for the formation of a congregation—20, with whom a property liability agreement was signed for placing a “cult building” (the main building for religious worship) and the corresponding fittings at its disposal. The list had to be approved by the commissioner and the local executive committee. In order to bring believers who had gone underground back under state control, after 1968 it was permitted to form a “religious group” with less than 20 members. Like congregations, only registered clergymen were permitted to operate. They had to maintain a sufficiently low profile in their utterances in order to retain their place in the “registry”. Congregations were headed by a three-member board of directors that the clergyman himself was not allowed to sit on, in order to reduce 60 Atko Remmel, ‘Believers, Human Rights and Freedom of Speech in Soviet Estonia’ (forthcoming). For comparison with the Lithuanian KGB, see Arunas Streikus, ‘Lithuanian Catholic Clergy and the KGB’, Religion, State and Society 34 (2006), no. 1, pp. 63–70. 61 See Otto Luchterhandt, ‘The Council for Religious Affairs’, Ramet (ed.), Religious Policy in the Soviet Union, pp. 55–83; for Estonia, see also Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 155 ff. 62 The Inostrannaia iuridicheskaia kollegiia officially operated under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was the legal representative of Soviet citizens abroad.

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the influence of the clergy. For economic matters, power rested with the auditing commission, which also included a representative of the local executive committee. In short, this meant that “the duty of the clergyman is to serve God and carry out religious ceremonies according to the wishes of the members of the congregation. And nothing more.”63 Thus executive committees had the right to demand the replacement of both the board of directors and the auditing commission through repeat elections—yet clergymen and the congregations’ governing bodies themselves did not have that right. Church rooms posed a major problem, because both sacral and secular buildings had suffered damage during the war, and congregations had to find other rooms for themselves. In some cases, that proved to be the deciding factor in registration. Even in the 1960s, finding suitable rooms remained a problem for congregations as well as the state, and thus the liquidation or merging of small congregations served state interests not just ideologically but also in practical terms. Most of the requisitioned church buildings were used as warehouses or clubhouses, while congregation buildings were converted into offices or residential space. Many churches were nevertheless left to decay.64 On the few occasions when a new congregation was formed (for instance, when a split occurred in an existing congregation), passing through the necessary gauntlet for finding rooms and registration could be an ordeal lasting for years. Congregations that did not meet the state’s requirements were shut down during several waves of closures in 1945–46, 1949–52, and 1961–64. The rest of the time, congregations were deleted from the registry mainly when they had ceased to function. Postwar refusal of registration (that is, banning) affected mostly smaller religious associations and organizations that died out, merged with other movements, or started operating illegally.65

63 Eesti Ajalooarhiiv (Estonian Historical Archives, EAA) f. T-15, n. 1, s. 440, l. 9. 64 ERA f. R-1989, n. 1, s.  226, l. 21. See also Andrei Sõtšov, ‘Eesti õigeusu koguduste likvideerimine Nikita Hruštšovi ajal aastail 1954–64’ (Liquidation of Estonian Orthodox Congregations during the Nikita Khrushchev Era in 1954–64), Acta Historica Tallinnensia 11 (2007), pp. 126 f. 65 Jaanus Plaat, ‘Eesti vabakoguduste vastupanu nõukogude religioonipoliitikale võrreldes luterliku ja õigeusu kirikuga (1944–1987)’ (Resistance by Estonian Free Congregations against Soviet Religious Policy Compared to the Lutheran and Orthodox Churches), Toivo Pilli (ed.), Teekond teisenevas ajas. Peatükke Eesti vabakoguduste ajaloost (Tartu, 2005), p. 133. See also Toivo Pilli and Tõnis Valk, ‘Ühest ateistliku töö meetodist: evangeeliumi kristlaste-baptistide palvemajade ja koguduste sulgemine Eestis 1945–1964’ (About a Method of Atheist Work: The Closure of Houses of Prayer and Congregations

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Control over the everyday life of congregations was established primarily in cooperation with church administrations. Additionally, local activity was suppressed through constant meddling and the need to ask for permission for practically everything beyond Sunday church services. This included renovation and construction work, the congregation’s general meeting, sermons given by guest preachers, Christmas and Easter church services, and the organization of gatherings at cemeteries to commemorate the deceased. The local feature in preventive policy was the “consultative seminars” that were held once or twice a year, invented by commissioner Leopold Piip in the mid-1970s, in which representatives of the executive committees introduced religious legislation to the clergy and the governing bodies of congregations, admonishing them to observe the legislation. Passive “preventive work” was supplemented by more active control by the LCRC. Members of the committees were each assigned active congregations that they had to visit within a certain period of time (for instance, once per quarter). The rest of the time, they had to keep an eye on the work of the “subaltern” churches.66 Elsewhere, however, members of the committees operated more at random, and they visited churches only when there were sermons by guest clergymen or large gatherings of people. The main source of interest was the loyalty of sermons, although the number of participants was also of interest, because it was considered the primary indicator of the vitality of religion.67 Gatherings at cemeteries to commemorate the deceased, Christmas, Easter, and the participation of young people under 18 years of age in religious proceedings were scrutinized more closely. At this point it is appropriate to consider the most important aspect affecting everyday religious life—the confidentiality of the religious legislation, which simultaneously affected the activity of both believers and the units that bore responsibility for supervising their activities. In 1961, a regulation that enacted stricter rules governing religious life was introduced to the clergy on only one occasion in the presence of a representative of the executive committee, without permission to take written notes. After that, believers knew the religious code only by word of Evangelical Christians and Baptists in Estonia 1945–1964), Pilli (ed.), Teekond teisenevas ajas, pp. 89–127. 66 EAA f. T-15, n. 1, s. 51, l. 1. 67 For this reason, the legend was widespread that the “names of believers were being recorded,” but most likely this monitoring involved only notes on the loyalty/disloyalty of the sermon or the number of churchgoers, because identifying people would have been impossible on purely technical grounds, at least in city churches, while in the countryside everyone knew each other anyway. In addition, no such lists have been found in the archives.

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of mouth, which meant that they became aware of the limits of their activities primarily by feeling them out and drawing conclusions from the ensuing warnings or penalties. The absurdity of the situation did not stop there. After the persons who dealt with religion in the executive committees had familiarized themselves with the regulation—also without the right to take written notes—it was classified as “confidential” and filed in the executive committee archives. The LCRC operational instructions were handled in the same way. Since cadre turnover was extensive, only the pertinent persons at that given time were shown the document. Later on, however, the documents were inaccessible, since many of the atheism activists were not employees of the executive committees. The result was a situation where both believers and the people who were supposed to monitor them had a relatively nebulous understanding of both the pertinent legislation and the limits of their own activity. Additionally, the members of the commissions were, for the most part, unfamiliar with the distinct religious features of the congregations under their “care”. In 1981, for instance, a member of the Kohtla-Järve LCRC tasked with overseeing the activities of local Adventists knew nothing about that religious movement, aside from what appeared in a seven-line article in the Estonian Soviet Encyclopedia.68 Another problem was the small number of atheist activists. Even though the point of having different working groups was to bring together people who were interested in the matter, in practice the same people still ended up in those groups due to either personal initiative or obligations deriving from their job (“social ­basis”). This blurred the boundaries of the commissions’ authority, and thus it often happened that units meant to engage in atheist propaganda dealt with monitoring churches, or they spread atheist propaganda under the aegis of monitoring compliance with state legislation. Even though proposals were made to combine the different units,69 and in practice they did indeed operate together in some localities in the 1960s, the aspiration was to avoid this kind of symbiosis in the name of legal correctness (the “guaranteeing of freedom of religion” could not go hand in hand with atheist propaganda based on ideology). From year to year, the commissioners of the CRA used up immense amounts of paper for memoranda to keep the activity of LCRCs more or less within the framework of legislation. For believers, of course, these nuances in the general repressive atmosphere were of no importance.

68 LVMA f. 2, n. 1, s. 38, l. 35. 69 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 589, l. 38–9.

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But what happened if believers or clergymen overstepped the limits set by the state? The first and most widespread mode of chastisement was administrative penalties levied by the executive committees. Its mildest form was the oral or written warning. Fines of 10–50 rubles, however, were more typical (for instance, for assembling without registration). Local authorities quite often demanded strict penalties from the commissioners (for instance, shutting down a religious association or banning a clergyman from carrying out his duties). However, because foreign policy required unnecessarily inflaming the religious situation and because of the relative reasonableness of Estonia’s commissioners, one-time severe penalties were mostly replaced by several moderate penalties, meaning fines or warnings.70 Most of the penalized persons were from “wild” (unregistered) religious groups. The authorities usually had no trouble with the “domesticated” churches (ROC, EELC, legal Baptists). The reason for this was that, unlike the Catholic Church in Lithuania, Estonian churches were not connected to the nationalist or dissident movements,71 and since the higher-ranking clergy had been forced to serve as agents of state security, the churches had already been largely neutralized in the postwar years. As organizations, however, churches were forced to their knees in the antireligious campaign of the 1950s and 1960s. Even so, this submission was not unconditional. Nor does it indicate that the churches supported the Soviet regime. Instead, it was quite conservative behavior as an organization—only a few isolated persons put up resistance. In 1986, for instance, five religious figures were penalized through administrative procedure, and only one of them belonged to a church registered by the state—the future archbishop of the EELC, Andres Põder.72 70 ERA f. R-1989, n. 1, s. 178, l. 115. 71 Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, p. 177; Viktor Niitsoo, Vastupanu, p. 112. 72 ERA f. R-1989, n. 2, s. 69, l. 84. Põder himself claims that there were enough such individuals to consider the entire EELC an organization opposed to the state: see Andres Põder, ‘Kiriku liikmeskond vabanemisprotsessi osana’ (The Membership of the Church as Part of the Liberation Process), Velliste (ed.), Usk vabadusse; idem, ‘Väitlus: Kuidas püüda ajaloo sinilindu?’ (Debate: How to Catch History’s Bluebirds?), Akadeemia 24 (2012), no. 10, p. 1887. However, church historians and researchers of the resistance movement are rather skeptical towards such claims. See Riho Saard, ‘Aktiivsetest režiimivastastest Eesti luterliku kiriku kontekstis 1970. ja 1980. aastatel’ (On Active Opponents of the Regime in the Context of the Estonian Lutheran Church in the 1970s and 1980s), Suomen kirkkohistoriallisen seuran Vuosikirja 102 (2012), pp. 77–110; Rohtmets, Ringvee, ‘Religious Revival’, pp. 359 ff; Atko Remmel, ‘Väärtuslik verstapost riigi ja kiriku suhete uurimisel’ (A Valuable Milestone in Researching Relations between Church and State), Akadeemia 24 (2012), no. 8, pp. 1507–15. The reactions of EELC clergy and their resistance to the antireligious campaign of the 1950s and

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If the fines levied by the administrative commissions did not help, the commissioner had several options for taming clergymen: for instance, withdrawing permission to give guest sermons or to give any kind of sermons at all, or reassignment to another congregation (in most cases, a small rural one), which restrained the clergyman at least for a time. The commissioner’s most severe means of punishment was the cancellation of the clergyman’s certificate of employment or his deletion from the registry, which disobedient clergymen were occasionally threatened with and which, in some cases, was carried out. In addition to the aforementioned penalties, the more active believers could also be subjected to direct repressions that were, however, concealed behind various criminal accusations and therefore not connected with religion (such as betrayal of the fatherland or refusal to serve in the military).73

2.  Economic Constrainment of Churches An important form of struggle against religion was the financial control of churches, which made it possible to keep churches relatively dormant. This control was based on two-faced legislation whose aim was to create the illusion of religious freedom. Even though the property of churches was nationalized, churches and houses of prayer were made available to congregations free of charge “to satisfy religious needs” in order to demonstrate freedom of religion. Instead, rent was collected for all “rooms not used for prayer” made available to congregations, that is, auxiliary buildings, offices, storage rooms, and other such rooms.74 To this was added a tax on all the buildings at their disposal and a tax on the land covered by those buildings. In addition to this, the absence of rental income from rooms used for prayer was compensated for by a compulsory insurance tax, which was raised in 1963 nearly five- to six-fold. Since the insurance estimate depended on the size of the building, this tactic soon achieved the desired result due to the large size of churches and the ever-dwindling membership of congregations—state taxes exceeded the annual income of congregations or swallowed up a very large part of it. Congregations paid 25 kopeks/kWh for electricity instead of the four kopeks/ kWh that ordinary consumers paid, while religious institutions of education paid 11 kopeks/kWh. In addition to all this, the rental rates and utilities for clergy were

1960s are examined in Riho Altnurme, ‘Eesti luteri kiriku reaktsioonid usuvastasele kampaaniale 1958–1964’ (Reactions of the Estonian Lutheran Church to the AntiReligious Campaign 1958–1964), Acta Historica Tallinnensia 17 (2013), pp. 89–114. 73 Remmel, ‘Believers, Human Rights’. 74 ERA f. R-1989, n. 1, s. 76, l. 186.

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four times higher than usual, and higher rates of income tax were applied as well (from 25–80 percent, depending on the income. For instance, the average income of the clergy in 1980 was reported to be “relatively small”, up to 200 rubles, and taxes paid on that sum were 70 rubles, whereas a “normal” Soviet worker paid only 20,20 rubles in tax on the same amount of income), and the higher income tax rate also applied to all church employees.75 On the other hand, many EELC and ROC leading clergy got their income tax rates reduced—in return for “good cooperation”—and in some cases this benefit also extended to people close to them.76 Yet another legal mode of extracting “tithes” for the state was semi-compulsory payments to a branch of the KGB, the Peace Fund of the Soviet Committee for Defending Peace. In order to avoid the impression of extortion, congregations sent the amounts collected to church administrations, from where they were transferred to the Peace Fund account.77 Even though officially the amounts collected (around 100,000–150,000 rubles per year in total from all Estonian churches) went toward ensuring peace in the world, these sums were actually treated as the share paid by the churches for maintaining the CRA apparatus.78 In order to more effectively control congregations’ finances, starting in 1946, the regime required churches to deposit all their funds in the State Bank (Gosbank). No more than 50 rubles could be kept in the church treasury. To conceal the state’s heavy hand, the central governing bodies of churches were required to underscore this rule.79 Donations could be accepted only inside the “cult building,” and all donations had to be registered by name.80 However, due to the indifference of the executive committees and their ignorance of the legislation, congregations seem to have put up surprisingly strong resistance to economic restrictions. The ROC was more firmly under state control, and thus its congregations behaved more loyally. Many EELC congregations, on the other hand, set up a system of parallel bookkeeping to conceal funds from the authorities.81

75 Ibid., s. 222, l. 6; Eesti NSV Rahandusministeerium, Elanikkonna tulumaksu juhend (Ministry of Finance of the Estonian SSR, Instructions for Income Tax of Residents) (Tallinn, 1968). Actually, a monthly wage of 200 rubles was quite a decent sum at that time. 76 ERA f. R-1989, n. 1, s. 102, l. 4, 29. 77 Ibid., s. 158, l. 21–2. 78 Ibid., s. 225, l. 161. 79 Ibid., s. 112, l. 42–3. 80 EAA f. T-15, n. 1, s. 954, l. 16, 24. 81 ERA f. R-1989, n. 1, s. 62, l. 47.

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3.  Use of Churches to Serve Foreign Policy A special form of the “patriotic work” of churches was the “struggle for peace”. That was the term for the foreign relations of churches, conducted under the strict control of the CRA and the KGB. Its long-term objective was to disseminate disinformation about “religious freedom” in the USSR under the aegis of establishing contacts.82 The success of this method is thought to be one reason why the Khrushchev-era antireligious campaign attracted so little attention in the West.83 At the same time, however, even the chairman of the CRA, Vladimir Kuroedov, admitted that it was a “double-edged sword”—clergymen made themselves useful to the state only so that they could continue to do their work.84 For clergymen, it was a choice between bad and worse. There is no reason to believe that this kind of role appealed to more than a handful of people—the local KGB assessed most of its church agents as “two-faced.”85

4.  Soviet Ceremonies The importance of ceremonies in supporting religious tradition was understood as early as the 1920s, when Soviet ceremonies started being created in Russia under the direction of Leon Trotsky. Inspired by this process, Estonian communists also declared: “If we want to fight against religious customs, we have to set up our own ways, proletarian customs in their place.”86 These attempts soon died out and did not emerge again until Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign. After the war, the Estonian SSR was one of the first to come up with ceremonies that opposed church customs (“vestiges”): in 1957, the Paide Raion Komsomol Committee organized youth summer days aimed at secondary school graduates

82 Jürjo, Pagulus ja Nõukogude Eesti, pp. 162 ff. 83 Dimitry Pospielovsky, Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and Persecutions (New York, 1988), p. 99. 84 John Anderson, ‘The Council for Religious Affairs and the Shaping of Soviet Religious Policy’, Soviet Studies 43 (1991), no. 4, p. 698. 85 Altnurme, Eesti Evan­geeliumi Luteriusu Kirik, p. 274. See also idem, ‘Foreign Relations of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church as a Means of Maintaining Contact with the Western World’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 19 (2006), no. 1, pp. 159–65, and idem, ‘Peapiiskopi tagandamine aastal 1967’ (Dismissal of the Archbishop in 1967), Arne Hiob, Urmas Nõmmik and Arho Tuhkru (eds.), Kristuse täisea mõõtu mööda: pühendusteos Jaan Kiivitile 65. sünnipäevaks (Tallinn, 2005), pp. 66–78. 86 Noor Tööline (Young Worker) 5 (1922).

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to counterbalance church confirmation.87 This included different events: sports, dancing, hiking, and excursions, but also lectures on ideological themes (atheism, love of the fatherland, etc.). The organization of such events was mainly left to the Estonian Leninist Communist Youth League (ELCYL) and became one of the main manifestations of the atheist propaganda work of that organization. This method proved to be extraordinarily effective, and in 1960, it was reported that “broadly speaking, our battle against confirmation has been won”.88 The 1960s can be considered the golden age of such summer festivals. Suitably complementing the summer days, the lecture course The Young Person’s ABC, intended for secondary school pupils, was added to the summer days in the mid-1960s. The course lectures were mostly held once a month and covered various issues related to becoming an adult: sexuality, beautifying the home, holding birthday parties, choosing one’s occupation, etc., while also including some more ideological talks, for instance about atheism.89 Just as confirmation classes culminated with the confirmation ceremony, so the culmination of The Young Person’s ABC was the summer days’ camp. Another field in which church and the state competed more intensely was connected to a person’s departure from life. Above all, public events at cemeteries to commemorate the deceased were an irritation for the authorities, since they brought together tens of thousands of people under the aegis of the church: the graves of loved ones were spruced up, and the clergyman’s sermon and choral singing gave the event a more organized form. To counterbalance them, secular gatherings started being organized at cemeteries, which, broadly speaking, differed only in that the sermon and choral singing were replaced with secular speeches and songs. The first such gathering was held in Elva in 1958.90 The authorities began obstructing religious gatherings at cemeteries:91 they dragged

87 Gennadi Gerodnik, ‘Grazhdanskie i bytovye obriady (iz opyta Estonii i Latvii)’, Nauka i religia (1962), no. 7. Concerning Estonian ceremonies, see Marju Kõivupuu, ‘Transitional Rituals of Transition Society: The Case of Estonia’, Folklore xiii–xxi (2014) (forthcoming); Atko Remmel, ‘Religioonivastase võitluse korraldusest Nõukogude Eestis’ (On Anti-Religious Struggle in Soviet Estonia), Ajalooline Ajakiri 125 (2008), no. 3, pp. 255 ff. The first postwar ceremonies originate from Latvia; see Rasa PaukštytėŠaknienė, ‘Ritual, Power and Historical Perspective: Baptism and Name-Giving in Lithuania and Latvia’, Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 1 (2007), nos. 1–2, p. 117. 88 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 476, l. 60. 89 Ibid., s. 1397, l. 25. 90 Raid, Vabamõtlejate ringidest, pp. 177, 178, 263, note 25. 91 ERA f. R-1961, n. 2s, s. 42, l. 27.

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their heels in granting permits, advertising was banned, and the gatherings could be held only after the respective secular gatherings at cemeteries. This method also worked, and soon, religious gatherings at cemeteries became marginal. Try as they might, however, the authorities were not able to do away with religious funerals, which still accounted for 30–40 percent of all funerals even in the 1980s.92 There were several reasons for this. First, most of the deceased were elderly, and their background was religious. Second, the state’s organizational work was weak (as late as 1970, it was noted at a gathering of the State Council of Ceremonies that “the church can only be driven out by way of ceremonies, yet the care given by the state in looking after a person ends with his death, and the Council of Ministers should do something in this respect”).93 Finally, there was the general repulsion that the “ceremony attendants” felt towards dealing with the topic of death. As a result, many curious incidents took place where a clergyman delivered the eulogy for a communist or a cross was erected at the grave of a Party member.94 Due to the opposition between the religious and the secular in the Stalin-era atmosphere of fear, by the early 1950s, wedding customs arrived at the point where everything that was thought to be associated with religion was abandoned—even white clothing and wedding rings. This led to steering clear of all manner of festiveness: the ceremony consisted only of registration at the local government offices, and couples often went to register their marriage in their work clothes. This practice was abandoned in the late 1950s, since the main reason for the persistence of the church wedding was precisely the emotional commemoration of the event. A new set of wedding customs was developed according to the principle “socialist in content, national in form,” and thus Estonian folk customs were relied on to a great extent. Alongside atheism activists and officials of the marital status departments, university lecturers and employees of history museums, the ethnography museum and other cultural fields were enlisted to “update wedding customs.” Thorough work soon brought results—while church weddings still accounted for 30 percent of all weddings in the late 1950s, by the mid-1960s they had already become marginal.95 In fact, the church wedding ceremony was supplemented by several types of weddings—alongside ordinary civil weddings were also more distinct types such as Komsomol, workers’, or university students’ weddings. The event became a Komsomol wedding by the fact that when ELCYL 92 Raigo Liiman, Usklikkus muutuvas Eesti ühiskonnas (Religiousness in a Changing Estonian Society) (Tartu, 2001), p. 29. 93 ERA f. R-1, n. 10, s. 800, l. 5. 94 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 646, l. 34. 95 See Raid, Vabamõtlejate ringidest, table on p. 296.

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members ­married each other, their comrades from the same organization were the organizers of their wedding, and the same was true of the other types of weddings mentioned respectively. These types of events nevertheless did not prove particularly viable. Ordinary civil weddings were more successful, because practically everywhere, a circle of wedding hosts managed to be formed out of suitable people, out of which professional wedding hosts soon evolved.96 The need to cover the entire life cycle with new customs led to the development of a custom called the children’s spring days. This was an original idea worked out by Estonian atheism activists for kindergarten children and was put into practice for the first time in 1962. The spring days were supposed to be a “festive day in the life of a growing child who is starting to spread his wings for the first time for independent living”.97 The children enjoyed various performances and games while their parents listened to lectures on subjects like “health and nourishment” and “atheist rearing in the family.” These customs were not the only ones. Attempts were made to inject “socialist content” into the festive commemoration of a number of events in the name of “cultivating civic spirit”. These included the presentation of a child’s birth certificate, the registration of a child’s birth, a person voting for the first time, the send-off to the army, the presentation of the keys to a new apartment, and the first day at a new job. Most new ceremonies in the ESSR were initiated in 1957–62. By comparison, in the rest of the USSR, the importance of new customs was not highlighted until the early or mid-1960s. The emphasis on new customs—the attempt to replace religion instead of direct struggle and opposition—was a distinct feature and the strongest aspect of the struggle against religion in Estonia (and Latvia). While atheist propaganda in the form of lectures and newspaper articles created a generally hostile atmosphere towards religion, and the state’s administrative measures made it very difficult for churches to continue their activities, new ceremonies did the actual work in discontinuing religious tradition—their connection to ideology was often not visible, and thus they were easier to accept.98 At the same time, new customs lost their novelty and glitter in the 1970s and started to recede. Many 96 Kaljo Oja (ed.), Kaunilt, meeldejäävalt: nõukogulikke kombetalitusi (Beautifully, Memorably: Soviet Ceremonies) (Tallinn, 1965). 97 Inna Baturin, Noorte traditsioonid (Youth Traditions) (Tallinn, 1965), p. 120. 98 Concerning the retreat of Christianity from the norm to an alternative, see Lea Altnurme, ‘Kristluse tähtsuse ja tähenduse muutus eestlaste seas 1857–2010’ (Change of Meaning and Importance of Christianity among Estonians in 1857–2010), Tuna 16 (2013), no. 4, p. 45ff.

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such “ersatz holidays,” however, did not take root at all or soon lost their original ideological content. For instance, youth summer days soon became an ordinary celebration of maturity that the state and the Party wanted to see as providing ideological instruction. Soviet Army and Navy Day, however, turned into “Men’s Day,” and so on.99

5.  Atheist Propaganda Alongside new customs, the other important direction was the holding of lectures on atheism, in which the Znanie Society played the primary role. The society’s atheism sections, which held around 1,000 lectures on atheism annually in the mid-1950s, reached an annual 3,000 lectures by 1964. For a time, there was an “inexplicable decline” in lectures (“Perhaps atheists no longer have anything to ridicule,” a member of an atheism SMC suggested);100 thereafter, the atheism sections held around 5,000 lectures yearly during the atheist campaign in the 1980s.101 The goal of the Znanie atheism SMC, that every person should listen to at least one lecture on atheism each year,102 was of course never achieved. The relevant statistics are also not precise, because all sorts of other speeches were counted as lectures on atheism in order to earn the brownie points necessary in ideological work. As one local activist confessed: “If we do not record funeral orations as atheist lectures, then there would be practically nothing else”.103 This kind of funny remark refers to a more widespread problem that Soviet Estonian atheism suffered as early as the late 1960s. New customs that initially were treated within the atheist paradigm as a method for breaking religious tradition soon began to dominate and became emancipated to the extent that they were no longer associated with the struggle against religion. Thus, the support they offered for the philosophical side of atheism also disappeared. Since religion was in a marginal position, people widely considered society to be atheist. Therefore, atheist propaganda seemed utterly pointless, and indifference towards both religion and atheism spread. Lectures given to propagandists on the topic “What is atheism?” bear witness to the blurring of the content and meaning of atheism for

99 ERA f. R-3, n. 4, s. 205, l. 51. 100 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 816, l. 99. 101 Remmel, Religioonivastane võitlus, p. 214. 102 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 1390, l. 8, 11, 21. 103 ERAF f. 3303, n. 61, s. 34, l. 2.

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the propagandists themselves.104 As a reaction, the topic of “moral and positive content” of atheism emerged in the 1970s in place of the previous dull criticism of religion and the church. This was in turn replaced in the 1980s by the topics of the atheist upbringing of young people and the evolution of the ideology and activity of churches. Considering all of this, the quality of atheist lectures was rather low, especially in the 1950s, when there was practically no methodological supporting material. For instance, the lecture “On the Religion of Marxism-Leninism,” held in 1956 at the Stalin Kolkhoz in Orissaare Raion, as one journalist described it, was made “so ploddingly that of the 116 people who attended the lecture, only two stayed to the end of the lecture—the local chairman and the deputy chairman!”105 Nor did the quality change notably later on, since the entire system of atheist propaganda was caught in a vicious circle: ideological activity pursued during one’s spare time left little time for preparing lectures. This meant poor quality for atheist lectures and a poor reputation for atheist propagandists, which in turn did not attract new people to the cause. The activists already at work, however, were unable to prepare more, given their workload. “The need to improve the quality of lectures” is probably one of the most frequently expressed thoughts in the archival records of the Znanie SMC. This, however, does not mean that there were no good lecturers on atheism at all—there were simply very few of them. Except for isolated television broadcasts and films of local origin, atheist propaganda in the Estonian SSR practically never used the possibilities offered by modern mass media. The theme of atheism was dealt with somewhat more on the radio, but even there it was discussed “mainly in connection with other problems of ideological struggle.”106 The main problem was the lack of qualified personnel: “There are five or six people in the republic who are capable of appearing on the 104 Because of the processes described here, the notion of atheism as the “absence of religion” or the “absence of a relationship with the church” is widespread in Estonia to this day. Cf. Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, ‘A Sacred Space Is Never Empty’: Soviet Atheism, 1954–1971’ (PhD-thesis, Berkeley, 2010), pp. 134 ff; Sonja Luehrmann, Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (Bloomington, 2011). On the effects of scientific atheism on beliefs in contemporary Estonia, see Ülo Valk, ‘Folklore and Discourse: The Authority of Scientific Rhetoric, from State Atheism to New Spirituality’, James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (eds.), Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science (Leiden-Boston, 2010). 105 E. Mets, ‘Siduda loenguline propaganda kommunistliku ülesehitustöö praktikaga’ (Connecting Lecture Propaganda with the Practices of Constructing Communism), Rahva Hääl, 20 March 20, 1956. 106 ERA f. R-1989, n. 1, s. 156, l. 22.

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radio and TV, but they are all so overloaded that they physically are unable to do so.”107 Thus, alongside lectures, the ESSR’s press became the primary medium of atheist propaganda. Every year around 10–15 articles on atheism usually appeared in the press. An avalanche of aggressive articles, however, was unleashed during Khrushchev’s attack against religion—particular clergymen or congregations were attacked, and stories frequently appeared on the conversion of believers to atheism and explanations of various miracles. New customs were often propagated. Special columns on atheist topics were established in many newspapers (including “Today is Brighter than Yesterday” in the newspaper Edasi [Forward] and “The Light of Science Wins out over Ignorance” in the newspaper Uus Tee [New Path]). Most of these columns appeared once a month or once per quarter—at their peak in 1960, a total of 165 articles on atheism appeared in the Estonian press. Since the range of themes considered was relatively narrow and articles translated from Russian outnumbered original material, most of these columns had exhausted themselves by the end of the 1960s. In addition to articles, every year five to 10 popular academic books were published during the campaign. Later on, two or three such books were published yearly.108 Naturally, the educational system also had to help turn society atheist, although direct atheist propaganda was, for the most part, not spread until secondary school. The program was more subtle, meaning that questions of religion and atheism were considered suggestively within the framework of different subjects— primarily in history and literature, less frequently in chemistry and physics.109 General practice was to address the theme of atheism once a year in order to get credit for the “atheist upbringing” required in curricula. This was most commonly done during homeroom lesson before Christmas. Sporadically, atheism courses or 107 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 742, l. 48. 108 Atko Remmel, ‘Ateismi ajaloost Eestis (XIX sajandi lõpust kuni aastani 1989)’ (On the History of Atheism in Estonia (From the End of the 19th Century to 1989)) (MA-thesis, Tartu, 2004), Appendix no. 9, list of Soviet-era atheist literature based on the Chronicle of Articles and Reviews and Appendix no. 10, list of Soviet-era atheist literature based on the Chronicle of Books. 109 Concerning ideological upbringing in school, see Eli Pilve, ‘Nõukogude noore kasvatamisest paberil ja päriselt: Ideoloogiline ajupesu nõukogude kooli(tunni)s 1953–1991’ (On the Education of Soviet Young People on Paper and in Reality: Ideological Brainwashing in Estonian SSR School Lessons 1953–1991), Tuna 16 (2013), no. 3, pp. 82–100; Anu Raudsepp, Ajaloo õpetamise korraldus Eesti NSV eesti õppekeelega üldhariduskoolides 1944–1985 (Organization of the Teaching of History in General Education Schools in the Estonian SSR where the Language of Instruction was Estonian) (Tartu, 2005).

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discussion groups were organized (especially in the 1960s) if an activist teacher was present, but none of these efforts operated for very long. More aggressive activities took place (periodically) in northeastern Estonia: “A teacher for carrying out atheist upbringing in school has been appointed to each school in Narva. All pupils from religious families are on file.”110 Ideological teaching was more visible in institutions of higher education. Alongside other “red” subjects, the compulsory subject “Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism” was added to the curriculum during the antireligious campaign, but the holding of lectures and the way the material was presented depended considerably on the overall intellectual spirit of the university, the availability of an appropriate lecturer, and the lecturer’s preferences. This course was continually given only at the Tallinn Polytechnical Institute111 because Kuulo Vimmsaare, the leading figure in the field of atheism in the Estonian SSR, worked there in the Faculty of Philosophy. The ideal of atheist propaganda indicated in Party decisions, however, was the personal conversion of believers, or the “individual approach.” Since this kind of activity was rather resource-intensive, it took place only sporadically and at the personal initiative of atheism activists, because specific requirements and supervision were lacking. Activities took place primarily along the lines of the Party. For instance, the children of religious families were identified in Ida-Viru County in the 1960s in a cooperation between Party and Komsomol committees and schools.112 People who had deviated from the correct path could also be put under pressure in the workplace. To a certain extent, cooperation took place with the KGB in this regard. For instance, activists perused KGB materials before visiting a believer, which of course did not help: “As a fanatical believer, he stuck to his convictions, categorically refusing to listen to atheist viewpoints regarding the question under consideration.”113 The main problem with the “individual approach” was that most propagandists did not have the faintest idea of how to carry out such work—the first methodological materials on such work were not published in Estonian until the mid-1970s. Thus, it is no wonder that practically all archival sources that mention the “individual approach” indicate that it was not used.

110 ERA f. R-2048, n. 1, s. 1118, l. 35. 111 Helgi Sillaste, ‘Ateistlik kasvatustöö meie kodulinnas’ (Work in Atheist Upbringing in Our Hometown), Edasi, 20 December 1975. 112 LVMA f. 2iv, n. 1/1, s. 20, l. 1. 113 ERAF f. 148, n. 47, s. 20, l. 46.

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Summary The Party and state’s attitude towards religion seemed to remain unchanged throughout the entire Soviet period. The utopian idea of a society free of religion remained the ideal. The strategies for achieving that objective, however, changed considerably during the Cold War period. The Stalin-era policy of terror and agreements with the churches was replaced in the Khrushchev era by an active campaign against religion. The campaign had three main directions: first the stifling of the activity of churches by administrative, legal, and economic means; then a propaganda war through the media; and finally, the disruption of religious traditions through the creation of secular equivalents. No change in and of itself took place in this scheme during the period of stagnation under Brezhnev—decisions adopted during the campaign remained in force, and the working units that had been created continued to operate (at least formally), though they were far less active than before. The new shift, which proved to be the last, was brought on by the policy of perestroika in 1988. As a consequence, religion once again began to be considered a (more or less) normal aspect of social life. The religious policy implemented in Soviet Estonia reflects fairly precisely the USSR’s changes in course according to the political needs of the day, even though Soviet Estonia’s treatment of religion was more lenient than in some other regions of the USSR. This “leniency” was possible only in the absence of a problematic religious situation; therefore the aim of local religious policy was primarily to maintain the status quo. Since the long-term exhaustion tactics (replacing the Khrushchev-era policy, which aimed to finish religion off quickly) appeared to be working, there was in fact no problem with religion, and most of the time this topic was completely unimportant. Instead of the constant militant atheism demanded in Party decisions, activity was limited to monitoring the fading away of religious life and not troubling the waters with antireligious action. Thus, the state’s religious policy in practice was actually far from homogeneous and often depended on the preferences of local officials. The other distinctive feature of the Estonian SSR’s policy on religion was its emphasis on new, secular Soviet ceremonies, which the Estonian SSR helped lead the way in developing until the mid-1960s. With the help of other methods used to suppress religion, new customs, whose connection to atheist ideology was generally not conspicuous, managed to make both church traditions and religious life utterly marginal by the end of Khrushchev’s campaign. However, the fruit of this victory took its toll in the subsequent decades. There was no visible need for antireligious activity due to the irrelevance of the church. In place of militant atheism,

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state policy on religion instead caused public indifference to both religion and atheism. The brief atheist campaign of the early 1980s did not alter this situation. Even though the state only partially succeeded in marginalizing the church and turning the population into militant atheists, the results (at least statistically) were noteworthy: while nearly 98 percent of Estonia’s population was associated to some degree with the churches before the war (according to the 1934 census) and nearly a fourth of them are thought to have been active church members, by 1987—before the relaxation of religious policy—less than a fourth of that fourth remained active church members, meaning only around 5 percent of the population.114

114 Remmel, ‘Believers, Human Rights’; Plaat, Usuliikumised, kirikud ja vabakogudused, p. 221. An overview of the processes that have taken place in the religious landscape of once-again-independent Estonia is provided in Ringo Ringvee, ‘Dialogue or Confrontation? New Religious Movements, Mainstream Religions and the State in Secular Estonia’, International Journal for the Study of New Religions 3 (2012), no. 1, pp. 93–116.

Indrek Paavle

Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR Abstract: The passport system and the border regime were important instruments of Soviet rule. Control was secured over the movement of people both domestically as well as abroad. The article analyzes the functioning of the border regime established in Estonia after 1940 and the legislative framework that remained mostly unchanged until the end of the Soviet era.

One of the main traits common to all communist regimes was the sealing off of the state borders. This meant restricting entry to and—even more severely—departure from the country. Governments sealed their citizens off, attempting to isolate them from foreign influences to protect their own positions of power.1 While citizens ordinarily need a passport to travel abroad, Soviet citizens needed passports just to travel domestically. While visas are generally given to foreigners visiting a particular country, Soviet citizens needed a visa just to leave their country. Soviet mechanisms for confining citizens within the country were refined to perfection in the initial years of the Cold War, when the confrontation with the Western countries led to the regime’s severely restricting its citizens’ contacts with the outside world. Opportunities for citizens to go abroad were reduced to nearly zero. In fact, a 1948 law even banned marriage with citizens of foreign countries. This ban—the pinnacle of the regime’s paranoia—was repealed after Stalin’s death, but other means of control devised and implemented in the Stalinist era remained in effect until the end of the Soviet Union, abating only on limited occasions or in certain details. Methods for sealing off the borders were no exception. Historical literature has paid little attention to the state regulation of the borders. This article seeks to identify how the border regime in the Soviet Union was organized, using the Estonian SSR as an example. Several pieces of legislation that applied throughout the Soviet Union and some 10 pieces of legislation specific to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic formed the basis for this regime. This legislation was continually being supplemented and the regime was implemented through many secret or restricted access directives and instructions. I will attempt 1 Robert Service, Seltsimehed. Maailma kommunismi ajalugu (Comrades: A History of World Communism) (Tallinn, 2010), pp. 422–36.

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to analyze the changes that took place in the system, the reasons for those changes, and their effect on the population by examining the chronology of the legislation regulating the border regime. I will also consider the implementation of general legislation, in other words the border regime permit policy, methods of control, and penal policy, to the extent that available sources permit. Legislation and restricted-access regulations, and correspondence between the Party and state institutions in the ESSR concerning the border regime, form the source base for this research. MVD (Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs), KGB (Soviet Committee for State Security), and Militia Administration2 reports were consulted. The main obstacle to a more thorough research of this topic is the scarcity of KGB and border guard forces documents in Estonian archives. The ESSR KGB’s Second Department reports from 1954 to 1958 have indeed survived, but only a few isolated KGB instructions and some related correspondence from later periods remain in Estonian archives. As the KGB’s counterintelligence department, the Second Department operated actively in the border zone as well, with the aim of preventing “anti-Soviet elements from leaving the territory of the ESSR with impunity.”3 However, there are practically no documents in Estonian archives generated through the activity of the border guard forces. People’s recollections have been used to try to fill in the gaps. To date, one collection of memories, a popular-history overview, and a brief treatment of the topic of the border zone have been published about the border regime in Estonia.4

2 ‘Militia’ (Russian: militsiia) was used as an official name of the civilian police in several former communist states. The Main Administration of the Militia was formed in 1932 as a new all-Union central institution at the same time as the passport system was established. This was justified by the need to directly supervise the work of the militia administrations in the union republics in implementing the passport system. The ESSR’s Militia Administration was established in the autumn of 1940. 3 Jüri Ojamaa and Jaak Hion (eds.), Aruanne ENSV Ministrite Nõukogu juures asuva Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee 2. vastuluureosakonna tööst ajavahemikul 1.IV 1954 – 1. IV 1955 (Report on the Work of the State Security Committee’s Second Counterintelligence Department for the Period of 1 April 1954–April 1, 1955, to the ESSR Council of Ministers) (Tallinn, 1997), p. 99. 4 Enno Tammer (ed.), Nõukogude piir ja lukus elu: meie mälestused (The Soviet Border and Life Locked up: Our Memories) (Tallinn, 2008); Virkko Lepassalu, Riigipiir (The State Border) (Tallinn, 2010); ‘Restricted Access Border Zones of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic’, Kalev Sepp (ed.), The Estonian Green Belt (Tallinn, 2011), pp. 12–6.

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Creation of the Border Regime and Its Initial Implementation in the Estonian SSR in 1940 Universal restrictions on movement were not set for Soviet citizens in the first years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, a special decree on 24 January 1922, granted all citizens of the Russian SFSR the right to move about freely throughout the territory of the country. The first restrictions were nevertheless established the following year, when legislation was enacted permitting entry to border checkpoints only for business trips with the permission of the provincial executive committee.5 The 1927 regulations for the defense of the state border started more seriously restricting residence and movement near the border, and the concept of the “border belt” (pogranichnaia polosa) was adopted “for the purpose of defending the state border.”6 When a uniform passport system was established in the Soviet Union in 1933, the passportizatsiia, a 100-kilometer-wide belt along the western border of the Soviet Union, was designated first of all, within which all residents were required to have passports. This meant that it was forbidden to live there or to enter that belt without a passport.7 The passport regulations of 1940 extended this requirement to cover the entire state border. Until the early 1980s, most Soviet citizens did not have proper passports; they possessed only “internal passports”. Thus entering the border belt was the privilege of the few. The 1935 regulation entitled “Concerning Entry to and Residence within the Border Belt” amended the corresponding clause in the regulations of 1927: restrictions were reformulated with the aim of establishing “stricter control,” and violations of restrictions were

5 Decree issued by the Russia-wide Central Executive Committee, 28 March 1923 (Vse Dekrety Sovetskogo Soiuza, http://www.dekrets.ru/doc.php?docid=03733, last accessed 23 February 2012). 6 Regulation issued by the USSR Council of People’s Commissars (hereinafter referred to as CPC) and the Central Executive Committee, 15 June 1927, Spravochnik po zakonodatel’stvu dlia sudebno-prokurorskikh rabotnikov, Vol. 1 (Legislation Guide for Court and Prosecutor’s Office Employees) (Moscow, 1949), pp. 278–82. 7 Indrek Paavle, ‘Ebaühtlane ühtne süsteem: sovetliku passisüsteemi kujunemine, regulatsioon ja rakendamine Eesti NSV-s’ (A Non-Uniform Uniform System: The Evolution, Regulation, and Application of the Soviet Internal Passport System in the Estonian SSR), Tuna (Past) 13 (2010), no. 4, pp.  37–53. Also available on the Internet: Indrek Paavle, ‘The Evolution, Regulation and Implementation of the Soviet Internal Passport System in the Estonian SSR’ (http://www.mnemosyne.ee/ publikatsioonidpublications/lang/en-us).

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designated as crimes.8 These acts of legislation from 1927 and 1935 remained the fundamental documents on which the border regime was founded until 1960, and the border regime was established in areas annexed by the Soviet Union on the basis of these same documents, including Estonia. From the very beginning of Estonia’s occupation, citizens were barred from leaving the country. First, in July 1940, all travel passports of the Republic of Estonia were declared invalid. Immediately thereafter, Estonian diplomatic passports were also invalidated.9 At the same time, NKVD border guard forces established control over the Estonian coast, and the liquidation of the Estonian border guard began.10 As early as August, Soviet border guards caught people trying to escape from Estonia by boat, and by October at the latest, the border guards started blocking fishermen from access to the sea. The establishment of the border regime according to the all-Union regulation of 1935 began in September. The first local act of legislation that referred to the border regime was the regulation issued on 26 September 1940, by the ESSR’s NKVD Militia Administration that prohibited entry to “restricted and border areas” without a permit.11 Since the Militia Administration did not have the right to issue universally applicable legal acts and the circumstances and consequences related to the issuing of the aforementioned regulation are unclear, it is more correct to consider the border zone to have officially started with the ESSR CPC decision formulated on 29 November and implemented on 12 December, which was drawn up at Border 8 Regulations governing entry to and temporary stays in border areas and prohibited regions in the USSR, Eesti Riigiarhiiv (Estonian State Archives, ERA) f. R-34, n. 1, s. 9b, pages not numbered. 9 Regulation issued by the Minister of Internal Affairs, 21 July 1940, Riigi Teataja (RT, State Gazette) (1940), no. 79, p. 757; Regulation issued by the Minister of Internal Affairs, 29 July 1940, RT (1940), no. 87, p. 841; announcement from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 30 July 1940, RT (1940), no. 87, p. 843. 10 Olavi Punga, ‘NSVLi julgeolekuväed Eestis aastail 1940–1941’ (USSR Security Forces in Estonia in 1940–1941), KVÜÕA toimetised 11 (Tartu, 2008), p. 186. See Tiit Noormets, ‘Fate of the Estonian Border Guard in 1940–1941’, Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu and Indrek Paavle (eds.), Estonia 1940–1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity (Tallinn, 2006), pp. 257–71. 11 ESSR Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia Administration regulation, 26 September 1940, ERA f. R-34, n. 1, s. 5, l. 1–3. The wording of the document was taken from an extremely poor translation of the 1935 regulation containing requirements that were impossible to implement in Estonia due to local conditions.

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Guard Forces Headquarters in coordination with the Baltic Fleet. This decision concerned the “border security regime” along the coast of the Gulf of Finland, navigation and fishing in the territorial waters of the Estonian SSR, and listed areas to which entry was restricted. All of Estonia’s islands were designated as “prohibited zones,” along with certain coastal areas west of Tallinn that were directly at the disposal of the Soviet Navy or within its sphere of interest. Citizens needed a permit from the militia to enter the zone, and after entry, visitors had to register within 24 hours. Additionally, there was a more secret zone within the prohibited zone that included the larger islands in the Gulf of Finland and was completely sealed off to civilians.12

Evolution of the Border Regime during the First Postwar Years, 1944–47 The de facto restoration of the border regime began immediately after the reoccupation of Estonia in the autumn of 1944 at the initiative of the Soviet Army, which dug trenches along the northern and western coasts of Estonia, set up machine-gun emplacements, and designated the entire strip of land along the coast as a border zone. In November, however, a plan was implemented to evict the permanent population from a two-kilometer-wide coastal belt along the entire coast. The operation began with an army directive and culminated with an ESSR CPC regulation that required the authorities in the counties along the coast to resettle residents by 1 January 1945 (people forced out of their homes were ordinarily not offered replacement lodgings; they had to find a new place to live on their own).13 It was, of course, impossible to do all that so quickly—by mid-February 1945, of the 538 families on the mainland who were to be resettled, only 227 had been. In Hiiumaa no more than 30–50 percent of the order was carried out, and in Saaremaa, it was completely carried out only on the Sõrve Peninsula, which was already deserted because the Germans had evacuated the local population

12 ESSR CPC Decision No. 34, 29 November 1940, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 10, l. 244–7; Saarte Hääl (Voice of the Islands), 23 December 1940. Most of the content of this decision was also published in local newspapers. Of the 13 clauses of the decision, two were secret, and their existence was hidden when the regulation was disclosed by changing the numbering of the clauses. 13 ESSR CPC Regulation No. 029, 21 December 1944, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 90, l. 106. See also Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti Eesti NSV-d (How the Estonian SSR Was Governed) (Tallinn, 2005), pp. 124–5.

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there in 1944.14 This ambitious plan was nevertheless abandoned when the war in Europe ended, and for the most part, the people who had been driven out could start going back home, even though in the meantime the army had in many places destroyed, removed, or laid waste to their houses.15 New framework documents were drawn up for the border regime in the autumn of 1946. Until then there had been no need for them, since the ESSR CPC decision of 1940 remained in effect and no changes had been made in the meantime to all-Union regulations. Furthermore, martial law remained in effect in Estonia until 4 July 1946, and this in itself restricted freedom of movement. However, the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a new framework regulation for the border regime on 29 June 1946, that was to be implemented at the Union republic level. An Estonian Communist Party Central Committee (hereinafter referred to as ECP CC) and ESSR Council of Ministers joint regulation was first issued on September 28, 1946, to establish the new situation, creating a passport system in the prohibited areas along the coastal border.16 Passports had been issued to about 60,000 people in those areas by the beginning of 1947. Individuals who were forbidden to live in the border zone (primarily those with criminal records, including persons penalized for “political crimes”) according to the passport regulations also had to be identified and expelled from the border belt as part of this campaign.17 The ESSR Council of Ministers regulation “Concerning the Estonian SSR’s Closed-Off Coastal Border Belt and Its Regime” was formulated on 26 October 1946, replacing the former framework document from 1940. The main change was that henceforth, the border belt was defined according to administrative units, including the territories of northern and northwestern Estonian seaside village soviets and all “islands in the Baltic Sea belonging to the Soviet Union.”18 Since the regulation was secret but certain clauses of it had to be disclosed to the population, the regulation was partially summarized in universally compulsory

14 Letter from the Eighth Army War Council to the chairman of the ESSR CPC, 14 February 1945, Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaal (Branch of the Estonian State Archives, ERAF) f. 1, n. 3, s. 500, l. 4–5. 15 Endel Saar, Hiiumaa – kiviajast tänapäevani (Hiiumaa: From the Stone Age to the Present) (Kärdla, 2004), pp. 132–8. 16 Regulation issued by the ESSR Council of Ministers and the ECP CC, 28 September 1946, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 322, l. 206–7. 17 Indrek Paavle, ‘Ebaühtlane ühtne süsteem’, Part 2, Tuna 14 (2011), no. 2, p. 48. 18 ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 058 ‘Concerning the ESSR’s Closed-Off Coastal Border Zone and Its Regime’, 26 October 1946, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 118, l. 233–9.

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decisions issued by county executive committees published in the press. This was accompanied by supplementary bans and obligations of a local nature, such as a ban on building campfires on the coast at night or the obligation for houses on the seashore to black out the windows facing the sea.19 The shaping of the border regime culminated in the spring of 1947 with the comprehensive decision prepared in the ECP CC apparatus to make the border regime “stricter.” The aim of this decision was to more effectively control what was happening in the border belt. Making life in those areas better was supposed to help achieve this goal. Among other things, the entire border belt was to be provided with the best possible personnel at the expense of other areas. All personnel were to be scrutinized, and unsuitable persons were to be replaced. The MVD and the MGB were assigned to remove the “anti-Soviet elements” from the border belt. New movie theaters, community centers, and libraries were to be built in the border belt, and all “hostile literature” was to be removed from the libraries. Communications received a great deal of attention: roads and bridges were to be repaired, all village soviets were to be provided with telephones, bus service was to be improved, ferry service was to be provided to the islands, and much more.20 The reorganization of farmland, the establishment of sovkhozes (state collective farms), and the development of hamlets were priorities in the border belt. This indicates that the set objective was to eliminate low-density settlement, which was difficult to control, and to concentrate the population in larger settlements. If all those tasks had been completed, life in the border belt would indeed have become better than elsewhere, but that is not how things turned out. Personnel was actively purged: by the beginning of July, about 70 school teachers had either been sacked or transferred inland, Party organizers and other officials in rural municipalities were dismissed, and destruction battalions were purged.21 19 Saaremaa Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet Executive Committee universally compulsory decision No. 5, ‘Concerning the Rules for the Behavior of Residents in the Closed-off Region adjacent to the Border’, Saarte Hääl, 20 May 1947. 20 Shorthand records of the ECP CC session on 19 March 1947, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 480, l. 201–4; ESSR Council of Ministers and ECP CC Regulation No. 020, 28 March 1947, ibid., s. 419, l. 12–28. 21 Letter from the ECP Harju County Committee, 30 May 1947, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s. 24, l. 3–4; Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi, Nõukogude unelaadne elu: tsensuur Eesti NSV-s ja tema peremehed (Dream-Like Soviet Life: Censorship in the Estonian SSR and its Masters) (Tallinn, 1996), p. 143. Destruction battalions were formally volunteer armed organizations that helped the security units in the western regions of the Soviet Union suppress the resistance movement in the 1940s. See http://www.estonica.org/ en/Destruction_battalions/.

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­ ccomplishing the larger tasks was far more difficult: not much had been done by A the end of the year to comply with the regulation, and only in terms of the repair of roads and bridges was the situation considered satisfactory. The designation of the island of Hiiumaa, which until then had been part of Lääne County, as a separate county in 1946 was also a direct consequence of this regulation. The public was told that this move was the “wish of the working class,” yet the justification given in classified documents was the need to increase the central authorities’ control over the island.22 Even though the “political and economic strengthening” of the border zone did not proceed at the pace desired, 1946–47 could be considered the decisive period in the development of the border regime. The construction of border guard stations and communications networks, and regular patrolling in the border belt, began in 1946. The guarding of the border was left completely to the border guard forces, since prior to that time, regular army units guarded part of it. The December 1946 regulation by the ESSR Council of Ministers established the placement of numerous facilities at the disposal of the border guard. One list assigned 45 buildings in Tallinn and Harjumaa and on the western Estonian islands to the Border Guard Forces Administration. Another list “rented long-term free of charge” a total of 395 buildings to them in Tallinn, Pärnu, and seaside counties. A third list registered 109 residential buildings and apartments in Tallinn, Pärnu, Rakvere, Kuressaare, Kärdla, and Haapsalu as housing stock for the Border Guard Forces Administration.23 The development of technical capabilities and of the border guard system made escape from Estonia by sea significantly more difficult than before. The principles written into the framework regulations during those years, however, remained in effect until the end of the 1980s, even though new laws continued to be enacted one after another. It is these that we will consider below.

Chronology of Fundamental Documents Related to the Border Regime In 1946–87, 14 framework regulations and a number of their amendments and supplements were formulated at the level of the government of the ESSR for 22 Minutes of the ECP CC Bureau, 3 July 1946, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, s. 308, l. 20–1. 23 ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 069, 18 December 1946, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 118, l. 290–307. A secondary objective of this regulation was to recover buildings occupied by the Border Guard without authorization, prescribing that facilities not entered on the list ‘must be vacated immediately and incontrovertibly’ and were to be placed at the disposal of local institutions of state authority.

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regulating the border regime (see Table 1). The reasons for drawing up new framework documents can be divided into three categories that were often combined. First was the establishment of new all-Union legislation, with which the local regulation formally had to be harmonized. Second was changes in administrative division and the structure of official positions, because administrative units in the border zone had to be listed in the regulation, as did the officials allowed into the border zone without a permit. The third reason was substantive need, when the KGB or Border Guard Forces Headquarters realized that control had to be made more effective. The framework regulation issued in 1955 by the ESSR Council of Ministers was conditioned by a new all-Union legal act from two years earlier. This also provided the opportunity to describe the extent of the border belt once again, taking into account the consequences of the administrative reform of 1950 in which raions were formed in place of counties and rural municipalities. The regulations of 1957 and 1959 contained few changes compared to previous regulations. These amendments primarily updated the lists of officials allowed into the border belt without a passport and of administrative units in the border belt. Table 1. Chronology of ESSR border regime fundamental documents 1940–8724 Fundamental document ESSR CPC decision 34 ESSR Council of Ministers r 058

All-Union guiding document USSR Central Executive November 29, 1940 Committee and CPC July 17, 1935 USSR Council of October 26, 1946 Ministers r 143563cc, June 29, 1946 Date

Changes to the fundamental document r 172 (October 6, 1944); r 188 (October 13, 1944) r 019 (April 11, 1949); r 032 (May 8, 1950)

24 Abbreviations and notations: r – regulation, o – order; legal acts to which access was restricted are indicated with an asterisk (*), all other remaining documents were either secret or top secret except for the very last one, the regulation of 1987, which was already available to the public. ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 10, l. 244–7; s. 90, l. 19, 26–8; s. 100, l. 124; s. 118, l. 233–9; s. 185, l. 113–4; s. 213, l. 222; s. 358, l. 20–6; s. 360, l. 6–7; s. 431, l. 104; s. 429, l. 119–27; s. 492, l. 42–51; s. 528, l. 31; s. 557, l. 27–39; s. 617, l. 87–91; s. 647, l. 140–1; s. 706, l. 26–53; s. 735, l. 52–70; s. 802, l. 87; s. 850, l. 47; s. 872, l. 42–55; s. 974, l. 63–9; ERA f. R-1, n. 3, s. 2213, l. 43–64; s. 2328, l. 253–5; s. 2554, l. 126–149; s. 3721, l. 141–4; ERAF f. 17SM, n. 14, s. 102, l. 1–4, 16–19; s. 94, l. 103–11; ENSV Teataja (ESSR State Gazette) (1988), no. 2, p. 38.

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Fundamental document

Date

ESSR Council of Ministers r 07

February 14, 1955

ESSR Council of Ministers r 385-22c ESSR Council of Ministers r 160-14c ESSR Council of Ministers r 91-10 ESSR Council of Ministers r 255-12 ESSR Council of Ministers r 216-13 ESSR Council of Ministers r 223* ESSR Council of Ministers r 236* ESSR Council of Ministers r 296-14 ESSR Council of Ministers r 297* ESSR Council of Ministers r 348* ESSR Council of Ministers r 453-33 ESSR Council of Ministers r 654**

All-Union guiding document USSR Council of Ministers r 26661124c, October 21, 1953

November 30, 1957

„

April 30, 1959

„

March 1, 1961

Changes to the fundamental document o 05 (April 1, 1955); o 196ks (February 20, 1957) – o 1249-рсс (September 5, 1960)

USSR Council of r 302-23 (June 12, 1963); r Ministers r 847-349, 384-23 (August 17, 1964) August 5, 1960

June 1, 1966

„

–

May 24, 1967

„

r 361-30 (August 4, 1970); r 169-18 (April 17, 1972)

May 29, 1967

All-Union directive

r 7 (January 10, 1968)

May 21, 1969

All-Union directive

r 294 (June 16, 1970)

June 21, 1973

USSR Council of Ministers r 847-349, r 389-28 (July 25, 1977) August 5, 1960

June 21, 1973

All-Union directive

–

July 29, 1976

All-Union directive

r 578 (November 28, 1977); r 201 (April 18, 1979); r 202 (April 18, 1984)

July 28, 1983

USSR Council of Ministers r 163-88, February 17, 1983

December 25, 1987

–

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A new all-Union border guard statute went into effect in 1960, replacing the border guard regulations of 1927 and the border belt regulation of 1935. It was implemented together with the regulation issued on August 5, 1960, by the USSR Council of Ministers.25 On this basis, the regulation “Concerning the Border Zone Regime within the Borders of the ESSR” was issued in 1961. Compared to earlier legal acts, this was a completely new text with many changes. The term “border zone” (pogranichnaia zona) was adopted as a new concept. It was demarcated in all raions, cities, villages, or hamlets adjoining the entire state border of the USSR. Until then, the term “border belt” (pogranichnaia polosa) had been used with the same meaning, but now it was given a new meaning. The border belt was now designated as a narrower area within the border zone. Its width was not permitted to exceed two kilometers, and this area carried additional restrictions not applied in the border zone. For instance, while as a rule a permit issued by the militia was required for entry to the border zone, entry to the border belt and residence there was allowed only with a permit from the border guard forces.26 The 1966 regulation once again changed mainly the list of officials allowed in the zone without permits, since a couple of all-Union directives on this topic had been sent out in the meantime. A proposal submitted by the border guards to start drawing up two separate regulations for regulating the border regime led to the implementation of the subsequent regulation in 1967, less than a year after the previous regulation. One of those two regulations—“Concerning the Border Zone Regime within the Borders of the ESSR”—was secret as usual, but the other—“Concerning the Procedure for Entering the Border Zone within the Borders of the ESSR”—was subject to restricted access. This much access was considered necessary to produce a document that would provide guidance at ticket counters, bus depots, airports, local executive committees, and factories. Henceforth a list of railway stations, airports, and ports located within the border zone (but not an enumeration of administrative units belonging to the border zone) was included in the unclassified regulation, along with the organization of civilian transportation; the list of officials allowed into the zone without permits; a list of resorts; and instructions for business travelers, sanatoriums, children’s summer camps, and other such information that affected a large proportion of

25 Statute concerning defense of the border of the Soviet Union, ENSV Ülemnõukogu Teataja (ESSR Supreme Soviet Gazette) (1960), no. 29, pp. 603–11. 26 ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 91–10, ‘Concerning the Border Zone Regime within the Borders of the Estonian SSR’, 1 March 1961, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 557, l. 27–39.

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the population.27 The restricted-access regulation was implemented on 29 May 1967, and its subsequent drafts in 1969, 1973, and 1976. The secret regulation “Concerning the Border Zone and its Regime in the Territory of the ESSR,” issued in 1973, originated from Border Guard Forces Headquarters, from where it was sent to the Party Central Committee, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the KGB for approval. According to the border guards, a new framework document was needed, since the number of watercrafts at the disposal of citizens had grown quickly in recent years, and there were too few moorings that were guarded according to requirements, especially “along the unguarded seacoast.” This was seen as the primary reason for why many escape attempts from the Soviet Union had been made in recent years using privately owned or stolen vessels. The border guards demanded stricter control to prevent further escape attempts, and the regulation established some new restrictions.28 The act governing the state border of the Soviet Union went into effect on March 1, 1983, annulling the all-Union border guard statute from 1960. The USSR Council of Ministers issued its own regulation on February 17, 1983, to implement that act, and on that basis, a new ESSR Council of Ministers regulation was drawn up on July 28, 1983, as the new local framework document. There were few changes compared to the former procedures, and the new legal act is characterized more by greater precision and detail than before. The concepts of the border zone and the border belt remained, but the former two-kilometer maximum limit for the border belt was done away with. The rules for entry also remained the same, but the rights of the border guard forces to control the border regime increased.29 This regulation arguably made the border regime even stricter.

Regulation of the Border Regime The rules for living in border areas and for entry into those areas changed little over time. For instance, the border belt regulation of 1935 is almost identical to the 27 Statement, March 1967, ibid., s. 735, l. 61–3. 28 Letter from the commander of the 106th Border Guard Squad to the chairman of the ESSR Council of Ministers, March 1973, ibid., s. 889, l. 31–31v; s. 872, l. 53–55. 29 USSR Act concerning the State Border of the Soviet Union: Official Text as of 1 March 1983 (Tallinn, 1987). To implement this act, the following regulations were issued: USSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 163–8, 17 February 1983, ERAF f. 17SM, n. 14, s. 102, l. 20–2; ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 453-33 “O pogranichnom rezhime v pogranichnoi zone na territorii Estonskoi SSR” (Concerning the Border Regime and Border Zone in the Territory of the Estonian SSR), 28 July 1983, ERAF f. 17SM, n. 14, s. 102, l. 16–9.

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instructions from 1983 concerning entry into border areas or living in those areas. The text had simply become more detailed over the course of nearly half a century. The basic procedure was very simple. To live in areas along the border, a passport containing address registration for a location within the border zone or border belt was required, along with the requisite stamp. Local residents always had to have their passports with them when moving about in the zone. To enter the border zone, non-residents had to apply for a permit from their local militia station and to supply documentation proving the necessity of their trip. Institutions located within the border belt or in the border zone were not allowed to hire people who did not have the required permit. Similarly, local residents were not allowed to take people without the required permit in as boarders. New qualifying clauses were constantly added as new regulations were drawn up. The list of activities that were forbidden in the zone or that required a permit grew ever longer. Strict restrictions were set for everything concerning maritime marine navigation, while hunting, holding sporting events, and so on, were regulated. In 1955, it was considered necessary to add a separate clause prohibiting topo-geodetic work, photographing, or filming in the zone without a permit. Keeping pigeons was also prohibited. A clause was added in 1959 concerning students registered as residents in the border belt who attended school elsewhere, somewhat simplifying the procedure for their return trips home. It granted them the right to pass through the checkpoint with their student card and the corresponding certificate from their local village soviet. Some notable changes were made in 1961. The regulation stipulated that citizens with passports containing the border zone stamp (“ZP”) were permitted to travel in the border zone within the Estonian SSR, since previously the permit was apparently valid throughout the Soviet Union. Most likely, this change was prompted by the authorities’ realization that a permit valid throughout the USSR somewhat simplified defections.30 At the same time, a clause was added to the framework regulation that had been missing from it since 1946 that required registration within 24 hours after entry into the border zone. This does not mean that the aforementioned requirement did not apply in the meantime. Namely, 30 Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the permit was valid as of 1961 within the territory of autonomous SSRs (ASSR), oblasts, and krais respectively. This restriction had not been included in regulations before. It is possible that the situation was elaborated on in instructions that have not been located to this date, but most likely this meant that the permit was valid in the border belt throughout the USSR. People who escaped to Finland over the border of Karelia have also claimed that this was the case and that they used this circumstance to aid their escape.

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the passport regulations of 1940 established a universal requirement for registration within 24 hours of arrival in any location whatsoever. This clause was eased somewhat later on, extending the deadline for address registration, but the 1961 border belt regulation meant that the 24-hour requirement remained in effect in the border zone and applied more or less until the end of the Soviet era. The application procedure for permits was elaborated on in the 1970s, and the cases that were prerequisites for obtaining permits were described in detail. As a rule, one-time permits were issued singly to individuals for a specific settlement. Permits valid for several locations or for an entire raion altogether were issued in exceptional cases, for instance to persons engaged in certain occupations who had to travel a great deal due to the nature of their occupation. Multi-entry permits valid for up to one year could be issued for visiting relatives living in the border zone. Citizens who resided temporarily in the border zone could be issued with a permit for up to 45 days, later for up to three months, and then for up to six months. The MVD, the KGB, and other institutions issued an immense number of directives and instructions for the implementation of these regulations. Unfortunately, most of them are not accessible, because the archives of these institutions were taken to Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed, and access to them is not available. Instructions from 1983 are preserved in Estonian archives. They provide more detailed information concerning the procedures in effect at that time, as well as matters such as the issuing of permits and the preceding procedure for special checks, as well as factors hindering the acquisition of permits.31 The procedure that was previously in effect was also most likely about the same. This allows us to assume the equivalence of legal acts from different periods in terms of other details. As a rule, border zone permits were not to be issued to citizens of foreign countries and stateless persons. The state security units and those for internal affairs had the right to prohibit entry to the border zone for persons whose presence there was undesirable due to “operational considerations.” There were special rules for persons with criminal records. The local unit for internal affairs was responsible for issuing all types of residence permits to persons released from penal institutions within its territorial jurisdiction, including the right to enter the border zone. The unit for internal affairs was responsible for checking the right of the incarcerated person to enter the border zone—that is to say, whether the

31 USSR MVD Directive No. 0285, 13 October 1983, ERAF f. 17SM, n. 14, s.  109, pages not numbered.

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person being released had lived there previously or if his immediate relatives had lived there earlier. The unit for internal affairs at the destination was responsible for providing its evaluation and had the power to ban the released person from taking up residence in the border zone. Certain sentences brought with them restrictions on address registration that made settling in the border zone significantly more difficult until the end of the Soviet era. In the context of Soviet repressive policy, this restriction actually meant that many people were prohibited from returning to their homes. The system that was in effect since 1940 listed counterrevolutionary and criminal acts, hooliganism (until 1952), and not engaging in socially useful work as the basis for restrictions. From 1974 onward, address registration restrictions applied to particularly dangerous repeat offenders and persons who had been sentenced to imprisonment or exile for particularly dangerous crimes against the state (10 sections were in turn categorized as such crimes, including anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, betrayal of the homeland, and others). The list included a number of serious criminal assaults and economic crimes, but also “dissemination of fabrications known to be false denigrating the system of government or the social system.” It was nevertheless possible to make exceptions in this regard, and exceptions were indeed applied. Not only persons with criminal records but also practically everyone who applied for a border zone permit was subjected to special control. Citizens had to submit a written petition and documents substantiating the aim of the trip (documentation concerning the residence of relatives in the zone, job offer from an institution, or other such documentation) at least 10 days before their planned trip in order to obtain a permit. This was followed by special control, the thoroughness of which depended on where the applicant lived: stricter control was required in the case of people living in the administrative center of a Union republic (or ASSR, oblast, or krai). Address bureaus and the 10th department of the corresponding security unit carried out the check.32 The security unit was required to provide an answer within two to three days. However, if the purpose of the trip was a funeral or to visit someone who was seriously ill, then the check was required to

32 The ESSR’s KGB 10th Department was subordinate to the USSR’s KGB 10th Department Main Administration and also issued permits to foreigners for entry into the Estonian SSR and to Soviet citizens for travel abroad. It also drew up the foreign travel files of people traveling abroad. The procedure for both special checks was also quite similar. The address bureaus managed enormous card files with data on the movement of people, that is, the transfer of address registration from one place to another.

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be carried out “immediately.” In cases where permission was denied, the organs were not required to state their reasons.33 Extent of the border belt and border zone. In 1940, all islands in Estonia’s coastal waters and certain areas of Estonia’s northern coast were included in the “prohibited zone”. As of 1946, “all islands in the Baltic Sea belonging to the Soviet Union” and 36 village soviets along Estonia’s northern and northwestern coast were defined as belonging to the border belt. In subsequent years, changes were made in the description of the restricted area, most of which were due to the reorganization of administrative units. The number of village soviets, for instance, decreased by more than a factor of three over the course of 40 years.34 The 1955 regulation took into account the consequences of the major administrative reform of 1950, in which raions were formed in place of counties and rural municipalities. Henceforth a total of 24 village soviets in seven raions stretching from NarvaJõesuu to Matsalu Bay on the Estonian mainland were part of the border belt. By 1983, their number gradually decreased to 19. This, of course, did not mean a narrowing of the border zone but just the opposite: because of the amalgamation of small village soviets, the area covered by those village soviets increased. At the same time, all these changes were formal, adhering to the principle that every administrative unit adjacent to the sea was part of the border zone. The situation was exactly the same elsewhere in the Soviet Union. For instance, in Latvia, 13 village soviets and some hamlets in its three raions located on the western coast were part of the border zone in 1983, and in Lithuania, nine village soviets and the Nida peninsula in its four seaside raions were in the border zone. The expansion of the border zone was indeed modest, but it nevertheless had a harsh impact on people with criminal records, who were subject to restrictions on where they could live. As the border zone expanded, they had to move repeatedly. This particularly affected areas near Tallinn, where many people who were banned from living in the city had settled.35

33 USSR MVD Directive No. 0285, 13 October 1983, ERAF f. 17SM, n. 14, s.  109, pages not numbered. 34 For further details, see Liivi Uuet, Eesti haldusjaotus 20. sajandil: teatmik (Estonia’s Administrative Division: A Reference Book) (Tallinn, 2002). 35 For instance, Ageeda Paavel was released from prison camp in 1955 but was not allowed to return to live in her former place of residence in Tallinn. She succeeded in obtaining address registration about 25 kilometers outside of the city in the village of Valingu. Her address registration of 1955 was nullified, since the border regime caught up with her, so to speak, due to changes in the boundaries of administrative units. Interview with Ageeda Paavel, conducted by the author, 1 March 2012.

Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR

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It must, however, be noted that it was chiefly moving to village soviets located in the border belt or border zone (meaning registering one’s address there) that was restricted. This did not always necessarily mean denial of permission to enter the territory of a particular village soviet or strict control at the border of the village soviet. The necessary checkpoint with its gate was set up within the zone wherever necessary or where it was easiest to set up, and that depended to a great extent on the local border guards. Cities as a rule were not part of the border belt or border zone, but there were always exceptions; two such exceptions were in Estonia. The first was Paldiski, which was essentially sealed off from the civilian population for the entire Soviet era. In 1964, the city and the entire Pakri Peninsula were given special status because “Object 346” belonging to the USSR Ministry of Defense was located there. The area was declared a restricted zone (zakrytnaia zona), where not only the border regime but another, stricter regime applied.36 The other exception was Sillamäe, located in the border belt along the northern coast. Sillamäe officially gained town status in 1957 and in subsequent framework regulations; it therefore had to be singled out as a town that was part of the border zone, unlike other towns.37 The administrative centers of union republics (like those of ASSRs, oblasts, and krais) were not part of the border belt or border zone. However, in 1946, the ESSR leadership concocted a plan to include Tallinn in the border belt as well, thus hoping to ensure better order in the city and to obtain additional means for combating the hordes of illegal immigrants coming from Russia. Baltic Fleet Headquarters also supported the proposal. In its opinion, Tallinn merited a stricter regime as a border city on the coast and the location of the main base of the fleet, similarly to other naval bases (like Sevastopol or Vladivostok). A draft regulation was prepared by the ECP Central Committee that prescribed Tallinn’s inclusion in the border belt and the expulsion of people caught without residence permits.38 However,

36 ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 384–23, 17 August 1964, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 647, pp. 140–1. The 93rd Naval Training Center (known as the training center for nuclear submarine crews) was located in Paldiski. It was established in 1964 and began operation four years later. See Jüri Pärn, Margus Hergauk and Mati Õun, Punalaevastik Eestis 20. sajandi lõpukümnendeil (The Red Fleet in Estonia in the Final Decades of the 20th Century) (Tallinn, 2006), p. 37. 37 The main reason for Sillamäe’s special status was the secret object located there, the uranium enrichment factory Combined Plant No. 7, whose construction began in 1946. 38 Letter from Karotamm, Tributs and Efremov to Zhdanov, undated [filed in the archives on 21 January 1947], ERAF f. 1, n. 5a, s. 34, l. 1–2.

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the plan was shelved, probably because making exceptions in a unified system was simply out of the question and the implementation of the border regime was not prescribed for the capitals of union republics. At the same time, special rules deriving from the passport regime were in effect in capitals that, like the border regime, were meant to control migration and the composition of the population. Exceptions. The framework regulation of the border regime was always accompanied by a list of settlements and areas that were exceptions—they were located within the border zone, but entry into them was not restricted. Often the reason for the addition or removal of a particular settlement from the list was simply a change in administrative jurisdiction or in the status of the settlement. Beyond that, an official list of summer holiday resorts existed, drawn up by the local executive committee in cooperation with the border guard. Citizens of the Estonian SSR—meaning people with a permanently registered address in Estonia—could visit those places during the “summer holiday season,” in other words, from May 1, (later from April 1) until October 1. At the same time, visitors always had to bear in mind that they could remain at the seashore only in daylight, in other words that, is, from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. This last requirement also applied outside of the border zone as well, for instance, at Tallinn’s public beaches. Sanatoriums, children’s summer camps (pioneer camps), and other holiday or health institutions formed a separate category of exceptions to which people had access on the basis of corresponding holiday packages or referrals. Finally, there were also exceptions that were valid under certain conditions or for local residents so that people could go to the market, visit the hospital, go to their summer cottage, and so on. The maritime islands as a rule were part of the border zone throughout the Soviet era. Visiting them without a permit was utterly impossible for ordinary citizens living elsewhere until 1961. This applies particularly to the islands in the Gulf of Finland whose permanent population was forcibly resettled to the mainland by the early 1950s (except for Prangli Island). The first exception in a long time emerged in the system in 1961, since Aegna Island, near Tallinn, was declared an area for summer holidaying.39 While initially all ESSR citizens theoretically had the opportunity to visit that island on their own in the summer, only people whose address was permanently registered in Tallinn and in Harju raion retained that right in 1973–83—that was one of the proposals made by the border guard

39 A ferry line between Tallinn and Aegna was opened for the summer season in 1961. There were about 20 holiday resorts on that island from 1960 to 1990. Aegna Island came within Tallinn’s administrative boundaries in 1975.

Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR

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forces to control the border more effectively. Foreigners were allowed onto the island only via a holiday package to a holiday resort or as part of a tour group. One further significant change was made in 1966 when Kihnu Island, located in the Gulf of Riga, was redesignated to lie outside the border zone.40 In practice, people were not prevented from visiting the islets in the Väinameri (the body of water between the Estonian mainland and the western Estonian archipelago), where a number of organizations and enterprises had their holiday resorts. In addition to exceptions, temporary anomalies arose. For instance, in 1953, after Stalin’s death, Lavrentii Beriia began liberalizing the system; an amnesty was declared and a relaxation of the passport system was planned.41 A number of restrictions on place of residence were done away with, including within the area extending to 100 kilometers along the border of the Soviet Union. According to Beriia, this kind of system, which was not used anywhere else in the world, was useless from the standpoint of guarding the border and hindered economic development.42 However, Beriia’s attempt at liberalization was halted immediately after he was removed from power, and that same autumn, a new passport regulation was approved that restored all the former restrictions. The effect of Beriia’s liberalization attempt and amnesty, however, is shown in Estonia in the statistics of entry permits issued for the border belt, because for a short time, the number of permits multiplied (see Table 2). Another interesting anomaly occurred in 1956, when Estonian SSR Party leader Ivan Käbin and the leader of the government, Aleksei Müürisepp, submitted a proposal to the USSR minister of internal affairs to exclude the village soviets near Tallinn from the border belt. The leaders explained that they wished to offer city residents opportunities for summer vacationing. A USSR-wide campaign for improving the living conditions of the population in general supported the plan. Within the framework of this campaign, a USSR Council of Ministers regulation prescribed the construction of 300 summer cottages and their sale to Tallinners. Furthermore, children’s summer camps (pioneer camps) and vacation resorts

40 ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 255-12, 1 June 1966, ERA f. R-1, n. 5, s. 706, l. 26–53. 41 See Tõnu Tannberg, ’1953. aasta amnestia: kas ainult varaste ja sulide vabastamine?’ (The Amnesty of 1953: Was It the Release of Only Thieves and Crooks?), Tuna 7 (2004), no. 3, pp. 37–51. 42 Aleksandr Iakovlev (ed.), Lavrentii Beriia. 1953. Dokumenty (Moscow, 1999), pp. 45–8.

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were located in those village soviets.43 The matter culminated in February 1957 with an order from the ESSR Council of Ministers that excluded four village soviets near the city from the border belt. However, this joy was short-lived for city residents, because the new border regime framework regulation issued that very same autumn returned them to the border belt.44 It is possible that the ESSR leadership acted without approval from Moscow and with undue haste, but it is more likely that the border guard forces or the KGB decided that the narrowing of the border zone had gone too far. In this respect Eugen Adrik’s August 1957 escape to Sweden by sailboat (mentioned below) could have had decisive impact. Privileges of the nomenklatura. A list of official positions that entitled one to enter the border zone without a permit formed one group of exceptions. Such lists were included with framework regulations beginning in 1946. These lists were based on USSR-wide lists that were usually established as a joint directive issued by the heads of several institutions, one of which was always the minister of internal affairs or the chairman of the KGB.45 These lists, which for the most part coincided with the list of nomenklatura positions, were divided into several levels, like the nomenklatura. Positions that ensured “unlimited” entry46 throughout the entire extent of the Soviet Union’s state border formed the first level—the lists of this level were so secret that they were not included with the ESSR regulations. Instead this document only referred to some USSR-wide document. The next level consisted of persons who did not require a permit issued by the militia; their identity document was sufficient to allow entry.47 The third level consisted of persons who required a business trip certificate in addition to their passport. The 43 Käbin and Müürisepp to the USSR Minister of Internal Affairs, 21 September 1956, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s. 405, l. 42–3. 44 ESSR CPC Order No. 196-ks, 23 February 1957, ibid., s. 431, l. 104; ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 385-22c, ibid., s. 429, l. 119–127. 45 For instance: Perechen’ dolzhnostnykh lits. Prilozhenie No. 6 k prikazu KGB SSSR, MVD SSSR, MPS, Minmorflot, MGA, Minrybkhoz No. 158/DSP/225/43/TsE/248/220/ DSP/548, 30 November 1983, ERAF, f. 17SM, n. 14, s. 109, pages not numbered. The last four institutions are the Ministries of Roads, the Naval Fleet, Civilian Aviation, and the Fishing Industry. 46 It is not entirely clear how ‘unlimited’ entry (v’’ezzhaiut svobodno in rules) was implemented in practice, because KGB or other directives or instructions describing these kinds of details have not yet been found. Members of this group apparently did not have to show any documents and drove through checkpoints without stopping. 47 The only identification document that civilians had was the Soviet citizens’ passport, where until 1974 the bearer’s place of work was also entered. After 1974, an employment certificate was also required at checkpoints.

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fourth level consisted of persons to whom the militia issued long-term permits (that is, for six months or a year). Ordinary citizens could also apply for this kind of long-term permit under certain conditions. The positions of the lower-level lists were in turn divided into lists where the right of entry was valid throughout the Soviet Union, only in their own Union republic (ASSR, oblast, or krai), or only within the boundaries of their own raion, respectively. In summary, the system was so complex that the often-updated lists ultimately ran to dozens of pages and included hundreds of official titles. This, of course, was not because the border regime had become more lenient but because the list of official nomenklatura positions grew longer and longer. There were also special rules for organizing transportation in the border zone. The framework regulation established the list of highways and railways passing through the border zone along with the railway stations, harbors, and airports located in the zone. These kinds of railway stations could be passed through, but people were not allowed to disembark. When purchasing a ticket to any of these listed stations, the purchaser had to produce a permit indicating the destination. A similar system applied to bus lines. Highways passing through the border zone were open to all automobile drivers, but road users without border zone permits were not permitted to get out of their automobile or to stop anywhere within the zone for any reason other than a traffic accident. The rules for marine navigation, as a very important domain from the viewpoint of the border regime, became stricter and more detailed over time. It was stipulated in 1940 that all fishing, sporting, and pleasure boats sailing in the Gulf of Finland had to be registered with local government organizations, regardless of the size, capacity, and power of the watercraft. The number and certificate obtained from the local government organization had to be immediately registered with the local border guard detachment corresponding to the owner’s place of residence. Watercraft could only be kept in places determined by the border guard. Landing and loading were prohibited anywhere else. All watercraft moored at ports had to be locked and guarded. All watercraft were permitted to sail at any time within 12 nautical miles of the coastline for the purpose of fishing, economic activity, or scientific work, but pleasure boats and sporting craft were permitted to sail only during the daytime and only within three nautical miles of the coast. Putting out to sea and landing was permitted only in the presence of border guards. From 1946 onward, all watercraft had to be registered at a specific fixed port or landing place. Boats had to be locked, and oars, oarlocks, and sails had to be stored separately. This requirement was extended to include outboard motors in 1967. Fishing permits valid for one season started being issued in 1946, and amateur fishermen were forbidden to fish at night. The life of professional fishermen was

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made a little easier in 1955, when they were permitted to land at all corresponding landing places to unload their catch, regardless of where their craft was registered. As an exception, fishermen were not allowed to unload their catch in Paldiski Bay, where fishing boats and other civilian craft were not supposed to be in the first place. The same restriction was placed on the port of Mõntu in Saaremaa in 1973. The focus was on yachtsmen in 1957. The reason was that Eugen Adrik and two companions had recently escaped to Sweden on a sporting association yacht after receiving permission to sail from Tallinn to Klaipeda in Lithuania. The case was sensitive, since the yacht’s captain, Adrik, a USSR champion sportsman in yachting, was a Red Army Estonian Rifle Corps veteran and also a former agent of the security units.48 The ESSR Supreme Court sentenced the fugitives in absentia to 10 years imprisonment. The case reached the ECP Central Committee, and the head of the ESSR’s KGB Fourth Department, Leonid Burdin, was reprimanded, while his first deputy, Gavriil Starinov, was given a warning. Thereafter, measures were quickly taken. Yachts were prohibited from sailing beyond territorial waters, and special control was established over yachtsmen and sailing on the open seas at night.49 The 1960s brought new provisions that primarily affected fishing boats that the border guard justified by previous escapes abroad of boats or crew members. First of all, a narrow entry gate was established and designated in the Irben Straits in 1960 for ships departing from and arriving at Riga. The following year, seagoing vessels were forbidden to go fishing alone—at least two seagoing vessels had to be together in order to be allowed to put out to sea (larger ships were relieved of this restriction in 1966 on condition that they were in radio contact with the shore). Minimum requirements were also set for the number of crew members—trawlers had to have at least five people, and boats had to have at least two people, in order to put out to sea. At least four hours before departure, the border guard had to be informed where the craft was going and when it would be returning.

48 ERAF f. 131SM, n. 1, s. 375, l. 102–104; Jaak Pihlau, ‘Lehekülgi Eesti lähiajaloost: Merepõgenemised okupeeritud Eestist’ (Pages from Recent Estonian History: Escapes by Sea from Occupied Estonia), Tuna 4 (2001), no. 2, pp. 68–81, here p. 74. 49 Jüri Ojamaa and Jaak Hion (eds.), Aruanne Eesti NSV MN juures asuva RJK 2. osakonna agentuur- ja operatiivtöö kohta 1957. aastal. Aruanne Eesti NSV MN juures asuva RJK 4. osakonna agentuur- ja operatiivtöö kohta 1957. aastal (Report concerning Agent and Operative Work of the State Security Committee Second Department under the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers in 1957: Report concerning Agent and Operative Work of the State Security Committee Fourth Department under the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers in 1957) (Tallinn, 2002), pp. 152–4.

Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR

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The maximum permissible distance from the coast was reduced to two miles for amateur fishermen. The next significant change came in 1967, when the entire set of rules affecting watercraft and fishing was extended to those areas of the Gulf of Riga and the Väinameri that the border guard did not keep under surveillance. Essentially, this established some rules of the border regime in areas that were not even in the border zone. The specific term “coastline without surveillance” was also adopted, concerning which new restrictions were implemented thereafter (primarily according to proposals made by the border guard forces). A new rule that applied throughout the entire coastline was established in 1967, requiring that privately owned boat motors could not be more than 20 horsepower.

The Issuing of Permits While the border guards shouldered most of the burden of controlling the border regime and the role of the militia was smaller, the militia units did most of the work in issuing permits for entry into border areas. Restricted-access militia statistics from 1945 and 1952–87 concerning issuing of permits have been preserved (see Table 2). The ESSR NKVD Militia Administration issued over 39,000 such permits in 1945.50 The number of permits steadily increased later. This was partially due to a certain expansion of the border zone and an increase in the population, but more generally, reflects the attitudes of the regime, which over time became somewhat more conciliatory in allowing people to the seashore. The year 1954 was exceptional, with over 80,000 permits, reflecting the relaxation of restrictions on place of residence due to the “Beriia amnesty.” The 22nd Olympic Games Tallinn Sailing Regatta presumably caused the decrease in 1976– 1980; before and during this time, restrictions on movement and place of residence were made stricter, and “unsuitable elements” were expelled from Tallinn. The sharp increase that took place in 1984 is explained by the new MVD border regime regulations that simplified application for border zone permits. Based on some reports, we can estimate that permits issued to people living permanently in the border zone accounted for about a fifth of the total number of permits.51 50 Otchet ob itogakh raboty narkomata vnutrennykh del Estonskoi SSR za 1945-i god, 8 March 1946. ERAF f. 17SM, n. 4, s. 40, l. 18. 51 Doklad po pasportno-registratsionnoi rabote, 5 February 1954, ERAF f. 18SM, n.1, s. 111, l. 52. For instance, according to the 1953 report, temporary permits issued for business trips and for personal reasons accounted for about 80 percent of all permits, in equal proportions. The remainder was thus meant for permanent residents of the

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Table 2. Issuing of border zone permits by ESSR militia units 1952–87 (thousands)52 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957

17 16 80 25 31 37

1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963

39 33 31 36 42 38

1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969

43 44 47 51 61 74

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

82 90 99 103 110 110

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981

95 88 88 90 100 118

1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

92 118 134 148 167 94*

Border Regime Control: Institutions and Methods Control of the border regime—the key element of the entire system—was the responsibility of the border guard forces and the militia units, according to the border defense regulations. For some tasks there was a more or less fixed division of labor; others, however, were fulfilled jointly. The militia units were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (until 1946 under the jurisdiction of the NKVD), and they issued border zone permits, processed the cases of border-regime violators, and supervised the passport regime. In other words, they made sure that all border zone residents or persons in the border zone had a passport and the proper address registration that justified their presence within the zone. Routine checks included private individuals and places of residence as well as organizations and administrative agencies. MVD statistics from the early 1950s preserved in the archives give an idea of the scale of these checks. Over 141,000 citizens were checked in the border belt in 1951, over 163,000 in 1952, and over 140,000 in 1953.53 The militia checked 19 institutions and businesses, border belt. The proportion of permits issued to people who lived permanently in the border zone was about the same in 1984­–86 (for which precise data exists), in other words 16–21 percent of all permits. 52 The data presented is rounded off. Data for the first half of the year is indicated with an asterisk. ERAF f. 18SM, n. 1, s. 58, l. 66; s. 111, l. 22; s. 159, l. 20; s. 228, l. 8, 13, 20; s. 267, l. 3, 4, 22; s. 291, l. 2–4; s. 312, l. 33; s. 341, l. 48–9; s. 358, l. 187; s. 363, l. 157; s. 391, l. 130; s. 405, l. 175–6; s. 416, l. 167; s. 429, l. 88, 213; s. 445, l. 96, 186; ERAF f. 17SM, n. 4, s. 388, l. 84, 163; s. 388, l. 84, 163; s. 424, l. 118, 341; s. 444, l. 24, 284; s. 490, l. 115, 288; s. 568, l. 369; s. 568, l. 369; s. 622, l. 30; s. 623, l. 147; s. 677, l. 292; s. 678, l. 165; s. 748, l. 128; s. 810, l. 255; s. 870, l. 244; s. 941, l. 159; s. 1020, l. 75, 116; s. 1076, l. 12, 121; s. 1126, l. 20, 127; s. 1321, l. 211–2. 53 Such astronomical numbers raise the question of whether they were made up. This sort of massive checking is not impossible in and of itself, considering the fact that most checking consisted of leafing through passports. It is, of course, impossible to check statistics after the fact, and perhaps this is not that important. These numbers indicate

Regulation and Control of the Border Regime in the Estonian SSR

417

12 sovkhozes and kolkhozes, and 20 village soviets along with all settlements in four raions in the border belt in 1952. Additionally, the militia also dealt with the “removal” of people from the border zone, that is, the expulsion of people not permitted to live there. In 1954, 47 people were removed from the border zone, and another 19 people were removed in each of the subsequent two years.54 Border guards also had the right to check passports and registration. The Border Guard Forces were also part of the NKVD/MVD until 1949, after which they were part of the MGB in 1949–53, then once again in the MVD, and as of 1957, they were part of the KGB.55 They were responsible for actually guarding the border; that is, they kept watch over border crossings in both directions over an approximately 1,700-kilometer-long section of the approximately 3,000kilometer-long maritime border of the Estonian SSR. They had the right to erect checkpoints and gates on roads within both the border zone and the border belt. They also had the right to apprehend people who violated border regime regulations, after which the detained persons had to be handed over to the militia units for prosecution. Their rights were more extensive in cases of violation of the border—in addition to arrests, they were also permitted to conduct investigation procedures (searches, interrogations, and other such procedures).56 The border guard regulations of 1983 expanded the rights of border guards. Thereafter they

the objectives and attitude of the regime, and the comprehensive and constant checking of the population was definitely a separate objective. 54 Doklad po pasportnoi rabote, 24 June 1953, ERAF f. 18SM, n. 1, s. 58, l. 46; Doklad po pasportno-registratsionnoi rabote, 5 February 1954, ibid., s. 111, l. 49. 55 Three border guard squads that were part of the Baltic Border Guard District located in the Baltic states were responsible for guarding the Estonian SSR border: initially the 99th and, as of 1954, the Sixth Border Guard Detachment operated in the eastern part of Viru and Harju counties; the 106th Border Guard Squad operated from eastern Harju County to Noarootsi, and the 11th Border Guard Squad operated on the western Estonian islands. The squads were divided up territorially into areas under the command of commandants, which were in turn divided up into border guard stations responsible for guarding particular sections of the coast. Additionally, an air force squadron and a fleet that consisted of 23 ships and 25 launches in 1991 were at the disposal of border guard forces located in the ESSR. See Jüri Pärn, Margus Hergauk and Mati Õun, Võõrväed Eestis 20. sajandi lõpukümnendeil (Foreign Forces in Estonia in the Final Decades of the 20th Century) (Tallinn, 2006), pp. 44–47. 56 Statute concerning guarding the Soviet Union’s border. Approved by USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium enactment on 5 August 1960, ENSV Ülemnõukogu Teataja (1960), No. 29, pp. 603–11.

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could detain persons for up to 72 hours, and with the approval of the prosecutor for up to 10 days.57 While the work of the border guard forces and the militia was at least partially visible and known to everyone, the KGB operated more undercover, and the purpose of its work was to prevent border violations. Counterintelligence in the border zone also included the identification and checking of people “suspected of betraying the homeland.”58 The KGB also kept an eye on the preparedness of the border guards themselves. A 1957 report claimed that an abnormal situation had evolved in which the border was practically not guarded at all for two months out of every year, because when conscripts were demobilized and new conscripts arrived for their training, the border guard stations were staffed with six or seven people “who defend only themselves.” There were insufficient reserves at the disposal of the boarder guards.59 The chapters in the KGB Counterintelligence Department reports concerning the work done in the border belt are similar in content, indicating that the work was routine and probably continued in the same vein into the period for which documents are not available. Joint KGB, border guard, and militia “plans of measures” were drawn up from year to year “to block betrayal attempts,” and joint maneuvers were held from time to time. For instance, the maneuvers “The pursuit 57 Nõukogude Sotsialistlike Vabariikide Liidu seadus NSV Liidu riigipiiri kohta: ametlik tekst seisuga 1. märts 1983 (USSR Act concerning the State Border of the Soviet Union: Official Text as of 1 March 1983) (Tallinn, 1987), pp. 24–9. 58 Indrek Jürjo, ‘Foreword’, Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne… 1955, p. 10; Jüri Ojamaa and Jaak Hion (eds.), Aruanne Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee 2. vastuluureosakonna tööst 1955. aastal (Report on the Work of the State Security Committee Second Counterintelligence Department in 1955) (Tallinn, 1998), pp. 61–3; Jüri Ojamaa (ed.), Aruanne Eesti NSV MN juures asuva RJK 2. osakonna agentuur- ja operatiivtöö kohta 1956. aastal. Aruanne Eesti NSV MN juures asuva RJK 4. osakonna agentuur- ja operatiivtöö kohta 1956. aastal (Report concerning the Agent and Operative Work of the KGB Second Department under the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers in 1956. Report concerning the Agent and Operative Work of the KGB Fourth Department under the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers in 1956) (Tallinn, 2000), pp. 34–37; Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne… 1957, pp. 44–52; Jüri Ojamaa and Jaak Hion (eds.), Aruanne Eesti NSV Ministrite Nõukogu juures asuva Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee 2. osakonna agentuur- ja operatiivtöö tulemuste kohta 1958. aastal. Aruanne Eesti NSV Ministrite Nõukogu juures asuva Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee 4. osakonna agentuur- ja operatiivtöö tulemuste kohta 1958. aastal (Report concerning the Results of the Agent and Operative Work of the State Security Committee Second Department under the Estonian SSR Council of Ministers in 1958) (Tallinn, 2005), pp. 62–9. 59 Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne 1957, p. 45.

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and apprehension of border violators brought to land from the sea” and “The pursuit and apprehension of border violators who attempted to escape abroad” were held.60 An important field of work was the recruitment of a network of agents in the border zone and the processing of information acquired from agents. The aim was to recruit agents from among people who were familiar with local conditions, had rapport with the people in the area, and could provide timely information. Agents came from among forest wardens, foresters, communications workers, roads supervisors, doctors, medical assistants, and others. As of January 1, 1958, the KGB had 669 agents, 36 residents, 54 proprietors of safe houses, five trap flats, and 165 informers in the border belt. They operated in cooperation with 665 agents from other departments in guarding the border.61 In addition, border guard officers and the militia both had their own networks of agents. Files were routinely established, and agent surveillance routinely placed, on people suspected of planning to escape. These were primarily people who had relatives abroad or who corresponded with people abroad, as well as people who had once been involved in illegally transporting people across the sea or in smuggling. When the circumstances had been ascertained, the suspect was arrested, followed by either a warning or a prosecution, for which the arrested person was handed over to the militia. If someone disregarded the law by building a boat, it was confiscated. Sometimes the militia used illegal escapes to transport their own agents abroad, and if someone tried to escape across a land border in some other part of the Soviet Union, the escape route was kept under surveillance for a long period of time in order to catch as many accomplices as possible. In 1956, agent and operative measures identified 96 residents of the ESSR who “planned betrayal”. By the end of the year, 30 of them had already been arrested by the border guard or the KGB while attempting to escape or had been arrested by the militia on suspicion of committing crimes. Over the course of 1956, the network of agents and informers submitted more than 40 alerts concerning escape plans or persons without permits staying in the zone. Fifty-nine such alerts were received in 1958. As of January 1, 1958, 65 violators of the border and “persons planning betrayal” were registered. Another 46 former smugglers, 11 persons who formerly provided transport across the sea, 1,238 repatriated persons, nearly 3,000

60 Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne 1958, p. 67. 61 Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne 1957, p. 51.

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persons who had returned from penal institutions, and over 5,000 people who maintained correspondence with people abroad were also registered.62 People who had the right to put out to sea were constantly at the center of attention. The crews of fishing trawlers were placed under close scrutiny after two Estonian fishing ships fled to Sweden in 1947–48.63 The state security units started recruiting fishermen and creating “crossing stations” under their control in order to trap escapees. The control exercised by the security units and the border guard was made significantly stricter in 1948. On any fishing boat, an Estonian captain and an Estonian driver were not permitted to serve simultaneously. The proportion of non-Estonians in the crews was increased, and all persons whose political loyalty was even slightly in doubt were removed from the crews.64 The Central Committee of the Party also intervened, declaring the political work done in Estonian maritime shipping unsatisfactory. The fact that in one year, 159 seagoing seamen were deprived of visas for traveling abroad was pointed out as an indicator of this deficient political work.65 Control became increasingly strict in subsequent years. Together with the local apparatus and the border guard, employees sent from KGB headquarters checked jetties, the supervision of watercraft, the personnel of fishing brigades, and ship crews, and they transferred seamen from one crew to another. Members of the same family or close relatives were not allowed to put out to sea together. The authorities also tried to identify fishermen who “show signs of political uncertainty, moral decadence, and degeneration in living habits.” In 1958, for instance, nine fishermen were deprived of permission to put out to sea and permission was denied to 14 other persons. In addition to fishermen, yachtsmen were placed under close scrutiny in 1957 as a consequence of the escape of Eugen Adrik’s crew (described earlier). Five new agents had been recruited from among yachtsmen by the end of that year. A special section (the Third Section) was formed as part of the KGB Fourth Department to increase the effectiveness of Chekist work among young people and athletes. The operative staff of this section consisted of seven employees. “Special control” files on yachtsmen were created. They and their relatives were kept under surveillance through both the agent network and card files. Over the course of 1958, 22 “suspicious persons” were identified. They were 62 Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne 1955, p.  62; Aruanne 1956, p.  36; Aruanne 1957, p. 52; Aruanne 1958, p. 65. 63 For more details, see Pihlau, ’Merepõgenemised’, pp. 68–81. 64 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 65 ECP CC decision “About Party Political Work on Estonian Maritime Shipping Seagoing Vessels,” 2 February 1949, ERAF f. 1, n. 4, f. 702, l. 102.

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not permitted to put out to sea, because the authorities had material suggesting they were politically unreliable.66 All the work described above proceeded along the unguarded coastline as well, and even though practically no materials concerning this work have been preserved from later years, it undoubtedly carried on until the end of the Soviet era. For instance, a 1978 map of the islands of Saaremaa and Muhu is known that indicates the locations of dozens of agents and informers, even though we do not, of course, know how many of them actually collaborated and how many were registered merely to “fulfill the plan.”67 The authorities tried to coax ever more new people to cooperate with the border guard forces. In 1953, Party raion committees along the border were assigned to deal more seriously with informing the population in order to improve vigilance. Additionally, civilian units drawn from the population had to start being formed by fiat in the border zone to assist the border guards. These units existed until the end of the 1980s.68 Young people and children had to be involved in guarding the border. A draft decision concerning the inclusion of the Komsomol in guarding the border was drawn up in 1954 in the Baltic Border Guard Forces District Political Department and was sent to the Central Committee of the Estonian Leninist Communist Youth League (ELCYL) for deliberation and ratification. Communist youth had to be mobilized to assist border guards, and they had to start monitoring the population of the border belt.69 The “Statute of the Group of Young Friends of the Border Guards” was drawn up in 1979. It was approved by the ELCYL CC, the ESSR Minister of Education, and the commander of the Baltic Border Guard Forces District. Children aged 10 and up had to join the squads that were to be formed in schools within the raions along the border. Squad members were expected to exercise constant vigilance, and it was recommended that maneuvers be held once every three months involving the “search for and arrest of a border violator.” To assist the border guard, the squads were supposed to patrol and set up observation posts. It was expected that the children would immediately inform the border guards of strangers who appeared in the

66 Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne 1957, pp. 152–154; Aruanne 1958, p. 130. 67 Harrys Puusepp (ed.), Kaitsepolitsei aastaraamat 2002 (Estonian Internal Security Service Yearbook 2002) (Tallinn, 2003); a copy of this map is published as an appendix of this book. 68 ECP CC decision, 2 December 1953, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s. 50, l. 456–8. 69 ELCYL Central Committee draft decisions, 22 January 1954, ERAF f. 31, n. 5, s. 10, l. 1–3.

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border zone as well.70 Exciting ways of spending free time were offered to squad members as an incentive, but it is anyone’s guess what effect, if any, these children had on border regime surveillance.

Punishment of Violators of the Regime Violation of the rules of the border regime was criminalized in the Soviet Union in 1935, when the penalty for living in the border belt or entering it without a permit was set at up to three years in prison camp, subject to the decision of the NKVD Special Board. The procedure was changed in 1937, and these cases were placed under the jurisdiction of people’s courts (first-instance courts). The 1946 border regime framework regulation stipulated criminal liability or administrative liability in cases where violation was not “malicious,” according to the 1937 regulation. This practice continued unchanged until 1957, when for some reason, the new framework regulation omitted the option of applying administrative penalties. The KGB noticed this immediately and demanded that this stipulation be restored.71 As a result, a new and very generally worded clause appeared in the regulation of 1959 that stated that violators of the border regime would be “prosecuted.” The border regime framework regulation of 1961 described only administrative liability (fines of up to 10 rubles), and only the subsequent framework regulation of 1966 stated that violators of the border regime would be subject to criminal liability and administrative liability “according to current legislation.” At the same time, however, the ESSR Criminal Code that took effect in April 1961 did not contain a section concerning violation of the border regime. According to Section 81 of the Code, one to three years imprisonment could be imposed only for illegally crossing the state border. This section was amended in 1984, stipulating two to five years imprisonment for a repeat offense.72 It was not until 1986 that the special Section 189,4 in other words “Violation of the rules for entering or living in or address registration in the border zone or border belt if an administrative penalty had been applied to the offender during the past year for the same kind of violation,” was added to the Criminal Code, permitting penalties of imprisonment or

70 Statute of the group of young friends of the border guards (Tallinn, 1980), ERAF f. 31, n. 133, s. 97, in print. 71 Ojamaa, Hion (eds.), Aruanne 1958, p. 68. 72 Eesti NSV kriminaalkoodeks: ametlik tekst muudatuste ja täiendustega seisuga 1. juuni 1990 (Estonian SSR Criminal Code: Official Text with Changes and Amendments as of June 1, 1990) (Tallinn, 1990), p. 83.

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corrective labor for up to two years.73 This essentially meant a return to the practice of the 1930s to the 1950s, though in different wording—in other words, to criminalization of “malicious violation.” Now the very real threat of two years in a prison cell hung over every person who went mushroom-picking in the woods by the sea. The number of people penalized for violating the border regime and how is not known. People’s courts imposed criminal penalties, while the imposition of administrative penalties was initially also under the jurisdiction of people’s courts. As of 1961, the administrative commissions of local executive committees could also impose administrative penalties, and this was also extended to the militia in 1982 (this last change is also clearly reflected in the relevant statistics—see Table 3). The penal statistics of the first, second, or third institution mentioned above have not been compiled; it is impossible to do so, partially due to the lack of sources. We nevertheless can get a certain idea from the restricted-access statistics of the ESSR MVD Militia Administration, which also contain data concerning court proceedings of border regime violation cases. These statistics should presumably include all cases of this nature. Table 3. Proceedings conducted concerning violations of the border regime (year/number of proceedings conducted)74 1951 1952 1953 … 1957

342 414 434 … 143

1958 … 1961 1962 1963

719 … 809 815 939

1964 1965 1966 1967 1968

1,227 1,038 1,298 1,120 1,295

1969 1970 1971 1972 1973

1,242 1,362 501 675 1,279

1974 1975 1976 1977 1978

1,531 1,613 1,486 913 644

1979 1980 1981 1982 1983

438 447 601 1,321 1,695

Data concerning proceedings that ordinarily are not included in MVD statistics is even more deficient. Isolated scraps of information can be found in only a few annual reports. For instance, 36 persons were criminally prosecuted for violating the border regime in 1951 based on the regulation of 1935/1937, and 22 persons were prosecuted in 1952. The USSR MVD Main Administration also complained 73 Ibid., p. 166. 74 ERAF f. 18SM, n.1, s. 267, l. 2; s. 228, l. 20; s. 267, l. 4, 22; s. 268, l. 4, 15; s. 292, l. 7; s. 341, l. 48–9; s. 358, l. 186; s. 363, l. 157; s. 391, l. 130; s. 405, l. 175–6; s. 416, l. 166–7; s. 429, l. 244; s. 445, l. 94–6, 174–6; ERAF f. 17, n. 4, s. 388, l. 82–3, 161–2; s. 424, l. 116–7, 339–40; s. 444, l. 22–3, 282–3; s. 490, l. 112–5, 286–7; s. 525, l. 50–52, 227–9; s. 568, l. 175–7, 365–7; s. 622, l. 34–6; s. 623, l. 152–4; s. 677, l. 296–9; s. 678, l. 168–71; s. 748, l. 131, 246, 255; s. 810, l. 123, 236, 242; s. 870, l. 114, 240, 244; s. 941, l. 9, 153, 159; s. 1020, l. 75, 116, 136; s. 1076, l. 12, 121; s. 1126, l. 20, 127.

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that there were not enough criminal cases and considered that kind of “liberal attitude” a weakness of the ESSR Militia.75 Later, however, the proportion of criminal cases was apparently even smaller, and as a rule, disciplinary action was limited to fines or warnings. For instance, Rein Sillar, the last head of the ESSR KGB, claimed that criminal cases were brought against 78 people between 1970 and 1989 for crossing or attempting to cross the border illegally.76 Finding more precise data—if it is even possible—would require a great deal of work in the archives. Finally, the actual number of “offenders” caught in the border zone was definitely many times greater, but for the most part, border guards did not bother to pursue the matter further. Instead, they cursed the offenders out and sent them back the way they came. A great deal also depended on personal connections with the border guards, acquaintances, bribes, and other such factors.

Relations between Border Guards and the Local Population Contact between local residents and border guards was unavoidable in coastal villages, but there was also a great deal of contact at public beaches. Many Tallinners recall encounters with patrols consisting of two men and a dog that emerged from their border guard station every evening at nine o’clock and went out to comb the coastal strip. According to the rules, people were not allowed at the beach after 10 p.m., and depending on the mood of the border guards, late-evening swimmers were also chased away. Inhabitants of the border zone, especially coastal dwellers and islanders, had to learn to live with the constant presence of the border guard and to reckon with the fact that they could be checked any time at random. As one man from Noarootsi has said, “Even when you crossed the yard to the outhouse, you had to have your passport with you.”77 At the same time, contacts with the border guard are often recalled in a positive light, and the attitude towards the entire border regime was often favorable. The inhabitants of the western Estonian islands in particular found the border guards’ presence useful in some ways and were well disposed

75 Doklad po pasportnoi rabote, 24 January 1953, ERAF f. 18SM, n. 1, s.  58, l. 46; Doklad po pasportno-registratsionnoi rabote, 5 February 1954, ERAF f. 18SM, n. 1, s. 111; Letter from the USSR MVD Militia Main Administration to the ESSR Militia Administration, 21 March 1953, ibid., s. 88, l. 40. 76 ‘KGB ei otsusta, kuidas Eesti saab iseseisvaks, kinnitab Rein Sillar’ (The KGB Does Not Decide How Estonia Will Become Independent, Assures Rein Sillar), Päevaleht, 2 August 1990. 77 Veskimägi, Kuidas valitseti Eesti NSV-d, p. 170.

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towards them. People sentimentally recall how border guards carried water from the well for old people and split firewood, helped to keep the peace and to make hay or, if needed, helped to obtain fuel or wire. Locals and guards drank liquor together and got along well. A familiar border guard station commander could also sometimes look the other way when locals broke the rules on going out to sea.78 People who had to spend an anxious night in some border guard station are surely of a different opinion. Hundreds of people who lived on the coast or the islands or happened to be in those areas can recall incidents where they were chased away from the seashore or the woods near the shore, cursed at, hauled to the border guard station, and interrogated. Flippers were confiscated from someone at the seashore, and others were forced to peel potatoes at the border guard station.79 Unfortunately, encounters with border guards did not always end with only a scare. Contacts and the isolation of the border zone from the rest of the world sometimes led to tragic consequences in which the victims were local people. Fortunately, there were not many such incidents, because conscripts were more carefully selected for the border guard forces, and discipline in border guard units was better than in many branches of the Soviet armed forces. Three incidents that ended with fatalities are known, and in all cases, border guards’ interest in alcohol and women played a key role. The most widely known incident with the most victims was the tragedy of August 8, 1976, at Letipea on the northern coast of Estonia, where a conflict arose between holidaying workers of the Estonian gas purchasing network and a border guard. A drunken border guard named Bagizhev shot eight people dead. The death toll includes Bagizhev himself and a fellow serviceman who tried to stop him. Another 14 people were wounded. This story attracted a great deal of publicity, spread by word of mouth, and was also reported by the Voice of America.80 The authorities succeeded in more effectively covering up previous tragedies, because there were fewer victims and witnesses. On March 9, 1968, a border guard station deputy commander named Dobrodeiev killed two local people on Vilsandi Island.81 More is known about the following tragedy that took place in Saaremaa, 78 See Tormis Jakovlev, ‘Nõukogude armee Lääne-Saaremaal ja selle suhted kohaliku elanikkonnaga’ (The Soviet Army in Western Saaremaa and its Relations with the Local Population), Olavi Pesti (ed.), Saaremaa Muuseum. Kaheaastaraamat 1997–1998 (Kuressaare, 1999), pp. 191–203. 79 See Tammer, Nõukogude piir ja lukus elu, pp. 12–32. 80 Statement on the tragic accident at Letipea in Rakvere raion, 9 August 1976, ERAF f. 2620, n. 73, s. 16, l. 7–10. 81 Lepassalu, Riigipiir, pp. 63–7.

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because the issue was recorded in documents of the ECP CC Bureau. Private G. Stoliarov left his post on the night before June 23, 1972, and went to a nearby farm, where he killed a 16-year-old girl with his Kalashnikov assault rifle and seriously wounded her sister and mother. He wounded another border guard and attempted suicide while he was being captured. The Tallinn Garrison Military Prosecutor’s Office brought a criminal case concerning this felony, and border-guard criminal investigators carried out the investigation. Stoliarov was found to be mentally ill, and he was placed in a military hospital in Riga. The leadership of his unit was accused of weak political work, which led to dismissals and military service discipline. Local people who were shocked by the killing, however, were later accused of trying to use the tragedy to incite anti-Soviet moods. Corresponding measures were implemented, the outcry was suppressed, and speaking publicly about this incident was forbidden as an attempt to weaken Soviet defense capability.82 There are probably more tragic stories, but the authorities succeeded in concealing them from the public, and if local people knew about them, they have by now been forgotten. It is possible that similar incidents were handled each time at the highest level of the ECP, but the relevant archival materials are not easy to find. An earlier incident referred to in the investigation materials of the Stoliarov case, where a private named Lobach had wounded a worker at a local kolkhoz in Hiiumaa on 31 July (the year is not indicated), indicates that there were more such incidents.

Liquidation of the Border Zone An entirely new situation emerged in 1987. The ESSR minister of internal affairs had proposed to the government the easing of the procedure for entry to the border zone, allowing citizens of the ESSR to enter the border zone of mainland Estonia at any given time in daylight without permits. Second, it was proposed to open a special bureau in the City of Tallinn Department of Internal Affairs exclusively for issuing permits to the border zone, since 50 percent of all permits were for people from the capital. The minister of internal affairs justified the proposal by referring to the militia’s heavy workload (over 160,000 permits had to be issued annually).83 82 Decision of the ECP CC Bureau, 17 August 1972, ERAF f. 1, n. 5, s.  122, l. 1–2; Statement from the ECP CC Department of Administrative Units, 7 August 1972, ibid., l. 3–7. 83 Letter from the minister of internal affairs to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, 8 September 1987, ERAF f. 17SM, n. 4, s. 1321, l. 211–2.

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The leadership of the ESSR went further in implementing changes: on October 27, 1987, the ECP CC Bureau issued a decision to do away with border zone permits, ordered the government to prepare the necessary regulation, and approved it on December 23. The ESSR Council of Ministers formulated the regulation “Concerning Procedures for Entry into the Border Zone in the Territory of the Estonian SSR” on 25 December.84 For the first time, the relevant regulation was not based on any all-Union legislation, and in the case of this document, we can speak of an entirely new concept in principle and the beginning of the end of the border regime. It did not yet do away with the border zone. Both the border guard and supervision of the border regime remained in place, but it did ease the procedure for entry to the zone. As of January 1, 1988, all persons registered at addresses in the Estonian SSR could enter the border zone within the borders of the Union republic (citizens who lived outside the ESSR had to apply for permits, as before). Restrictions that applied during the summer season remained for the western Estonian islands, and they were justified by the need to “preserve the ecological environment of the western Estonian islands,” to maintain necessary order, and to improve the organization of services for visitors. The regulation of entry to the islands was now placed in the hands of local authorities—the executive committees of the raions—which approved common rules for entry at the beginning of 1988. During the period of restricted entry—that is, in the summer—a visitor’s card, business trip certification, a vacation or health-treatment package certificate, an invitation to a funeral, or another such document had to be presented along with one’s passport in order to gain entry to the islands. At other times of the year, people coming from elsewhere in Estonia needed only their passport to enter.85 The permanent residents of the islands did not like the new procedure and protested loudly. As a budding freedom of speech emerged, the press was full of opinions on this topic, and a wide range of interest groups rallied to man the “battle trenches for the common cause.” All the locals demanded year-round

84 ECP CC Bureau decisions, 27 October 1987, and 23 December 1987, ERAF f. 1, s. 4, s. 6955, l. 20–1; s. 6962, l. 37; ESSR Council of Ministers Regulation No. 654 ‘Concerning Procedure for Entry to the Border Zone in the Territory of the Estonian SSR’, 25 December 1987, ENSV Ülemnõukogu ja Valitsuse Teataja (ESSR Supreme Soviet and Government Gazette) (1988), no. 2, p. 38. 85 ‘Haapsalu rajooni Vormsi saarele, Hiiumaa ja Kingissepa rajooni sissesõidu eeskirjad’ (Rules for Entry to Vormsi Island in Haapsalu Rayon, Hiiumaa, and Kingissepa Rayon), Kommunismiehitaja (Builder of Communism), 20 February 1988.

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entry restrictions and a return to stricter conditions.86 The locals mainly feared an increase in crime, but opposition to the sudden change can surely be viewed more broadly. Apparently it took time to get used to the new conditions. When a local newspaper asked inhabitants of Saaremaa in January 1991, “Is the border zone necessary?” all respondents were convinced that it was, and they all cited the increase in crime after the border zone was eliminated. The newspaper expressed the hope that the government regulation then being drafted on the border regime would take the opinion of the people into account.87 The government regulation referred to here has not yet been found, and it is possible that it was not drawn up at all. Minister of Internal Affairs Olev Laanjärv issued a directive instead on January 23, 1991, to end the arguments, announcing that “all border zones are liquidated in the territory of the Republic of Estonia.” Orders were given to stop using stamps with the old border zone markings when registering the addresses of citizens and to immediately procure address registration stamps for general use.88 The legal liquidation of the regime was left to the period after the restoration of Estonia’s independence: in 1992, Section 1894 of the Criminal Code concerning violation of the border regime was done away with, and in 1994, a regulation issued by the government of the republic declared the Soviet-era border regime legislation null and void.89 At about the same time, document checking ceased once and for all at the island ports. (Soviet border guards had already departed from there in late 1990 or early 1991.) Permanent checking by police continued at the port of Kuivastu, for instance, for another year or two, gradually becoming more intermittent, and it ended once and for all around the turn of the century.

Summary The border zone, along with the special rules that applied in it, existed in Estonia for almost the entire Soviet period. After being partially established in the autumn 86 ‘Ants Tammelehe sõnavõtt ENSV ÜN istungjärgul 8. aprillil 1988’ (Ants Tammeleht’s Speech at the Session of the ESSR Supreme Soviet on April 8, 1988), Kommunismiehitaja, 21 April 1988. 87 Meie Maa, 4 January 1991. 88 Directive No. 02, 23 January 1991, ERAF f. 17SM, n. 14, s. 6, pages not numbered. One motive for this directive was the USSR Council of Ministers regulation concerning making changes to the framework regulation of the border regime from 1983, the invalidity of which in the territory of Estonia had to be declared. 89 Regulation No. 53 of the Government of the Republic Amendment and Repeal of Government Decisions, 15 February 1994, RT I (1994), no. 20, p. 370.

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of 1940 and put into full force within a few years after the war, the border regime system remained in almost unchanged form until 1988. There were no fundamental changes in that system—the rules for entering the border zone and for living and functioning in it were indistinguishable in the legislation of 1935 and 1983. The method consisted simply of allowing as few people as possible near the state border and carefully checking those people. At the same time, the system was constantly supplemented and improved upon. Legislation and instructions describing elements of the regime became successively more detailed, and the system became ever stricter. Ever more restrictions were set, especially for marine navigation, to the point where border regime rules were put in effect in 1967 in areas of the coast where there was no border zone. Penalties continued to be made stricter even in the mid-1980s. At the same time, the opposite tendencies emerged—entry to the border zone became somewhat easier. The number of settlements within the border zone that could be entered freely and the number of public beaches or recreational areas gradually increased, and the procedure for entry to these areas became more lenient. Ever more border zone permits were issued from year to year: their number increased nearly sevenfold in the post-Stalinist era. By the end of the 1950s, the rules on putting out to sea had become so strict, the control of seagoing craft and ships’ crews had become so thorough, and the sea itself had been placed under such close surveillance that secretly crossing the sea had become practically impossible. Only two successful cases of escape by sea after 1957 are known—one in 1978 and the other in 1984. Since no one could get away by sea, the regime could be a little more accommodating in allowing people access to the seashore. Together with the passport regime, the border regime formed a uniform whole that applied in the same way throughout the Soviet Union. Its aim, in the most general terms, was the total control of the population. Compared to the passport regime, the border regime functioned better, and generally speaking, it succeeded in fulfilling its main objective, which was, in the vocabulary of the KGB, “the prevention of the departure of anti-Soviet elements with impunity from the territory of the ESSR.” The number of people who escaped abroad from the ESSR in various ways has been estimated at about 50, but a very small portion of those escapes took place by sea across the border of the ESSR. Unexpectedly, the Soviet border regime left something positive behind as well. To the delight of conservationists, the decades-long restrictions ended up preserving diverse and undisturbed nature in many areas along Estonia’s coast.

List of Contributors Dr Ivo Juurvee is Associate Professor at the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences. Dr Tiiu Kreegipuu is history teacher at the Hugo Treffner High School in Tartu. Dr Olev Liivik is Researcher at the Estonian History Museum. Dr Vahur Made is Associate Professor at the University of Tartu. Dr Meelis Maripuu is board member and editor at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. Dr Olaf Mertelsmann is Associate Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Tartu. Dr Marek Miil is Staff Officer in the Estonian Defense Forces. Dr Indrek Paavle (1970–2015) was Senior Research Fellow at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. Oliver Pagel is a PhD-student at the Institute of History and Archeology of the University of Tartu. Dr Kaarel Piirimäe is Professor of Military History at the Estonian National Defense College and Research Fellow at the University of Tartu. Dr Anu Raudsepp is Associate Professor of History Didactics at the University of Tartu. Dr Atko Remmel is Researcher at the University of Tartu. Dr Meelis Saueauk is Senior Researcher at the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory. Dr Tõnu Tannberg is Professor of Estonian Contemporary History at the University of Tartu and Research Director at the National Archives of Estonia. Dr Karin Veski is Lecturer at the University of Tartu.