Estonian Professor: It Started With Small Demonstrations. A Year Later The Protest Was A Success

The window of opportunities may open unexpectedly in the struggle of the Belarusians against the dictatorship.

The protesters should retain their moral authority in the processes in Belarus and keep in mind the window of opportunities that may open unexpectedly due to the events of historic proportions.

Karsten Brüggemann, Professor of Estonian and General History at Tallinn University, told Charter97.org.

– How did the Estonian independence movement start? What prompted people to start fighting for freedom?

– This is a difficult question because people nowadays would readily believe that the independence movement already started in June 1940 when Soviet troops invaded the country and it never stopped until the independence was reached in 1991. So, this is the usual narrative of a nation fighting continuously for independence. If you ask me about real actions that took place in the period of Soviet annexation, there was not so much. Estonians regularly demonstrated loyalty to their old national colors during anniversaries of independence or historical dates of deportations in 1941 and 1949. For instance, at these days school kids were carrying the national colors, which was regarded by the regime to be some kind of hooliganism rather than national resistance.

As a rule, in Estonia, it was youth who protested, and in the 60s and 70s, the state usually reacted with prophylactic measures, as it was called in the terminology of KGB. For all Balts the date of 23 August, the day when Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, was important in motivating resistance. Generally, the number of people in Estonia, who were really committed to the independence fight, was very small. These people knew they were facing dramatic consequences.

In the 60s and 70s, people started to adopt to the fact that Soviet power was there to stay. The real impulse for starting with more powerful protests came from Moscow and Gorbachev. I would say that right from the beginning when the perestroika movement started it was a fight for more autonomy for the Soviet Republic of Estonia. Even when independence not yet seemed to be a realistic option, people started to dream about it.

The year 1986 began with smaller demonstrations, which took place on the dates of the national calendar – 24 February, the birth of the Estonian Republic in 1918, the dates of deportation, and 23 August. Very soon the movement became trilateral because the organizers started to look for contacts in Lithuania and Latvia where the same had started to happen to different degrees. 3 republics with similar histories have a stronger voice in their fight for independence.  

The crucial moment started in 1987 when the demonstrations were not crashed by the KGB or the police anymore. People felt that under the slogan of glasnost the state is somehow becoming more liberal. This grey field of activism got a lot of momentum when in Estonia the ecological side was integrated into the agenda. The Soviet Union planned to excavate phosphorite in the north of the republic. There was also a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences who protested against it which gave the protest some union-wide authority. Such activism gave a clear idea that “we” need to protect our nature in order to protect our people, therefore, people stood up against the economic goals of the central Soviet ministries in Estonia. In late 1987 the protest was successful, the state stopped planning to increase excavation of natural resources. In the eyes of the people, it was another example that the state is not as rigid as it used to be which provided some kind of leeway for more initiatives.

– In 1987, protests against the system began in Estonia, which became open and frequent. Why did this happen in 1987? What was the driving force in the struggle against the communist system?

– It was the changing attitude of the regime because Gorbachev did not support the idea of violent suppression of any kind of demonstrations that were not explicitly against the Soviet Union. Perestroika was carrying the idea of glasnost, moreover, the whole Soviet Union debated historical issues such as the brutal side of Stalinism and its repressions against the own people. Filling these “white spots” of the history was an all-union agenda of that time. The people from the Baltic republics took part in it as well because the Soviet annexation of the independent Baltic states in 1940 perfectly fit in this agenda. They used it to frame their national ideas into the Soviet agenda of democratizing society.

– In April 1988, the Estonian Popular Front was established. What were the main goals of the movement, how was it able to unite people?

– First of all, this idea to organizing something like a “Popular Front” was publicly announced in fact in April 1987 by one of the most important politicians in Estonia of that time, Edgar Savisaar, at that time still a member of the Communist Party. However, the Popular Front was not founded on that date, it was only founded in October of the same year and afterwards it spread all over the Soviet Union, first, of course, to the other Baltic republics.

Initially, the Popular Front was presented as a popular organization that supports Gorbachev. You have to take into account that quite a lot of initial members of the Popular Front were members of the Communist Party. This made it in a way legitimate for the center, at least for those who supported the idea of social-democratization, even if at that time still nobody talked about that openly.

The major idea was to keep the process intact, everyone understood that this was the chance to gain some benefits for the national agenda of the Estonian SSR. Of course, officially nobody spoke about independence at that time. On the other hand, from 1988 onwards, there was a small but growing radical wing in Estonia, which also tried to organize itself demanding immediate independence.

Thus, Estonia had two alternative streams of mobilizing mass support for political ideas. One is more moderate and wanted to have a more evolutionary development in cooperation with the center and the party structures because this was the constitutional way to do it, nobody at that time thought it’s possible to dissolve the party. On the other hand, the more radical wing supported the restoration of full independence in the near future. Both movements gained support from the population. Moreover, there were quite a lot of people who were active in both wings at that time since the idea of becoming independent was becoming more attractive the more the center obviously lost power.

– It is known that the Estonian struggle for independence was without bloodshed. Why do you think the Estonians chose this particular path and did not resort to use weapons? How is a peaceful revolution superior to an armed one?

– I think it was a conscious decision from the start. Estonians consciously wanted to avoid any kind of violence and to avoid any kind of provocations. In the process of gaining independence, there were critical moments, for instance, when the Russian-led anti-independence movement (Interdvizhenie) became active as well. There were moments when the situation could easily become violent, however, even at that point, Estonians managed to keep the process peaceful.

In general, there were quite a lot of provocations from the side of the center. You might remember what happened at the Russian Lithuanian border in July 1991 when 7 Lithuanian border guards were killed. I believe that keeping it peaceful was a major achievement of the Baltic independent movements during Perestroika. The other reason why it was done is to present the movement as legal especially in the eyes of the West. Each time the Kremlin choose violence to keep the union together, the sympathy towards Gorbachev and the Soviet Union was minimized, in contrast, the sympathy towards the Baltic people was rising.

This occurred not the least because of the major demonstration on 23 August 1989, the “Baltic way” with up to 2 million people protesting against Soviet rule standing hand in hand all the 650 km from Vilnius to Tallinn. It was a crucial moment in the revolutionary struggle. I believe that right from the start when they prepared this human chain the trilateral organizers had a clear understanding that this was a chance to promote the issue of independence towards the West. And it was not the least the harsh reaction from the center after this demonstration that made it ever more unthinkable for Balts to remain a part of the Soviet “brotherhood of nations”.

– What role did samizdat play in Estonia? How important was it to have independent sources? How has the media helped bring people together?

– I do not know too much about the Estonian samizdat of that period. Clearly, the Estonian language is not so prominent in the history of samizdat. You have the famous Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania that collected information about anti-religion repressions in the Soviet Union which was quite well-known in the West (and also union-wide). However, nothing to that scale happened in Estonia.

Perhaps, the reason why Estonian samizdat is not so prominent lies in the exotic quality of the Estonian language? Who was censoring Estonian production? Nobody from the Kremlin obviously because of linguistic problems, therefore, it was done by Estonians themselves as a rule. There is quite a lot of literature in the Estonian language published in the Soviet period that would have never got a chance to be legal and to be published in Russian. Therefore, I believe that partly, what we might call “Estonian samizdat” was covered in officially published literature and, of course, Estonians had access to Finish TV which also made it not so needed to have a lot of illegal anti-Soviet publications.

– For more than a year, protests in Belarus have continued in one form or another. Do you see any similarities between Belarus and Estonia then?

– There are some clear similarities – the fight against dictatorship, however, there are quite a lot of differences too. Similar to Estonia the protests against autocratic rule are peaceful and nationally colored. However, the major difference is that in the case of Estonia it was a kind of protest against foreign rule. Moscow rule could be easily framed as foreign which is not the case in Belarus. Unfortunately, to put it in a very romantic way, Lukashenka is still a child of the same country.

Estonia got her independence thanks to peaceful demonstrations and a general change of mind-set covering all three Baltic republics (and partly also the rest of the USSR – in January 1991, 100,000 people in Moscow demonstrated for Baltic independence!). Most importantly, however, nobody knows what would have happened in Estonia if the coup in Moscow in August 1991 would not have happened. The Soviet Union itself crumbled at that point which created the window of opportunity for all three Baltic states to leave. Some people in the Baltic states still would claim that it was the Baltic independence movement that played a decisive role in that, but this would mean to neglect quite a number of other factors which led to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

That period of time was full of debates, for instance, about the union contract that Gorbachev wanted to renew. The Baltic republics and some others, however, did not want to take part in it. Nobody in the center was ready to let Balts go, even the West was not ready to support them at that moment. The solution was found just in the moment when Yeltsin took over. He was the one who supported Baltic independence already in January 1991 after there were bloody clashes in Vilnius and Riga. You need this kind of moment in the story of secessions when it is clear that the power of the imperial center is about to crumble.

– What advice can you give to Belarusians who continue to fight for freedom in the country?

– It is very decisive to have at least moral support from the West because the West will never fight in the military sense for Belarus. And you can keep this moral support only while being peaceful. If you would resort to violence in the fight against the Lukashenka regime, I do not know what will happen. You just have to look south and see the intervention of Moscow in Ukraine.

On the other hand, from all the articles that are being written about what is happening in Belarus,

the protest movement of course does not get too much from that. The real support is very limited. I doubt that there will be a power in the West that will really fight for regime change. This reminds me of the discussion that we have in the Baltics concerning the support of NATO. Is NATO, for instance, prepared to defend Narva against a Russian attack? Nobody knows. Of course, there are contracts, obligations shared among the NATO-partners, but will the alliance really send something that would stop Russian army at the border?

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