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EESTI ELU reedel, 30. juulil 2021 — Friday, July 30, 2021
Farewell to Enn Tarto Jüri Estam Small peoples (take for exam ple my own Estonian identity group) face some issues that set them somewhat apart from the matters that concern larger nations. Not only do we have fewer people who attain prominence internationally, but often our great sons and daughters are little known to the rest of the world, and sometimes undeservedly so. Enn Tarto – an Estonia hero who isn’t widely known inter nationally – died in his home city of Tartu in southern Estonia on July 18, and it’s a shame that the global community isn’t particularly well-versed about who he was and what he did. Tarto was born in 1938, which means he couldn’t have had any personal recollection of the fabled period of Estonian independence between the years of 1918 and 1940. He was less than one year old when Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed the infamous Molotov-Ribben trop pact that divided up various countries of Europe between them, much like two criminals dividing the spoils of a big bank heist. Annexed by the Kremlin along with her Baltic sister countries of Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, Estonia lost her freedom as a result. The late Swedish politician
Per Ahlmark remarked on several occasions on the unique ness of the fate of the Baltic countries, expressing astonishment that three par liamentary democracies could be made to disappear, and so wholly that the community of Western nations barely noticed their abduction and their removal from the international map. The fact that the United States and several other nations stuck to their guns and adopted a policy of non-recognition towards the forcible incorpora tion of the Baltic countries into the USSR was principled and even noble, but the policy itself was known largely only to diplo mats, politicians and his torians, and provided little reallife solace to the millions of Estonians, Latvians and Lithua nians who, as a consequence of the Stalin-Hitler “deal”, were forced to suddenly adjust to life in an alien and very rough totalitarian system. Although I got to know Enn Tarto well in the 1990s in newly independent Estonia, I don’t to this day fully fathom what made him choose at a tender age to take up resistance activi ties in the 1950s, at a time when Estonia wasn’t just cut off from the international commu nity, but also barely registered in the minds of the majority of the residents of what we were
New research on the history of Ruhnu examines the widespread social adaptations of Estonia’s Islanders Vincent Teetsov Last April, VEMU organized a lecture with professor Trond Ove Tøllefsen from Uppsala University. That evening, Professor Tøllefsen gave a concise overview of the lives of Estonian Swedes on the island of Vormsi from 1861 to 1887. Attendees were privy to astounding historic accounts
uncovered together with Dr. James White of Tartu Uni versity, as part of the Baltic Orthodoxy research project. One learned of the material and labour-based disputes with Baltic German barons; the simul taneous social develop ments and pressure to remove old traditions brought on by Swedish missionaries. Most un expected was hearing about the
St. Madeline’s Church on Ruhnu. Photo: Kalle Kaldoja, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 EE license
against Estonia’s freedom fight ers were pitiless almost beyond description, until Stalin died in 1953, and even for a number of years after that. The late guer rilla fighter Alfred Käärmann is one resistance fighter (who eventually ended up in the prison camps of his sworn enemy) who managed to graphically describe, in his book of memoirs, the extremely dirty war that Russian counterinsur gency troops waged against Estonia’s resistance fighters.
After the end of summer in 1944, the Red Army didn’t just occupy Estonia, but also im prisoned the members of the national government headed by Otto Tief, suppressing the aspirations of Estonians to be come independent again. It then took the Soviet armed forces some ten years before they were able to fully break the resistance of numerous Estonian guerrilla fighters in the country side. The methods they used
It was under these conditions – against overwhelming odds, and under circumstances that must have seemed close to hopeless – that Enn Tarto and a number of his young male and female contemporaries chose to join the struggle aimed at re establishing Estonian indepen dence. Instead of resorting to arms, the newer generation applied methods of civil diso bedience and underground activism akin in some respects to the struggle that had only recently been waged in India by Mahatma Gandhi, but under much more challenging condi tions. Tarto and his colleagues collected forbidden literature, printed and distributed leaflets, and did their best to counter the propaganda spread by commu nist youth organizations. When news of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 broke, Enn Tarto was the head of the underground Youth League of Estonia. Pro
means with which religious conversion was used by island ers to expunge the influence of outside forces. In 1886, hundreds of people from Vormsi convert ed to Russian Orthodoxy, which was then followed by the pur chase of the island by the Czar, once again shifting who had power in the area. It might seem that the ex periences and shrewdness of Vormsi’s residents were rather singular. However, as we see in Tøllefsen and White’s latest research, 133 kilometres away on the island of Ruhnu, people were negotiating similar situations. The Swedish speakers of Ruhnu are thought to have come to the island in the 1200s, and managed their own affairs with autonomy. They developed their own system of gover nance, called the loindskap, made up of all men over 20 years old. The people of Ruhnu, who were known as “Aibo folk” just like the people of Vormsi, were relatively unencumbered by kings or armies until the early 1600s, when Swedes invaded and occupied the island. Within 50 years, though, when trying to send away a pastor who was not to their liking, the popula tion threatened to leave the island entirely. With this threat, it would seem that the Swedes deemed the island too much trouble to manage. Thus, the people of Ruhnu were given ownership of their own island. The memory of this event
lingered subsequently, and so what we see in the research project’s latest article, published in the Scandinavian Journal of History, is a repeated, uncanny ability of Estonian islanders to improvise methods of getting what they wanted. At the most basic level, if a pastor was too tough on the local people, unjust, or not accepting of their customs, they might lock him out of the local church. They came up with new ways of making money, includ ing salvaging shipwrecks. When ships were destroyed in the stormy Gulf of Riga, the Aibo would go out and rescue crew members. They would then proceed to spend several days scraping the boat clean of all of its valuable components and items aboard, dressed for the inclement seaside conditions and equipped with special tools. This salvaged material would be paid for by the owners of ships or sold at auction. Conversion was also le veraged for the hope of an im proved quality of life. Tøllefsen and White write of how crop failures in the 1840s led to thousands of converts to Ortho doxy, seeking a closer connec tion to the Czar, and thus his assistance. This hope was weighed up against the potential of acts of retribution against those who converted. For the Russian Orthodox Church, it was necessary to communicate clearly with converts that they
Photo: Siim Lõvi/ERR
then accustomed to refer to as the Free World. This topic more broadly matters a lot in the present day as well, as we see a new standoff taking shape be tween big authoritarian nations and those societies that enjoy greater levels of freedom.
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tests against repression of the Hungarians led to eight Youth League members being arrested. All of them were sent to Soviet prison camps. Enn Tarto served a total of 14 years in the forced labor camps of the USSR for his political activism, and wasn’t finally released until 1988. Tarto recalled that in the earliest years of his imprisonment, he and his contemporaries were so excruciatingly hungry that they resorted to eating grass and weeds. All of this took place under conditions where news of what prisoners of conscience were having to endure rarely leaked out. People who aren’t familiar with the cultures of the Baltic countries might assume that Russian ways and customs are similar to the way that things are done in the Baltic geo graphical area, but in fact the Estonian language doesn’t even belong to the same language group as Russian (English and Russian have more in common than Estonian and Russian), and as a result Estonians sentenced to prison time in the Gulag were destined to try to survive under conditions that were par ticularly trying for them. They were “kidnapped” to and im prisoned in a foreign land, in a system of penal colonies that was notorious for its bleakness, austerity and high mortality rate. (To be continued)
wouldn’t be rewarded materially for their conversions. Then, in 1866, many of the Swedish-Estonians on Ruhnu tried to convert in order to bring about compromise and changes from Swedish Lutheran reli gious bodies that had influence on local life. For instance, residents wanted to get out of paying to build a new church. And whenever changes came as was hoped for, the interest in conversion went away. While spirituality was commandeered in order to control the Aibo, the Aibo used the character of this distortion to achieve their own aims. Across these island locales, we can see a range of social adaptation techniques being applied. There’s also evidence of how geographical factors affected these relationships with outsiders. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised any longer to hear about the persistence of these islanders, but I’m impressed by history’s countless examples of confident underdogs coming out on top or David and Goliathesque confrontations. This is just the start of all there is to learn from the output of the Baltic Orthodoxy project. Anyone interested in looking at the finer details of this research can read the Scandinavian Journal of History on Taylor & Francis Online: https://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/full/10.1080/03468755.2021 .1921840?scroll=top&needAc cess=true
