Remembering Estonian political prisoner Kalju Mätik

JÜRI ESTAM, ERR

Former political prisoner Kalju Mätik passed away last fall. Journalist and consultant Jüri Estam looks at the significance of Mätik’s life and actions, and hopes that future generations will honor those who gave up practically everything to keep the spark of Estonian independence alive during the decades of Soviet occupation.

Kalju Mätik, one of the most important figures in Estonia’s small but vital brotherhood and sisterhood of political prisoners from the past century, died in Tallinn on Oct. 2.

During those periods when Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union (1940-1941 and 1944-1991), there were many forbidden topics in this country, numerous forms of disinformation and propaganda, and many decent people who were blackballed by what then passed for the “media” here.

There was also a period of Nazi occupation between the two Soviet eras, when things were equally authoritarian and grim, but with different emphases.

Our primary task in the various language services at Radio Free Europe (RFE), where I worked during the Cold War, was to try do our best to act as a surrogate or substitute free press for our audiences back in the “old country”. In my case, my parents had been born and raised in an independent Estonia, before the Baltic States were dragged into the unfamiliar and Orwellian abyss of Soviet rule.

As a young man at RFE, I was the person in the Estonian newsroom tasked with covering what might be called the samizdat beat, (samizdat being a Russian word meaning “self ­ publishing”) involving the dangerous and painstaking reproduction in communist countries of either underground or censored publications by hand, and the passing of such news, periodicals and documents, also by hand, from reader to reader.

Many of these materials reached the West too. It was my task and that of my colleagues to read these items aloud on the air, bringing them to the awareness of Estonians and many others in the Soviet Union and the three occupied Baltic States.

There was a “problem” for me personally with this task, in that a lot of the materials smuggled out from Estonia concerned the hard lives and very difficult conditions of imprisonment for Estonian freedom fighters who’d been apprehended by the Soviet security services and subsequently sent to the labor camps, and even to the psychiatric institutes that were used to punish opposition figures.

The problem then was that getting immersed in the life stories and fates of these brave people ended up leaving a mark on us as well. It’s difficult to become steeped in the lore and accounts of the activities and also the suffering of such people without it getting internalized, and without – eventually – at least, in a sense, “getting to know” the people you’re talking about in your radio programs.

You get into their heads, which also tends to then get them into your head in turn. That comes with the territory. Eventually, in this way I came to know Kalju Mätik’s story, and to respect him from a distance. I had no idea at the time that in the future I’d come to know him personally too.

(Full story available via link below)