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EESTI ELU reedel, 6. märtsil 2020 — Friday, March 6, 2020
Nr. 9
Come and learn about the history of Estonian Swedes
English-language supplement to the Estonian weekly “EESTI ELU” Tartu College Publications Founding Chairman: Elmar Tampõld Editor: Laas Leivat 3 Madison Avenue, Toronto, ON M5R 2S2 T: 416-733-4550 • F: 416-733-0944 • E-mail: editor@eestielu.ca Digital: www.eestielu.ca
Apologist, fellow traveler or throwback to the 1960s–70s? Bernie Sanders’ persistence in claiming his admiration for the “good” that the Cuban revolution brought to the island’s people is akin to the obsession that inflicted many Western academics and intel lectuals that stretched from the 1930s well into the 1960s and 1970s. Appeasing the Soviet Union was paramount. It was then de rigeur for the “leftist elite” to accept and even praise the claims that Moscow and Cuba made for their own accomplish ments and reaffirm their own version of its history. Even though Sanders con demned autocratic regimes in general, he insists that Castro nevertheless had some redeem ing qualities. It reminds us of admirers of Stalin who claimed he constructed Moscow’s sub way during WWII. It was simi lar to Hitler’s building the Auto bahn and Mussolini’s getting Italy’s train’s back on schedule. Even such claims have been debunked. North Korea’s Kim Il Jong’s fake achievements still remain the official story, at least domestically – one of the most preposterous being that Kim, aged 16, was able to organize the building of 20,000 new homes within six months to solve a crucial shortage of housing. Let’s note that when Soviet fervour had dissipated among most of the of the Communist sympathizers by 1988, Sanders upon returning from a trip to Moscow gushed about the mar vel that was Moscow’s Metro and Jarovslavl’s inexpensive theater tickets. Even after Sanders was con fronted with old footage of him defending Castro, he told 60 Minutes that he opposes au thoritarian rule in Cuba, but “... you know it’s unfair to simply say ‘everything is bad’. You know when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Castro had it?” One must seriously question Sanders’ gullibility, especially when tens of thousands of poli tical refugees from Cuba and told it like it really was. It was clear that the illiterate could NOT READ HIS PROPAGAN
DA! It was Castro’s full-blown indoctrination program that had to reach everybody, not only the ones who could read. Those who bought into the idea that there was a ‘humanistic side’ to Castro also trivialized Commu nist (a.k.a. socialist) indoctrina tion and the repressions of a one-party system. One would hope that now those views are ancient, something out of the stylish silk-stocking-socialist fad of the past. A closer look at Castroadmirers’ praises of his ‘re forms’ would expose how mis informed they were about the success of his ‘literacy’ pro gram’. Census statistics from pre-Castro Cuba of 1953 showed that 77.3 percent of Cubans were literate, 88.9 percent in urban areas. This was one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America, even higher than in some southern rural counties in the USA. Oxford Univer sity’s analysis for 1960 showed 79 percent literacy. Castro’s boast that he pulled Cuba out of dire poverty and illiteracy is woefully hollow. Some other aspects of his educational reforms need a closer look. Schools were inun dated with texts that were raw propaganda. Books out of line with the revolution were banned. Castro closed newspapers, magazines and radio stations he suspected of non-compliance. Education was changed into an indoctrination program that didn’t allow any deviation from Marxist thought. The literacy program was meant to strengthen the regime’s stranglehold on the population. While pre-Castro Catholic private schools were closed, new elite schools catered strictly to the party faithful and military brass. The so-called ‘literacy cam paign’ gave a bogus allure to the guileless in the West. Education was meant to have a decisive role in consolidating the revolution. Teachers would have to actively advance govern ment policies. They were to follow the party lead and use information provided by a to tally controlling authority. New legislation made it a criminal offence for parents to teach their own children in their own
On March 25, VEMU’s lec ture series will host a lecture about the history of the Swedish-speaking farmers who lived on the Estonian island of Vormsi/Ormsö. The Estonian Swedish minority, “rannarootslased” in Esto nian, originated from Sweden and Finland and arrived to the coastlands of Estonia in the 13th and 14th centuries. There are only a few of their descendants left in Estonia today as almost all of Esto nia’s Swedish-speaking mi nority fled to Sweden during World War II. Dr Trond Ove Tøllefsen teaches history at Uppsala University in Sweden, and is consulting professor in peace and conflict studies at the Free University of Catalunya (UOC). In his lecture he will concen trate on the period when the Ormsö islanders became the subject of different cultural, religious and political battles between Sweden and Russia. This period started in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was a period of imperial tension and rising na tionalism in Europe. Within the Russian Empire, a reform wave was sweeping the lands under the influence of Tsar Alexander II. However, on Ormsö, little seemed to change. The tyrannical German-
speaking landlord of Ormsö was a cruel man, known to whip and torture the peasants and publicly voicing his opinion that he would rather see them off his land. The peasants pro tested to the governor of Estland, but to no avail. They protested to the tsar, and got no response. Finally one of the farmers, remembering the tales of old, set off to their ancestral king in distant Stockholm to plead their case there. His arrival created a sensation in the Swe dish capital. The Swedes had all but forgotten about their old medieval settler colony across the sea. It now became a focus of intense Swedish interest: Here was the original Swedish culture, untouched by the trappings of modernity. The Evan gelical Patriotic Society (Evan geliska Fosterlands Stif telsen) sent two missionaries to Estonia to teach the Estonian Swedes to read, write and re connect with the “homeland”. This would kickstart a period of enormous change for the Ormsö inhabitants. Over a period of about 25 years, the island transformed from a poor backwater to a thriving Swedish-speaking en clave. But these enormous changes did not solve the politi cal divisions on the small is land, instead they helped to create new ones as economic
differences between the Swe dish farmers grew. With the changes came also religious awakenings. Several Protestant revivals spread on the island with the neighbouring Swedishand Estonian-speaking commu nities. This greatly troubled the Russian government and the Orthodox Church. When the more conservative tsar Alex ander III took over in 1881, the state started to push back, not only seeking to end Swedish influence, but also to make the Estonian Swedes into Russian subjects. And what happened then? Come to the lecture to find out! The lecture: “Liberation or salvation? The Vormsi/Ormsö Estonian Swedes between Swedish Evangelism and Russian Orthodoxy” will take place in Tartu College on March 25 at 7pm. The lecture is organized jointly with the Finnish Studies Program at the University of Toronto and SWEA Toronto. JOHANNA HELIN, edited from the abstract by Dr TROND OVE TØLLEFSEN
Like KGB before it, FSB simultaneously fights and recruits Protestants and uses them at home and abroad Paul Goble, Jamestown Several recent cases highlight a fact often overlooked in the West: the FSB, like the KGB before it simultaneously fights and recruits Protestants and especially Protestant mission aries to work as its agents at home and abroad, US-based Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova says. That this is the case should surprise no one because the threat of repression can be a powerful recruiting tool and the knowledge that repression is home anything that contradicted communist ideology. Castro killed and imprisoned thousands. But indoctrination works, not only among those forced to be its consumers, but seemingly also for those callow enough to accept a deceptive image cunningly conceived by the Castro regime to make its brutality less odious – as San ders it puts it, ‘authoritarian’ rather than ruthless. Is Sanders as genuine as most of the US media make him out to be? It’s too early to tell whether the unaligned US voter’s support this fall will be torn between a self-obsessed, power-besotted pathological liar or a seemingly fervent crusader bamboozled with communist rhetoric. LAAS LEIVAT
often used against Protestant groups gives such people an aura that puts them beyond suspicion of being the agents of Moscow. But in several recent cases in the Russian Federation, this combination has broken down with those the FSB has Re pressed and recruited letting slip what is taking place, Kirillova documents, and she cites the experience of Boris Perchatkin, a Soviet-era Pente costal dissident who emigrated and has worked to expose those recruited through repression in the West. “Being a leader of the Pentecostal community and a member of the Helsinki Com mittee on the Rights of Be lievers in the USSR, during Soviet times, he was put in jail numerous times and then, having emigrated to the US, contributed to the assistance of repressed confessions” in his homeland. Unfortunately, he says, to day, some religious emigres “do not justify the trust of Ameri cans” because, exploiting the image of being oppressed by the FSB, they are in fact work ing for it just as some did for the KGB in Soviet times. Indeed, the problem is perhaps worse now because there are so many more Russians coming to the West.
Perchatkin says that “when toward the end of the USSR, it became clear that the exodus of Russians would not stop and would be massive, the special services decided to take the lead in this process” and recruit some of its members to work as Russian spies in various foreign countries. He and others, like former KGB lieutenant colonel Kons tantin Preobrazhensky, say that the FSB has its own special department “M” that deals exclusively with emigres and especially with religious groups. And Perchatkin stresses that the FSB sees such religious emigres as useful in several ways. Espionage, of course, but also as “a channel of influence on American society” and as a means of undercutting Western support for the genuine victims of religious repression in Putin’s Russia because Moscow can se lectively expose some of these people and thus suggest that all religious dissidents are suspect. Sorting out those who are genuine from those who are FSB recruits is no easy thing, but it is a challenge the West must rise to, Kirillova con cludes, lest Moscow’s combi nation of repression and recruit ment work against Western countries in general and the United States in particular.
