In Estonia, the war reopens the wounds of the Soviet past – Aro Velmet

On February 24, when Vladimir Putin announced his “special military operation”, I was a long way from Ukraine, as my country, Estonia, celebrated its 104 years of independence. Meanwhile, I was teaching a history course on apocalyptic movements in Los Angeles, ten thousand kilometers from Ukraine. The distance from Tallinn to Kiev is exactly ten times less.

Nine thousand kilometers can make a huge difference. A friend told me he couldn’t sleep because he kept looking on his cell phone for the latest news from the front. Another was stockpiling canned goods and fuel for generators. Some of my relatives, a couple with two small children, were discussing where to emigrate, if the invasion had reached them. “I don’t really think Putin will invade us. But what harm can there be in being found prepared? ”: That’s how most people expressed their feelings about him at the time. I found myself following a similar logic. Sure, they were overreacting. But again, that’s what everyone was saying even before February 24th.

In Los Angeles it was – unfortunately – easier to pretend that nothing was happening in Ukraine. Few people had any personal ties to the region, and war news was soon overshadowed by discussions of rising gas prices or the Supreme Court’s right turn.

From panic to solidarity
Meanwhile, attempts to make sense of the crisis were nullified by claims that the war was a product of NATO intrusiveness and therefore, ultimately, like everything else in this narcissistic country, the United States. Occasionally someone reminded me that Los Angeles was not, after all, a world apart. A student told me that there was a Ukrainian designer in the independent video game company she worked for. That designer hadn’t met various deadlines lately, as he worked from Kharkiv and kept getting interrupted by air strike signals.

When I returned to Estonia in early May, the war had become part of the daily life of almost everyone I knew. The initial panic over a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic states was replaced by a more sober push to support Ukraine at home and abroad.

Estonia has so far received more than forty thousand refugees, a similar number to those in the United Kingdom, which has a population more than fifty times that of Estonia: a rate of over three hundred refugees for every ten thousand inhabitants. The cultural center in front of my house had become a volunteer center, where people collected and sorted donations. A friend of mine sent emails in which he asked for help to get fuel to the refugees he was hosting in an apartment he had available. Another organized the delivery of medical equipment to the front. And everyone kept losing sleep reading the news on their cell phones.

Politically, the war has brought to the surface tensions that many believed to be long since buried and has brought to light many others. A conservative politician, who had consistently fought against the redistribution plans of Syrian refugees during the crisis a few years ago, proclaimed that the Eastern European states, alone, could certainly not support the arrival of refugees, and did call for greater solidarity on the part of Western members of the European Union.

Shared racism
It reminded me of the old definition of the term chutzpah given by Leo Rosen: “The intrinsic quality of a man who, having killed his father and mother, asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan”. After a short and unusual period of silence, the Estonian Conservative People’s Party, a far-right formation, has tried to re-propose the same old story of “immigrants who steal our jobs”, which however seems to have fallen on deaf ears so far. Maybe that’s not all that surprising.

Suddenly, the traditional Estonian media seem to have lost all interest in generating moral panic by wondering why refugees arriving in Estonia have such expensive phones (actually very common smartphones), whether or not they may be carriers of exotic diseases, or whether their values ​​are compatible with Estonian culture.

The Ukrainian crisis has made it clear that racist refugee hysteria has never been confined to the far right but is a phenomenon shared by the mainstream media and the political center. Recently, human rights organizations protested against a bill that would allow people to be deported at the border without examining their asylum applications “during a period of emergency or threat to national security.” Eero Janson, director of the Estonian Refugee Council, called the bill “undoubtedly a violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, not to mention European Union law”. The war in Ukraine changed Estonian politics less than anyone could have hoped for.

The issue of the Russian minority in Estonia has proved equally toxic from a political point of view. Since the first days of the war, the crisis has played into the game of those political forces – largely of the right – which for years have warned against the threat of the “Russian bear”. Encouraged by this claim, they have gone on the offensive against all sorts of imaginary enemies: a logic that does not help Ukraine much to win the war, but helps to gain political points for local nationalists.

The question, for example, of the school attendance of Ukrainian children – whether they should attend school in Estonian or in Russian – has turned into a struggle over decades-long attempts to put an end to the teaching of the Russian language.

The moderate right insists that Ukrainians must attend school in Estonian, while local officials stress that without the help of all schools, regardless of the language of instruction, the presence of refugee children would, by itself, end up overload the education system. The far right has accused the ruling coalition of having engineered a conspiracy in which refugees are used to maintain and expand Russian schools. Nobody seems to care what Ukrainians themselves prefer.

Politicians from all sides have proposed limiting the rights of the Russian minority in various ways, from limiting the right to possess firearms to revoking the right to vote in local elections for Russian citizens permanently resident in Estonia. The fact that the monuments of the Soviet era must be demolished is now considered an established fact. In May, two of the leading Estonian universities decided to refuse admission to Russian and Belarusian citizens for the next academic year. The rector of the University of Tallinn, Estonia’s third largest, wrote a passionate article defending the right to education regardless of nationality, but was outnumbered by the Academic Senate.

A friend berated me for retweeting an article by a Russian-Estonian politician who accused the Estonian government of long neglecting Russian education, media and culture. “No wonder many Russians in Estonia did not condemn Putin’s aggression! No wonder they believe his speeches about ‘denazification’, ”the author exclaimed. According to everyone, this is a fair observation. My friend – I could imagine him turning his face red – thought that doing so was diverting attention from the real causes. “Do the Russians have no power in this matter?” He asked me. “When are we going to stop talking about the state’s inability to do this or that, and we’ll just say: wake the fuck up, look what’s going on and stop repeating Putin’s bullshit?” The truth is, I too understood what he meant.

Four months into this bloody war, Tallinn looks a lot like February’s Los Angeles. People talk about inflation, the fall of the ruling coalition, the impending heat wave, and vacation plans, which are proceeding as usual. The news from Sievierodonetsk is still on the front page, of course. After all, this is not another continent. The refugee council complains that the government does not cooperate with NGOs and leaves newly arrived refugees without assistance in the border town of Narva. And the national broadcaster launches yet another appeal to hand over the monuments of the Soviet era to the “dustbin of history”. Thousands of kilometers from the front, in the first days of summer, it is quite easy to pretend that everything is the same as before. But in reality this is not the case. It’s worse. It’s always a little worse.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)