Chapter 10.3: Resistance and repressions
The forest brothers had a support network. Whilst some would hunt and scavenge in the forest, most received direct supplies from local farms. To destroy that support network, and to also force the local farmers to join kolkhozes, another grand deportation was conducted, which became known as the March deportation. On the 26th of March, 1949, more than 20 700 people were deported from Estonia to Siberia, or roughly 2.5% of Estonians living in Estonia. It involved more than seven thousand families, of the deportees 49,4% were women, 29,8% were children and 20,8% were men. I will not go over the details again, as this one was no different from the June deportation that I covered earlier. Let it be noted that the main organisers of the event were awarded with high honours by the regime.
A train packed by deportees leaving for Siberia near the town of Keila.
It served its purpose. After the shock that many people felt after seeing people they knew disappear overnight, an even greater sense of fear spread which made people fall in line. (By the way, one of those people was my grandfather, who went to school a day after the deportation and found that a large portion of his class was now empty.) Farmers joined kolkhozes en masse and the resistance of the forest brothers started to break. Indeed by this point the numbers and motivation of the forest brothers had also fallen enough for the operation to succeed in the first place. People were losing faith of ever recovering independence. The larger fighting stopped in 1953, last battles were held until 1957. The last forest brother was captured in 1978.
In addition to the forest brothers, many youth resistance groups were formed as well. In total there were dozens of groupings like that all across the country and they called themselves the linnavennad, city brothers. The children that had received a patriotic education would form groupings at their respective high schools, universities and trade schools. They would spread flyers, display the banned national tricolour, gather weapons and intelligence as well as other supplies such as typewriters, papers, bandages and so on to give to the forest brothers. In Rakvere (1945), Tallinn (1946) and Tartu (1949) some groupings even managed to blow up Red Army monuments. In the 1950s their resistance started to wane, as the security organs managed to crack down on their activities.
Between 1944 and 1945 about 10 thousand people were arrested in Estonia, of whom more than half died in the two following years. Excluding deportees, until 1953 about 30 000 people were sent to labour camps, of whom roughly 11 thousand never returned.
In addition to direct physical violence the post war era was also followed by more subtle mental violence. The spiritual life of the nation was forced to follow the guidelines of the regime. A fight against “bourgeois nationalism” began, in an effort to sovietize the society faster. “Bourgeois nationalism” meant any deviation from the official ideology, any connection with the old “reactionary” order. It was found everywhere, in literature, art, science and economy. This concept became a common form of accusation.
In the meantime infighting within the communist party also became apparent. After Karotamm, who was disliked by Moscow, was let go and replaced by Käbin, a major cleansing in local authorities began. It reached from ministries all the way to local village councils, through all of the education system and cultural institutions. Many leading politicians and civil servants and the so-called June communists were arrested and sent to labour camps. They were replaced by Estonians who had grown up in the Soviet Union and Russians. An atmosphere of fear and creative oppression deepened in the society, attacks against the national culture and history strengthened.
The regime changed after the death of Stalin ushered in a new era in the Soviet Union, called Khrushchev Thaw. Stalin´s reign of terror came to an end, his crimes against the Soviet people were acknowledged by the regime and criticized. Arrests were tuned down, many persecuted people were rehabilitated and many surviving deportees were allowed to return home. As the return process went very slowly due to being entangled in bureaucracy, it took years for many to return. Despite this they were still banned from entering many professions, living in Tallinn, the border zone or the city where they were from, had a hard time finding a place to live and were never compensated for their confiscated property.
Many restrictions on culture and self-expression were lifted. Artists received more freedom. This coincided with the quick rise in the standards of living in the 1960s, the rise in the international prestige of the Soviet Union and the technological edge in the early stages of the space race.
A scene from a 1965 Estonian movie “We were 18”. The movie takes place before and around the events of the June coup, and in this scene you can see some school students carry the Estonian tricolour and sing a nationalist song popular in the Estonian army. Both of these things would have been great offences in public, so that they could be displayed in the cinema was an incredible sign of the times.
After the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was put down, the last hopes of Western intervention to end the occupation ended. People started to slowly accept the regime and learn how to live in it, trying to focus on their own well-being and success. A sense of optimism for a better future set in.
The construction of private homes boomed in the 1960s, being a sign of the new era of small scale individuality.
This optimism carried over to the new generation of Estonians, who had lived most of their life during the occupation by that point. These so-called “national communists” believed that the regime could be democratised and made more humane. In that effort they would join the communist party en masse, to affect change from within. However they soon found out that there was a glass ceiling for them between the lower ranks of the party and the higher, important ones.
In 1968 Soviet tanks crushed the building of “humane socialism” during the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. That was the final nail in the coffin of hoping to reform the system. Reactionary forces once more strengthened themselves in the ESSR. Many members of the so-called “golden sixties” generation found their way into literature, science and art instead of politics, but some also gave up on their ideals and continued to loyally serve the regime, despite not being ideologically communist. This would be important at a later date.
In the 1970s and especially after Karl Vaino came to power, there was a deep change in local politics. Local interests stopped mattering at all. In December 1978 the EKP approved a secret plan called “The future betterment of the acquiring and teaching of the Russian language”, which implied an immense ideological-political importance of the language. An active pro-Russian propaganda campaign was conducted, declaring that a person can only be a useful member of society if they speak Russian. Teaching Russian already began in first grade and in some cases kindergarten, in universities acceptance into courses in Russian increased greatly. It was made clear that Estonians ought to assimilate into Russians, whilst local Russian immigrants did not have to do anything.
In the 1970s public resistance against the regime reappeared, mostly taking the form of public letters addressing the shortcomings of the regime. It was attempted to seek out and publicise all human rights violations and spread the information abroad. The first contacts between Latvian and Lithuanian, as well as refugee organisations appeared. The regime continued its persecutions, arresting active freedom fighters and sending them to labour camps. Amongst some of those was Jüri Kukk, a professor at the University of Tartu who had been sent to a labour camp for “anti-soviet” thinking, and where he died in 1981. Another anecdote involved an art student Andrus Rõuk, who wrote a poem titled “The sky and sea in one´s eyes.” The poem was politically neutral in its contents and published in a magazine. However, later it was noticed that the first letter of each line of the poem made up the word “sinimustvalge” (blueblackwhite), a synonym for the national tricolour. For this stunt he was thrown out of the university.
The pressure of russification deepend fears about the survival of Estonian national culture. Dissatisfaction spread in the society, which first burst in the youth riots of the spring of 1980, where after the (officially undisclosed) performance of the banned punk group “Propeller” was cancelled, hundreds of high school students marched through Tallinn screaming anti-Soviet slogans. They were promptly reprimanded and thrown out of schools. In the meantime 40 famous members of Estonian intelligentsia created a “Public letter from the ESSR”, which was sent to the most important newspapers. They hoped to bring attention to the social problems of the language question, unstoppable migration and failures in youth policy. The newspapers did not publish the letter of course, but it spread among the people in secret. It was publicised abroad and increased attention of Western powers on what was taking place in Estonia and in the end the pressure of russification was eased a little. Kindergartens stopped teaching Russian. Some of the homes of the signatories of the letter were searched, almost all were interrogated and a few were fired from their job, but for the most part they managed to get away without much of a hassle.
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