Revisionist History and the Dampening of National Identity

By Lee Kurm

I am currently cosied up in an armchair in my cousins’ living room, glancing out of the window onto beautiful snow-topped trees and icicles lining the roof. A perfect winter day in the south of Estonia. I have not lived here for most of my life, yet I still consider it my home. I might not, oftentimes, agree with my country’s politics, yet I still take pride in its history, culture, and nature. To think that, were I in this exact place 30 years ago, I might not know my country existed seems unthinkable. Yet it could very well be true. 

A couple years ago, I happened to be driving through Estonia with my father. I can’t remember how the conversation got there, but at some point he told me, casually, that when he was a child he had no conception of Estonia ever existing as an independent republic (vabariik as we call it in Estonian (literally, ‘free country’)). I immediately did a double take. 

Estonia has, ever since the end of the Middle Ages, constantly been under the rule of some or another European nobility. The Teutonic Order, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Germany, …

Estonians have, for the longest time, been peasant people, ruled by overlords from another nation, yet somewhat left to our own practices. At some points in time, the country has even been separated in half, Estonia up north and Livonia in the south. Nevertheless, in the latter half of the 19th century, when Estonia was a part of the Russian Empire, first movements of national identity started emerging. These were led, notably, by writers and poets like Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, Lydia Koidula, Johann Voldemar Jannsen, Juhan Liiv, and many, many more. In the beginning of the 20th century politicians and military figures, such as our first president Konstantin Päts, general Johan Laidoner, and politician and lawyer Jaan Tõnisson, also started working actively towards a free Estonia.

On the 23rd and 24th of February 1918, the Estonian Manifest for Independence was published, and the latter date is to this day celebrated as our Independence Day. However, it still took two years of war for our independence to be fully recognised, on the 2nd of February 1920 with the signing of the Tartu Peace Treaty. 

Nevertheless, this history was not taught at schools for most of the 20th century. In 1940, Estonia was invaded and occupied for a short while by the Soviet Union, then in 1941 by Nazi Germany, and finally in 1944 reinvaded and annexed again into the Soviet Union, under pretext of liberation from the German occupation. The country then became, until August 20th, 1991, the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR). 

My father was born in 1976 and started his school career before the winds of a new liberation, the Singing Revolution, started blowing. He went to a public school in Tallinn, the capital, which followed roughly the same curriculum as every other school in the country. By his time at school, history was separated into two sections – world history and Soviet history (which in the 90’s became Estonian history). 

The teaching of history back then was very different from how it is nowadays, at least at EIM. It mainly consisted of learning names and dates of battles, notable historic events, and people by heart. Overall, it was considered quite pointless by many students, especially when teachers weren’t always the most qualified. Nevertheless, my father remembers being taught, from the beginning of the 20th century two main events: the October revolution of 1917, which ended the czarist regime in Russia and instituted the Bolshevik Party into power, and then the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945 (as the Second World War was called in the USSR). 

Now, between these two dates is a gap of 24 years. A gap that was, as per my father, ignored. One might remember, from earlier in this article, that exactly into this gap fell the first Democratic Republic of Estonia. However, this period of time, besides being never mentioned or explained in an educational environment, was also never brought up at my father’s home. So in his young years, despite his confusion, didn’t ask questions, and didn’t get answers - and didn’t know.  

I’m not going to pull the cliché of “and this was in a time before computers, so you had to search in books to find answers to your quandaries, yada-yada-yada…”, because it was not like that in this case. This information wasn’t going to be found in books either. The Soviet regime had heavy measures of censorship and literature that gave even an inkling of freedom or had positive connotations to anything other than the USSR was banned and very, very hard to come by. The Soviet government was very good at inciting fear in the population, in making you feel like you could never trust anyone, because they could always turn their back on you and feed you to the wolves (or, well, the militia).

My grandfather from my mother’s side – a very educated man, but also one that didn’t fear to hold on to the free, independent country he was born in (in 1939) – told me, not long ago, that used/antique bookshops were very hard to come by during the Soviet occupation. The factoid surprised me a bit at first, but, of course, it makes sense. You couldn’t own or sell most of the books from the beginning of the century, so if people came in with books from a time of free Estonia, a law-abiding bookkeeper would have to destroy it. They would probably also turn the original owner of the book in. So, if you owned books that were written by convicted and deported authors, books that spoke of freedom, you were forced to hide and guard them with your life. Or, you could have gone the safe way and destroyed them. The threat of prison, or worse, deportation to Siberia, was very effective. And very real. There is almost no family in any old Soviet state that doesn’t have stories of a deported great-grandparent, grandparent, aunt or uncle, parent or child. My family has many.  

Back to my father – he, as a child, was left wondering, without the words to express his impression of something being missing and without any sources to tell him anything. Because how do you even ask a question or find answers about something you have no conception of? Only in the latter half of the eighties, when blue-black-and-white flags were starting to be flown and anthems of our fatherland were starting to be sung again – despite the bans – did he (and I can imagine, many other young folk) finally understand we, Estonians, are our own people, have our own history, and have had and can have our own country. 

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Soviet history isn’t often studied at schools in Western Europe, or in the Political West in general. It holds a very important part in the curriculum of post-Soviet countries, of course, but elsewhere is, to my knowledge, mostly only studied in the context of the Second World War and/or the Cold War. Usually, not many other aspects of it, those that are more distant from the background of WWII, are studied. Even if it was studied in more detail, the every-day aspects are understandably glossed over. But if you come from a, for example, Estonian family, you grow up on anecdotes from the times of the Soviet occupation. Some of them are funny, some are shocking or things you wouldn’t have thought of as an enjoyer of seemingly guaranteed freedom (such as the ones told in this article), and some are completely devastating, told in hushed tones and decades of suppressed tears. 

As I wrote in the beginning of this article, I am proud of my country and its people. I am glad that I get to enjoy living in a free land and have the opportunity of travelling through (mostly) free borders. That I get to hear and read and speak about my country’s culture and history. I recognise that not everybody has that opportunity today, or has had it in the past, and that is crushing. 

Realising that hearing stories from your people, your family’s past is a privilege, it makes you hold on to them so much harder. It makes you understand how important is listening and remembering and sharing, because losing it all is very easy.