BONJOUR L'ESTONIE

Going Baltic over Tallinn

It had been 15 years since I last stepped foot on Tallinn’s soil. Estonia’s capital back then was still trying to find its long, lost identity having only recently cast off the oppressive clutches of Mother Russia. I remembered my first glimpse of Tallinn back in December 1997 with the unmistakable sight of the huge chimney of the old power plant acting as a beacon for our creaky Viking Line ferry as we made our way through the early morning mist. Tallinn was cold, dark and sinister and immediately appealing to explore.

Fast forward to the current day and Tallinn is now a leading European tourist destination, promising and delivering on a captivating historical past and a few pleasantly surprising additions as well. According to popular opinion, the quality of food and restaurants has improved tenfold since communist days. Sampling the culinary delights of Tallinn with some Finnish friends was the perfect way to reacquaint myself with this fascinating city. Helsinki’s locals often pop over for a day trip (think of a visit out of London to Oxford followed by a pub lunch, this is Helsinki’s equivalent). I could not believe what a make-over Tallinn has done to itself…..once you get away from the old port terminal, where we docked, which sadly dates back to the grey, concrete ways of the Russians. The city today is alive with hipster locals and happy tourists.

Leave touristy Tallinn behind
It pays to leave the tourist maps at home and deliberately get lost in the old town as aimless wandering around these beautiful cobbled streets reaps rich rewards.

"Tuesday In Paris" - Carmen Kass by Txema Yeste - Interview - Germany - May 2012

Carmen Kass by Txema Yeste

Estonian output price inflation rises In February

Estonia's producer price inflation accelerated in February, data released by Statistics Estonia showed Tuesday.

The producer price index increased 3.5 percent on an annual basis in February, following the previous month's 3.1 percent growth.

Output prices in the manufacturing sector grew 3.3 percent year-on-year, while mining production advanced 0.8 percent. There was a 6.8 percent annual growth in the production of electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply during the month.

Month-on-month, output prices moved up 0.4 percent in February, the agency said..

The export price index rose 0.9 percent on a monthly basis in February, taking the annual growth to 4.7 percent. Import prices moved up 2.1 percent essentially, and 6.1 percent compared to February 2011.

For comments and feedback: contact editorial@rttnews.com

De Gendt wins as Wiggins holds Paris-Nice lead

NICE — Belgium's Thomas de Gendt won the seventh and penultimate stage of the Paris-Nice here Saturday with a lead of more than six minutes over Estonia's Rein Taaramae and nine minutes over the peloton.

Bradley Wiggins retained the race leader's yellow jersey, on the eve of Sunday's 9.6 km uphill time trial from Nice to the Col d'Eze, putting him on course to become the race's first British winner since Tom Simpson in 1967.

At 219.5 km, Saturday's stage from Sisteron to Nice was the longest of the race.

Vacansoleil rider De Gendt and Cofidis' Taaramae broke from the peloton in the 48th kilometre and stretched their advantage to almost 13 minutes.

Fifty-six kilometres from the finishing line, De Gendt outdistanced the Estonian as they neared the summit of the Col de Vence, and pulled further ahead as they began the long ride down into Nice.

De Gendt has sported the number 103 in the race, which he noted had proven lucky before.

"It's the same one I had last year when I won the first stage," he said.

Estonia diver bumps into subsea treasure

An amateur diver discovered a 13th century treasure chest on the bottom of the Tallinn Bay in Estonia.

The chest contained more than 200 old coins and merchant belongings and was described as a “stunning find” by experts.

The coins helped experts to establish the age of the treasure and the route it had been following, which was between Tallinn and Visby in Sweden.

Flashes in the Night : The Sinking of the Estonia

In September 1994, almost 900 lives were lost in Europe’s worst peacetime maritime disaster of the century. The MS Estonia, which sailed between Estonia and Sweden, sank in the Baltic Sea during a stormy night, and only 137 people survived.

Author Jack Nelson details the events of that tragic night, during which many were trapped in a ship whose list made it very difficult to escape, and in which those who were able to get out of the ship spent many dark, cold hours waiting for rescue.

The Estonia could transport more than a thousand passengers between Estonia, which was just emerging from Soviet rule, and Sweden. It was a popular quick, cheap vacation for Swedes and a gateway to a new world for Estonians who had been unable to travel for years. The bars, restaurants, dance floors and karaoke room hosted revelers who often partied all night during the overnight 14-hour voyage, and those who didn’t party could sleep in peace in comfortable cabins below deck. On the night of the disaster, there were groups of business people and a large contingent of Swedish police officers as well as a Bible group traveling between the two countries.

The voyage that night was particularly rough, with a storm and huge swells tossing the ship. Seasoned travelers mostly took it in stride, assuming the ship was built solidly enough to weather the storms of a choppy Baltic Sea. Others simply retired to bed early and hoped sleep would help them deal with their upset stomachs. But many knew something wasn’t right when around midnight a metallic grinding sound was followed by the ship starting to tilt steeply. The smartest got up to the top decks quickly, wearing warm clothes.

Book tells of dark times in Lithuania

In 1941, the lives of 15-year-old Lina Vilkas, her brother and their mother are turned upside-down when they are forced from their home in the middle of the night. Deemed “enemies of the people,” they are expelled from Lithuania and forced to work in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, where prisoners are routinely starved, brutalized and killed.

Under the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, areas of Eastern Europe were divided between the two countries. The Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were annexed by Stalin, who deported members of the intelligentsia and their families to maintain control of the region.

These countries were under Soviet control for over 50 years until declaring their independence in the early 1990s. Unlike the well-documented atrocities of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, accounts of Soviet brutality have only recently become known.

“Between Shades of Gray” is a fictional story inspired by actual accounts and experiences of prisoners. It is told from the viewpoint of Lina, an aspiring artist, and follows the Vilkas family during their first few years of imprisonment in Siberia.

Lina is feisty and opinionated, a dangerous combination in an era of communist oppression. She secretly documents Soviet atrocities in her drawings.

Fellow prisoners become an extended family of sorts while working at a collective farm harvesting potatoes and beets.

Jack A. Nelson's 'Flashes in the Night'

"FLASHES IN The NIGHT: The Sinking of the Estonia," by Jack A. Nelson, Apprentice House, $26.95, 314 pages (nf)

The sinking of the Titanic has become an iconic event embedded securely in the public consciousness. But a similar maritime disaster that occurred in 1994, in which 852 people died in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea, has not registered similarly for those who live outside of Europe.

The M/S Estonia sailed daily between Estonia and Sweden, making an overnight passage on which there were often many revelers. The bars, dance floor and karaoke lounge provided plenty of opportunities for relatively inexpensive fun. Those who didn't plan to party were able to sleep through the journey in comfort in cabins below deck.

One night in September 1994, however, the partying and sleeping were interrupted around midnight by a loud metallic grinding sound and the tilting of the large ship to the side. Within 30 minutes, the ship was at the bottom of the sea, and those who had been able to get out of the ship were floating in the frigid water in life vests and rafts.

After a long, dark, cold night in which most rescue efforts were hampered by the darkness and stormy conditions, only 137 people survived. Most were young and male, strong enough to climb out of hallways that turned into slick shafts by the extreme tilt of the ship.

As with the Titanic, many elements contributed to the huge loss of lives. The weather was particularly rough during the night, warnings to passengers from crew members didn't occur early enough, Mayday calls didn't reach enough rescuers as rapidly as they should have, life boats couldn't be detached from the ship and the inflatable life rafts didn't function well either.

A terrible time, punctuated with hope

Back when I worked in Duluth, an elegant middle-aged man used to come by the newsroom now and again to chastise us about Estonia. He usually showed up after we had run wire news from the Soviet Union; if the story carried a dateline of Vilnius, USSR, or Tallinn, USSR, or Riga, USSR, he would voice his firm objection.

USSR, he would tell us -- calmly at first, and then with mounting frustration -- did not belong in the dateline. These were not Soviet cities; these would never be Soviet cities.

The man had fled Estonia in the 1940s when it, along with Latvia and Lithuania, was annexed by the Soviet Union. Over time, he had made it his mission to pound into our young and history-deprived journalist brains the sad fate of the Baltics.

If only Ruta Sepetys' novel had been around then; it would have hammered that history home.

"Between Shades of Gray" -- billed as a young-adult novel, but one that everyone should read -- opens with a clash between normalcy and terror. On a balmy June evening in 1941, a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl named Lina sits down to write a letter when she is interrupted by someone pounding on the front door. Soviet secret police burst in and order the family to pack their things and get out.

What follows is a series of intense scenes, almost unbearable in their detail. The family is crushed with dozens of other deportees into one car of a long train labeled "Thieves and Prostitutes." There, with no bathroom, almost no food, no ventilation, nowhere to sit, they must endure an interminable journey east, and north, into exile.

Xenophobe’s Guide to the Estonians

Xenophobe’s Guide to the Estonians
By Hilary Bird, Lembit Őpik, Ulvi Mustmaa
Oval Books 2010

Reviewed by Katrin Volt at GSI, www.diversophy.com
The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Estonians is filled with clever observations and self-ironic descriptions that shed light on the Estonian soul, its uniqueness and its phobias. Here you can find our best kept secrets to piece us together. Bird, Őpik, and Mustmaa, the authors of this short book, describe the Estonian way of life with humor and wit. Okay, a hilarious read–but you may wonder, “Who are the Estonians and where is Estonia?” Some think it is somewhere in Siberia or part of Russia. No? Australia, did you say? Slovenia? On the Moon? Never heard of it.

Does it exist? Yes, it does. “Find it underneath Finland, about the size of Denmark or Switzerland,” would be a quick Estonian orientation. A land between East and West, next to the Baltic Sea, a place where wandering tribes and invaders have passed leaving their mark on this nation of nature worshippers, who have somehow made their way into the 21st century.

While Estonia is very multicultural, with more than 120 ethnic minorities, native Estonians define nationality through language and ethnicity. The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Estonians focuses on those who see themselves as the original Estonians. Meeting an Estonian for the first time and speaking Russian would generally not be in good taste, though you may never know if you offended your interlocutor or not.

Why? Simply because Estonians have their own identity and they can be great poker players. Don’t expect an Estonian to talk about their feelings openly or what is bothering him or her – the one who suffers lives longer. Estonian Russians would be a different matter but they are not under the microscope here.
Bird, Őpik, and Mustmaa review Estonian national symbols, for example, Kalevipoeg, the national epic and the Estonian flag’s horizontal stripes (top to bottom) of blue , black and white. Blue is for loyalty, the beautiful blue skies, seas, and lakes; as well as the blue peasant jacket of the past; black speaks of both oppression and fertile soil; white recalls virtue, winter snows and the light of summer nights. These colors help explain Estonian likes and experiences.

How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other’s crimes

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder. Basic Books; 524 pages; $29.95. Bodley Head; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk 

IN THE middle of the 20th century Europe’s two totalitarian empires, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, killed 14m non-combatants, in peacetime and in war. The who, why, when, where and how of these mass murders is the subject of a gripping and comprehensive new book by Timothy Snyder of Yale University.

The term coined in the book’s title encapsulates the thesis. The “bloodlands” are the stretch of territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea where Europe’s most murderous regimes did their most murderous work. The bloodlands were caught between two fiendish projects: Adolf Hitler’s ideas of racial supremacy and eastern expansion, and the Soviet Union’s desire to remake society according to the communist template. That meant shooting, starving and gassing those who didn’t fit in.

Just as Stalin blamed the peasants for the failure of collectivisation, Hitler blamed the Jews for his military failures in the east. As Mr Snyder argues, “Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory.”

Popular abroad, under fire at home !

SOFI OKSANEN is probably Estonia's best-known living novelist. Many Estonians are thrilled that her novel "Purge" has done so well (this blog gave it a rapturous review a few months ago). Estonia's president Toomas Hendrik Ilves gave her a medal. But some Estonians are less keen. Jaan Kaplinski, probably the country's most heavyweight writer  (his fans hope he may win a Nobel prize for literature one day) had a crack at her on his blog in August. 

 My only, but very serious objection to the book is that it pretends to be a realistic story about life in Soviet Estonia in the second half of the XXth century.... S. O. who has no direct experience of the time and events she describes has taken parts of our life, sewing them together according to some age-old rules of ideological-mythological literature, and is now selling it in the West. She is selling something that pretends to be our life, but isn't. Our life in the Soviet Union was not a horror story! Of course, there were many horrific episodes, years of terror and counter-terror, but as a whole, we lived a life that was often quite interesting and funny. I cannot approve the idea that my life, the life of my parents, my friends, my colleagues was not a life worth living, that we felt we were prisoners in a large prison camp. The USSR after the death of Stalin was not a prison camp. It was a lousy country, but there were and there are many much more lousy countries in the world. ... I don't want anybody to take my life away from me and sell an adulterated version of it to unknowing people abroad.

That passed largely unnoticed. But now the Estonian journalist Piret Tali has returned to the attack (link in Estonian), accusing her of "wallowing in violence".

Husband and wife, Walters, Kiin, publish books

Jack Walters and his wife, Sirje Kiin, both have recently published books.

Walters, a Dakota State University faculty member has published his first book entitled Positive Management, Increasing Employee Productivity. The book is part of the Strategic Management Series edited by Mason Carpenter.
His wife, Kiin, has published her ninth book. Written in Estonian, Kiin's latest book is entitled, European Travels of Marie Under.

Walters said his book is referred to as an airplane book, because its size is ideal for reading on an airplane. The target audience is mid- to upper-level managers.
Walters said he was approached about writing the book in early 2009. He spent the next nine months writing the book that was published this past June.

"Given the situation, and the global economy, and us being a first-world country, the best productive method is to create a partnership or a collective effort," Walters said.
The idea of positive management started circulating about 10 years ago, Walters said, and definitely merits more study. It's an idea similar to what is presented in the television series Undercover Boss, where the company CEO goes undercover and works in a variety of positions within the company. The CEO typically completes the week with some insight on the company and changes that could be made to improve efficiency.

Walters said the idea of Undercover Boss is based on the idea that the CEO gets isolated from the rest of the company.

Walters said he plans to continue exploring the idea of Positive Management through the publication of papers.
"It's a relatively new idea," he said. "It needs more study."

Purge - Sofi Oksanen

The story of Estonia's long occupation underpins a sprawling tale of sex trafficking, abuse and betrayal.

The title of this bestseller from Sofi Oksanen alludes to the mass deportation to Stalin's gulags of those Estonians deemed to have collaborated during the 1941-44 German occupation. The purge is pivotal for the family at the centre of her story, but Oksanen also moves beyond the bitter dilemmas of collusion and resistance to deal with the more private horror of sexual violence during both peace and war.

The story spans 60 years, opening in 1992 after Estonia has regained its independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aliide Truu, an elderly widow, lives by canning fruit on the outskirts of a forest in western Estonia. She pursues a land restitution case and is tormented by stone-throwers who revile her communist history. Her daughter has moved to Helsinki because "Estonia was full of people who kept saying that they should have left for Finland or Sweden during the war", a regret "passed on to the next generation with their lullabies". The buried past resurfaces when Aliide takes in Zara, a bruised and dishevelled "dishrag of a girl" from Vladivostok who has turned up in her yard.

As the two women circle one another, each suspicious by reflex, the novel moves back and forth in time. We learn that Zara, granddaughter of an Estonian woman exiled to Siberia during the purge, is on the run from Russian pimps after being trafficked via Berlin as a sex worker. Her gangster pursuers are closing in but, for the widow, "they might as well all come – Mafia thugs, soldiers – Reds and Whites – Russians, Germans, Estonians . . . Aliide would survive. She always had."

The Ghastly Year

The republishing of «The Ghastly Year» is not only praiseworthy and to be congratulated but also necessary. «The Ghastly year» in the life of the Latvian people refers to events which can not be kept hidden. «The Ghastly year» is the first and, at the given moment, the only documentation of events of 1940, precise evidence from that time without any connections to be made with present events within Latvia.

This book can not be accepted as an invitation to a specific action or as blame upon some nationality. It is evidence left by history on events in 1940 within Latvia so few of which are documented or depicted. It was a period of time filled with tragedy, and the misrepresentation of actual historical events in order to serve present needs is unacceptable.

This historical, unedited republication of the «The Ghastly Year» , unexpurgated for the current political state of affairs, has the blessing of God, and there are no grounds to consider this to be anti-Semitic literature.

Check it all here

Bradt's Estonia

This week's essential reading is a guidebook: Estonia by Neil Taylor, published by Bradt. I would not normally make a guidebook pick of the week on this blog, but Neil Taylor's book is different. For a start, Bradt is the only major publisher to treat the Baltic states separately and give them each their own book. The lazy conflation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into a single region is a tiresome hangover from the days when they were called the "Soviet Baltic Republics".

The book covers almost every visitable corner of Estonia, from the grim ruins of the old Soviet airbase at Paide near Tapa to the Hanseatic delights of the Tallinn old town. The author's affection for his subject shines through—but is never sickly. If a drive is dull or a museum tasteless, he says so.

It would be nice if more guidebooks showed that kind of honesty. And it would be nice if those responsible for Estonia's tourist industry would read the book and perhaps take Mr Taylor's gentle but well-directed advice: for example in ensuring that the staff at the long-distance bus station ticket office all speak enough English to sell tickets.

The Eesti experience

TALLINN — Traditionally, Estonians like to have sex on a Saturday after their weekly bath in their sauna. In fact, the sauna is one of the most important buildings on any property in the country.

This is one interesting things I learned from the new book “My Estonia” by Justin Petrone. It is one of the funniest, frank and most accurate accounts of real life in the Baltics that I have read.

Like one of Bill Bryson’s better books, Petrone’s yarn lays out life in Estonia as an expat actually experiences it. No sugar-coating of the northernmost, frigid country in the region, just reality, as an expat like myself that has lived in the Baltics for years can attest.

The book retells the story of Petrone’s romantic rollercoaster ride in his first year in Estonia back in 2003, before Estonia joined the European Union. Petrone arrives in Estonia in the middle of winter, a harrowing time when one doesn’t see the sun for most of the day and when any rock could be a slippery piece of ice.

Stories about bizarre characters, strange food and other escapades make up the book in hilarious chapters, most of which each could be read individually as well. It’s a book you can start and stop easily, without losing your rhythm.