BONJOUR L'ESTONIE

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.