Kallas: I'm Kristina Kallas. I'm a Director of Tartu University Narva college. This is a college that is out of main campus that is off Tartu. It's in another city. It's a border city with Russia. And we are a minority college so we ... our students come from the minority community. They are 90 percent of our students are Russian speaking students. And I have personally done ... my research career has been focussed on questions of the minority rights, the inter-ethnic relations, ethno-political regimes of different Central and Eastern European and Western European countries, on integration issues between the majority and minority in the 20th century. So that's been my research focus mostly.

Shirrefs: And what's your own background, what's your own ethnic background?

Kallas: I was born in Soviet and raised in Soviet Union. So I grew up in a completely different state system. I was 16 when the Soviet Union collapsed, so quite a teenager. And my mother is Russian ethnically. She's from Russia. So, she moved to Estonia during the Soviet times, or she was moved, because in Soviet times nobody moved freely in that sense, she was sent here. My father is an ethnic Estonian who is from here, from Estonia, deep deeply rooted here. I grew up in a bilingual family and also in bilingual society because Soviet Union, I mean Soviet Estonia was bilingual, Estonian Russian. And of course the whole ethnicity, ethnic identity and linguistic issues changed drastically after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So there was a lot of ... I was a teenager and I had to rethink a lot about who I am and what my language is. And this was a quite painful process, and I think maybe up until age of 26, 27, 30, I was still confused about the new identity I had to take, because of the of the state disappeared. So I'm considering myself of course Estonian. My ethnic identity's weak, it's not something that I tend to identify myself through. So I am identifying myself through my civic identity, which is an Estonian state, so I call myself an Estonian because I'm an Estonian citizen and I was brought up in this country.

Shirrefs: So when we talk about a Russian minority in Estonia, we're not talking about a small minority, we're talking about a very large section of the population. How big is it.

Kallas: No, it's not small. The number of people who are, so to say, Russian speakers, they're not all ethnically Russians, but they speak Russian as a mother tongue. It's 30 percent of Estonian total population based on the last census.

Shirrefs: And how does that compare with the other two Baltic states, Lithuania and Latvia? Is it similar?

Kallas: Latvia has, proportionally a little bit more, I think close to 40 percent. And Lithuania has much, much less so the Russian speaking population is less than 10 percent in Lithuania.

Shirrefs: So it wasn't always on that scale. How much of this happened after the end of the war, end of the Second World War, 1945?

Kallas: I mean, the whole Russian speaking population pretty much what we have now in Estonia is the result of after the Second World War migration during the Soviet times. Estonia had a small Russian minority before that, but it was less than eight percent of the whole population I think. So the Russian speaking part of the population grew drastically doing the Soviet times.

Shirrefs: Was it a deliberate Soviet policy of miscegenation? Was it deliberately trying to blur the ethnic core of Estonia and the other Baltic states?

Kallas: It's a constant debate among the historians. It's a chicken and egg question because, Estonia became the main focus of Stalinist industrialisation after the Second World War. But Estonia had lost 25 percent of its population in the war, which means that you couldn't industrialise country heavily without bringing in an extra workforce, because the local population has either died in the war or emigrated, was sent to the Siberian camps. And then because of this industrialisation they had to bring in the labour force. But of course some of the historians claim that industrialisation was just a pretext to actually change the social demographics of the society. So we don't know. As long as the Russian archives of Stalinist times are still closed to the researchers, we cannot establish very clearly the historical truth about what was actually happening, was it industrialisation, and that's why Russians were moved in enormous numbers, or because he was planning to bring the Russians in anyway and then he had to do the industrialisation as a pretext, that somehow they had to be sent here to do something. So. We don't know. It's debatable.

Shirrefs: I mean you know, in a sense, regardless of the motive, one has to ask the question did it end up being, effectively, a form of miscegenation?

Kallas: Yeah. Let's ask what the consequences of this was. So the consequence was that the immigrant part of the population grew extremely rapidly. I think in 1950s, right after the war, 45,000 people per year arrived. So let's compare now Sweden, which is today the country that receives the highest number of refugees, is receiving 35,000 refugees per year, and Sweden is eight million population. Estonia, after the Second World War was less than a million it was 850,000 residents. And we received 45,000 migrants per Europe from Russia. The tempo, the pace was enormous, the migration pace. So of course Estonians, the population that was historically on that territory, was extremely unhappy, and this added up to this resentment towards the Soviet regime, because the migration was seen as just a tool by Moscow to take control over the territory. And it didn't help anyhow to inter-ethnic relations so the inter-ethnic relations became bad from the very first moment Stalin started sending those people in. Soviet Union didn't take any effort in developing any kind of policies to develop some kind of inter-ethnic relations. Russians lived in their own houses, in their own districts, with their own schools and Estonians completely segregated in another part of the community. So when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we just suddenly discovered that we have it completely two parallel worlds.

Shirrefs: Another thing I'm wondering is, at this point in history, was it in effect, whether deliberately or not, almost a way of booby-trapping. Estonia because, it could be seen almost like a ticking time-bomb, at a moment when suddenly the East looks vulnerable, we've got a regime in Moscow that is doing a lot of breast-beating, a lot of posturing. We've already seen what happened in Crimea and Ukraine and. And the rhetoric around Estonia is not to be taken lightly. So, does having a large Russian minority in Estonia sort of almost work like a sleeper-cell for Putin? Is that how he would see it?

Kallas: Sergei Dovlatov, one of the famous Russian dissident writers at the time, during the Soviet time, he lived in Estonia in 1980s for a short time, because he ran away from Leningrad at that time because it was oppressive for him. And he wrote a book where he, one of his famous quotes that was quoted a lot of time, he said 'Estonia is a time ticking bomb, that you can see these inter-ethnic relations are extremely problematic, highly conflictual, those two communities don't talk to each other.' And he a stranger who came to work in a newspaper. He noticed it very quickly. And in 1991 this bomb exploded, eventually, so Estonia had a very serious inter-ethnic conflict, starting with the Perestroika of course, it slowly started developing. And in 1993, two years after we declared independence, we were very close to the civil war. We were very close to something that we know in Transnistria in Moldova, South Ossetia in Georgia or Donbass in Ukraine. We were very close to that. There were some things that were going around us that helped us get out of this conflict, without actually ending up shooting at each other. And one of the reasons why we did not end up in a civil war, because Russians were very upset. Russians were not happy about the dissolution of the Soviet. I'm not saying what all Russians, but a big part of the Russians were not happy, and the Soviet army was still in Estonian territory. So if Russia in 1994 would have wanted, it would have given the access to so-called separatist Russians here to the weapons, because the army bases were here, the weapons were here. It was easier just to tell them that, okay go and get those arms and start fighting for your, your interests. So we were very close to that. But, what was a difference? The difference was that Yeltsin, who was the president at that time, he was interested in cooperation with Europe. He was not interested in initiating a civil war in a country which Europe very strongly supported. So he was not interested in going into confrontation with Europe, he wanted cooperation with Europe, he was a different one. Mr. Putin is not the one who is interested in cooperation with Europe. That's not what his geopolitical interests are. So, in this sense that Estonia didn't end up in civil war in 1993, is because Yeltsin did not want it. And this is the simple explanation how big role Russia is playing in either instigating conflicts in the neighbouring countries or not instigating conflicts. Okay, conflicts of course in the neighbouring countries are ... I mean the problems are local, but whether this conflict ends up in military conflict or in some kind of riots or some kind of violence this is quite often the work or the decision of Russia, because Russia has all the tools to turn those conflicts into what they need them to be. And unfortunately Russia is also using this, not only has tools but sometimes uses those tools.

Shirrefs: Let's talk about something that you've written about, the Doctrine of Restorationism. First of all I mean, before the fall of the Wall, before the fall of the Soviet Union, there was already a move to try to put in place changes in the way Estonia functioned ethnically, from the Soviet Council in Estonia. Just talk about the sort of pre-empting of this doctrine.

Kallas: Well, this Doctrine of Restorationism, all three Baltic states applied it. Which means that Baltic states did not declare themselves as independent states when the Soviet Union collapsed. Baltic states declared that the time of the Soviet occupation is over, so we are reestablishing our statehood that was taken away from us violently in 1939. And as a result of this Doctrine of Restorationism, Baltic states are counting the age of their republics starting from 1918 and not from 1991. So Estonia is celebrating hundred years next year, not 27. However, because of this restitutionist principle that that we are restoring our statehood, this framework allow Latvia and Estonia specifically ... Lithuania did not use it but could have used it as well ... to establish the citizenship, saying that because we are re-establishing the statehood, the citizens will come with the state are the people who have or are the descendants of the citizens of the previous Republic. Which means that everybody who came in between, meaning during the Soviet occupation time, is a foreigner by default, and has to naturalise or leave. And of course this created a huge social conflict, because the sheer number of 350,000 Russians, who came during the Soviet times, first of all, it was very shocking to them to learn that they actually suddenly migrants, because they have never thought about themselves as migrants. Second that they are foreigners, because many of them by that time, by then already had been born in Estonia. And third that, being a migrant and being a foreigner, you suddenly become also a minority, because in the Soviet times Russians were a majority, even if they were a minority in the Estonian territory, but in Soviet Union as a whole they were the majority. And therefore there is this famous term that Russians in the former Soviet republics, they are a minoritised majority. So this is a majority that suddenly, overnight, became a minority. And this is not easy to change your identity, from being a superpower, ruling nation, into being a minority in a foreign country. Actually a foreigner. So, I think this describes worry well that this restitutionist principle, actually what kind of effect it had on the Russian community. While the Estonian community, it did not affect it to that extent, because they got the passports automatically, because all of them could prove that their parents or grandparents where the citizens of the republic in 1939, when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia.

Shirrefs: For all of the fact that Europe, supported Estonia ... Europe believed and supported the idea that the occupation of Estonia was illegal and that the principles that Estonia were working to were correct ... the actual mechanics of that Restoration was problematic for Europe. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe had real issues with the methods that Estonia was using, because it was clearly trying to punish the Russian minority and trying to force them out. So it was almost ... almost like what we're seeing now with Slovenia and The Erased, almost a form of ethnic cleansing.

Kallas: Yes. Europe was in some kind of a pickle because they, they could not back off from this restitutionist principle, because they themselves, especially in Britain, Sweden, United States of America have been declaring the occupation of Baltic states illegal throughout all those 50 years. So they couldn't suddenly now, when actually the occupation was finished to say, 'Oh by the way, don't mind the occupation.' So they had to support this restitutionist principle, but of course the consequences that it brought to the Russian minority were severe. And Europe was in trouble, because it understood that it might end up in ethnic, serious ethnic conflict, like it did in Yugoslavia, like it did in Caucasus with the Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. So, basically the collapse of the Soviet Union brought so many ethnic conflicts on the map. And of course Europe didn't want another conflict so close to its home. So this was, I think, even more shocking because, you could handle the conflict somewhere in Kyrgyzstan, in the Fergana valley between Uzbeks and Kyrgyzstan, that's on the other side of the world. But to have a ethnic conflict 80 kilometres from Helsinki or a 120 kilometres from Stockholm was a little bit uneasy for Europe so .

Shirrefs: It's little bit more three dimensional?

Kallas: Yeah. Of course Europe was doing a very hard job to try to prevent the escalation of this conflict. So Estonian ... the conflict mediation was, especially OSCE he was doing heavy conflict mediation and I think Max van der Stoel was the High Commissioner of National Minorities on the OSCE at that time, every Estonian government member hated him because he kept telling to Estonians that you can not do that to Russians, and Estonians felt very upset because they felt that historical justice has to be restored. You know it's a very tricky issue to make the majority feel that their historical justice is restored and still protect the rights of the minorities who used to be a majority, or the ruling elite. So it's ... I would compare it to South Africa, to the South African Republic post-apartheid. So you have this white, colonial ruling-class and you have a change of the regime and suddenly the white colonial ruling-class becomes a minority within the country. So how do you treat it?Because you know that they were the oppressors, they were the ones who didn't allow you to express your identity, be who you are. And this is, to the less extent of course, but this was happening in Soviet Union here. So to ask indigenous South Africans to be generous to the whites felt a little bit unfair considering how much they had to go through, through the apartheid process. And I think the Europe also understand that the same is happening here, to ask Estonians to be nice to Russians was hard, considering what the regime has been doing here during the Soviet times. But of course nobody wanted to have an ethnic conflict. So, you know, playing between those two, historical justice for Estonians and protection of the Russian minority, it wasn't easy, and it was not easy for Estonians either, of course Estonians rationally understood that they are not interested in ethnic conflict. But there were more emotions than anything else in this story.

Shirrefs: Estonia didn't ever have anything akin to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission did it? Something where that sort of expression of pain, expression of injustice could be aired in a way that had an utterly peaceful intent. And that was what was very moving about South Africa.

Kallas: No, it was, because the Singing Revolution, the fact how we fought against the occupying regime in the end with a singing Festival, this is the peaceful way of reconciliation trying to tell yourself yes, we were telling about this pain through the songs. So that, I think, was the way. But we are still dealing with the reconciliation in a way, because the history of Second World War is still dominating every political debate not only in Estonia but the whole Central Eastern Europe is still suffering from what happened in 1939, either from the German side or from the Soviet Union side, but the nations that were in between suffered from both. And why the German side story, a sort of reconciliation has happened there. Germany has apologised, there's a certain acceptance of the wrongdoing. Then from the Soviet Union or Russia as a successor state for the Soviet Union, this has not happened. And I think this creates all those tensions between Central Eastern European states Baltic states and Russia. Hungary here is surprisingly an exception and even to a certain extent Czech Republic. But if you look at Poland there is a lot of historical issues between Russia and Poland concerning the Second World War that are completely unresolved and that do not allow for Russia and Poland to have any nice diplomatic relationships. So, the Smolensk air crash even added to this because a Polish government flew to Smolensk to remember those Polish army officers killed by the Red Army and then the plane crashes on the Russian territory again. So, the Polish nation reconciliation with Russia is not going well either, because I know the society quite well, and they are struggling with the fact that they cannot accept that Russia has not apologised or Russia has not said anything regarding what happened in the Second World War. And I think Baltic states are going with the same. Finland is doing a little bit better in that sense because, I think, Finnish reconciliation process went through during the 50s and 60s. Soviet Union sort of, sort of accepted the fact that they did wrong for Finland and left them alone. I think the fact that the Soviet Union left Finland alone was enough for Finnish nation to kind of reconcile with the past. With the Baltic States and Poland. This did not happen. And the Second World War is still lingering everywhere. Everywhere you go, every political debate about the minority issues, about Russia, about geopolitics, it always ends up there, so ...

Shirrefs: One of the things that's always been said to me by Estonians is, particularly ethnic Estonians, is it through the whole of Russian occupation, Estonia always believed it was European, it always looked to the west. So, that was doubly difficult for Europe, because they wanted to embrace the idea of Estonia, but Estonia was also, as you said, trying to seek justice. Europe suddenly had some leverage when Estonia was trying to join the European Union. That gave ... suddenly gave Brussels some clout. That gave them some leverage to be able to convince Estonia to, pull in their horns, as it were.

Kallas: I think the EU enlargement of 2004 was all about restoring historical justice to those nations that joined. I mean except maybe Cyprus and Malta, but all the others, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, this was about restoring the justice of Soviet occupation and, you know, giving the hand of Europe back. And that's how the nation saw it, all those nations I believe. And that's why I think, with the exception of Central European states, Baltic states are still fiercely pro-European, despite the fact that European Union is such a big trouble ... in such a big troubles. Those three nations here are very, very pro-European Union because for them this was the Union that restored their identity. It's part of who they are, so it's very hard for them to exist without Europe.

Shirrefs: So, membership of Europe and the passion for Europe is unambiguous this far east.

Kallas: Yes. Here in the Baltic states it's unambiguous. It's also unambiguous in Finland for example. You have some marginal groups of the society that question it, but it's very marginal. And surprisingly support for European Union, or for the European aspect of Estonian identity, is very strong among Russians as well. So this is ... the Russian community in Estonia has embraced very strongly the European-ness of their existence. Not Estonian-ness because they don't fit into the picture of being an Estonian, but they fit themselves very nicely into the picture of being European. And I think that's the very strong part of their identity that they have constructed for themselves, which sets the border between them and the Russians from Russia. This is very clearly, they have done a research among the Russian community here about their identity. They set very clear border between the Russians in Russia and Russians here in Estonia, and when I ask what's the difference, they say 'Well, we are more European, we are European Russians'. When I ask what does it mean they say 'Oh, well ... we behave differently'. I said 'What do you mean?' ... 'We are we are more civilised, we are not so loud, we are not so obnoxious, we dress better'. You know this is a simple person explanation how it defines itself but ...

Shirrefs: More tolerant? Do they see themselves as sort of more cosmopolitan in a way?

Kallas: I think maybe tolerance ...I didn't ask about tolerance and I don't think that's really different. Tolerance is not a main feature, but more acceptance of individuality, individual freedoms, individual rights. This is definitely what Russians here, what differs Russians from here, from from Russia from Russia. So they explain it through for example in that 'All in Russia. You are not allowed to do that, then your family tells you where you have to go to study, and for the community here it's not acceptable anymore, that the young people are much more individualistic in their choices and this is very European. This is not very Russian. Russian existence is very communal and family oriented'. So, yeah this is an interesting phenomena, that the Russians here have taken up the European part of identity.

Shirrefs: In a sense, the sort of Baltic state situation would be fairly straightforward in relation to Russia and Europe, except for the fact that you've got a Russian enclave, Kaliningrad, which is to the west of the Baltic states. And it's on the Baltic Sea, so it's got a port. Tell me, what is Kaliningrad's role in what we're seeing at the moment, in the current ... I wouldn't call it instability at the moment... but the sort of, the rhetoric around Russia and Europe.