A few months ago, I travelled from Austria to Estonia. It was an uneventful flight, except for an interesting twist, which I’ll get to shortly. I’ve been to Estonia once before, at the end of 2010, when the country joined the Eurozone. It was New Year’s Eve and I endured a brisk -25° outdoors for more than four hours, waiting for midnight, when the then Prime Minister Andrus Ansip was due to come to an ATM to symbolically withdraw Euro. Earlier in the day, I’d asked the Prime Minister if, given what seemed then to be the declining fortunes of the European currency, he had concerns about hitching his country to a seemingly leaky ship. He shook his head and proclaimed absolute confidence in the move. Of course he did. He had to. The process of application for entry had taken years and this was not a moment for wavering doubt. This was a proud and triumphant formality, because perceptions and consensus are everything in the heady world of global economics.
And so, for many hours we weathered the ice and snow—the cold was bitter and the waiting bureaucrats, bankers, business-folk and media were frozen to the bone as they remained poised for this moment. I ended up very sick after that night and the doctor accused me of stupidity. Apparently, I’d committed the arctic equivalent of foolish tourists walking into the Australian desert without water. It seems the air, at that temperature, has ice crystals in it and, breathing it for long periods is akin to sandblasting your airway and lungs.
Former Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, signals his country’s transition to the Euro in 2010 (Shirrefs)
In spite of this unseen terror, the PM and the President, with an entourage of government ministers and the head of the Estonian central bank, emerged from the warmth of the opera house, where the city’s glamorous New Year’s Eve ball was in full swing. Despite such a long wait, the actual moment was suitably unremarkable, but this ticking over of the New Year signalled something else for this city of Tallinn—the independent capital of a former Soviet ‘possession’. It also marked that the city was a European Union Capital of Culture for a year. This is an important mantle to be given to smaller cities that do it a bit tough in the global economic landscape. It’s a program that allows a city to reimagine itself and, in effect, reinvent its identity through significant and genuinely creative cultural programs. And it’s an initiative from Brussels that has had many more successes than failures, allowing places and people to shine.
Tanel Pader and the Sun, playing to a New Year’s Eve audience in the centre of Tallinn in 2010 (Shirrefs)
As I watched, a very popular soft rock band, Tanel Pader and The Sun were playing on a large outdoor stage for the horde of New Year’s Eve revellers who’d braved the sub-Arctic chill. Between the frosty hoi polloi outside and the well-warmed, state guests inside the opera house, there was a palpable sense of celebration and genuine optimism about the future of the country and its increasingly firm attachment to the organism of Europe. This was a country that, through all the pain and ‘servitude’ under Soviet occupation, never wavered in its belief that it was European and would eventually escape the bear-hug of Russian rule.
A bit more than six years later, I was returning. This time I didn’t come by ferry from Helsinki, where the boats must navigate the winter ice of the Baltic Sea. This time I flew from Vienna. The reason for being here is simple and complex.
On board the ferry in 2010 as it navigated the sea ice between Helsinki and Tallinn (Shirrefs)
This region—the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—has once again become a geo-political football, at a time when the internal instabilities of Europe are being further provoked by the myriad malignant manipulations, threats and outright assaults from people like the Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
For the Baltic states though, it’s Russia that remains a clear and credible threat, and if there was ever any doubt that Putin’s Russia could or would act out threats to reclaim what it believes to be its rightful territory, the 2014 annexing of the Crimean Peninsula and the consequential destabilisation of Ukraine left no room for either disbelief or complacency. Russia’s subsequent unambiguous military support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and the deep suspicions over emerging evidence that Moscow-sanctioned agents have been reaching into foreign election campaigns to sway the outcomes, has shown that the Russian bear has woken up and does not intend to play nice.
The interesting aspect of my flight to Tallinn is a place called Kaliningrad. It’s a Russian enclave that’s marooned between Lithuania and Poland. This is still Russian territory, but it’s to the west of the Baltic states. Which means that, while Kaliningrad is surrounded by European countries, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia effectively have Russia either side of them. Which is why they’re (understandably) nervous. Kaliningrad is strategic, because despite being tiny, the territory has a valuable port on the Baltic Sea, meaning that Russia can easily get troops and military machinery in there.
So here I was, flying from Vienna to Tallinn, and the plane is flying due north, rather than north east, which would have made more sense. We reach the Baltic coast of Poland, and we’re still flying north towards Sweden, and I kept wondering why. It suddenly occurred to me to check how close we were to Kaliningrad. I looked at a map and then looked out the window and realised it was just off to the east of us. I could make out the shoreline and figure out where the harbour probably was, but couldn’t see any detail. And, of course, that’s the point. It’s quite possibly a no-fly zone, so no-one can spy on the Russians. We had to fly well beyond that area, including shipping lanes, before finally turning east towards Tallinn. This is just a theory, but I put my suspicions to security specialist Jüri Luik. Jüri was both Foreign Minister and Defence Minister in the early years of Estonian independence in the 1990s and, since my conversation with him, he has once again been appointed Minister of Defence in the 2017 ministry of Prime Minister Jüri Ratas. It’s clear that, at a time of renewed uncertainty about regional security, Estonia needs … wants a steady hand in this critical defence portfolio. And given that Jüri Luik was one of the critical figures originally involved in steering the country out of murky Soviet waters, the choice is understandable.
The disconnected Russian Territory of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, tucked in between Poland and Lithuania.
One of the characteristics of Estonians is their capacity for understatement. They can’t afford the luxury of hysteria, because they must be certain that, when they really do need help, no one can accuse them of crying wolf. So, when I put the Kaliningrad question to Jüri, he was suitably circumspect:
Well, Russia has a relatively large military base, as well as a huge military port in Kaliningrad, and in some ways, it is a military post, especially when there are exercises it’s possible that civilian planes have to skirt it. So, this is undoubtedly an important factor for the security of the Baltic Sea region. But obviously, as an outpost, you can see it as a strength, but you can see it also as a vulnerability, because it is basically in the middle of NATO, surrounded by NATO countries from both sides. So, I wouldn’t overestimate its military importance, but it clearly has a political and flag-waving importance, and Russia has now said that it will be placing some of its most sophisticated, ground-to-ground ballistic missiles, so called Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, which is clearly a negative step, but it’s their territory … their decision.
Clearly the answer is both yes and no, in that Kaliningrad is a strategic chess piece. The more I thought about this though, the answer is (predictably) a trifle more mundane. I remembered being told once that Russia is generally very controlling about who has access to their airspace and the only non-Russian, European airline to have access is Finland’s national airline Finnair. All other airlines must skirt the perimeter, or risk financial or (worse still) military penalties. Kaliningrad is Russian territory and therefore is clearly subject to the same rules. Being as newly-minted pilot myself, I double checked flight charts for Europe and confirmed this conclusion.
The result though, is still the same. A Russian no-fly zone is still a Russian no-fly zone. And it guarantees Moscow a level of discretion that allows them to escape casual scrutiny. I’m quite sure that a good spy satellite can easily, and literally, overlook these sanctions, but it speaks to the notion of fortress walls that, for the rest of Europe, have become a thing of the past. It therefore stands out far more starkly to a Western audience and a European Union view of the world, and marks very precisely where the boundaries of open idealism lie—a fact highlighted by an increasingly audacious and combative leader in the Kremlin.
And clearly, NATO and Europe are taking the posturing from Moscow and Putin seriously, because NATO has been increasingly moving troops to the region. The original plan was to have 650 UK troops based in Estonia, but the number has increased to 800[1]. In fact, across the Baltic states and Poland, NATO has 4000 troops, grouped in four battalion-sized troop placements, and this is being described as the largest build-up of NATO troops since the Cold War[2]. The troops in Estonia are positioned in the town of Tapa, about 90 minutes east of the Estonian capital, almost halfway to the Russian border. For most Estonians, this build up is reassuring, but for those close to the border, it simply highlights the sense of risk and makes them deeply nervous about the possibility of these east Estonian towns, like the university city of Narva, becoming a battleground, not just for the security of Estonia, but for the very idea of Europe sanctity. My hope is that this is just brinkmanship, but we currently exist in a world of increasingly volatile politics and social movements, where the ground and relational positions keep shifting. And we’re only just beginning to be reminded that, despite the idea of globalisation, there are no global ‘rules of the game’. Any idea of international propriety is a nonsense—a confection cooked up by the west and filled with comforting delusion.
The other curious imponderable in all this lies in the very make-up of the Estonian society. One of the strategies of Soviet occupation of the Baltic States, along with the many other countries that were also absorbed into the USSR through the period of the Cold War, was that of deliberate miscegenation. This refers to the relocation, voluntary or forced, of Russian citizens into these newly appropriated territories. The logic is simple and fits the timeless trick of victors exercising their will and power over a defeated people. The process is partly about forcibly taking land and property, but is also about blurring ethnic distinction, watering down the gene pool of the vanquished and attempting to wipe out their language and culture. It’s a very particular and successful form of ethnic cleansing. The result, for Estonia, is that the numbers of ethnic Russians rose dramatically, to the point that, today, the Russian minority forms approximately thirty percent of the country. This phenomenon is replicated across Latvia and Lithuania.
In the immediate post-Soviet world, this dramatic ethnic duality threatened to become a destabilising social schism that could easily have plunged the region into civil war. The fact that this didn’t happen is the result of a number of distinct factors. One is tied up in the personality of the then new Russian leader Boris Yeltsin and the domestic predicaments he was facing. Estonian Independence came in the midst of the failed coup attempt in Russia in August 1991. Hardliner communists were desperately trying to unravel the reformative policies of glasnost and perestroika, that Yeltsin’s predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev had helped conjure into being. Boris Yeltsin had no appetite for a battle against the tides of change that were sweeping the former Soviet Union—changes that had fundamentally transformed the global geopolitical landscape and had brought about an unprecedented level of calm and optimism to large parts of a hitherto fractious world.
Alongside this, there were potential flashpoint moments surrounding Estonian independence that involved the expulsion of the Russian military, as well as the reclamation of property that Moscow had illegally appropriated for the influx of ethnic Russians. Both of these policies took Moscow completely by surprise and had the potential to inflame tensions to the point of military action. The fact that this didn’t happen says much about what Moscow and Yeltsin felt was at stake. It also explains why, when a controversial Soviet military statue was moved from the centre of the Estonian capital Tallinn, enraging the Russian population in Estonia, Moscow did nothing.
The other factor in all this has, to do with the very nature of the Estonian people and the personalities of those who were in the remarkable position of having to imagine the very idea of an independent Estonia into reality. This job fell to very smart, but in many cases, very young women and men who had to build a nation in the middle of what was still a regional minefield. I meet two of these people over these past few weeks. One is Liia Hänni, currently the senior advisor to the new Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid. Liia was a highly regarded astrophysicist during the period of Soviet rule in Estonia, before she was coaxed into politics in the final years of the Cold War. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Liia’s experience was highly sought after, as the country had to rapidly form a stable, wise and trustworthy government with a good instinct for reinvention. The other person was the previously mentioned Jüri Luik, who was barely 27 years-old when he was first made Defence Minister, and was then promoted to Foreign Affairs Minister less than a year later. He subsequently served another term as Defence Minister four years later and now, twenty-four years after that first appointment and still only 50 years-old, Jüri has once again been asked to fill the role of Defence Minister, at a time when old Russian demons seem to be threatening Estonian sovereignty all over again.
The Estonian Choral Festival stage, built for 25,000 singers (Gallacher)
The last time Estonia escaped Soviet dominance, it was through one of the most remarkable acts of peaceful resistance in history. In a sense, Russian rule was defeated through song. For all three Baltic states, music and particularly singing is the defining cultural strength. In Estonia, the number of people involved in choral singing is breath-taking, and once every four years, the country hosts a choral festival, with a stage designed to take a massed choir of 25,000 singers. And so it was that the push-back against Moscow came via what has become known as the Singing Revolution, with people from all three countries joining hands in a continuous line that stretched the length of the Baltic states, and singing all the banned songs. It will be a question on the minds of most people in that area of Europe, whether such a display of cultural certainty can be mustered and succeed once again against Russian aggression. One hopes that the power of a good song is enough.
[1]C. Mortimer, First of 800 UK troops arrive in Estonia to face off against Putin as part of NATO show of strength, The Independent [online], 18th March 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/uk-troops-deploy-estonia-baltic-nato-russia-security-threat-military-a7636456.html
[2] K. Rawlinson and E. MacAskill, UK deploys hundreds of troops and aircraft to eastern Europe, The Guardian [online], 27th October 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/27/uk-to-deploy-hundreds-of-troops-and-aircraft-to-eastern-europe