The Estonian population is not growing and at the same time people are seeking employment outside the country where salaries are higher. The greatest unemployment rate is in the east part of the country. Teams of construction workers come from there to Tallinn, where they work as masons, roofers, or carpenters in the suburbs. The flow of Mexican workers into the United States is somewhat analogous. In Texas, Mexican immigrants are known to be hard workers, and do the jobs that native Texans do not want.
The majority of ethnic Russians who came with the occupation clearly will stay in Estonia. Although the number of people who came originally from the East has not diminished significantly, over the years they have become less noticeable. In the past one could identify non-Estonians by their clothes, but no more. However, on the buses to Lasnamäe, a Tallinn high-rise suburb built during the Soviet occupation with a high concentration of ethnic Russians, lively conversations in Russian are the rule. When a bus driver or a Lasnamäe pedestrian is asked for directions, inevitably the response is in Russian.
Native Estonians feel that Russians can never become Estonians, because the Russian character is different. Yet two of my schoolteachers in a refugee school were daughters of Russian émigrés from the Czarist times, and I cannot thank them enough for their positive influence on me. To me, the ethnic Russians seem very warmhearted. Although I was a stranger to her, an elderly Russian lady, who now lives in the house in which my mother was born, showed her home to me graciously. When I left she repeatedly blessed my family and me. I was told of an instance in which a man had fallen and injured himself on a street in Tallinn. Most people passed by him in a distance, but a lady with a Russian accent knelt down to help him. At the same time I was told that although ethnic Russians are warmer, they are quicker to give up on work, and are less focused and less tenacious than Estonians.
Many of the taxi drivers I encountered spoke with a Russian accent. One driver, who spoke good Estonian, said he was a Russian. I wonder, when will ethnic Russians feel that they are Estonians, and when will Estonian émigrés feel that they are Americans? In separate conversations, Laas Leivat, Estonia’s honorary consul in Canada, and Mari-Ann Kelam, who served in the Estonian Parliament, encouraged Estonian-Americans to take part of Estonian elections. But since American Estonians don’t pay taxes in Estonia, do they have the right to vote for a representative who will decide how Estonian taxpayers’ money is spent?
While in Tallinn I observed veterans who fought in 1944 against the Soviet army demonstrating to be recognized as equals to those who fought in the War of Independence in 1919 against the same colossus in the East. The hang-up seems to stem that most of them wore German uniforms and were supplied by Germans. But it seem preposterous that after Estonia became independent in 1991 their cause has not been recognized as just, and that it was not folly to fight for Estonia’s independence given that in 1918 a similar effort succeeded. Estonians who fought in 1944 against the Soviets surely had in mind the mass deportation of 10,000 academics, administrators and their families to Siberia in the 1940–41 period of Soviet occupation.
***
From the main roads, I could see hay being harvested. Some fields had crops called raps (canola, also rapeseed in Canada) for producing cooking oil. Others may have been unused because crop rotation requires that land rest. I visited a man whom I met in 1982 when he was still a schoolboy. At that time he had led me to a deserted village where one of my ancestors once farmed. There he took out of his pocket a crest with Estonian colors: blue, black and white, then forbidden by the Soviet occupiers.
He was courageous to show this to a stranger. Now, twenty-two years later, he provided me with some insight into declining Estonian agriculture. He said that it was partly a self-inflicted problem.
When Estonia regained independence, most collective farms were dissolved and lands were privatized by returning them to the heirs of former owners. The result has been a proliferation of small farms that are not able to compete on the world market because they cannot afford the needed farm machinery. In Puurmani the privatization was handled better, with the collective farm converted into a cooperative in which farmers owned shares and the cooperative retained the machinery. Nevertheless, of the 30 farms created by privatization in Puurmani, only five are still working farms, and this number may reduce.
(To be continued)
Impressions of present day Estonia (3)
Archived Articles | 22 Apr 2005 | Arved PlaksEWR
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