Instead of doing penance for their sins, former ideologues brazenly justify their past

(A summarized translation of Jüri Saar’s article “Eesti lähimineviku tõlgendamine”, Sirp, November 30 2007.)

A society that has undergone radical changes can’t avoid confronting recent history. The past is unavoidably part of the present, to which previous participants bring the mentality of the past. Attempts at disposing of the past do not succeed. The more the Soviets denied the past or perverted history, the grander the truths of an independent Estonia became for people, and the Soviet reality that much more miserable. That is why the Soviet past must be dissected, honestly, openly so one can deal with it objectively.

For the past 16 years attempts have been made at understanding what actually happened during the 50 years of Soviet occupation. It is somewhat surprising that the debate has taken on vehemence among the Soviet ideologues of the past. The future will show whether this stems from the April incidents (riots following the relocation of a Soviet era statue), which polarized the community or the communist ideologues’ despairing efforts at changing actuality.

Former officials claim that considerable and valuable contributions were made during the long Soviet period. Since most were unable to flee the Soviets, people adjusted to the inevitable and lived as upright as conditions allowed in the former Soviets state. A negative appraisal of the times, they say, would negate the achievements of many. By calling active participants (in Soviet life) and those able to quietly adapt, collaborators, then the only non-collaborators would be freedom-fighters whose role at the time and even now is marginal. Similarly, those escaping to the west were of no value for the homeland.

Former communists-ideologists/ideologues don’t regret their previous activities but boldly justify them. This can be called as the “Allik-phenomenon”. (Jaak Allik was a former and self-righteous leading communist party member. – LL.) Firstly, victims are deliberately confused with perpetrators. This blurs one’s personal role in the “near past”. It reinforces the belief that all, more or less, collaborated. Secondly, if injustice and dishonesty prevail in the long term, circumstances normalize and they both change into justice and honesty. But a Roman maxim states: ex iniuria ius non oritur ius – justice does not derive from injustice. Thirdly, thousands incapable of fighting totalitarianism and repressed by the Soviets have been thus insulted. Fully culpable are those that aided and abetted the onset of communist terror in 1940, which lasted to 1991. Fourthly, those justifying the Soviets are abusing freedom of speech (somewhat similar to holocaust denial) and tend to be those that were the most aggressive in supporting the Soviet system.

Allik has (in an article published August 10, 2007 in Sirp, “Põlvili või püsti” [Kneeling or standing] – ed.) gloatingly stated with obvious Schadenfreude that “scholars have still not found a common ground from where to adequately describe the essence of the Soviet Union.” But I’ll attempt to describe the Soviet period using the “prison model”, because we’re not dealing with a bolshevik experiment but a bolshevik prison experiment. If Russia was called the peoples’ prison during the Czarist era, then the bolsheviks created a state in which a prime governmental function was the maintenance of a system of concentration camps – the GULAG. In one sense the GULAG functioned internally in the state, but from another perspective the GULAG prison experience was similar to the daily existence of people living in the entire Soviet Union.

The USSR’s borders controlled the physical movement of information in and out of the state. Even domestic info was censored. Private property was confiscated; work was compensated not with money, but with “prison vouchers” which were recognized only in the USSR. (Indeed, the Soviet ruble was not convertible at regular currency exchange establishments. -ed) There are many more analogies between the Soviet and prison systems. The country was a metaphor for a penal network, with prisons of various levels of harsh conditions.

Within the system Estonia was unique, because the “social experiment” wasn’t homegrown but rather forced on the country with the Soviet occupation in 1940. When Allik contends that tyrannical foreigners conquered, brutalized and then left Estonians to their own devices, he dismisses the most basic facts.
(To be continued.)

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