President Kaljulaid: Please Stand for the Rule of Law in Moscow
Jüri Estam

President Kersti Kaljulaid is going to meet with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin tomorrow (on Thursday). There will be no better time than now for our president to inform her host in the Kremlin that the Republic of Estonia wishes the return of two large parcels of Estonian land annexed during the previous century by Mr. Putin’s predecessor Joseph (Josif) Stalin.

The very least she can do is to not do any political harm to the interests of her country while in Russia. Madam president should avoid all discussion of going ahead with a Russian-Estonian Border Treaty with Mr. Putin. This thing ought to be permitted to die a nice and quiet death and be laid to rest.

The Historical Narrative

99 years ago, in true David and Goliath fashion, with the help of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom and volunteers from several Northern European countries, the armed forces of the young Estonian nation unexpectedly won what the Estonians call the War of Independence. The Treaty of Tartu between the Republic of Estonia and Soviet Russia, signed on February 2, 1920, ended that war. Among other things, the treaty in question fixed the location of the border between Estonia and Russia in painstaking detail.

Two decades later, Moscow forcibly incorporated Estonia and the other two Baltic States into the USSR. After driving Hitler’s troops out of Estonia in 1944, the Red Army then replaced the German occupation force, settling into the country for the next five decades. As WW II drew to an end, Joseph Stalin added insult to injury by amputating 5% of Soviet-occupied Estonia’s territory and annexing it to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, as though even more land was something that Russia might have been in dire need of.

One of these annexed tracts is located in the upper right hand corner of Estonia across from the city of Narva, and the other larger parcel is situated in the Southeast, centering on the city of Petseri. In 1991, when Estonia regained her independence, Russia retained control over most of Petseri County and three local jurisdictions in the Northeast (Estonia’s Narva, Piiri and Karjati parishes) on the eastern banks of the Narva River, and didn’t return them to Estonia.

As Claes Levinson has noted in ‘The Long Shadow of History: Post-Soviet Border Disputes—The Case of Estonia, Latvia, and Russia’ (in “Connections”, Fall 2006), Russia has been maintaining for nearly 3 decades now that “…the Soviet Union neither occupied nor annexed the Baltic States”, and that the Soviet Russian presence in the Baltic littoral, starting in the forties, was nothing more than the result of “interstate treaties”. If you look at it that way, Russian propagandists, as has often been the case, might be able to teach a few things to Western spin doctors about muddying the waters of meanings and about obfuscation.

Ignoring the fact that the Kremlin engineered the WW II takeovers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania at the barrel of a gun, and continuing to act even now in an essentially Stalinist manner, Vladimir Putin and his colleagues continue to contend that the arrangements Stalin forged with puppet governments in the Baltic States in 1940 superseded and overrode the Peace Treaty of Tartu, and that the treaty itself now rests in the rubbish bin of history. The spin that the Kremlin puts on the ball is that she was thus freed from the cumbersome obligations she assumed in 1920, when Soviet Russia renounced “in perpetuity”, all rights to the territory of Estonia. While all that the Baltic States can do is shrug their shoulders at Russia’s less than neighborly behavior on this count, they don’t have to agree or comply with Moscow’s interpretation of events either.

After regaining their independence in 1991, Estonia and Latvia did plead their territorial cases under international law, but for several reasons, they weren’t very persistent about it. To begin with, for several years there was the overarching and dominant need to first get the Russian Federation, under Boris Yeltsin, to withdraw large numbers of Russian troops from the Baltic countries, which fortunately did happen in the mid-nineties.

If we think ourselves back in time, the three Baltic States were then (and even now often remain) eager to do the bidding of the major powers in the West. In Washington and several capitals of Western Europe, “we won” was the sentiment of the day in the late eighties and during all of the nineties and even beyond. One of the best-know examples of this was Francis Fukuyama's essay’ The End of History?’ which trumpeted the triumph of liberal democracy. Put a different way, the West had no inkling yet of the huge change in course that would arrive a decade later, when Vladimir Putin took the reins of power in Russia. In the nineties, particularly before the ravages of alcohol and health problems got the best of Boris Yeltsin, there was genuine, but also blue-eyed hope that Russians could be convinced to join both the program and the aspirations of liberal Western-style democracy, also sharing in the benefits thereof. Strobe Talbot, American-raised Toomas Hendrik Ilves and others urged Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to make positive engagement with Russia a cornerstone of their approach to foreign policy. Rocking the boat was not encouraged, which included refraining from making “territorial claims” on Russia.

The problem is that recent Estonian governments have continued to act as though we were still stuck in the nineties, and that some sort of hope remains that the current Russian regime could magically be transformed into something along the lines of the Netherlands or Denmark. Put simply: Estonian foreign policy approaches that continue to try to appeal to Putin as a “good tsar” or that rest on conciliatory ideas are obsolete, and need to be replaced with something more realistic.

The Estonian historian Aldo Kals has written that the holiday period at the end of 1994 will go down in infamy as the “black Christmas” of Estonian history, for it was then that Estonia’s Prime Minister Andres Tarand announced while in Finland, without informing the other members of his cabinet, that Estonia, in her negotiations with the Russian Federation, need not really be bound by the sections of the Tartu Peace Treaty of 1920 that delineated the location of Estonia’s border with Russia. As we now see in retrospect, the Tarand gambit and the Western hope that Russia might liberalize never materialized. For reasons that remain unfathomable, many younger-generation Estonian politicians such as Urmas Paet, Marko Mihkelson and others have steadfastly stuck to this day with the concessions that Tarand made back then. Paet and Mihkelson and others of this school of thought have been far from eager to publicly explain the logic and the policy considerations that drive them. They might also be afraid of losing face, in the event that Estonia were to change her foreign policy strategy now and revert, as she should, to standing on the foundation of the Peace Treaty of Tartu. In reality, Estonian foreign policy needs to get unstuck from assumptions that have been rendered obsolete and are no longer of utility or helpful.

European Union Entry Negotiations Also Entered the Picture, but now we’ve been Overtaken by new Events

Other factors were soon to also make their influence felt in this equation. Although Estonia wasn’t admitted to the European Union and NATO until 2004, preparations for the accession of the Baltic States began long before that. According to the Charter of the EU, member states (and quite apparently prospective members) should not have territorial disputes with neighboring states. One could easily say that 15 years ago, Estonia found herself in a Catch-22 situation on two fronts. Regardless: nothing changes the fact that under international law, annexation, which means the forcible acquisition of one state's territory by another state, is held to be an illegal act one way or another.

In real life, territorial disputes come in a broad variety of flavors all around the world, in hundreds of cases. A quick look at Wikipedia should convince anyone who’s interested that even on the European subcontinent, tens of countries have agreed to disagree when it comes to territorial claims. Territorial disputes are nearly as omnipresent in our world as is the common cold. There is no reason a priori for the next Estonian government to fear declaring that it has changed its position regarding attempts in recent years to strike a Russian-Estonian border agreement, and that Estonia is now reverting fully to the Peace Treaty of Tartu as the legal foundation of Estonia’s birth as a modern nation. It’s not as though the treaty itself is hard to find. It was registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series on July 12, 1922, and the United Nations Organization (successor to the League of Nations) still has it nicely tucked away in its files in Geneva. Making Russia heed the Tartu Peace Treaty doesn’t seem to be realistic, but that isn’t actually the point that this essay wishes to make.

Coming back to the present: although there might be something awkward about continuing to build a border fence atop the demarcation line that currently separates Estonia and Russia, while at the same time requesting that the Russia Federation return the annexed Estonian territories to Estonia, both are doable at the same time. People would just need to get adjusted to the idea.

Estonia’s Behavior Concerning the Problem of Annexation is Strange and even Hypocritical

The extreme aversion that the majority of Estonia’s policy makers seem to have to the idea of asking Russia to return big swathes of Petseri County and the three Northeastern parishes doesn’t just seem to be anomalous and self-harming by international standards, but even appears to be very anomalous, compared to the behavior of a great many other societies.

The Soviet occupation of Estonia lasted half a century. Could it be that many of my dear compatriots, and particularly those in power, suffer from Stockholm Syndrome? Is this a case of Estonian politicians not merely being timid, but also being stuck in a fossilized mindset from the early nineties or even earlier? Could it be that the foreign policy doctrine on this – one that seems by now to be written in stone at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – has actually been rendered pointless by the changes that have taken place over thirty years, with most everyone in the establishment sticking to it simply out of reflex and outdated inertia? Out of force of habit? Why does the Estonian political elite continue to act in a way that actually serves Russian interests on this particular issue?

The Taboo Against Discussing Petserimaa (Petseri County) in Public

Public discussion of the annexed territories and “the injustice of it all” have essentially been placed off limits in modern-day Estonia. It’s a topic rarely frankly raised by the Estonian media. What’s more important: the many proponents of signing a new border treaty between the Republic of Estonia and the Russian Federation – people who agree then to abandoning claims to large parts of Petseri County and the three parishes on the other bank of the Narva River – basically decline to justify the logic and the benefits or supposed benefits that would come from permanently ceding these territories to Moscow.

What was conspicuously absent or at least underrepresented during the debate that that took place prior to Estonia’s general elections on March 4 was the realm of foreign policy and foreign relations.

For whatever reason, asking Moscow to return the territories she once annexed has been close to a taboo topic in this country after the return of independence. A curious silence surrounds the issue, and Estonian politicians don’t discuss it in public, much as one doesn’t break wind at the dinner table. It is a matter shrouded in mystery, presumably discussed only behind closed doors on occasion in the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other rarified government venues.

Perhaps it’s catching or perhaps it’s a virus, but an air of mystery also surrounds this trip of our President to Moscow, as though the entire venture had been stamped Top Secret. What is driving the President to meet with president Putin? Commentators, politicians and other pundits are puzzled and have voiced consternation. It also bears mentioning that trips by Estonian presidents to meet their Russian counterparts are rare as hen’s teeth.

What Would the Point of a new Border Treaty with Russia be?

Some Estonian businessmen certainly hope that Estonian concessions to Russia will work to their benefit and they lobby to this end, but selling the current and former Estonian residents of Petseri County and the other annexed Estonian territories down the river is not a pretty picture. The proponents of the new “technical” Border Treaty with Russia avoid – like the plague – discussion of the damage that such a move would do to Estonia’s legal standing as a successor state of the Republic of Estonia that was declared in 1918, and they also haven’t presented (being tight-lipped, as described earlier) any convincing arguments about why it would otherwise work to Estonia’s advantage to continue to proceed with the new Border Treaty.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

In the electoral program that the Estonian National Conservative Party (EKRE) published prior to the recent general elections, EKRE declares: “We will annul the unconstitutional Border Treaty Estonia has concluded with Russia. We demand that the occupied part of Petseri County and the lands beyond the Narva River be returned to Estonia, along with compensation to be paid for damages rendered by their occupation.” If the president of Estonia makes concessions to Vladimir Putin tomorrow on Estonia’s border problems, chances are good there will be some interesting fireworks in the Riigikogu soon, if not hell to pay. The other option would be for EKRE to back down on its election promises.

What is this - a Fellini Movie?

Andres Tarand and other politicians who want to cede the Estonian territories in the East to Russia – in other words, Estonian politicians who want to add an Estonian endorsement to Stalin’s annexations (which took place in several stages), rendering them “legitimate” are promoting a bad idea. It was a bad idea then, and it’s even a worse idea now.

Charles Clover, in his book ‘Black Wind, White Snow - The Rise of Russia’s new Nationalism’ has a fascinating passage early on in his work about ideas – both good and bad – as “viruses” that can almost be looked at from the perspective of epidemiology. He also writes about how “theory produces monsters”. The Estonian foreign policy establishment too seems to have been “eaten by the idea” that Estonia’s annexed territories simply must be ceded with blessings from the highest levels of authority, and they just can’t shake the idea, as though they were addicted to it.
This leads to all sorts of grotesque and even Kafkaesque situations here in Estonia. The president, the Estonian government and various organizations continue to mark with a series of events and ceremonies the memory of the battles this country fought 100 years ago in the successful War of Independence. Many of the veterans whose praises they sing perished in the several battles fought for Petseri County, but at the same time, present-day politicians are also in a hurry to give Petseri County away for good. We’re also less than one year away from marking the 100th anniversary of the Tartu Peace Treaty. All of this makes for some pretty disharmonious viewing and nonsensical posturing.

The bad decision made by Andres Tarand in 1994 has led to a situation where Estonian men born in Petseri County on the Russian side of Stalin’s line who were drafted into the Soviet military are now told – in a fairly bizarre fashion – by Estonian bureaucrats that their years in the Soviet Army don’t count towards their pension credits because they were “born in a foreign country”.

Instead of sticking to their guns and proceeding from the principles of international law, Andres Tarand and the others who are the architects of Estonia’s misguided policy concerning the annexed territories have painted us into a corner and created – from the perspective of legal logic and consistency – a really troubled and unfortunate situation similar to the story of the Tar-Baby, as described in the Uncle Remus stories. Such stories are difficult to justify.
With the president going to Moscow tomorrow, her first move should be to do no harm. The President and other Estonian representatives now and in the future should back away from the concessions previously made to Moscow concerning Estonian territories annexed by Russia, as well as the bundle of other important legal issues that are involved here.

A Wake-up Call: Estonia and the Others Shouldn’t Let Themselves be Dictated by the Nineties Any More

Earlier, I described the hopes that the western countries pinned a quarter of a century ago to the prospect of Russia being willing to undergo a change in societal thinking that would have brought her into the fold of the liberal or Western democracies. That didn’t happen. Nor did the transatlantic community draw the conclusions it should have from the Chechen War. The same thing also happened in respect to the war between Russian and Georgia.
It took the annexation of the Crimea, like the effects of a bucketful of cold water in your face, for all or most Western countries to “get it” and to begin to comprehend Putin’s Russia as it is. “Each time hopes for substantial change in Russia have been raised”, writes Keir Giles in his work ‘Moscow Rules - What Drives Russia to Confront the West’, “they have been dashed, as the country reverts to its historical pattern”.

I think that a great many Western countries now “get it” as concerns the nature and the behavior of Putin’s regime, but I’m not so sure about my own Estonia. Or if Estonian leaders get it, are they perhaps not in denial or paralyzed on some level?

It’s strange to watch Estonian leaders making the rounds at international conferences and other events, where they actively chime up about the wrong that was done to Ukraine in respect to Crimea, and also endorse the need for sanctions or more sanctions, but they continue to clam up about the case of Petseri and the three parishes on the far side of the Narva river. Do they not see the inconsistency and peculiar logic involved here? How precisely does the case of annexed Petseri County differ so dramatically from the Crimean case that Estonian leaders would rather die than direct attention to the bad treatment received by the Baltic States that also took place at the hands of Moscow, only earlier? If Estonia cedes her own annexed lands, is she not actually breaking ranks with the West on this question?

For Estonia to now validate the annexation of her own territories wouldn’t just be grotesque and preposterous. It would be out of synch with the times.

The Expected Cries of “Warmongering Estonia” that Would Emanate from Russia Shouldn’t be Taken Seriously

Before anyone starts suggesting that all of this might jeopardize Estonia’s security, let’s be both civil and realistic about this. First: while she doesn’t need to supplicate herself before President Putin, I’m sure that the good Estonian President is more than capable of being polite and levelheaded in her discussions with him. And I hope she uses a translator! Even claims for redress can be expressed in a classically diplomatic fashion.
Can we expect Mr. Putin to be deliriously happy about this or to say “yes” right off the bat? Hardly. But, if Estonia is to be a country that respects the rule of law and international law in a uniform manner, someone needs to finally point to the fact that the forcible acquisition of one state's territory by another state is generally regarded as an illegal act, and that retention of annexed territories doesn’t make for good-neighborly relations.

As concerns realism, one would have to be out of one’s mind to even entertain the thought that Estonia, with her 1,3 million residents and her small and under-equipped military would be inclined to ever make war against behemoth Russia to regain the territories in question. Rather: it is better to file the claim, and to even state directly that Estonia has no intentions to take steps – other than diplomatic ones – in the hopes of eventually recovering her lands. We can certainly hope for eventual better relations with Russia, can’t we?

Does the President Have the Right Stuff?

It is finally time for an Estonian president or an appropriate minister to register a complaint with Russia about the historical annexation of much of Petseri County and Narva, Piiri and Karjati parishes, and to ask formally for their return. The international community should be notified of this as well.
President Kaljulaid has been on the job now for over two years, and is at the halfway point in her tenure. She has obviously hit her stride and has become acclimated to her job. If the president is to make a name for herself, the time is now. One can even sense that the president feels such a need, and that this is one of the factors compelling her to go to Moscow, The question is whether, fifty or a hundred years from now, she will be seen as a positive or negative figure by Estonian historians.

It’s fortunate that the democratic nations woke up when Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea, and that the line is currently being held internationally on the importance of the problems of annexation and respect for international law. At the same time, Benjamin Netanyahu has been signaling in recent months that he intends to annex the Palestinian West Bank. We have reached a watershed moment in history, where the international taboo on annexation is being challenged and is even in danger of being broken or badly eroded. It would be an enormous tragedy if the consensus of civilized nations concerning the illegality and the undesirability of territorial annexation as a crude tool of empires and a device used by strongmen were to be abandoned.
Kersti Kaljulaid stands before a choice. She can weigh in on behalf of the rule of law, in the interests of maintaining the taboo against annexation, or she can cave on the issue. I hope she does the right thing in Moscow on Thursday.

This is not a hypothetical matter or merely an academic plaything. If she gets sucked into “legitimizing” the Stalinist annexation of Petseri County a number of decades ago, president Kaljulaid would essentially be egging Netanyahu and Putin on. By not condemning annexation in the past as well as in the present, Estonia would also open herself up, at least potentially, for possible additional land grabs of her own territory sometime in the future.
Meanwhile – domestically speaking – has the time now not arrived for a serious and open debate on foreign policy, possibly even leading to a sea change in the course of that policy?

Jüri Estam is a communications consultant, journalist and writer who lives and works in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

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