Reviewed by Ain Söödor
Andres Kasekamp is not the only observer who has contributed to the impression that Estonia, after 1935, became a 'nationalist 'authoritarian' and 'fascist' state.
It is wrong to judge a book by its cover, but it would not be surprising, if a casual observer, on the basis of titles such as Tönu Parming's, 'The Collapse of Liberal Democracy and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Estonia (London, 1975), and Imre Lipping's 'The Emergence of Estonian Authoritarianism' (1974), came to the conclusion that in the final years of its independence, the Republic of Estonia was not a 'true' democracy and that, therefore, the loss of Estonia's independence in 1939 was, perhaps, not really a great loss.
Kasekamp and other obsevers have consistently downplayed and downgraded the patriotism and idealism of Estonians, possibly because they cannot conceive that the Estonians who created the free, democratic, independent Republic of Estonia in 1918, had not only a deep and profound understanding of injustice, they also had an intense desire to be just, to be better than their oppressors.
In his first chapter, 'The Emergence of Independent Estonia', Kasekamp claims that it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that Estonians acquired a 'national identity' (Page 4), that '... the idea of independence had never been contemplated by Estonians before the Tsarist regime crumbled in 1917' and that Estonia's national leaders were 'impelled' to declare independence by '... the unexpected simultaneous collapse of the Russian and German empires' (Page 6), thereby making Estonia's declaration of independence in 1918 sound like a kind of accident and not something that Estonians really wanted.
These are remarkable claims.
Of course it is possible that Kasekamp is right. It is possible that when Juhan Liiv, the Estonian poet, wrote several well-known and well-loved poems in 1894, expressing the fervent hope that Estonia would, some day, be a free state, Liiv was the first and only Estonian to contemplate the idea of Estonia's idependence.
Of course, the careful reader will have noticed that Kasekamp's chapter, 'The Emergence of Independent Estonia', should have been titled 'The Re-emergence of Independent Estonia', because, as Kasekamp points out on page 5, Estonians were free and idependent until the thirteenth century, when Teutonic crusaders quashed their ancient liberty and imposed a 'dark age' of serfdom on them. During this 'dark age of serfdom', that lasted seven hundred years, Estonians never lost their common language, traditions, culture and values - in other words, their 'national identity'.
The trouble is that not all readers are careful readers and casual readers often tend to accept the distorted and prejudicial claims of careless writers at face value. Also, it is important to remember that some casual readers are quite prejudiced against Estonia to begin with. They know that Estonians in SS-uniforms fought 'on the wrong side' during World War Two, without knowing or understanding any of the circumstances in which this took place. In their view, it is pointless and futile to preserve cultures and countries that once were - especially when these cultures and countries were 'nationalist', 'authoritarian' 'fascist' - and not 'true democracies' as some 'sentimental emigres' and 'apologists of the Päts regime' say they were.
There are also those who believe that the time for all small countries is past, and that it is, therefore, pointless and futile for Estonians today to resist the attempts of the New Russia to 're-absorb' what Kasekamp, at the outset of his book, casually refers to as one of '...Russia's Baltic provinces' (Page 4).
(To be continued)