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  The islanders were ravaged by alcohol and poverty. Shipwrecks were plundered, and theft was common. “During the night the wool was stolen which had been cut during the day,” Österblom wrote, “and the seed which should have been sown, and when nothing came of it, it was said that the worms had eaten it. It was vain to employ anyone as a guard, because he would steal more than anyone.” He continued: “One speaks about the curse of drinking, but here was a living illustration of it. The people went around dressed in rags. Dirt, vermin, grief and illness were consuming them.” The farmhouses were dirty, and often without chimneys, and the thatched roofs were leaking. “In these smoky and dirty cottages lived up to four families, where each family had a corner of the room, and one bed. One of the men was the farmer, and the others were servants. These servants had no wages, simply food, and some clothes.”

  Religious freedom was limited. Laymen were not allowed to gather for spiritual purposes except in household prayers, and then they were restricted to reading from the Bible or from Luther’s postils. Österblom practised as a teacher, concealing his missionary purpose. He began by reading Luther to a small gathering of people, which lulled them to sleep:

  These people were unusually good at sleeping. If they had the opportunity to lie down on a bench, they were soon fast asleep. That they fell asleep during my reading was perhaps natural, since they didn’t understand what I read . . . When I understood that, I let the book lie open in front of me, and read between the lines instead. I used the same words that they used in their everyday speech, and the same dialect. Then they woke up and became very attentive.

  The beginning, however, was slow:

  I talked to everybody I met about the saving of their souls. People therefore became afraid of me, so it wasn’t easy to get hold of anyone. If I met someone in the forest, he would steal away amongst the bushes, like a fish diving deeper in the water. Sometimes I would see people climb over stone walls, and walk across the fields to escape me.

  Finally one woman was saved, and filled, she said, with ecstasy and peace and joy. Others followed. Now people were torn between Österblom and the Lutheran priest on the island, or, as some saw it, between anti-Christ and the church: “What was distinctly to my disadvantage was that the seer had predicted that during the year I arrived, anti-Christ would come to Wormsö.”

  After the first wave of revivals, Österblom called the women to a meeting, where he told them the story of David and Goliath. He told them that Goliath existed on Ormsö, too, and asked them to put up their hand if they wanted to help to defeat him. They were all so eager to help that they put up not one hand but two: “After I thus caught them in the trap, I told them that the Goliath I was referring to was dirt and uncleanliness.” He talked to them about the dirt in their homes until they wept, and promised to clean. The next day he set off on a tour of inspection, and saw cottage floors covered in water. The women were digging mud and dirt from the floors to reveal long-forgotten planks. He also encouraged people to build chimneys. Most people had damaged eyes from living in a constant cloud of smoke. After one man saved his eyes by building a chimney, following Österblom’s advice, many others soon did the same: “When the smoke and the dirt were done away with,” he wrote, “people became very grateful to us.”

  Österblom was by now revered. He was even called in by the baron to talk to striking villagers, whom he persuaded to go back to work. The mission had transformed the islanders, he wrote, into “honest and sober workers,” sought after on the mainland as factory workers, servants, and wet nurses. Gone was their reputation for thievery, laziness, and drunkenness. Before, he wrote, “They often appeared in small groups, dressed in rags, and always begging. You gave them money or whatever they wanted at once, to get them out of your doorway as soon as possible, so as not to catch vermin from them.”

  This is how quickly cultures can change. Like most Swedes, I had assumed as a child that the Swedish national character was intrinsically solid, hard-working, and egalitarian. Ormsö, in fact, was a kind of microcosm of Sweden at the time: deeply hierarchical, poor, and alcoholic. Individuals in Sweden profoundly transformed that society over the course of a few decades, from the 1890s to the 1930s, just as Österblom transformed Ormsö. Progressive people were active everywhere; the whole of Europe was changing and improving. Cultures are so malleable, so changeable, and also so fragile. What can be created can also be destroyed. If history is falsified, people eventually forget.

  As for the mission, it remained controversial. Members of the board of the Swedish Evangelical National Society came to visit, following a number of accusations from the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. A “strong wind of mercy,” they wrote in their report, had transformed the island: “As a consequence there is now not a single bar left on this island inhabited by about 2,000 people, and nobody dares to drink and steal publicly, whereas before Ö’s arrival there were a large number of bars, and stealing, drinking, and fighting were openly practiced.” The mission, they wrote, deserved support:

  . . . particularly since we have here descendants of Swedes, who, even though they have been separated from the motherland in a foreign country for hundreds of years, still speak the Swedish tongue, albeit an ancient form of it, so that the question of language is no hindrance to their education. They have at the occasion of the visitation asked to convey their kindest regards and warmest thanks to the Board and the Friends of the Mission for what has been done for them, and, furthermore, have asked to be included in our prayers.

  Opposition, however, continued from the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. In February 1887 the mission, which had then been running for fourteen years, was finally closed down. Österblom was summarily deported from the Russian Empire, following an interview with the governor of Tallinn, Count Scachowskoi. The final accusation was sacrilege: it was alleged that he had claimed to be Jesus Christ.

  The poverty, and the impoverished culture, of the Russian Empire was not so different from today’s repressive societies. All the ingredients were there: blasphemy laws and censorship, excessive bureaucracy, a secret police and terrorist threats, corruption and oppression of minorities. The nationalist “Russification” measures of the 1880s made life particularly difficult for the ethnic minorities of the Russian Empire. Their languages were banned in schools, and censorship was tightened, to impose the Russian language and culture on the margins of the Empire.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century there were two teachers on Noarootsi, Johan Nymann and Hans Pöhl, who belonged to the Swedish minority. Their secret goal was the “unification” of the Swedes in Russia, but all they could realistically hope for was to establish a small Swedish lending library in Noarootsi. After a lengthy application process permission was granted, on condition that a list of the proposed books was delivered to the local school inspector, who doubled as a censor. There was another long delay whilst the list was inspected. The books, gifts from individuals and societies in Sweden, were already there, hidden in the villages. Everything takes so long in repressive societies. Applications are reviewed with excessive caution when the repercussions of making the wrong decision are harsh. The censor goes through documents and books with his black pen, redacting subversive thought. Books are hidden, secrets are kept, ambitions are thwarted; cultural poverty becomes entwined with material poverty.

  Whilst they waited, Nymann and Pöhl investigated what other forms of association might be possible. A temperance society seemed one way to call legitimate meetings, and permission was eventually granted for that. Many issues other than drinking were discussed at those meetings, and potentially subversive contact was made with temperance societies in Sweden. Well-wishers there sent more books, journals, and financial assistance, in solidarity with their compatriots across the Baltic Sea. Finally, of course, there was a crack down: in 1904 Nymann was called in and questioned at the police headquarters in Haapsalu, accused of hiding a
nd lending revolutionary books. By 1905 the controversy of the library reached St. Petersburg, and the decision was taken higher up to ban all Swedish books in Estonia. That year, however, was also the beginning of the end of this phase of Russian imperial oppression. The workers’ strikes and, eventually, the revolution of 1905 led to the establishment of Russia’s first parliament, the Duma, and a new constitution. The temporary liberalisation was halted by the outbreak of the First World War, but the ideas and, it has to be said, conditions of revolution remained.

  The minorities in Estonia were discussing their relationship to the state and majority cultures even before independence in 1918, like minorities in all the countries in the region. Soon the debate about minority rights, about the national aspirations of minorities, about Zionism, about separate schools, about quotas to universities, and so on was taking place in newspapers across eastern and central Europe. The question of what place ethnic minorities occupied in the nation-state was one of the most important central European political questions of the time. The discussions among the Swedes in Estonia were a very small part of a much wider debate.

  Some thirty years after Österblom’s deportation, before the First World War, an unemployed agronomist called Gunnar Schantz left Sweden for Estonia. He, too, wrote a book about his experiences. He worked initially at a Baltic German estate. The landowners were Baltic German, as were the priests, doctors, and veterinarians. The tenant farmers, stewards, administrators, and superintendents were generally Germanised Estonians who had taken German names. Lowest in the hierarchy were the so-called Undeutsche, the Estonian peasants, former serfs. “And the peasant?” he wrote. “I see him walking with slow, well measured steps up the paved walkway to the office, holding his cap with both hands pressed against the chest. His exaggerated submissiveness was completely alien to me as a Swede and filled my heart with bitterness and compassion.”

  Schantz returned to Sweden after the war, with none of the capital he had hoped to save to buy his own farm, and faced, moreover, with recession and unemployment. After some time he turned to the church and, in 1923, took ordination as a Lutheran pastor. He trained as a missionary, and was soon on his way back to Estonia, this time to the island of Runö (Ruhnu in Estonian). This most remote of the Estonian islands was inhabited entirely by Swedes, who, even before independence, farmed their own land, fished, and traded seal fur and fat. Unusually, they had no landowner, and it was therefore a far more egalitarian society than most of the islands and the mainland. Schantz had had some experience of Estonian Swedes, particularly from Ormsö, who often took temporary work on the mainland estates during the summer. “They were well liked and always welcome,” he wrote, seemingly unaware of that island’s late nineteenth-century cultural transformation under the guidance of the missionary Österblom

  Schantz arrived on Runö in 1923, three years after Estonian independence. The islanders spotted the boat, and went down to the beach. He described the scene: “Children playing, wearing colourful traditional clothes, men and women of all ages, barking dogs, rows of flat wagons each with a pair of small and ragged horses.” He brought the islanders hymnbooks and grindstones, tobacco plants and boxes of books, toys, Christmas tree lights, and other gifts. With him were also two researchers from Nordiska Museet, the large ethnographic museum in Stockholm.

  The enlightened Swedish archbishop Nathan Söderblom charged Schantz with improving the living conditions on the island. He tried his best, though his schemes were not always successful. His imported ram got loose and killed three indigenous rams in one day, and the bull calf descended from his imported cow took to jumping fences like a deer. He did, however, build rails for bringing the boats up on land, and imported small boat engines and guns, bought by the islanders with the help of microcredit loans from a charitable society. At that time, Schantz noted, Runö and the entire Estonian Swedish population were popular causes in Sweden.

  In 1928 the island harvest failed following long rains, and starvation threatened. Schantz campaigned for food aid with the help of a friendly newspaper editor, and at the end of November a ship arrived. On board was a group of Swedish “Runö friends,” with sacks of rye and wheat, seed potatoes, sugar, paraffin, herrings, and other groceries, as well as a Christmas present for each home, containing coffee, biscuits, and sweets. Hunger abated, and improvements continued. In the liberal and democratic 1920s development was everywhere. Schantz noted how the Swedish Birkas school, in Pürksi, and the new Estonian Swedish journal Kustbon (established 1917) were spreading new and modern ideas. On Runö, a farmer built a small plant to process seal blubber. The farmer’s son started the first grocery shop on the island, selling fabrics, sowing tools, paper and envelopes, and candy. Schantz himself initiated a land shift, since the fields were small, narrow strips of land. Development continued after his departure in 1930, including a healthcare centre run by a Swedish nurse, and visits by a Swedish agronomist who taught the farmers how to further improve the land.

  The future looked so bright. They didn’t know it then, but they were running out of time. In 1934 President Konstantin Päts staged a nationalist coup, in order to subvert the right-wing League of Veterans of the Estonian War of Independence (the Vaps movement), from gaining power. The country ceased to be a democracy, though it was not a repressive dictatorship either. Päts did, however, implement a policy of Estonianising the country, a milder variant of the harsh Russification measures of the 1880s. Minority schools, journals, and societies were curtailed. Schools had to teach in Estonian, and minority children were not allowed to speak their own languages on school premises. The “era of silence” ended with the 1938 election and a new constitution reducing the power of the presidency.

  In the summer of 1939, Estonia was forced into a Soviet “mutual assistance pact,” following the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The treaty, the existence of which was always denied by the Soviet Union, was signed on 23 August 1939. It planned the partition of eastern Europe into Russian and German spheres of interest. Poland was to be divided. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and most of Lithuania and Romania were assigned to the Soviet sphere of interest, and the rest of Lithuania and most of Poland to Nazi Germany. Within weeks, Poland was invaded, first by Germany from the west, and then by Russia from the east.

  Kustbon, the Estonian Swedish weekly journal, reported that fateful summer on the “new agreement” between Estonia and the Soviet Union, whereby Estonia would allow Soviet military bases in return for keeping the peace agreement of 1920 and the nonaggression pact of 1932. Two weeks later the journal was devoted to the sensational news that Hitler had called the Baltic Germans back to Germany, the Heim ins Reich policy of persuading ethnic Germans around the world to come back to the homeland. Many Baltic Germans had already left after the First World War. Now fourteen thousand people, almost all the Germans who had remained in Estonia, left the country in the following months. Most of their families had lived in Estonia since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They left their ancestral homes, their grand estates, their town houses and professions, perhaps because they were Nazi sympathisers or German nationalists believing in the pan-Germanic ideal, but probably also because they were wary of the Soviet Union. For the Nazis, calling Germans home and settling them in the occupied territories was a deliberate colonising policy. The intention was to create a Greater Germany, with lebensraum and opportunities for all ethnic Germans, cleansed of Jews, and supported by a subhuman labour reservoir of Slavic people. Most of the Baltic Germans were resettled in Poland, in expropriated farms and houses whose owners had been expelled to make way for them. More than a million Germans, some Baltic, others from Germany itself, others again from German colonies in eastern Europe and the rest of the world, settled in Poland during the war.

  After the war there was a mass expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe, mainly from Poland, parts of the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. Many people fled befo
re they were expelled and evacuated, to escape from the violent revenge of the Red Army. Russian officers had little sympathy for German civilians who had supported a regime that caused the deaths of millions of Russians, and allowed the soldiers a free hand. Rape was a weapon of war, then as it is now. Hundreds of thousands of German refugees died in the chaos of the flight, freezing to death in the snow, bombed, and attacked by aerial machine-gun fire.

  In Estonia in 1939 the same issue of Kustbon also carried a short article entitled “No Cause for Nervousness,” about the movements of Russian troops in Estonia. It ended, memorably: “In the areas where Russian troops will be stationed it is rumoured that local people may be forced to evacuate their farms, leave their belongings, or even have their property confiscated. No one needs to fear anything like that.” Less than a year later, in June 1940, the people of the islands of Odensholm, Rågö, and Nargö, most of them Swedish, were forced to evacuate, in order to make space for Soviet military bases. A year later, on 16 June 1940, Latvia and Estonia received ultimatums from the Soviet Union. Both countries, following the course of Lithuania, capitulated. Two days after that, Estonia was an occupied country. The NKVD, precursor of the KGB, entered Estonia together with Red Army units, and the arrests and deportations began.

  On 21 June 1940 a popular uprising was staged in order to establish a puppet government. A 1987 Estonian book gives the Soviet version of events, quoting from contemporary newspapers:

  Sirens rang out almost simultaneously at 9 o’clock in the morning from Tallinn’s biggest factories and plants. It was a signal for the workers to take action. Crowds were gathering at the workers’ sportshall on the Pärnu highway, forming columns of people . . . “We don’t need policemen! We’ll establish order ourselves,” the workers shouted. The policemen who had just arrived at the square retreated. And the Estonian workers proved that they were not a motley group of people torn by internal contradictions but a united front, as strong as steel, welded together by common desires and ideas. The meeting was held in an orderly fashion. The crowd of thirty or forty thousand people gave their full endorsement to the speeches and resolutions made in Freedom Square.