Everything is Wonderful Read online

  The formal annexation of Estonia took place in August 1940. Soon all non-Soviet public activity was proscribed. Soviet soldiers emptied the stores because of the artificially low exchange rate and the shortages in Russia. Banks, businesses, factories, and workshops with more than ten workers were nationalised. Houses larger than two hundred square meters could be expropriated. Bank accounts exceeding 2,000 kroons (about £200) were frozen, along with the contents of all safes. Leaving work without permission was punishable by jail.

  On 30 July 1940 President Konstantin Päts, whose grandson Matti I met in 1991, was deported to Leningrad and subsequently to Ufa, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Bashkortostan in the Ural Mountains, together with his son, his daughter-in-law, and his two grandsons. A year later he was rearrested and sent to prison, accused of counter-revolutionary sabotage and anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation. In 1952 a series of psychiatric hospitalizations began: in one of the more tragic Soviet ironies of the time, he was diagnosed as mentally ill because of his persistent belief that he was the president of Estonia. In 1954 he was briefly detained in a hospital in Estonia, but recognition by hospital staff (former subjects encouraging his “delusions”) meant that he was once again removed, to the Burashevo Mental Hospital in the Kalinin region, where he died in 1956.

  Almost all Estonian politicians from the independence era fled, committed suicide, or were deported. The NKVD arrested about three hundred people a month, mainly those regarded as opposed to the occupation, until 14 June 1941, six days before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, when thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, most of them from professional backgrounds, were deported in one night. Families were broken up, the men sent to labour camps, and the majority of the women and children to Siberian collective farms. That summer, 230 Estonian officers serving in the Red Army were also arrested. As the army retreated, they forced thousands of men to retreat with them—in all some twenty-five thousand people voluntarily or involuntarily evacuated to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. About three thousand men died on the way, before they reached their final destination.

  The intellectual elite of the country was being decimated. Soon libraries, archives, and all publishing was under Soviet control. The Museum of Occupations in Tallinn, which opened in 2003, has published research on Estonian Soviet censorship. In the summer of 1940, following the occupation, more than two hundred newspapers and journals were banned by a resolution of the chief of internal affairs. Twenty-nine authors were banned outright. All exchanges with foreign journals were prohibited, and foreign literature could no longer be imported.

  A new regulation was issued in August that year. All literature containing anti-Soviet “slander and agitation,” and all literature justifying “bourgeois exploitation,” or inciting “chauvinistic anger and hostility,” along with all theological literature, was to be removed from libraries. In south Estonia the books were sent to Tartu University Library, where they were destroyed. In north Estonia they were sent to the State Library in Tallinn, where they were preserved.

  That month lists of banned books and publications were compiled. The first list contained 130 works in Russian. The second contained memoirs and other biographical works in Estonian, fiction and children’s books. The third specified magazines, monographs, brochures, manuals, and all books published by particular publishing houses. The fourth included Russian and other foreign books, and covered such subjects as journalism, theology, education, politics, philosophy, and history. There was a further list of 111 banned plays, and a list of books that were partly banned, mainly textbooks, that could still be used for the time being. These lists were made public.

  One particular list was kept secret. More than a hundred children’s books were on it, and many works in Russian. Altogether, according to the museum, more than fifteen hundred books were banned. The censored books were removed from libraries, bookshops, and publishing houses, and shredded or burnt.

  By September old textbooks and reference works used in schools were banned. Circulars were issued to school boards and head teachers to warn them that “reactionary literature,” literature “justifying and supporting capitalist exploitation,” and “anti-Soviet and anti-communist literature” must be removed from school libraries. Later, works by communists who had already been purged, like Grigory Zinoviev, Leon Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin, were also banned.

  That month the Publishing Centre of the Estonian SSR was launched. It was responsible for the management and inspection of publishing activities and bookshops. The Soviet Estonian Glavlit (the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs) was founded in 1940 to “review” all books. At the end of 1940 libraries of independent societies and associations were banned, and independent-minded librarians everywhere were replaced by “loyal citizens.” All in all, probably some two hundred thousand books were destroyed in the first occupation, including seventy thousand volumes of theology belonging to Tartu University.

  During the Nazi occupation (1941–44) censorship continued. The Nazis made their own lists of banned books, compiled anonymously and kept secret. The first one was ready in November 1941, and banned seven categories of books: Soviet Russian literature from 1917 to 1941 (except science and classics without communist commentaries), all communist literature, English and French literature from 1933 in the original and in translation (except new editions of classics), Estonian literature published in 1940/41 (except purely scientific works), Jewish literature in all languages, works by non-Jews having emigrated from Germany since 1933, and “anti-German” literature in all languages. The list contained 197 completely banned authors, (only 16 were Estonian).

  A second list banned individual books and periodicals, and all works issued by certain publishing houses. Textbooks had to be approved. Some works, for example on sexuality, or analyses of totalitarianism, were banned by both the Soviet and Nazi censors.

  The returning Soviet occupying force carried on the censorship and destruction of books. According to the museum, the entire Tallinn Central Library, containing some 150,000 volumes, including the archives of Estonian literature, was destroyed between 1946 and 1950. Independent publishing was ruined, and the libraries of Estonia were decimated by the removal and destruction of books. From June 1945 all typewriters required registration, and publishers (those few who had survived the war and deportations) needed to show an “unblemished political past.” By now, a quarter of all books being published were “sociopolitical.” Finally, in 1949, most foreign literature in libraries was destroyed. Foreign books from the State Library were shredded. Lists of permitted foreign literature were created, containing 109 classical authors. In 1950 much of Soviet Estonian literature was purged and banned. By 1952 almost everything that had been published during independence was banned and destroyed. And Estonia, of course, was only a small country. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany did more or less the same things in all the countries they occupied, working diligently, following their meticulous plans for censorship and repression.

  After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began preparations for what became known as the thaw, the era of liberalisation, which ended in a coup in 1964. During Khrushchev’s period of power, Soviet censorship was loosened, culminating in the publication in 1962 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the literary magazine Novy Mir, edited by Aleksandr Tvardovsky. It was the first text about the Gulag published in the Soviet Union, and it was personally approved by Khrushchev.

  After the 1964 coup, the long era of stagnation began, led by ­Leonid Brezhnev until his death in 1982. The 1965–66 show trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel—accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, having published anti-Soviet editorials abroad under pseudonyms—symbolised the hardening climate. They were sentenced to seven and five years respectively, in strict-regime labour camps
. Then Solzhenitsyn was accused of not following Soviet principles in 1968, and was eventually arrested and deported in 1974.

  I am thinking again about Toivo and Inna’s books. The books they owned, by Balzac, Galsworthy, Hardy, Shaw, Zola, Maupassant, and London, were passed by the Soviet censors, and encouraged by the authorities. The themes of poverty, greed, and corruption under capitalism were welcome, of course. In 1987 Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, openness and reform, had started in earnest. A commission was established to return previously banned books to the main library catalogues. But Nabokov’s Lolita, which Toivo and Inna also had on their shelves, was the real test of the end of censorship. Trying to find out when the first Estonian edition was published, I found a copy of it for sale on eBay. Described as a “rare first edition,” it was published in 1990, thirty-five years after the first edition was published, in Paris, in 1955. And how did Toivo and Inna come to have this strange and pivotal book, this still controversial literary masterpiece, in their modest library? I don’t know. But I think Toivo may have bought it. He had a wider horizon somewhere inside him, beyond his alcoholic demons.

  After the Soviet invasion, the Estonian Swedish journal Kustbon duly became a Soviet organ. The 1940 showcase elections were reported on the first page on 20 July, under the heading “Exceptional Participation in Parliamentary Elections.” The article stated that each farm must acquire a Soviet flag, for which precise dimensions were given. Almost as an afterthought, it also informed readers that all bank assets had been frozen until further notice. The issue also carried a critical article about the previous government’s treatment of minorities, with examples of post-1934 laws restricting their rights. Despite the obvious political caution of the editors, the Soviet authorities still closed Kustbon down.

  In October 1940 the first issue of its replacement, the Swedish Sovjet-Estland (Soviet Estonia), was published. “The 21 June this year was a great day of freedom for the Estonian proletariat,” the editors proclaimed on the first page.

  The first rays of socialism dawned over our land. Step by step the working class has battled to vanquish the violence of the capitalists. Now, power is in the firm hands of the working people. Justice, equality, and socialism are the slogans for our class-conscious workers and farmers. Soviet Estonia has new, unlimited and wide possibilities for development. The walls that imprisoned the minorities in this land have fallen. All are now one people, and all minorities can live their lives within the boundaries of our great country. Cooperation with other people in our country has become possible for our minorities. Our working people’s government, and our leader the Estonian Communist Party, has shown its goodwill towards the working Swedish-speaking people’s struggles and wishes, and intends to see to the well-being of the Swedish-speaking coastal people. A step in the right direction has been made by giving them their own Swedish newspaper. This newspaper will come out once a week under the name of Sovjet-Estland . . . Sovjet-Estland wishes to be the leader and guide to correct socialist-communist basic thought. With our Leninist Stalinist basic philosophy we begin our work, and strive to be worthy workers, building socialism. All those who want to work for our country’s well-being must mobilise around Sovjet-Estland and help with its distribution in their area. We are ready for our great task.

  The Editors

  In articles on the inside pages the Estonian Swedes were encouraged to “work in a socialist way,” to “follow work programs with honour, to increase work productivity, to develop our socialist industry, to raise our socialist culture, in order to quickly catch up with the other free people of the great Soviet Union and to build socialist society.” “Together with the working people of the entire Soviet Union the working people of the Soviet Estonian Socialist Republic will freely celebrate the twenty-third birthday of the great October Revolution. Under the leadership of the Communist Bolshevik Party the working people of the Soviet Estonian Socialist republic have begun building a new, free, and happy life, exterminating capitalists and landowners.” Improving the “sanitary conditions” and the “socialist culture” (such as it was) of the Estonian Swedes was also on the agenda. The rest of the newspaper was mostly about the difficulties in Europe: “pea rationing in Finland,” “shortage of meat in Denmark,” “the dictatorship in France,” “the Nazification of Norway,” “the catastrophic situation for Swedish farmers.” And “great progress of coal production in the Soviet Union.”

  A hasty provisional land reform followed. In Läänemaa, the county of the northwest coastal region that included Noarootsi, it was reported that 1,764 new farms were being created. Sovjet-Estland described the local land redistribution. Some of the Swedes, the reporter wrote, still “waited for help from the old fatherland [Sweden], despite the fact that they knew that even there the working people suffered under the yoke of the capitalists. After the 21st of June the atmosphere was transformed in Rikull. Still, not everybody was happy. Even amongst the Swedish minority there are backwards, politically ignorant people who can’t find their place in the new society.”

  The journalist meets an elderly woman:

  “Well, I wanted some land,” she says. “Not for me, but I have two sons. For two years they were away, but now they’ve come back.”

  “But you wanted to move to Sweden, too, to your sons. So now they are back and you have changed your plans?”

  “I cried with happiness when they came back,” says the old woman, and dries her eyes on her apron. “And if we get land they won’t need to [go]. Then they could stay at home.”

  “Home?” the journalist writes. “Even though the old woman was Swedish, she didn’t want to leave Estonia, her home. It’s not easy to leave your motherland, to leave the soil that your ancestors have cultivated. The soil is barren and stony, and yet you love it. It is the soil of the motherland. It is impossible to replant an old tree—it will languish. Those who propagate for the removal to the ‘old motherland’ should remember that.”

  Within four years most of the Swedes were gone from Estonia, probably including this journalist. Who remembers now that hasty land reform, wiped out by the collectivisation a few years later?

  During the early part of the first Soviet occupation, Birkas school was occupied by Russian troops. After much negotiation Fridolf Isberg, acting headmaster, managed to reopen the school, which was in a bad state after the troop occupations. They still thought they could carry on. The curriculum was changed, replacing geography, history, and Estonian with Russian language and the mandatory study of the 1936 constitution, also known as the “Stalin Constitution.” I find it online. There was much to study: thirteen chapters, 146 articles, guaranteeing civil rights and gender equality, all subject, of course, to Article 3:

  In the U.S.S.R. all power belongs to the working people of town and country as represented by the Soviets of Working People’s Deputies.

  Article 118 of Stalin’s constitution outlined the right to work:

  Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to work, that is, are guaranteed the right to employment and payment for their work in accordance with its quantity and quality. The right to work is ensured by the socialist organization of the national economy, the steady growth of the productive forces of Soviet society, the elimination of the possibility of economic crises, and the abolition of unemployment.

  Work is not only a right, however, it is also a duty, defined by Article 12:

  In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

  I am slightly startled by this phrase—it doesn’t look right. And it is, in fact, a reformulation of Karl Marx’s famous phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” taken from his tract criticising the Ge
rman Social Democratic Gotha Program of 1875. That phrase came to be seen in the Soviet Union as a defining description of communism (the goal), rather than of socialism (the reality, later described as “actually existing socialism”), so they rewrote it. From each according to his ability, to each according to his work. It seems oddly capitalist. I am reminded of George Orwell, and the post-revolutionary anthem in Animal Farm:

  For that day we all must labour,

  Though we die before it break;

  Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,

  All must toil for freedom’s sake.

  The school’s model farm, meanwhile, was transformed into a sovkhoz (state-owned farm), and a five-year plan was drawn up. All religious literature from the library was sent to Tallinn, according to the new censorship rules, and a “red corner” was established in the common room, with Soviet slogans, and portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on red paper. A year later the accountant and one of the teachers were deported.

  On 22 June 1941, a year after the Soviet invasion, Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began. On 5 July the Wehrmacht forces reached Estonia. Some thirty-five thousand people voluntarily joined the Red Army, and a further thirty-three thousand were conscripted. A similar number joined the other side. The country, and sometimes even individual families, Swedes as well as Estonians, were divided between Communist and Nazi sympathisers, the liberal centre attacked from both sides. Nazi Germany prevailed, and Estonia was added to the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the new German eastern provinces. A Nazi directorate was put in place, and the work to make Estonia Judenrein (“clean of Jews”), the primary goal in occupied countries, began.