Estonians and Russians finally on speaking terms

By Edward Lucas

Date: 16/06/05

It would be flattering if it wasn't scary. Opinion polls show that Russians regard Estonia as one of their country's main enemies. Given that Russia's population is almost exactly 100 times bigger than Estonia's, that's quite something - as if France or Germany were getting all nervy about Luxembourg.

But it's not a joke: Russians who have even fleeting contacts with Estonia's Moscow embassy have been visited by the Russian security service, the FSB, and asked to explain what they're up to. So a conference in Estonia last week on "free media in Russia" hit a nerve. One hot-tempered Russian website, regnum.ru, described it as "part of Estonia's psychological war against Russia".

If there is a war going on, it's a different one, waged by the Kremlin against the free media. My friends at the conference were mostly mainstream journalists when I was based in Moscow in the late 1990s. Now they are mostly scraping a living as freelances or with foreign employers.

It's depressing. Internet journalism is still riotously independent - but it's hard to make a living there without a powerful sponsor, which comes at an ethical cost. The print media is freeish - but still subject to strong pressure on issues that the powers-that-be care about. The electronic media, particularly television, now smells very Soviet, with its slavish adherence to the Kremlin's agenda.

The main discussion among the visitors from Moscow was about where things were heading: to full authoritarianism or merely to more muddled bullying. But there was an interesting note of controversy, from a handful of Tallinn-based Kremlin loyalists. One in particular, a voluble local politician called Dmitri Klenski, persistently heckled his compatriots, saying that they were distorting events in the motherland and ignoring the Estonian media's "censorship" of him and his friends.

I found this fascinating: the Russians from Moscow were visibly relishing Estonia's freedom and Europeanness and contrasting it with the situation at home. The Russians from Tallinn, meanwhile, were insisting that the country was a miserable mess full of discrimination and fascist revanchism, whereas the situation in Russia was greatly preferable. I wondered if they'd like to change places.

But what really struck me was the number of Estonians who turned up - and their willingness to speak Russian. In the Soviet-period, speaking Russian in Estonia brought a frosty reception. "You are speaking the language of the occupiers," one Estonian colleague said severely in 1990 when I thought I could short-circuit his rather limited command of English by switching to Russian. When I then learnt some Estonian, I found out why the Estonians were so prickly about Russian linguistic imperialism - "Govorite pochelovecheski! [Speak in a human language!]," barked a Russian post-office clerk when I dared to speak the country's titular language.

Those linguistic hang-ups were echoed in a desire in the early post-independence years to have as little as possible to do with Russia. Places like faraway Washington, Brussels, London and Berlin all mattered a great deal more than Moscow, Pskov, or St Petersburg.

Now that's changed. Not only have many Russians learnt Estonian, but almost all Estonians have dropped their hang-ups about the language of the former occupier. And I was struck by the numbers and seniority of the Estonians present. Journalists, people from NGOs, security and defence officials, politicians and academics - all wanted both to be better informed about events in Russia and to support the people there who stand up for the same values of pluralism, freedom and legality that for Estonians are now, thankfully, part of everyday life.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Feature on political and linguistic relations between Estonia and Russia.