Debate Renewed: Did Moscow Free Estonia or Occupy It?

The New York Times
Steven Lee Myers
January 25, 2007

TALLINN, Estonia, Jan. 23 — The Bronze Soldier stands in a small park near Tallinn’s lovely Old Town, staring mournfully at the snow-covered earth, helmet in hand. An inscription in Russian and Estonian says simply, “To the fallen of the Second World War.” It is far less conspicuous, as war monuments go, than the furor its fate has caused.

Estonia’s Parliament, led by Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, laid the legal foundation this month to dismantle the Bronze Soldier and relocate it to a military cemetery or a memorial park on the nearby Gulf of Finland. The monument, supporters said, has become a source of tension, not remembrance, which has proved to be the case.

The move, though not yet final, has provoked indignation and even threats of sanctions inRussia, this country’s ever-looming neighbor, which claims historic dominion, if not political sovereignty, over the fate of the Bronze Soldier.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, denounced Estonia’s decision as a blasphemy against the soldiers who defeated Nazi Germany. The lower house of the Russian Parliament went further, accusing the Estonian government of “representing Nazism in a heroic light,” while the chairman of the upper house, Sergei M. Mironov, said Tuesday that Estonia had taken “the first step towards legalizing fascism and neo-Nazism in the 21st century.”

To the Estonians, the Russian reaction reflects the glorification of another totalitarian state, the Soviet Union, which occupied independent Estonia, as well as Lithuania and Latvia, on the eve of World War II and again in 1944 after having driven out the Nazi armies.

“The propaganda that the official Russian media uses reminds me of Germany in the 1930s,” Justice Minister Rein Lang, a member of the Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, denounced Estonia’s decision as a blasphemy against the soldiers who defeated Nazi Germany. The lower house of the Russian Parliament went further, accusing the Estonian government of “representing Nazism in a heroic light,” while the chairman of the upper house, Sergei M. Mironov, said Tuesday that Estonia had taken “the first step towards legalizing fascism and neo-Nazism in the 21st century.”

To the Estonians, the Russian reaction reflects the glorification of another totalitarian state, the Soviet Union, which occupied independent Estonia, as well as Lithuania and Latvia, on the eve of World War II and again in 1944 after having driven out the Nazi armies.

“The propaganda that the official Russian media uses reminds me of Germany in the 1930s,” Justice Minister Rein Lang, a member of the European Union and NATO

But Estonia remains a divided country, despite a free and thriving economy. Of its 1.4 million people, about 25 percent are ethnic Russians, who according to Andrei A. Zarenkov, an ethnic Russian and chairman of the Constitution Party, live as “untouchables” in a political caste system.

He said Estonia’s government was fighting to remove the monument because “Estonia never had its own heroes.”

Only weeks before elections scheduled for March 4, Parliament passed a bill bringing Estonian law into line with the Geneva Conventions. The measure, signed into law by President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, requires honoring war dead. Both sides see the law as a necessary first step to moving the monument, and it has become a central campaign issue.

In an interview in his office, part of a palace complex built for another conqueror of Estonia, Peter the Great, Mr. Ilves emphasized that no final decision had been made about the monument. [On Wednesday, Parliament postponed debate on another bill, which would ban monuments to occupying forces, including the Nazis or the Soviet Union.]

But the president said the planned move had become a rallying point for protests by ethnic Russians aimed at undermining the country’s political course — with “considerable support, assistance and encouragement” from the Russian Embassy here.

The protests boiled over last May 9 — the day the Soviet Union commemorated the victory over Nazi Germany, and Russia still does — when Russians waving Soviet flags clashed with Estonian nationalists.

Until then the Bronze Soldier was a largely uncontroversial place of mourning, saved from the dismantling of all other Soviet monuments in 1991. The main monument to Lenin came down four days after the start of the failed coup against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev
The clash gave impetus to the wishes of those who viewed the Bronze Soldier not as a war memorial but as a symbol of Soviet occupation. “We don’t want to be weighed down by the past,” Mr. Ilves said. “We want to think about where we are going, what we are doing, but all of that sort of comes back when you have, basically, a very provocative demonstration glorifying the Soviet Union and Soviet power.”

He added, “When you see red flags and hammers and sickles, people get upset.”

Russia has said disinterring the remains believed to rest beneath the monument would violate the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war dead. Mr. Lang said the evidence was not clear. Anyone buried there, he said, would have died elsewhere and could be lawfully removed to another place. He added that a trolley bus stop made the site inappropriate. No one is talking about removing it, though.

Kadri Liik, director of the International Center for Defense Studies here, said Russia’s reaction fit a pattern of quarreling with its neighbors over history, which she said was personally important to President Vladimir V. Putin as he sought to rebuild a national identity based on a Soviet foundation that, at least in the case of World War II, was unassailable.
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“They feel so offended by anyone who challenges their view of history,” she said, referring to Russians’ refusal to recognize Soviet rule in Estonia as an occupation. “They should be discussing the other side of the coin.”

For others, though, the Bronze Soldier represents something less political.

Yelena B. Borisova came to the monument the other day bearing carnations, which she put in the sculpture’s hand and at its feet. She propped a candle in the snow at the monument’s base and lighted it, crossing herself in the fashion of Russian Orthodoxy. She said she had lost her father and two brothers in the war.

“Sixty years have gone by,” she said. “Why do they need to change it?” She pointed to the trees in the park that had grown around the monument and added: “You cannot fight these soldiers. They already died.