The records have been locked up, or already destroyed. So there is nothing left for us but to turn to the people's memory. And we have to do this quickly, before the last people still living who know about these events, and the butchers implicated in them, go quietly to their graves. Whole villages destroyed by Red Army
On September 22, 1988, the Estonian Historical Society [Eesti Muinsuskaitse Selts] announced that it was going to collect this oral history. Its aim was to get the real facts of Estonia's history, to preserve this memory for future generations, to maintain and defend our historical memory. Today, as a hundred years ago, the people respondrubric "Living History." MART LAAR MANI LAAK ed to our appeal with moving enthusiasm, although some publications have not yet found room in their columns to report this undertaking.
With the help of a network of collaborators covering the entire country, over the past year we have received about 8,000 pages of handwritten material and 90 hours of taped reminiscences.
In the summer, six expeditions were undertaken. I would like to take the occasion here to express my thanks for everything, even the short reports from collaborators. Those who have just provided an exact list of those arrested and deported from their own villages have made a welcome contribution to preserving our history. Along with the short accounts, we have also received memoirs of 400-500 pages.
It cannot be said that it has been easy to read all the contributions. We have all seen the film about the burning of Belorussian villages (E. Klimov's naturalistic "Come and See"), but how many know that in Estonia, according to virtually certain infor-
International Viewpoint #157 • February 20, 1989
mation, three practically identical villages were destroyed, along with their inhabitants. And not one of them was destroyed by the Germans, but rather by the Red Army, or the soldiers of its demolition battalions.
Listening to reminiscences of the Black Sea Demolition Battalion that went on a rampage after arriving on the shores of Lake Peipus, killing or torturing to death women and children and splashing acid over very young people, I personally could not understand what the touching monument erected on the site where members of this "death patrol" were shot down was supposed mean for the younger generation. Its victims' graves were leveled after the war by bulldozers.
Very few returned from
Siberian prison camps
For a long time, it has been felt that it was hard to imagine any event more terrible than the deportations of 1949. But it seems to me that the wave of arrests throughout the country at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 amounted to only a slightly smaller mass deportation. And of those who went to prison camps in Siberia, only a very few returned.
Reading the reports of this total injustice, this implacable destruction of all the concepts of decency that have existed honor, conscience, diligence, humanity, pity), about the elevation to absolute power of blood-thirsty local Rasputins, it is still hard to comprehend what happened. The torture perpetrated in the Pagari Tänava cellars and elsewhere would, in general, be hard to imagine, if I had not seen many Soviet films about Nazi torture cellars in my youth.
At the same time, we all have to understand very clearly that Estonians escaped the worst fate. Looking at the total destruction of the Crimean Tatars, we can be thankful about our own lot. And to think that we were saved from the worst by the military conflict that erupted between Hitler's Germany and Stalinist Russia on June 22, 1941. The June 14 mass deportations were supposed to be the opening of a purge. In addition to categories marked for liquidation, at least 25 per cent of the population was to be expelled. The second wave of the deportations only hit Saaremaa, which had proportionately the highest losses in Estonia.
Thus, the start of the war generally brought relief in Estonia. What happened in 1940 and 1941 had to be really terrible for the people to forget their 700-year-long hostility to the Germans, and greet them with flowers in the summer of 1941. The general inspector in the period of the German occupation, Soodla, was awarded the Vabusristi [Freedom Cross] for bravery in the fight against the German militia. You have to agree with the opinion of H. Vaino that this war [World War II] could hardly
DOCUMENT• USSR be called a Fatherland War [as the Soviet authorities term it] for Estonians.
Reading all the stories written by the people (there is abundant material in the museum about the massacres during the German occupation, and the "white terror, which was quite terrible in some respects" and so on), you cannot help being left with the impression that in the handling of history up until now the sequence of events has been completely turned upside down. The origin of the bloodshed in Estonia was the forcible occupation of the country and the forcible maintenance of a regime of terror, which people opposed out of an instinct for self-preservation.
In 1941, the forest brotherhood first of all defended themselves and later their homes by force against liquidation. On the same basis, the entire people feared the worst consequences when the Soviets returned, and so Estonian soldiers fought exemplarily on the Narva line, in the Blue Mountains and in other places. Under the cover of these soldiers' last desperate struggles, tens of thousands of people escaped by sea. They cannot be blamed for that, because if they had stayed, what awaited them was arrest, deportation, execution and intellectual terror.
Recently, the question has often been raised in the press of why no one opposed this bloodiest dictatorship in human history.
There were of course those who resisted it, but until today they have been characterized as anti-Soviet elements, bandits, narrow nationalists, terrorists, Western agents and so on. But can they be blamed for not seeing anything in Soviet power but Stalinist violence and an empire of injustice?
Keeping alive the spirit of independence
Now it seems, in fact, the only ones who fought against the terror were high-school youth trained by illegal national organizations, men and women who hid in the forest for a decade and prisoners and deportees who kept alive the spirit of the period of independence in Siberia. Naturally, some of the forest people were robbers, murderers and sadists (although it was easy to blame all the crimes on the forest people), and many people who started out with "clean hands" over time turned into real human beasts. They were also hunted like beasts of the forest.
No conditions can justify inhuman acts of violence, but at the same time I cannot consider people who beat pregnant women, who nailed children to trees, who robbed and killed harmless workers to be human beings. Naturally, you could find humanity among them too, but you have to recognize that that is not exactly the way they stand out in the memory of the masses.
What distinguishes the Soviet activists killed by the forest people (many of whom, in the opinion of the local people, deserved to be shot) from the prison guards, who were given the job of escorting a mother who, along with a few friends, was taking dead child's cobbled-together veneer coffin to the camp cemetery. It was very light, but the women were so exhausted that the smallest stones were unbearably heavy for them. They fell in the filth, they crawled, pushing the coffin slowly toward the cemetery. But the soldiers laughed and beat them with their rifle butts.
Moreover, most criminals of this type are still alive and somewhere they must be living peacefully on pensions and enjoying the greatest possible comforts.
I am by no means an advocate of new blood vengeance, but the names of such persons should be published so that at least the people can know who is who. Otherwise, any ostreperous veteran will be seen as a mass murderer.
### Plan to publish subsequent memoirs
It is hard to judge them, because for the most part they have simply been forgotten for years! Not much is remembered about the sadistic mass murder committed in Kuressaari and the chief of security at the time in Saaremaa, V. Riis, remains in retirement in Pärnu.
Reading the above, some could maintain that on the basis of a person's opinion and throwing out a few ugly facts, I am making a generalization about the murders. Unfortunately, I could tell such readers quite long stories, with specific names and often even the days of the month. That was done with the initial collection of data. In fact, I still do not have an overview of what happened in Estonia. I do not know the number of deportees killed in 1949, to say nothing of those who were arrested and perished during the German occupation or of those who perished and were slaughtered in the late 1940s.
For this reason, the Estonian Historical Society is appealing to the broadest possible public to send us information about all repression under the first or second occupation [that is, both the Soviet and the German].
We need the names of people, of places, ages; the times when people were arrested, perished or deported; data about the subsequent fate of people (death in prison camps, return to Estonia). Likewise, we are collecting data about people who were killed in the first or second half of the war.
We are truly grateful for every piece of information. Only through the broadest possible collaboration from the people can we get the true facts about the history of our country and our people.
Our address is the following:
Tallin 200090, postkas 3241, Eesti Muinsuskaitse Selts. Ajalooline pärimus [Oral History]. Subsequently, we are planning to publish memoirs that may have a 25 broader interest. *
PERU • AROUND THE WORLD