Anger and uncertainty reign among Estonia's Russians

  • 2007-05-02
  • By Nikolai Karayev
TALLINN - Now that the sun has risen on the damage suffered by Tallinn in recent days, members of Estonia's Russian minority have awoken to find themselves in an entirely different, and much less pleasant, country.

Echoing loudly through the Russian-language press, as well as some notable Internet blogs, is the general mood of this community, namely, Russians feel that the government ignored and betrayed them, and they are angry at how the events were depicted in the Estonian media. What's worse, the uncertainty and fear that reigned immediately after the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and restoration of Estonian independence has returned.
It must be made clear that Russians roundly denounce the violence and looting that took place during those fateful nights. That is not an issue.

But immediately after it happened, the Russian-language media raised questions that the Estonian press seemed to avoid 's namely, why did the police steer clear of the streets where the riots roared? Why did they let the the marauders openly steal goods?
The Russian press has also pointed out that, in the immediate wake of the first night of rioting, the Estonian newspapers published articles denouncing the looters as a crowd of Russian thugs, managing to completely ignore the fact that, according to the police reports issued after the events of Thursday night, a good portion of the rioters detained were Estonian.
Particularly vexing was an editorial titled "Unknown Russian Riff-Raff" published in the Estonian Postimees daily, which stirred the ire of many Russians.

Though a few Russian bloggers living in Estonia supported the authorities and criticized the "Tonismagi Russians," the prevailing mood was simply one of disappointment.
Several blog writers on LiveJournal discussed how the Soviet war monument was associated with their dignity and the historical memory of World War II. They wrote about their right not to be humiliated by the authorities, who used the monument as a political trump card during the last electoral campaign.

But Russians also feel that the battle is over and lost. The monument has been relocated to a quiet war cemetery and, as one blogger wrote, "The outside world probably won't understand what all the fuss was about."
Indeed many expressed the worry that their point of view will never get across in the international media.
"Abroad they prefer to discuss the relations of the states, not the attitude of the people in Estonia," writes LiveJournal blogger iris_a. "Many people [will] continue to think that the 'rebels' are semi-literate immigrants, rednecks who don't wish to learn the Estonian language or accept Estonian culture."
There's also the troubling question of how relations between the Russian-speaking community and the Estonians have been affected.

Russians in Estonia are afraid that in the eyes of the Estonians they will remain the marauders who fought with authorities for no good reason. To counter this, some bloggers have written "civil resolutions" and other compromise statements declaring that they are loyal to the Estonian Republic and condemn criminals, but have no pleasure in tolerating what they see as the violation of their dignity. The question is whether this message will fall on deaf ears.
In an editorial titled "It's sickening," Viktoria Korpan, editor in chief of Postimees' Russian edition, writes, "What shall we do now? The thing I am most afraid of is mutual hostility. If you're Estonian, then you're 'pro-Nazi,' if you're Russian, then you're one of the 'narrow-minded lice.'"

This is a time of confusion and questions galore. What should Russians do now? Should they continue to struggle with the prime minister? Or maybe it's better to stay away from the obviously political game between Russia, Estonia and the EU, and just try to defend their rights, mend the image of them created by the mass media, and concentrate on the future instead of the past? That's the dilemma now facing Estonia's Russians.

Nikolai Karayev is a staff writer for the Russian-language newspaper Den za Dnyom.