AN ESTONIA DIARY

"A few days in Tallinn recently offered the chance both to reflect on the past and to worry about the present", writes the Central Europe correspondent for The Economist ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

"ESTONIANS OUT OF SIBERIA--SOVIETS OUT OF ESTONIA".

Amid the protests against the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, that slogan--on a banner carried by two elderly émigrés outside the Polish embassy in London--stood out as seemingly the most lost of all lost causes. True, Britain, like most other Western countries, recognised Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as still existing de jure, but de facto, they were occupied by the Soviet Union and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Britain had even handed over to the Soviet authorities the Baltic gold reserves entrusted to the Bank of England for safekeeping by the pre-war governments. Complaining about the occupation inside Estonia meant arrest and deportation. In the outside world, it just looked futile.

Undaunted by this gloomy prospect, your diarist promptly hitched himself to the Baltic cause, spending many of the years since then living in, travelling to, and writing about the Baltic states. In 1990, he received Lithuanian visa 0001, issued by the authorities there in defiance of Soviet border controls (he was deported from the Soviet Union a week later). In the years that followed, he lived there and edited a newspaper. His eldest son was born in Tallinn Central Hospital--the first baby from a Western country to be born in Estonia since the Soviet occupation of 1940.

So a few days in Tallinn recently offered the chance both to reflect on the past and to worry about the present. In both cases the picture is mixed. The humming streets of the Estonian capital, now dotted with skyscrapers and clogged with large western cars, epitomise a return to prosperity and freedom that on that cold December afternoon in 1981 would have seemed as unimaginably miraculous as Atlantis re-emerging from the waves.

Indeed, Estonia's success has excited other countries. President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, for example, is a huge fan of Estonia, and based his policies of deregulation, low taxes and privatisation explicitly on policies pioneered by Estonia in the 1990s. Scores of Estonians have spent time in Georgia, advising on everything from anti-corruption efforts to spy-catching.

The temperaments could hardly be more different: Estonians are reserved, unhierarchical and efficient. That makes them excellent team players--one reason why Estonia's public institutions are the strongest and cleanest in the ex-communist world. Georgians, by contrast, are emotional, status-conscious and individualistic. This leads to a rather different style of work, to put it mildly. But opposites attract: Estonians and Georgians get on splendidly (much more so, in fact that either country does with its immediate neighbours).

But Estonia's enthusiasm for "Misha" Saakashvili is now dented, partly because of distaste for some of his policies, and also because of what is seen in Tallinn as his scaremongering. After the war in Georgia, he proclaimed that "the Baltics are next". Although Estonians and their neighbours are glad to have international attention for their problems with Russia, they are not happy about being bracketed with Georgia. "We are members of NATO and the EU; they are not. Misha's wild talk makes it sound as if we are as crazy and vulnerable as they are," said one official frostily.

Picture credit: LHOON/flickr

(This is an instalment of a correspondent's diary from Estonia, published on Economist.com.)