nemad

I just spent a week in Ireland and though I have but one Irish grandmother, I did feel comfortable with the country, some familiarity with its people.

Even if we did not look the same, they did seem to be relatives of some kind. There was some intimacy there, some immediacy to the Irish. And then I took two planes and landed back in Eesti.

As soon as I arrived, I knew that I was not of this place. When I sat among Estonian passengers on the flight back to the mosquito coast, when I chatted up the cab driver on the ride back to my home, I knew the language, the surroundings well, but felt intrinsically that these people were nemad, them, and I also knew that I was not like them, even if I am married to one of them, and even if my daughters are two of them. To be a bit more specific -- this doesn't mean that I look down or up at them; I merely acknowledge their difference. And I started to wonder about these instinctive ideas of us and them and what roles they play in today's Europe.

While Estonians are them to me, I started to wonder if they were meie, "us," to others. And who were these others. Estonians are foreign to Italians, foreign to Irish. But to Swedes and Finns? Even if they care not to advertise, it's hard for those who have come here and spent time among the Estonians to look at the locals and not feel a familiarity with the place. For Finns, this is perhaps the only place in Europe outside of their homeland where they can speak their native tongue and be kind of understood. And how about the Germans, who come expecting little Russia and wind up feeling like they've come across some Twilight Zone version of Schleswig-Holstein? Indeed, for a lot of northern Europeans, Estonians are "one of us," and this sense of kinship may have played a subtle role in the fate of Estonia.

I recall how then Latvian Foreign Minister Maris Riekstins at the Lennart Meri Conference a few years ago remarked that any application by Iceland or Norway for European Union membership would likely be fast tracked, while interest from Georgia or Ukraine for European integration would always be looked upon officially with polite openness, but privately with intense skepticism. I have to ask, was it really geopolitics, or was it something else that drove such attitudes? Is Europeanness more than just democracy, rule of law, and historical coincidence? Or does it have to do with German lawmakers meeting their Estonian counterparts and coming away feeling that the Estonians are a chip off the old block? Is it really possible for Nordic decision makers to look at, say, the Icelanders and the Georgians the same way? Is it possible for them to construct the Georgians as an "us" and keep the Icelanders as a "them"?

Of course, the Estonians share kinship with the Russians too, but it's a precarious relationship given the status of Finno-Ugric minorities in the Russian Federation. Russians can appeal to common Finno-Ugric roots, but the Estonians feel a tinge of sadness, for in their eyes, the Russians with a Finno-Ugric past have lost the one thing that continues to define the Estonians' image of themselves as a separate nation: the language. So there will be no warm embrace. Yet again, kinship plays a role. And this is not just information gleaned from some ethnology course. This is the process of looking at someone, spending time in their company, and deciding that, by some stretch of the imagination, they are family.

But for me, as close as I get to the Estonians, I still know that we are different. I know that they are, to put it simply, a them. I wonder though how foreigners with Estonian roots feel when their plane touches down in Eesti. Do they feel like they have landed in a foreign country? Or do they feel that they have finally arrived home?

puhastus

Yesterday, the Estonian Green party expelled some of its top members, including former leader Peeter Jalakas, who briefly replaced party leader Marek Strandberg after the party bombed in last year's municipal elections before Strandberg muscled his way back to the top. In total, 20 members of the party were given the boot, officially on an ideological basis, though I suspect there were personal reasons too.

In carrying out this purge, the party leadership has removed internal opposition. That might help them iron out a platform for next year's parliamentary elections. But the question remains, how will a party that is on life support already benefit by eliminating some of its better known members? Can the Estonian Greens really afford to get rid of its members when it polls abysmally, and wasn't able to get any seats in the municipal elections or last year's European parliamentary elections?

I have always felt that Estonia needs a postmodern Green party to shake up the dull back and forth between the Reform Party-led right and the Centre Party-led left. But is the current Green party the Green party that Estonia needs? Or will it mosey off into political oblivion after it (likely) goes down in the next parliamentary elections?

euroremont

When I heard the news today that the European Commission had recommended that Estonia adopt the euro as its currency on January 1, 2011, I was pleased.

Though I appreciate the aesthetics of Estonia's national currency, the kroon, the euro is the money that most of Europe uses. There is a belief that the adoption of the euro will allay any concerns about investing in an insecure economy, turning the FDI tap back on next year.

Local leaders haven't yet done the happy dance on Toompea. They are being cautious, reserved, taciturn. Eesti Pank President Andres Lipstok warns that Estonia's work is pole tehtud -- not finished. We won't know for certain whether Eesti really will join the troubled euro zone until July. But people are talking nonetheless. Here's a roundup of what they are saying:

Edward Altman, finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, calls the adoption "ill timed" in Business Week. "Expansion at this time is not a good idea," Altman is quoted as saying. "There may have been internal political pressures that we don’t know about that caused this to happen or maybe it shows they are still a dynamic entity and want to show the world they’re not finished."

Peter Garnham blogs on the Financial Times website that euro adoption is better for Stockholm than it is for Tallinn: "The adoption of the single currency will not change much for the denizens of Tallinn, whose currency, the kroon, has long been fixed against the euro in a currency board ... But the EC’s enthusiasm for Estonia to join the single currency did have an effect on the wider market, helping the Swedish krona to rally across the board."

Garnham cites UBS analyst Geoffrey Yu: "We believe this is a major positive for Swedish krona as the risk of [Estonian] devaluation will no longer exist."

Jack Ewing writing in the New York Times notes an "unusually blunt" report from the European Central Bank that seems less convinced of Estonia's readiness for euro adoption. "While the country is well within the limits on government spending and debt, the Baltic country has a history of high inflation that raises concerns," Ewing states, citing the ECB's position.

Meantime, The Wall Street Journal's Richard Barley writes that the EC's decision "sends a signal that the euro zone is here to stay—but it may be a while before there are any more entrants."

According to Barley, the move is "due reward for the extremely severe recession it has endured." He writes that it will "remove the risk of any foreign-exchange mismatch in private-sector lending, a key concern for Western European banks in the depths of the crisis." Still, he argues that there will be "big challenges on the monetary-policy front: euro-zone interest rates may well be too low to restrain inflation as the Estonian economy reaps the benefits of euro membership. And at some point, Estonia may get an expensive call to support other euro-zone states in trouble, as the current members are doing for Greece."

With the EC saying one thing and the ECB saying another, Estonia's favorite analyst Lars Christensen at Danske Bank said that "though Estonian euro membership is likely it is still not a done deal due to the ECB’s obvious reservations." Said Christensen, "This is now entirely a European political decision."

UPDATE. Here are some more:

Russian analyst Igor Kostikov tells the Voice of Russia that Estonia is well prepared for euro adoption: Noting that Estonia's public deficit is well within the 3-percent of the GDP, as required by the Maastricht agreement, Kostikov says that Estonia is an "even better budgetary performer than Belgium and France, let alone Greece and other countries in Southern Europe." According to Kostikov, Estonia's entry would be a "signal of Eurozone readiness to encourage frugal economies" and the "lure of the euro remains irresistible."

For some, Estonia's status as a former Soviet country is no longer something of which to be ashamed, at least when it comes to euro adoption. Ahto Lobjakas writes in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty online that, "assuming no late reverses, Estonia will be the third former communist-bloc country to join the euro after Slovenia and Slovakia." Poland and Romania are currently on course to accede to the single currency in 2015, he notes.

Edward Lucas, I presume, in The Economist reveals that the real remaining hurdle to Estonian euro adoption is political. "Some euro zone members (France is often mentioned) think that allowing an obscure and volatile ex-communist economy to join a currency union that has too many dodgy members already should not be a priority. If Estonia is really so solid, why not wait a year to be sure?"

By the way, The Economist leader had great artwork, so I decided to steal it for my own nefarious purposes. Credit where credit is due ...

ukraizy?

Ever wonder what might happen to your country should an alleged "Kremlin stooge" come to power? Just look at Ukraine. Since President Viktor Yanukovich took office in February, Kiev has made nice with Moscow on many fronts after years of acrimony.

On every one of Putin-Medvedev's pet issues, NATO membership, historical revisionism, the future of the Black Sea Fleet, Yanukovich's Ukraine has seen eye to eye with the Russian Federation. There is even talk of deeper integration between the two countries' energy sectors, though any deal will respect Ukraine's sovereignty, of course.

Some call Yanukovich a traitor, others see him as a wily leader who is duping Moscow into giving Kiev more than what it receives in return. But one election pledge that Yanukovich has failed to make good on so far is the elevation of Russian to the status of an official state language.

Russia has a bit of a fetish for official languages. While external observers tend to describe the linguistic situation for many of its minority languages as dire, the Russian Federation maintains a policy of retaining official status for minority languages in certain republics, so that in Mari El, the official languages on paper are still Russian and Mari, though the UN, for example, has criticized the actual treatment of the Mari linguistic minority. As you can imagine, when Yanukovich promised to make Russian an official language of Ukraine, the Kremlin-controlled media swooned.

But there's a problem. In order to make Russian a state language, Yanukovich has to change the constitution, and even he and his mighty coalition of the Party of Regions, the Communist Party of Ukraine, and the Bloc Lytvyn, still can't do that. So, instead of mirroring Russia's federal republics, where Russian and the "titular" language are co-official on paper, he's decided to peddle Ukraine down the European route by implementing laws that protect the use of Russian under the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

Most countries in Europe have adopted the charter. In this part of Europe, there are three notable exceptions: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Finland ratified the charter in 1994. Sweden ratified it in 2000. Poland ratified it last year. In fact, one of the 15 languages protected by Poland is Russian. But the Baltic countries have yet to ratify this charter, which was the main suggestion of Amnesty International following its controversial critique several years ago.

Language policies continue to be the third rail of politics in the Baltics and, obviously also in Ukraine, because of Soviet language policies, memories of tsarist-era Russification campaigns, and in some places, demographic conditions that would make it difficult to receive any services in the national language at all without state enforcement. So it's a headache, but, in the case of Estonia, I have to ask, had the country not been occupied and annexed in 1940, had it not withstood mass Soviet "population transfer" -- as it is termed -- would it still not have opted to adopt the charter, this same charter that its neighbors have adopted?

There is this idea out there that minorities have no official status in Estonia. This is not true. The 1918 manifesto that proclaimed Estonia's independence specifically mentioned Estonia's minorities: "All ethnic minorities, the Russians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and others residing within the borders of the republic, shall be guaranteed the right to their cultural autonomy." It's actually the second principle in the manifesto, right after, "All citizens of the Republic of Estonia, irrespective of their religion, ethnic origin, and political views, shall enjoy equal protection under the law and courts of justice of the Republic. "

The Law on Cultural Autonomy for National Minorities, passed first in 1925 and again in 1993, similarly enshrined minority rights. Under the guidelines of the law, national minority cultural autonomy could be established by persons belonging to "German, Russian, Swedish and Jewish minorities and persons belonging to national minorities with a membership of more than 3000."

The problem for the Russian minority in this case is that, with about 340,000 potential "members" in Estonia, it's kind of hard to elect a cultural council that represents everybody's interests. This is not the case for smaller groups like the Estonian Swedes or Ingrian Finns, both of which elected councils based on this law in the last decade. State authorities have noted the trouble for Estonia's Russians in applying the autonomy law, but no consensus has been reached.

So it seems that, in Estonia's case, the adoption of the charter might not actually be a bad option. But should some "Kremlin stooge" come to power in Tallinn and try to adopt the law, would the session end with eggs and smoke bombs on Toompea? Would the politicians who passed such a law be seen as a traitors or wily leaders, "solving" the minority issue once and for all by giving Estonia's minorities freedoms they actually already enjoyed? I don't know. It is reassuring to know that, with Estonia's historical narrative strongly supported in the West, and the country deeply integrated into NATO, there are relatively few opportunities for any sea change in future policies, regardless of who holds power.

talle see sobib

One of the perks of living in Estonia is that you are far removed from the endless barrage of propaganda that is American political discourse. On the downside, the longer you stay in Estonia and, especially, the stronger your command of the local language becomes, newer, potent forms of propaganda manifest themselves in your daily life.

Consider the case of Tallinn Mayor Edgar Savisaar. He was prime minister of this country for a short period of time in the early 1990s. Ever since then he's been running a never ending, so-far unsuccessful campaign to win back his seat in Stenbock House. Savisaar likes to lavish his voters with free firewood, potatoes, electronic greeting cards, and public advertising campaigns that border on harassment. His political demagoguery has earned him the exasperation of many an Estonian, not to mention the ridicule of his rivals. But the problem for his political opponents is that his critiques are not completely untrue.

Savisaar's most recent attempt to woo voters is to pin the economic crisis on the ruling coalition. He's been trying to do it for years now, with some success. His party did win the most votes during the municipal elections last October. And here's their narrative, as put by Ain Seppik, an MP and Savisaar's right-hand man. Seppik said in a recent article that when Centre was in coalition with Reform from 2005 to 2007, all was well. The economy was up, unemployment was down; Estonia was looking forward to an endless summer. Then things took a turn for the worse. Following the March 2007 elections, Reform callously dropped Centre and decided to steer to the right with their new best friend and coalition partner Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit. The economy subsequently tanked, unemployment grew, there was rioting in the streets, and Estonia now faced cold, endless winters.

So Savisaar blames the ruling coalition for the high unemployment rate and the deep economic decline of the last few years. And who could argue with him? It's true! Estonia does have high unemployment. Estonia has experienced an extreme economic slump. Of course, other countries have these phenomena too, his opponents point out. But little Estonia has the third highest unemployment rate in Europe. GDP meantime dropped 14 percent last year. The EU on average saw a decline of 4 percent. Anyone who travels around Estonia can see that the money from the economic boom did not exactly trickle down to all. There are plenty of disgruntled have-nots in this country, and most of them can vote in parliamentary elections. So why not appeal to their interests?

Savisaar's opponents fire back that they aren't responsible for Estonia's problems. Estonia's paternalistic rulers instead argue that they are only responsible for the good in this land. As Prime Minister Andrus Ansip put it, his Reform Party has made Estonia what it is today. But the bad? Well, that's like the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Some other superior force is behind the bad. Not the local politicians. I mean, without their foresight and wisdom, things could be much worse and when I say worse, I mean Latvia. Estonians owe their leaders everything, that lightning-quick wifi connection, that efficient online tax system, those gold medals our skiers won at the Olympic Games in 2006. But, wait a second, Centre was in the coalition in 2006. Looks like Ansip and Savisaar will have to share the gold.

So you see, there are different narratives competing in Estonia. Flasher T, an Estonian blogger, has constructed his own, which is closer to Reform's than to Centre's. In Flasher's narrative, Estonia's friends in high places secure it the green light for Euro adoption next month, filling the sails of the ruling coalition with wind that will earn them the top slot in next year's parliamentary elections. Since Eesti Pank director Andres Lipstok will be the point man for the currency change, Flasher hypothesizes that Ansip will retire to some sinecure in EU or NATO, while Lipstok becomes the flashy, new, attractive face of Reform's 2011 ticket. And Flasher may be right. The Estonian media is undoubtedly slanted towards the ruling coalition: they are certain to make a hero out of Lipstok if that's the way events shake out.

But they may not turn out that way. If American political discourse (and personal experience) has taught me anything, it's that journalists tend to favor the winner. When the Centre Party won the municipal elections last October, I noticed how the Estonian media suddenly went a little easier on the victorious party. And they have to go easy on them: you can't interview politicians if they won't speak to you, and if you can't write your articles, then you are out of work. All journalists have to trade a little integrity for access, and that's why if Savisaar does come out on top, and he is able to put a coalition together, the media spin might turn quickly in his favor. The Centre Party's narrative will prevail.

For some reason, the British parliamentary election of July 1945 comes to mind. Winston Churchill's Conservatives were favored to win. Churchill had led the country through the war and enjoyed a certain hero status. With the war in Europe over, though, the British public turned their concern to employment, housing, social services, and they voted for Labour's Clement Attlee instead. Of course, that's an elementary school textbook's version of events, but take it as an example of how fast the national mood can change, and how a prediction that would seem rather obvious -- the Allies' triumph in the war leading to Churchill's certain reelection -- was not fulfilled. Not to say that Savisaar is Estonia's Attlee -- the local Benny Hill jokes are often not off their mark -- but don't count on the "victory" of Euro adoption translating to votes.

We will have to wait to see how Estonians vote next March. Either outcome will be interesting.

a short history of estonian comedy

"Does Estonia have a stand-up comedy tradition?" So one Australian Swede named Louis asked me weeks ago. I never answered, but during long walks along the overflowing Emajõgi in Tartu I turned the question over and over again, trying to find one.

Despite the Estonians' taciturn public image, they actually are a humorous people. They have funny writers (Andrus Kivirähk), funny sketch comedy groups (Kreisiraadio), funny actors (Jan Uuspõld), funny 'journalists' (Mart Juur), and even funny politicians (Edgar Savisaar), but do they have a verifiable stand-up comedy tradition?

I would like to tell you that, yes, they had a week-long Laugh In during the St. George's Night Uprising in 1343. Or how about Johan Voldemar Jannsen's gut-splitting intro monologue to the first ever National Song Festival in 1869? And who could forget Gustav Ernesaks' bawdy attempt at musical comedy, "Sillamäe Slapstick"? Sadly, it isn't so. To date, Estonia has lacked its own Chris Rocks. Until now.

On April 27th and April 28th, the Tartu Comedy Festival 2010 will take place at the Eduard Vilde Lokaal ja Kohvik. Each night's performance begins at 8 pm, and admission costs 50 EEK. Another performance is scheduled for April 29th at the Drink Baar in Tallinn.

Both the festival and the Tallinn performance boast the "best comedians from around Scandinavia" and one could see them as another example of Swedish empire-building in its former province. The aforementioned Louis Zezeran is one of the prime movers behind the festival and will be performing there. Based in Stockholm, Governor General Louis has enlisted other Nordic imperialists, most notably the notorious Finnish propagandists Phil Schwartzmann of Finland for Thought and Zöe Chandler, along with American Swedish soldier of fortune Joe Eagan to take part in the shows.

Of course, what imperial project would be complete without local collaborators? Fortunately, Estonia has always been a jackpot of sorts for imperialists, an over-flowing well of unscrupulous characters out to make names for themselves in the service of whoever is asking. This time around, Andrei Tuch, who will basically do anything for money, will be on hand to represent Estonia, while other miscreants and ne'er-do-wells tapped for the festival include American Estonian playboy Stewart Johnson and Baltic German monarchist and warlord Eric von Ungern-Seufert.

So, after thousands of glacial years, an eternity of darkness, Estonia will at last have its stand-up comedy. The only question that now remains is how funny the show will be. Considering the potent, even toxic mix of wit and A. Le Coq, it is likely that things will get out of hand.

välismaa mees

Estonian manhood seems to be going through a crisis. Postimees journalism godfather Priit Pullerits polishes off article after article about the perils of eesti naised falling into the malevolent clutches of foreign men; columnist Jüri Pino compares Estonian men in the magazine Eesti Naine to pigs "or some other lower life form"; and the cover of Õhtuleht greeted me the other day with one question: Eesti mehed on jobud?

I really wish I could define for you the meaning of the word jobu. At first I took it to be a relative of the word joodik -- a drunk. But a jobu is not merely a drunk. A jobu is something different, something more profound. My favorite online English-Estonian dictionary equates jobu with the following words: berk, birdbrain, blithering idiot, bumpkin, daff, jerk, prat, sucker, turkey, and zombie(!) And this is how Estonian men see themselves. I've even heard talk that there is a Jobu magazine in development.

The arch nemesis of these jobud is the välismaa mees -- the foreign man. He's everything the Estonian man is not, allegedly wealthy, supposedly slick; a smooth operator. In Pino's piece, the Estonian man actually goes so far as to give up smoking so that he can compete with this imaginary foreign man because välismaa mees doesn't smoke. As much as it irks me, I find this wallowing in the meandering river of disillusionment necessary for Estonian guys, because if the specter of välismaa mees can get them to eat right and quit smoking, if their foreign foe can help them lift their chin above the bar to get the average Estonian male's life expectancy to inch over 70 years, then I'll be more than happy to play the villain. Competition is good.

Still, there are elements of the eesti mees/välismaa mees discourse that are unsettling. One is that by marrying foreigners, Estonian women are somehow betraying their country. There are so few Estonians, this argument goes. Estonians need to make more of them, together, in Estonia. By partnering with the dread välismaa mees, the pure bloodstream of the Estonians is tainted, polluted. The future of the nation is flushed down the toilet the second that välismaa sperm connects with eestimaa egg.

This is, of course, complete jama. Biological diversity should be welcomed, not shunned. National homogeneity is wonderful if you want to study rare genetic diseases across generations in one population, but it's not going to make your population any more flexible, healthy, or open to the world. And the great tragedy of the slow death of the "pure" Estonian, is that, as Rein Taagepera describes the local attitude, "There are really only two pure Estonians in Estonia, me and you, and I'm not so sure about you." Scratch an Estonian and you'll find a Swede or a Finn or a Russian or a Pole or a Latvian or a German or an Ingrian or a Seto. I've even heard there is an abundance of brunettes on Saaremaa because some Portuguese sailors once docked at Kuressaare and went on a spree. So you can mix your purity in a bowl with some kama and eat it. The well was contaminated long before I showed up.

Eesti mees. Välismaa mees. The two closest "minorities" in my neighborhood aren't Russian or Ukrainian or Finnish. One's a Swede, the other is Latvian. The Swede is a few years older than me and, naturally, married to an Estonian lady. He likes Depeche Mode and good restaurants. Svensson's cool and well traveled; a dormant rock star who pays the bills by working for a local Swedish call center where his language skills are put to good use by arranging for little old ladies in Umeå to get a state-subsidized ride to the hospital. See, that's Scandinavian solidarity for you. Old-fashioned Swedish help to self help. The only problem with Estonia, we lament, is that there is no Polarbröd, a tasty baked good from northern Rootsi. There is a spark of hope that by merely mentioning its absence on this blog, Selver might start importing it. Keep your fingers crossed.

The Latvian is the pioneer foreigner here. Born in Riga, this septuagenarian rides about the neighborhood on an old bike, wearing a Parisian black beret. Like all of us, he's also married to an Estonian lady and when I yell out "Sveiks!" to the Latvian, he usually responds to me in Estonian. Still, the Latvian is different -- he's friendly and outgoing, easily the friendliest in the 'hood. My daughter calls him "uncle." Sometimes when I see the Latvian grandpa riding his bike with his black beret, I feel as if the spirit of Old Europe has passed me by. We're all here in this neighborhood, välismaa mehed, Old Europe and New Europe and the New World. I wonder if anyone notices us.

Sometimes at the supermarket I do cross paths with tough-looking locals with tattoos and t-shirts that are covered with Germanic or Scandinavian imagery. Maybe it's a cross or Thor's hammer. I can't always tell. These gentlemen don't look especially happy as they buy their lunch of beer and cigarettes, but they never seem to pay me any mind, and they are by no means your standard issue eesti mees.

In reality, most Estonian guys are pretty helpful and I think we foreigners have a lot to learn from our Estonian counterparts. These men are our partners' fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, and co-workers. They inform what is to be expected of us, and one can imagine the sharp pangs of shame the välismaa mees feels when his eesti naine discovers that, unlike most Estonian men, he a) doesn't know how to build his own house; and b) doesn't particularly feel the need to do so. Or so it seems. Because as the time a välismaa mees spends in Estonia increases, the probabilty of him becoming involved in a joyously miserable construction project approaches 1.

**

A Note: when I started working on this post five days ago, Lech Kaczynski was still president of Poland. I cannot help but feel terrible about what has happened since. My condolences to the Kaczynski family, the families of all on that flight, and to the people of Poland.

buratino

My wife sat in our bedroom spellbound by YouTube clips of The Adventures of Buratino, a 1975 Russian-language made-for-TV film. For her the song at the finale, with an auditorium full of children shouting "Bu-ra-ti-no!," brought back warm memories of a happy childhood. And there always is this question in Estonia of how fondly to recall life in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.

It reminded me of an interview I read with Toomas Hendrik Ilves conducted by Mikhail Veller and published last month in Nezavasimaya Gazeta:

--

What do you think now, many years later – aside from the bad, did Soviet rule bring Estonia anything good?

If I’m not mistaken, Brodsky has an essay on this topic. He answers it this way: yes, but no.

But didn’t Estonia have a dynamic, intriguing and rich literary, painting and musical scene? A foundation was laid for science; the Estonian Academy of Sciences was founded…

Yes. But it all took place under pressure. It would appear that a totalitarian regime is still too high a price to pay for artistic development.

--

Too high a price to pay for artistic development, most certainly. But what about all those kids clapping and shouting about Buratino? If that film was made under Stalinist guidelines of Soviet realism, where everything has but one meaning, I couldn't tell. Besides, little Buratino didn't even have a red star on his nose. Wait, Buratino? Who the hell is Buratino?

If you are from the Anglo world like me, then Buratino is Pinocchio. But in the Russian world, Pinocchio is Buratino. Just as Puff Daddy took The Police's 1983 hit "I'll be Watching You" and made it his own in 1997 with "I'll be Missing You," Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy borrowed the motifs from Carlo Collodi's 1883 masterpiece The Adventures of Pinocchio and made them his own in his 1936 book for children, The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino. Tolstoy had read the original as a child, tried to recreate it as an adult, and came up with something slightly new, he said. "Geppetto" became "Papa Carlo," and other new characters were thrown into the mix. The book soon spawned a series of cartoons, films, records, dolls, and other Soviet merchandise. It's still somewhat popular. While Estonians now consider their land to fall under the protective umbrella of the West, to this day they put on Buratino plays. In the Estonian language, of course.

That was another "Say wha?" moment the other night. The 1975 film my wife was watching was in Russian. Except my wife's native language is not Russian and, even though she lived within the USSR as a child, Viljandi county in the southwest of Estonia is a pretty monolingual environment, unless you want to consider Mulgi dialect a separate language from Estonian. "Did you understand what they were saying back then?" I asked her. "Muidugi," she replied. Muidugi? Of course?

For me, and a lot of Americans, this one is a bit hard to fathom. The most of any other language I knew as a child was gleaned from listening to Speedy Gonzalez, Warner Brothers' "fastest mouse in all of Mexico," shout ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! French lessons were provided by a skunk named Pepé Le Pew, who was always searching for "l'amour." Affaire d'amour? Affaire de coeur? Je ne sais quoi ... je vive en espoir. Mmmm m mm ... un smella vous finez. So, no, I was not functional in any language other than inglise keel as a child. How did she do it? I don't know. But she still knows the Russian words to the songs in Buratino.

An interesting aside: as a child, a lot of the programming I consumed was not produced in the United States. Instead, other than Looney Tunes, I watched imported British television (cartoons like Danger Mouse, spooky serials like The Third Eye). In my formative years, I saw enough British TV that I still get excited when I see the old logo of Thames Television. Whenever I see the reflection of London in the river, something stirs in my chest; I know that something really good is about to happen. "Ah, the good old Thames," thinks this New York-bred 30-year-old who lives in Estonia, "how I miss it."

What does this really mean? It means that we are dinosaurs. How small is the demographic of Estonians for whom that Buratino film from 1975 brings back warm feelings of nostalgia? It's a preciously thin slice of the local population. Likewise, how many Americans really care about Danger Mouse? For most, he's a successful DJ, not a mouse detective. And Mikhail Veller can reference Eesti NSV and the triumphs of the cassette generation, but how many Estonians today are still leafing through the nearly 50-year-old works of Leelo Tungal and Jaan Kaplinski?

When our 15-year-old babysitter gets a case of childhood nostalgia, she starts talking about the Moomin TV series from the early 90s. I don't understand it, but she can sit and watch those old Finnish cartoons dubbed into Estonian all day long.

põhjamaade satelliit

It's all becoming very clear to me, the whole thing. My perspective is informed by time and distance. Only with time and distance is it possible sometimes to make sense of things.

It began with a newspaper on a Wednesday morning. Sami Seppänen, CEO of Finnish telecommunication firm Elisa's Estonian office, had finally done it. He had unearthed the domestic Holy Grail. The chalice of Kalev. Estonia's Nokia. What is it, you ask? I wanted to know too, so I read the whole article.

Nordic trade unions, Sami wrote. They are always on strike. It's such a pain, that it makes sense for the Nordic countries to outsource their manufacturing to nearby Estonia. And they are already coming.

"Electronics producer Elcoteq is expanding its manufacturing in Tallinn, the Danes' Flexa is closing its factory in Denmark and moving its furniture manufacturing to Estonia, the Finns' Incap wants to close its Finnish factory and bring its electronics production to Estonia, the Swedes' car tire maker Trellborg is bringing from Sweden part of its production over to Estonia, and Ericcson Estonia's production is also growing."

It's like a perfect storm, no, even better, a shooting star, a Nordic meteroid of manufacturing jobs is headed this way, set to recreate the awesome collision in Saaremaa that Lennart Meri hypothesized gave the Scandinavians their "Thule" so many years ago. But how should we feel about this? How should we feel now that the search is over, and Eesti Nokia is on its way across the Baltic, packed away in boxes of electronic equipment?

The Scandinavians and the Estonians have a long, intimate history. As far back as the fabled year of 1991, when the Estonians regained their independence, historians familiar with old chronicles agree that it was not the Americans or Brits or French who were most eager to recognize it. Instead it was Reykjavik, followed quickly by Copenhagen, that, two days after the August 20 reaffirmation, restored relations on the basis of the de jure relations that had existed since 1922. Reading Seppänen's article, I began to wonder, maybe this was the secret plan all along: to pry the Estonians away from Moscow so that they could become the "sixth Nordic country," akin to the "fifth Beatle," a nifty little R&D and assembly shop, a satellite across the sea.

Of course, no Estonian is content to be the fifth Beatle. Even if he just plays organ on a few songs, he wants full membership in the band. He wants to be on the album cover, not in the liner notes. The Estonian wants to see his somber tricolor up there, tossing in the air alongside the crosses of the giants. He aims to look Stockholm in the eye, not up the nose. And so the joy with which Estonia's Nokia is received is muted. Others whisper. What can sate the Estonian's hunger for status, money, and international prestige?

At night, I pace back in my workshop, trying to put it all together. For years, the Estonians have dreamed of their own Nokia, their own launching pad to prosperity. But what if Seppänen is right? What if Estonia's Nokia doesn't come in the form of shiny communication devices, but as manufacturing jobs outsourced to a sunny corner of an often troublesome galaxy of labor. I worry as I pace. Will the Estonians be content? It's up them, I determine. Something to mull over as they assemble consumer electronics and detail rubber tires.

isa teab paremini

While the Estonian parliament wrestled with a new bill that would raise the age at which residents can begin receiving their pensions, a journalist sent me a few questions: Why don't Estonians take to the streets to protest unpopular government decisions? How come Estonians prefer to cower behind anonymous Internet comments rather than to make their voices heard in public?

Like the men and women on Toompea, I struggled to find an answer. What could it be? What makes Tallinn unlike Athens and Paris? How come other Europeans let their representatives know when they are angry, but Estonians, yawn, are content to yell at the TV set or beat their chests in cyberspace?

Could it be temperament? Could it be that the glacial Estonians are too slow and peaceful to pick up placards and storm the capital to voice their concerns? Or maybe it's the weather? Surely, a late March thaw is no time to stand around in a crowd of cold and unhappy people? I toyed with this idea at first, but eventually came to dismiss it. It is true that the Estonians are stereotypical northerners. It is true that Estonia is cold. But neither stopped the Icelanders from bringing Geir Haarde's government to its knees last winter. Why, they even burned Christmas trees at protests in Reykjavik. So if there is an explanation for the Estonians' aversion to mass demonstrations, that isn't it.

With the iceman theory debunked, I tried my hand at the good old reliable post-communist explanation. Estonians were held captive at gunpoint for around 50 years by Moscow. You needed a visa to visit Hiiumaa. Under such circumstances, of course Estonians are protest shy. Why would anyone conditioned under such a system assemble in public to question the status quo? That's just asking for trouble. I started to buy into this theory too, until I remembered the Latvians with their umbrella revolution and the Ukrainians with their orange revolution. They had communist pasts too, why, they had even been constituent parts of the same commie super state. Still, that hasn't stopped them from taking it to the streets in recent years. Like the iceman theory, the post-commie theory doesn't hold up.

So what could it be? What keeps Estonians indoors accusing each other of being national socialists or communists or both from the comfort of their own homes rather than taking their grievances to the halls of power? Without a simple theory to fall back on, I began to stitch together my own, new theory, a political one at that.

According to my political theory, Estonia has been run by basically the same politicians for years. Since 1999, Estonians have had Mart Laar (Isamaa) as prime minister, followed by Siim Kallas (Reform), who was replaced by Juhan Parts (Res Publica), who was succeeded by Andrus Ansip (Reform), whose current minority government is a coalition with Laar's conservative fusion of Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit, and includes Parts as minister of economic affairs and communication.

It is true that the current coalition is a minority government, which, by definition, means that most Estonians did not vote for it. However, the opposition, a motley crew of Centrists and Social Democrats plus two smaller parties that are on life support, the Greens and People's Union, is in no shape to offer any serious challenge to those in power. Reform and IRL's jobs are secure. And, with parliamentary elections 12 memory-loss inducing months away, Ansip's government is in a position to do basically whatever it wants. Estonians know this and therefore don't bother to waste their time trying to influence those who probably will be unmoved by street demonstrations.

Critics of social democracy often refer to social welfare policies as manifestations of the "nanny state," where the imaginary "nanny" of bureaucracy is entrusted to take care of you from cradle to grave. I would argue that what we see in Estonia these days is a paternal "daddy state," where the government makes its decisions and, in most cases, once the leadership decides on something, it's set in stone. Isa teab paremini, as they say, father knows best. And if you disagree, what are you really going to do? Vote for Centre Party leader Edgar Savisaar? If you're a pensioner, chances are you probably already do. And if you're not? Well, I'm sure the party spokesperson will circulate some talking points to allay your concerns.

autod

My father-in-law was right. Andres said we should get a Volkswagen Sharan. But we didn't, we got a Mercury Villager, an Ameerika auto as they call it here. We've paid for it ever since.

Ameerika auto in Estonian doesn't have the negative connotation you think it does. If you drive one, it does not necessarily mean that you are obese or prone to support any war your government presents for your approval. What it means is that if some hooligans decide to rip off your windshield wipers and do damage to your antenna, as they did to our car during the pronksöö in '07, you'll have to order spare parts. From America.

Had we listened to Andres and bought a Volkswagen, we wouldn't have had that problem. There are VW service centers all over Estonia and Germany isn't as far from Estonia as the US. If the Saksa Kultuuri Instituut on Kastani Street in Tartu can be stocked weekly with fresh issues of Frankfurter Allgemeine, then it's fairly easy for an Estonian mechanic to fix a Saksa auto. But we didn't listen to him because the Villager was such a good deal. Plus it had been shipped here from Staten Island by some Estonian-American international car merchant. It still had the dealership's label of Freehold, NJ, on the back. I took it as a sign.

I shouldn't complain. The old red caboose, which I nicknamed "Zhou Enlai" on account of its color and license plate letters and numbers, was fairly reliable, zooming across South Estonian country roads for years, hauling books from Tartu print houses to Tallinn warehouses. But even good things must come to an end, and this winter Zhou froze to death. He's been sitting in a lot in Ülejõe ever since as we contemplate either getting him a new engine or putting him and his rare spare parts out to pasture.

And so now we hunt for a new car, something a little more reliable than Zhou. One of our friends, an Estonian mechanic named Akko who came to Tartumaa via Tajikistan, recommended a KIA, a Korea auto which sounds nice when you say it, but, having seen too many Vietnam movies as a kid, reminds me of a certain dreadful acronym. We were contemplating the KIA, when friends and family came out of the woodwork to point us in other directions. Supposedly the new KIAs are better than the old ones, and the reason why this KIA is such a sweet deal is because that's all it's worth. But it's hard to make decisions when one know-it-all is telling you that a car is a great deal and the other know-it-all is telling you it's a shitbox. What to do?

Looking for cars is a disorienting experience. If you spend enough time looking, you can't help but notice how ridiculously they are all named. Only the drug companies, with their Nolvadexes and Removabs and Jantovens, can beat the car companies with their Fabias and Cordobas and Mondeos. They sound like minor characters from some long lost Shakespearean production. But in this forest of names and numbers, we will find our next ride.

This new car must be energy efficient, we've determined, smaller, but with enough legroom for big people like me, popular enough in Estonia that it is easy to find spare parts, not too expensive, have five seats and preferably four doors (though two doors might be ok), and be automatic because even though we've given up on Ameerika autod, the guy behind the wheel will still be an ameeriklane and in America 75 percent of cars on the road are automatics (in Estonia, it's the other way around). I am writing this post now because I need your help. I am also writing it because I know how passionate people are about vehicles.

põdrad

I knew I was nearing reindeerland as soon as I headed towards the Tallinn docks. Some cheeky Finnish youth actually said "Welcome to Helsinki" to me as he trudged through that day's blizzard towards the ship with a bundle of discount booze in his arms.

I had the privilege of spending some hours amongst Estonia's northern kin that day. Some notes on the neighbors:

* According to a recent column by Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb (left) in Finnair's in flight magazine, his country is among the happiest in the world, if not the happiest. How this washes with having three public shooting sprees in as many years is anybody's guess. Maybe those three mass murderers were the only unhappy people in Finland?

* Grouped by some wacky 19th century anthropologists with Japanese and Koreans as part of the "yellow race," there is some truth to Finland's eastern orientation. Finnair maintains reliable services to many cities in Asia, including three destinations in Japan and China each. Even though Finns have had preciously little to do with Asian culture or history, they seem to know what they are doing. It's hard to tell the Finnish elements and the Japanese elements in their marketing campaigns apart.

* Even though Finland has its problems, some Finns still seem to think that life is infinitely better there than in Estonia, which I think they see as troublesome and less stable. Finnish media covered a small protest outside the independence day gala by marginal figures, for example, while Estonian media ignored it. Why? If only Estonia was more pragmatic, if only they knew how to deal with Moscow, if only Estonia had a world class Olympic hockey team, if only Estonians were, basically, Finns, then they would rise rapidly on the happiness scale, according to this line of thought. Little Estonia still needs to grow up. Big Finland is waiting patiently for the day to arrive.

* Some Estonians stereotype Finnish women as being ugly. This is not true.

* Finland seems to enjoy its own monoculture: all the things you could possibly need are produced within the country, with each brand contributing to the national identity. In Finland, your whole childhood can be Moomin, your pantry and closets filled with Marimekko dishes and attire, your communications needs serviced by Nokia. It's easy to spot Finns in airports: they sport the same hairstyles, spectacles, and fashion accessories. It's like they have some kind of secret national uniform. Estonia also has attempted to replicate Finnish monoculture by building its own Esto world of consumer goods, but, so far, it's less convincing.

* Along with consumer monoculture, there is also genetic homogeneity. Researchers will tell you that Estonians are actually genetically closer to Latvians than Finns. That's true, but one should keep in mind that Finns are remote from basically all other Europeans because they descend from a relatively small founder population. This may be why so many Finns look alike. Each one is like genetic concentrate.

manifesto

To All The Peoples of Estonia

Never in the course of centuries have the Estonian people lost their ardent desire for Independence. From generation to generation Estonians have kept alive the secret hope that in spite of enslavement and oppression by other nations the time will come in Estonia "when all splinters, at both end, will burst forth into flames" and when "Kalev will come home to bring his children happiness."

Now this time has arrived.

An unprecedented struggle of nations has destroyed the rotten foundations of the Russian Tsarist Empire. All over the Sarmatian plains ruinous anarchy is spreading, threatening to overwhelm in its wake all peoples living within the borders of the former Russian Empire. From the West the victorious armies of Germany are approaching in order to claim their share of Russia's legacy and, above all, to take possession of the coastal territories of the Baltic Sea.

In this fateful hour the Estonian National Council, as the legal representative of our land and people, has, in unanimous agreement with Estonian democratic political parties and organizations, and by virtue of the right of self-determination of peoples, found it necessary to take the following decisive steps to shape the destiny of Estonian land and people.

ESTONIA,
within her historical and ethnic boundaries, is declared as of today an
INDEPENDENT DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC.


The independent Republic of Estonia shall include Harjumaa, Läänemaa, Järvamaa, Virumaa, with the city of Narva and its surroundings, Tartumaa, Võrumaa, Viljandimaa, and Pärnumaa with the Baltic islands of Saaremaa, Hiiumaa, Muhumaa, and others where the Estonians have settled for ages in large majorities. Final determination of the boundaries of the Republic in the areas bordering on Latvia and Russia will be carried out by plebiscite after the conclusion of the present World War.

In the aforementioned areas the only supreme and organizing authority is the democratically supported Estonian Salvation Committee created by the Estonian National Council.

The Republic of Estonia wishes to maintain absolute political neutrality towards all neighbouring states and peoples and expects that they will equally respond with complete neutrality.

Estonian military forces shall be reduced to the extent necessary to maintain internal order. Estonian soldiers serving in the Russian military forces will be called home and demobilized.

Until the Estonian Constituent Assembly, elected by general, direct, secret, and proportional elections, will convene and determine the constitutional structure of the country, all executive and legislative authority will remain vested in the Estonian National Council and in the Estonian Provisional Government created by it, whose activities must be guided by the following principles:

1. All citizens of the Republic of Estonia, irrespective of their religion, ethnic origin, and political views, shall enjoy equal protection under the law and courts of justice of the Republic.

2. All ethnic minorities, the Russians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and others residing within the borders of the republic, shall be guaranteed the right to their cultural autonomy.

3. All civic freedoms, such at the freedom of expression, of the press, of religion, of assembly, of association, and the freedom to strike as well as the inviolability of the individual and the home, shall be irrefutably effective within the territory of the Estonian Republic and based on laws which the Government shall immediately work out.

4. The Provisional Government will be charged with the immediate organization of the courts of justice to protect the security of the citizens. All political prisoners shall be released immediately.

5. The city, county, and township local governments will be called upon to continue their work, which has been violently interrupted.

6. For maintenance of public order, people's militia, subordinated to local governments, shall be immediately organized and citizens' self-defence organizations established in the cities and rural areas.

7. The Provisional Government in instructed to work out without delay, on a broad democratic basis, bills for the solution of the agrarian problem, and the problems of labor, of food supply, and of finances.

E s t o n i a ! You stand on the threshold of a hopeful future in which you shall be free and independent in determining and directing your destiny. Begin building a home of your own, ruled by law and order in order to be a worthy member within the family of civilized nations. Sons and daughters of our homeland, let us unite as one man in the sacred task of building our homeland. The sweat and blood shed by our ancestors for this country oblige us to do it, and we must do it for the sake of our future generations.

May God watch over Thee
And amply bless
Whatever thou undertake
My dear homeland!

Long live the independent democratic Republic of Estonia!

Long live peace among nations!


The Council of Elders
Estonian National Council
February 24, 1918

west end girls

There's something utterly depressing about hearing the Pet Shop Boys in a supermarket in Estonia. Maybe it's the cold synthesizers or the singer's sad tales of broken romance, but I'd rather hear anything else, I even welcomed Madonna's "La Isla Bonita" after suffering through one of their tunes.

I guess it reminds me of being on the Brighton waterfront at 2 am, with some guy screaming at me that his boyfriend OD'd. I told him, "What do you want me to do? Get him in one of those taxis and take him to a hospital." But he didn't. All he did was cry and scream. What a nightmare. And of course I didn't help, being not only a foreigner with a dead cellphone but a callous bastard, too. But that was then.

I think little of Estonian politics these days. The Ansip years stretch on, buoyed by the prime minister's steadfast belief that he is always right (Crisis? What crisis?). Ansip has supposedly modeled his career on Denmark's Andres Fogh Rasmussen's but he actually reminds me a bit of his overly confident counterpart to the north, Matti Vanhanen. In the same way that Ansip can argue that his country's concerns about the planned Nord Stream pipeline are solely environmental, Vanhanen can tell the Finnish press that an underwater pipeline is good for the environment and European energy security. Matti and Andrus, two sides of the same Balto-Finnic coin (which will hopefully be a euro on both sides of the gulf by this time next year).

I think Estonians are bored with Estonian politics too. Party support has ossified. Reform and Centre trade leads every few weeks, depending on whose leader most recently said or did something dumb. IRL and SDE limp by with their reliable slices of the remaining electorate. The same tired politicians continue to hurl the same insults at each other and few care. The central spread in this weekend's Postimees isn't about Estonia at all; it's about Ukraine. I have to say, I am more eager to read about Ukraine than Estonia.

The underwhelming victory of Viktor Yanukovich over Yulia Tymoshenko last week has caused all sorts of soul searching in Estonia and, in general, the West. Estonians look at the electoral map of Ukraine with its Russophone, industrial east and see Ida Virumaa, perhaps glad that they've only got one county like that, rather than half a country. Americans look at the electoral map of Ukraine and see the irreconcilable "red states" and "blue states." Geopolitical nerds fantasize about a velvet divorce between West Ukraine and East Ukraine. As usual, we blame ourselves. If only we had done more, Ukraine wouldn't have fallen back into the hands of the Kremlin's stooges, some analysts argue. We've missed a prime opportunity and it's all our fault.

Indeed, there are lessons to be learned. I think everyone in the West sympathized most with Yulia over Viktor, even if, as any Ukrainian-born cab driver will tell you, she's just as mercurial and crooked as the rest. It started with her role in the Orange Revolution. I did enjoy watching her spar with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a series of articles, because anybody who gives it to Lavrov is ok with me.

Tymoshenko, let's not forget, also has the hair. Never underestimate the power of the hair. With Tymoshenko, for the first time, perhaps ever, people in the West had a distinct image of Ukrainians, and a positive image at that. She became Ukraine's romantic nationalist face, with a mug more magnetic than Viktor Yuschenko's or Viktor Yanukovich's. Show the photos of Yulia and the Viktors to anyone on a street in Tartu or Stockholm or London or Vancouver, and most people would probably choose Yulia. She seemed so different from what we've come to expect from Soviet and post-Soviet leadership: not only was she dynamic and charismatic, but she was also female.

Think about it. Who was the last female leader of Ukraine? Actually, I did a little research, and Serafima Hopner was secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine for a few months in 1918. That's better than Estonia, though, where there has never been since 1918 a female state elder, president, or prime minister. In the West, especially after 12 years of Margaret Thatcher, gender seems less of an issue. Ireland's had two successive female presidents. Even in Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania, women have held the highest office. But still in Estonia, it seems that we are faced with an ensemble cast of middle-aged men who are always right.

Despite the progressive, northern light in which Estonians would like to view themselves, I think the population would actually be uncomfortable with a Yulia-like candidate serving as prime minister or president. At one level, some female candidates have done well as mayors and parliamentarians. But at the top? Estonians swear they are not religious, but they prefer their leaders to be like their Evangelical Lutheran pastors: dour, conservative, plain, righteous, and, most of all, male.

There have been a few exceptions. Marju Lauristin comes to mind as an Estonian leader who was one of the faces of the Popular Front in the '80s and continues to play a role in the domestic debate. She was also the head of SDE for five years, from 1990 to 1995. But Estonia hasn't had a woman running for PM since then and there will probably be no female face at the debates in 2011, either. How is that possible? How is it possible that in a country where 54 percent of the population is female, the heads of all the major political parties are male, and only one minister out of 13 ministers in the government is a lady?

I am sure there is a logical, Estonian explanation for that, and I'd be glad to hear it. In the meantime, while some analysts say that the Ukrainian presidential elections are an example to Russia, which does not have free elections, one could also see them as an example for Estonia, too.

käärmann

People talk about war too much, maybe because violence seems so profound, maybe because for people like me who have never been in one, it's hard to connect with those who have, people who have known true horror, those who have run through the woods with weapons, hunting one another like they were wild game. Alfred Käärmann was intimately acquainted with such terror. He died Feb. 4 at the age of 87.

Käärmann's story is similar to that of many metsavennad, the Estonian republican "forest brother" guerrilla groups that fought the Soviets in this country deep into the 1950s. He was drafted into service by the German Reich in February 1944, fought on the eastern front, and went into the woods in Võrumaa in October 1944. The next year, he lost his arm after a fight with Red Army troops. Despite this, he spent seven more years in hiding until his capture in 1952. He did time in Soviet labor camps until 1967, and was only allowed to return to Estonia in 1981.

In his later years, Käärmann was a member of the Congress of Estonia that led the movement to restore the Estonian state. He was also an author and wrote several books about his experiences. Most importantly, unlike many forest brothers, he lived to tell his tale, to even make it into the New York Times as their Saturday Profile in 2003. Because of his high profile, Käärmann is sort of the forest brother to me, the one who represents all the others. I feel connected to him because of those interviews and books, though I never had the pleasure to meet him in person.

Estonia is a country with strong folk traditions, and I personally feel that the drama that went down in the woods more than 60 years ago is being woven into these traditions. There is something deeply Estonian about going it alone, preferring to live off your wits in a hole in the ground for seven years, even if you've only got one arm, rather than be captured and sent to a prison camp. Resilience is the word. Käärmann was resilient. Some might call such a person a hero. But heroes are still just people, and people die. When they die, they become history.

communication breakdown

Our friend and business partner Tiina composed a letter to an American publishing company informing them of our decision not to reprint the entire appendix of a book we had translated into Estonian. The reason? Many of the sources were either inaccessible or irrelevant for Estonian readers.

Though Tin's English is strong -- it's one of the main languages in her home, along with Estonian and Swedish -- I was asked to edit this letter, just in case. I was glad I did. To put it bluntly, Tin was blunt. Too blunt. Absolutely rude. Tactless. Rather than trying to assuage the publishing house about our good intentions in cutting part of the book, she went to work on detailing exactly why we had absolutely no need to republish all that crap in their manuscript.

With some buttery, flowery, feel-good American language, I was able to smooth out the kinks in Tin's text to make it sound as polite and quasi-British as possible, cutting of course the obligatory insincerity that pollutes English discourse ("I'm terribly sorry"), and dressing it up in sunny, optimistic tones ("Let's work together to make this book a success"). Our relationship with our partners would remain cheerful but still smart and businesslike.

It wasn't really Tin's fault that the letter came out that way. It's just that if you communicate the way Estonians communicate in English, you can come off sounding like a rude bastard. If your newly renovated house is ugly, they won't tell you that it's different, they'll tell you that's ugly. If they don't like your food, they won't tell you that they're full, they'll tell you it stinks. Estonians are not liars. They'll tell you to your face what they think of you and not even feel the slightest need to polish it with niceties. This cultural idiosyncrasy, as you can imagine, might pose some troubles for Estonian diplomacy.

Such problems work in other ways though. Just as an Estonian might come off as blunt and tactless in English, an American might come off as abrasive and downright ridiculous in Estonian. It was recommended to me, for example, that for a certain media project I contact a university professor who I'll call Virve. "You should work with Virve," said one academic. "She's quite talented." "Oh, you should talk to Virve, she'll help you, she's really good," said another. Finally, even Epp gave it her blessing. "Talk to Virve. She's one of the best."

So I wrote a letter to Virve and said I was contacting her because her colleagues recommended her and said she was quite talented - päris andekas. I thought such flattery might automatically win her friendship. People are vain, right? They like to hear good things about themselves, right? It works in New York. My colleagues always tell me when someone says something good about my performance. But in Eesti?

"Päris andekas?" Virve was surprised. "Should I take this as a compliment or does it have anything to do with my age and gender? This is something we usually say to a school girl."

A school girl? Shit. I checked it out with Epp who confirmed that, in this context, telling someone they are talented, especially a man telling a woman she is talented, is rather patronizing. "Patronizing?" my body temperature dropped. "Oh no, what have I done? What have I done?" I felt like an idiot. Not only had I been patronizing to Virve -- who, surprise, was too busy to help me -- but my patronizing tone had perhaps even been laced with subtle sexism. And all because I told someone that they are talented! (Still ashamed, I'm rubbing my face even as I write this).

These are just the things that happen when multiple cultures collide. There's no stopping it. It's hard though to rectify some situations because some Estonians, particularly some male Estonians, are the opposite of open. There are infrequent displays of, "That's ok, bro, it's all water under the bridge." There's a paucity of self-deprecating jokes. In short, a lot of the Estonians I've met are convinced that they're just about perfect; it's pure coincidence that they happen to be surrounded by assholes. Nobody's perfect, though, not even these Estonians. Life is messy. People are messy. Even people with the best intentions make mistakes. Maybe honesty and openness in these situations are the best policies because not every letter can be edited by a well-meaning friend, nor every conversation monitored for correct usage of vocabulary.

vaene vaino

Even though I live in a post-socialist country with ruins of the state-command economy to be found just around nearly every corner, I have a hard time digesting just what this Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic entity was and, in general, what Communism meant.

The perversions of Stalinism terrify the soul, but they are still abstract. Even if one is to meet old survivors of the deportations and the GULAG system, they are still old and crooked, shadows of the youthful faces in black and white photos they hold out with wrinkled hands and say, "This is me. This is what they did to me."

The cultural divide between my partner and me is wide in some respects because of this, but can still be bridged. She remembers the one, two, three succession of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko; my geopolitical memory fades in at the moment that Gorbachev takes over. My first-hand knowledge of the Cold War is of its end game. Still, a recent documentary opened my eyes to the reality that, even in the 1980s, there may have been seven time zones between the New York metropolitan area and Eesti NSV, but there were some things young people shared, namely Dallas and Knight Rider.

Disko ja Tuumasõda (Disco and Atomic War) is a film by Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma that investigates the role that Finnish TV played in encouraging pro-Western attitudes, or even Western identity, among Estonians beginning from the 1950s until the late 1980s. The narrated film relies on a combination of reenacted scenes, old photographs and news reels, interviews, and, of course, great clips of JR Ewing getting shot and Michael Knight talking to his car KITT -- a jetlagged (or inebriated) David Hasselhoff even shows up for a special appearance in Helsinki!

"Have you ever seen Dallas?" she asks.

"Have I ever seen Dallas?!" I respond.

The basic answer to the question is yes, I have seen Dallas. The longer answer is that the program is tattooed on my mind, that I know the theme song by heart, I can even see the aerial images of Texas circa 1980 that were used in the opening credits. To this day, I use the intrigues of the Ewing family as a moral compass for life. You don't want to be like JR, right, you want to be like Bobby.

"Yes," I finally tell her. "We watched Dallas."

The odd angle of this story is that, in the old days, Estonians weren't supposed to be watching Finnish TV. Moscow put pressure on both the Finns and the Eesti NSV leadership to put an end to the Nordic capitalist contamination of pure communist minds south of the Gulf of Finland. And the poor guy who was ordered to put a stop to Estonians watching Dallas was Karl Vaino, first secretary of the communist party of Estonia from 1978 to 1988.

Even in old news clips, Karl Vaino comes across as a hapless bureaucrat that would love to comply with Moscow's orders if only they were possible. Stop Estonians from watching Finnish TV!, the geriatric hardliners in the Kremlin bark. Vaino, a yes man, tells them that, yes, he will. The only problem is how. Among the more creative scenarios dreamt up include building some kind of metal divider in the gulf to block the signals coming from Espoo. Such proposals are earnestly discussed by the party leadership, but later abandoned when it turns out that they make absolutely no sense!

And here is where a new understanding of the Soviet system comes into focus: local bureaucrats with no domestic legitimacy being ordered by central authorities with no domestic legitimacy to carry out orders that border on the absurd. And they say yes, of course they do, even if it's impossible, the Karl Vainos of the Soviet Union said yes, cracked down on smouldering dissent, and then continued to ignore the social issues at hand, right up until the whole rotten tenement of a state came crumbling down.

In the end, the only one who sees through Vaino is Gorby himself who arrives in 1986 to be briefed by Vaino and then to go out and tell the media at the airport with the aura of a movie star that the loyal local bureaucrat must be doing a bad job because he says everything in Estonia is ok and it's so obviously not. In the end, Vaino is replaced by Vaino Väljas and he retires to Moscow (where he still, at nearly 87 years of age, lives). He gives one filmed interview to German media where he is asked what precipitated the restoration of the Estonian state. Vaino's answer? Finnish television.

hurmaa

Any food one could desire is available within Estonia. The hitch is that it is available somewhere in Estonia and that somewhere can change at anytime. You might be able to procure some celery one day at the Selver down the street, for example. But the next week, you won't find it there, but at the Konsum across town. How would you know? You've simply got to go hunting for it.

Fresh produce flows into and out of E-land from myriad locations: Georgia, Brazil, Morocco. It's not even the more exotic products that are difficult to keep in your cupboard, though. I fell in love with Fazer Cacao -- cocoa powder so strong it gives you an uplifting headrush with every sip. I'm not sure where I got it, but then -- poof! -- in a cloud of chocolate dust, it was nowhere to be found. I trekked through Maxima, Konsum, Säästukas, but, no, all gone. One seller tried to pawn off a bag of Nesquik on me, like it was the same thing. Let me just say that I really want to vote for Kalev on the poll to your right, but my allegiance to Fazer Cacao keeps me on the fence.

Which brings us to a curious fruit called persimmons by Englishmen, "cachi" by paesans, and, as I have come to learn in not one but two separate supermarkets, hurmaa by eestlased. Hurmaa. It's a curious name. It doesn't sound like your typical Estonian fruit or vegetable. Õun (apple), jõhvikas (cranberry), maasikas (strawberry), kartul (potato), porgand (carrot), and then, hurmaa? Como? It sounds like an Estonian national park. Between Soomaa and Lahemaa, there lies Hurmaa, an endless grove of pure imagination. And the best thing about my favorite fruit, hurmaa/cachi/persimmons, is that they must have imported a shit load of them to Tartu, because they're everywhere. Maybe the food import gods knew I'd be here, because I didn't see anyone else loading up their bags at the local shop. See, I need things like this to function in society. I need hurmaa to show me that, even if my car doesn't start because it's -15 F/-26 C outside, even if my fingers ache and my face is frozen in one, oddly Eskimo-like position, there was a reason I hiked through the tundra all the way to the supermarket.

The frozen car situation is quite a new experience. I was proud as ours revved up and got us to the office to unload some Petrone Print books. I thought of all those other poor suckers in their pussycatmobiles. I felt vindicated in sticking with our ride, arrogant even. But then pulling out of the parking lot, klunk, nothing. The Antarctic silence was broken only by the hum of my AM radio, which refused to go off. In fact, even removing the key from the ignition would not turn the electric in the car off. It was a ghost car. The lights were on. The radio refused to die. And the annoying air-bag light, which never goes off, kept blinking and blinking. "What's going on?" she was bewildered. "Maybe it's the weather?" I was honest.

I was reminded of a time I went to go help out a writer friend with car trouble who was stranded on a country road in north Estonia. When I approached, his Estonian wife declared: "I should have married an automechanic, not a writer. A mechanic could fix this car. What's he going to do?" she gestured at her mees. "Write a story about it?" With a stroke of good fortune, the writer friend was able to get his machine going after a few hours in distress and ride it back to the autobody shop in Tallinn where manly Estonian men fix things. But that was in the summer. And our car? We had to abandon ship. It's still sitting there in thick pack ice. There is some hope amongst the crew that the weather will soon turn for the better, and the ship will sail again. Until then, we are here camped out on the ice, with nothing but Fazer Cacao, Hurmaa, and each other for company.

kaks tuhat kümme

I am so frustrated with the state of my Estonian language skills. Frustrated, angry. I'm angry at myself. I'm simultaneously lying flat on my face in the ring and yelling at myself to get up. Get up off that mat, Giustino, get up!

You might think of the main facets of language ability - speaking, reading, writing, and listening comprehension - as a sort of regatta where the sailboats begin the race and, though one may pull ahead of the other from time to time, they are generally neck and neck on their way to the highly anticipated climax, the finish line of fluency.

But it's not really like that. No, language abilities are like the tides: the words flow in and the words flow out. My vocabulary has expanded and contracted multiple times, each time gaining new words and expressions, only to later lose some of them. I know other foreign guys here who don't even bother with the Estonian language. I think of them as perpetual tourists: "I'm on vacation, darling, and besides, all the help speak English." There are still others who have acquired fluency, who quip little indigestible sayings -- they are called kõnekäänud -- to you that make little sense, even if you do manage to translate them, unfold them, stake them out, and examine them under a microscope.

Take Nokk kinni, saba lahti. What does this mean? "Imagine you are a bird," says a friend (and it's always animals with these Estonians). "You are pecking away with your beak, your nokk, but if you peck too hard, then," she lifts up a foot, "your beak gets stuck and your tail, your saba, is lahti, exposed." But it doesn't end there. "Then the bird struggles to get free," she leans in to demonstrate, "and it pulls and pulls and pulls, and then, bang!," she tosses her head back, "the bird loses its balance." I stare. "It's like you try to fix one problem, and you just wind up with another problem," she tries again. "Ok," I nod. I'm still waiting to use this expression in real life, but the best I've done so far is quote from a gin advertisement: nokk džinni, saba lahti.

The most formidable Estonian speaker I have met so far is Epp's uncle, the legendary Onu Tiit. Tiit is the Mount Everest of Estonian listening comprehension challenges. With a muddy south Estonian mumble, even his kids sometimes don't understand what he's talking about. Usually I have to ask him to repeat things two times before I have a good idea of what he's saying. Onu Tiit probably doesn't know this, but he has now inspired me to press on. I will study, study hard just so that I might one day understand around 75 percent of what he says. When Tiit talks to Epp, she understands 100 percent. Poor little Giustino. He wants to run, but still can only walk.

While my comprehension skills boat fell back in the race, reading comprehension glided ahead. Each day I scan the Estonian online news media, learning more about this intriguing windswept peninsula. Some people think newspapers are the enemy, and being a journalist myself, and having seen the unscrupulous characters in the business who delight in fomenting discord amongst their fellow men and women by printing and distributing deliberately inflammatory texts to the masses, I tend to agree. "The shit's going to fly once this story hits the streets," I recall an old editor of mine chuckling and rubbing his hands together with manic, sleep-deprived glee. "We could start a war," he was giddy. "I can hardly wait." Indeed, it's a miracle the entire world hasn't spontaneously combusted by now, given the content of your fresh morning copy of Postimees, or Eesti Päevaleht, or Õhtuleht. But I keep reading. I have to keep reading.

From my sojourns in the Estonian infosphere, I've learned that the Russian chauvinist of the week is Sergei Markov. You may recall United Russia MP and political scientist Sergei as the venelane who took credit for organizing the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonian private and public IT systems. For this, he was banned by the Estonian government from entering the Schengen area, though his name was later controversially removed from that blacklist during Justice Minister Rein Lang's one-month reign at the helm of the interior ministry after Ansip fired the previous minister, Jüri Pihl. Lang later handed those ministerial duties over to Marko Pomerants.

The Estonian media feels that it is its job, it's raison d'etre, to keep us abreast of the ravings of Russia's political establishment. Markov is quoted in this news story as saying that he wouldn't be surprised if Estonian or Latvian Russian Black Panther Party-like groups were formed to bring about "total democracy" in these countries. Not like he's hoping for that sort of thing, but the guilt would belong solely to the "undemocratic Estonian and Latvian governments" should such events come to pass. Of course, a mere political scientist, Sergei wouldn't be willing to pack heat himself in the name of civil rights. Those kinds of menial jobs are usually doled out to the Kremlin youth. This is the kind of nonsense I wake up to when I eat my breakfast cereal. And you wonder why I am frustrated from time to time.

Good thing we've now got contingency plans. Six years after Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the collective defense organization has agreed in principle to draft plans to come to the aid of the Baltic countries in case of an attack from somebody. Good to know. According to our trustworthy correspondent Edward Lucas over at The Economist, it was the Poles who finally pushed the deal through, somehow convincing the recalcitrant Germans and "other countries" (who?) to drop their opposition.

Baltic defense plans will essentially be an "annex to existing plans regarding Poland, but with an added regional dimension," writes Lucas, leaving room for Sweden and Finland to take a role in the planning too, as they damn well should, considering they own most of Estonia, anyway, (it's rumored, for example, that the replacement investor for SAS in Estonian Air might be Finnair. One can only hope). A big bilateral American exercise, including a fabulous USO show, is already planned for the Baltic this summer, too, and is likely to widen to include the other aforementioned countries, Lucas writes.

As I've mentioned previously, while I am glad NATO finally got around to doing what it was created to do, I am curious to see the contingency plans for older members Denmark and Norway. Like Estonia, they are also water-bound and exposed. But such things would never happen because it would be so uncivilized, and Moscow, being the Third Rome, is on a mission to civilize, not to undermine civilization, right?

This is precisely the logic behind President Toomas Hendrik Ilves' recent declaration that Moscow is not a threat to Estonia. Estonia is in the EU and NATO, the clubs of the civilized. It may even soon have the euro as its currency. And the Third Rome wouldn't attack a country that has the euro as its currency, would it? That would be a PR disaster. For some reason, the Russian elite is still sensitive to how it is seen in the West. And this odd tango between Europe's perceived moral authority, and Russia's self-assigned role as savior of humanity, is what, in the end, keeps us safe at night. Estonia in its 90-year-long soap opera of a history has never been more secure than it is right now, argues Ilves.

He may be right, because as caustic as domestic politics can get, one only need to look at the 1920s and 1930s in Estonia to see how divided the country was back then, how ripe it was for the picking. Estonia endured a Communist attempted coup in 1924, followed by the rise of the right-wing Vaps in the early 1930s, the failure of Jaan Tõnisson's government, and the eventual benevolent dictatorship of Konstantin Päts, who let the Commies jailed in 1924 out of jail in 1938 (not a smart move). Some think of the Soviet period as some kind of total lobotomy that severed all connections to Estonia's political past, but these divisions exist today. You'll find Estonians who strongly support Päts' rule: even if he was a dictator, his heart was in the right place, he was looking out for the national interest, building the state, they say. Then there are those who praise the Vaps as sharply dressed, goodtimey patriots who, if they had been successful, would have staved off a Soviet invasion in 1939, somehow, some way, I'm sure of it. There are Tõnisson people, too, still kicking around. Tõnisson was such a great speaker and gifted diplomat. He could have charmed the two-headed snake of 1930s authoritarianism into submission. That's the thing about history. It never ends. It just goes on and on and on.

No wonder then that Andres Anvelt recently became head of the Social Democrats in Tallinn. If the name Anvelt rings a bell, you're right, Andres is the grandson of notorious Estonian Communist Jaan Anvelt, who led a short-lived Bolshevik government in Tallinn before going underground. Involved in the 1924 uprising, he subsequently fled to Moscow, where he worked for Comintern until he was beaten to death during an NKVD interrogation in 1937, and declared an enemy of the people. With that kind of background, it's only natural that Andres would join SDE, which has interestingly become the ideological offspring of Estonia's deep left wing past. That's what I love about Estonia. Every family's got a few reds or Vaps in it. These people are so mild mannered in person, and yet they've passionately indulged themselves in every passing ideological fad.

But that's just the news in 2010. I crumple it up and burn it in my wood-heated home. The Estonian word of the week, by the way, is vingerpuss. It means 'practical joke.'