THE CANADIANS LEFT

The 9th of May is Victory Day in Russia and used to be celebrated as Victory Day in the USSR . In Estonia this year it is scheduled as the History Explanation Day, to be marked by some local nationalists by displaying photographs of the Soviet repressions.

I come from Estonia . My family lived there after my grandpa was transferred to the Baltic Fleet from the Pacific. My grandpa was 17 in 1941 and volunteered to join the army . He fought the whole war until the end, the day he entered the surrendering Berlin and put his signature on the Reichstag's wall. Later he became a naval commodore. In the 1970s he was transferred to Tallinn . He soon retired and began working at a fishing company.

In Tallinn we lived in a large apartment block. I remember playing in the sandbox in front of our building and being attacked with potatoes and plastic bags filled with water, thrown out of the top floor windows. My grandma explained that Estonians did not like us because we were Russians. I was not offended . I thought it was fun .

I liked Estonia . It was more esthetically pleasing and more dignified than Leningrad , where everyone in my family had studied and where we eventually moved for good, because my mother, a medical doctor, could not easily get a promotion in Estonia . “I am only going to the supermarket, no need to get all dressed-up, I'll just go the Leningrad way”, my grandma began to say after we moved. My grandpa died.

In Estonia my grandparents had a large apartment and a car. I heard them say they could have gotten an even better apartment if they wanted to, but my grandpa was very modest and never really used his high-ranking position for personal gain. I had a happy childhood. In Leningrad we soon moved to a slump far away from the center . Was Estonia my Batavia ? My colonial paradise ?

Estonia was colonized by the Russians in 1940 after several decades of independence. Between that year and the end of Stalin's rule Estonia lost approximately 270 thousand of its inhabitants. That is about one third of its total population which was then around one million people. In 1940 alone, 8 thousand people were arrested for their political believes and 10 thousand were deported to remote Soviet steppes. The first massive deportation happened one week before the war against the Soviet Union began in June 1941.

From the 70 Estonian government members only 4 survived. From the 14 thousand men in the Estonian army, 12.5 were assigned to the Red Army. The army leaders were arrested and deported to Russia . 5,573 Estonians ended up on the Russian-German frontier after the war started . Over 4,000 of them were reported missing within one year, that is to say they were either taken captive or ran away. May of them later fought against the Russians on the German side.

When the Soviet army won over the fascists and reoccupied Estonia in 1944, another 20 thousand Estonians were deported and another 30 thousand were arrested for political reasons.

Sometimes I try to imagine what would have happened to me should I have stayed in Estonia . Would I have regarded the statue of the Russian Unknown Soldier the symbol of my ethnic integrity or have constantly felt ashamed of it as it would have reminded me that I belonged to the race of the occupants? I think I would have felt neither, because I would have taken interest in the history of my country and processed its past to get past it. Instead of living in the past, I would have learned the local language and become an EU citizen.

It hurts me to watch many Russians cling to the colonial glory, as if those phallic attributes of size and aggression add to their self-fulfillment. It hurts me to watch Estonians attach occupants' labels to every Russian they see. Whenever I begin speaking to an Estonian, I first of all mention I understand how they must feel. “Russian have liberated Estonia ”, my mother says. How can I teach her to imagine what a tiny country feels like between a Scylla and a Charybdis? Living in Holland , I have learned to think like a resident of small country. Holland too, was occupied by the fascists and liberated by the Canadians. Then the Canadians left.

Maybe you should replace the Soldier with a monument to Yeltsyn, I heard someone say. Yeltsyn let Estonia live its own life.