The history of Estonia’s tumultuous twentieth century is intriguing, complex and unjustly ignored. The country went from a province of the Russian Empire to an independent nation to a Soviet republic and then back to a sovereign state, all in the course of a hundred years. This has created a dense and tangled web of traumas and victories, of repressions and resistance, of betrayals and resolve. This is particularly the case for the Second World War and its aftermath, when subsequent Soviet and German invasions and the installation of the Stalinist regime left a bloody trail of recriminations and reprisals that still influence modern domestic and international politics in the Baltic region. The historian approaching this topic needs a deft touch to emerge with an account that approaches at least some standards of objectivity.
Regrettably, Neil Taylor is not such a historian.
As a travel writer, he certainly knows how to craft a readable narrative that can appeal to an audience lacking familiarity with Estonia. Quickly dispatching with the country’s pre-revolutionary history in the first chapter, he comes to the meat of his story, the political events between 1917 and 2017. The prose is lively and moves at a brisk pace, introducing key figures, places and occurrences through memorable anecdotes. The basic contours of Estonia’s history are traced and some of the complexities at least touched upon. If perhaps Taylor’s goal was to encourage curiosity in (and thus tourism to) Estonia among a wider English-speaking public, then it has most likely been achieved (rather strangely, the book has been translated into Estonian: quite how natives, presumably well versed in their recent history, will benefit from this work is open to question).
I do not criticise the paucity of footnotes in Taylor’s book (although he certainly should have considered citing evidence for at least some of his claims): it is a valid choice to dispose of the bulky and off-putting hallmarks of academic presentation when writing a popular history. What I do intend to criticise are the remarkable caesurae, the glib moral and analytical judgements and the abandonment of any pretence of objectivity, especially towards the end of the book.
First things first: caesurae. The book is overwhelmingly a political history, focusing almost entirely on the actions of great men and (more recently) women. His sources reflect this, since he predominantly quotes books penned by presidents, preeminent politicians, ambassadors and journalists to the significant detriment of other historical documentation. That such figures might have a particular political perspective on the past does not seem to occur to him. But such people often wrote in English, French or German, the main criterion in Taylor’s selection: only two or three Estonian works are cited in his bibliography. No archival and newspaper sources are mentioned. As a consequence of this overweening focus on the great and the good, the daily lives of Estonians are either ignored or generalised. For instance, rather than focus on how people’s economic and cultural life changed in the chaos of the early 1990s, we are assured that in 1994, foreign journalists could now pay with credit cards, watch international TV and have a Chinese [1]. This is most certainly not a people’s history.
More serious is the absence of any sustained discussion about Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority, currently around a quarter of the population. The only real mention of them comes in the last chapter, that on the post-Soviet era, presumably because the author could no longer ignore them at this point. That rather significant populations of Russians have existed in the region for some centuries is skipped over, along with any contributions (cultural, social, economic, or otherwise) they have made.
And even when Taylor does discuss Russian-speakers, he is oddly condemnatory. For instance, when he investigates the privatisation of the Estonian economy in the early 1990s, he notes that had the Russian population followed the example of the Baltic Germans following land redistribution in the 1920s and set up businesses, they might have avoided economic exclusion [2]. But surely the question should be asked: did the Russian-speaking population have sufficient capital to take part in the bonanza sale of national assets, especially given, as we are told a few pages before, a large portion of this group could only exchange their roubles at a discriminatory rate? The comparison is additionally loaded, since the Baltic Germans were a landed and mercantile elite, whose international capital and revenue streams were sufficient to allow their community to adapt to post-1917 independence.
There is another notable gap. Despite being penned in 2018, no mention is made of the alarming rise of the populist EKRE party in 2015, a fact surely of interest to Taylor’s readership given the party’s notable share of parliamentary seats and invitation into government in 2019. One could come to the reasonable conclusion that the reason Taylor does not mention EKRE is the same reason he does not mention the Estonian economy’s sharp plunge in the recession of 2008-9 or the demographic problems caused in part by emigration to the West: to do so would dim the glowing encomium to Thatcherite neoliberalism that constitutes his book’s finale.
On the second major problem: the glib moral and analytical judgements. Minor instances of this occur throughout. Why twice condemn Winston Churchill for congratulating Stalin on the Red Army’s entry into Tallinn, a prestigious victory for the Allied cause? More substantive, however, are how Taylor treats issues of occupation. In recent years, much of the literature on authoritarian and dictatorial regimes (not to mention the body of work on social reconciliation and healing) has advised moving beyond dichotomies of collaboration and resistance, instead focusing on the myriad ways people sought to navigate imperilled social and political lives. The same is true of scholarship on imperialism, which has focused on the complex and contradictory mechanics at work in the relationship between ruler and ruled. For the most part, Taylor is not interested in this more sophisticated perspective on the difficult issues he discusses. In fairness, he does mention in the introduction that he wants to take a more balanced approach to figures often condemned simply as traitors in the Estonian national canon. But this is not how things ultimately work out. Estonian interaction with the Soviet regime is almost entirely seen through a lens of betrayal or resistance. The focus on local politicians and notable emigres helps this approach, since it is quite easy to assign labels of moral cowardice or purity to such figures. A discussion of everyday life, with its inevitable compromises and accommodations, might have inclined the author to a more balanced perspective.
In the book’s final pages, a quotation is offered (of course from the Observer, and not an Estonian source): one of the problems in Estonian society is ‘Estonian bitterness and Russian blindness to the roots of that bitterness’. This quote is not analysed beyond to ignore the first half and focus on the second, presumably to make sure that blame is properly allocated. If Taylor had indulged in some contemplation, he might have realised that popular history books which are all too quick to dole out condemnation and accolades in morally compromised situations contribute to bitterness and blindness, rather than correct them.
And, finally, the abandonment of objectivity. It is natural for writers to have sympathy for their subjects, especially when they have long-standing associations with them. The Estonian story during the twentieth century is indeed a sympathetic one. But to simply cast aside analysis and reasoned observation in favour of cheerleading a particular perspective, and one skewed by a highly limited source base, is scarcely acceptable. By the conclusion of this book, the reader is left in no doubt where Taylor’s sympathies lie and that these sympathies have an exclusionary quality. Russians must accept Estonia’s language laws are “understandable revenge” and deal with the fact that their tongue can only ever be for the home.
In sum, Taylor’s obvious sympathies, superficial judgements and limited source base have led him to wholeheartedly accept and embrace a particular narrative of Estonian history, one typical of smaller states trying to forge a particular national identity in the wake of independence (this is presumably why the work was translated into Estonian). Such narratives cast all preceding history as a centuries-long road to national independence. Anything that comes between the nation and its independence is bad, ipso facto. Any interactions with intervening forces are seen through a lens of collaboration or resistance. Eras of independence are shining beacons of light, shattering the shadows around them. This narrative is, in short, a fairy tale.
Given all this, Taylor’s book cannot act even as a supplement to more serious historical works on the subject: it certainly does not hold a candle to Toivo Raun’s much more solid work Estonia and the Estonians (2nd edition. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002). Should they be curious about Estonia’s past and present, it is to this latter work that all readers should turn.
Review by J. M. White
[1] Loc. 3303 Kindle version
[2] Loc. 3289 Kindle version