Identity crisis
Why Estonians (and by extension Latvians and Lithuanians) have been right about pretty much everything. And we don't listen
Estonian lessons: What Europe needs to learn
Why Identity Matters in a world of Trump and Putin
This is a speech I gave at the Vabamu (occupation museum), Tallinn, May 15th 2025
History and geography have shaped Estonia’s identity, and at times threatened its existence. You live in a bad neighbourhood (not Latvia: it’s the eastern neighbour that matters), and it’s been bad for centuries. Not only do you have a hard time of it; the outside world mostly doesn’t notice its hard. Indeed it doesn’t notice you at all.
Estonians understand these woes all too well. My inspiration here is Lennart Meri, this country’s former president and my greatest Estonian friend. His book Hõbevalge features what one might call the earliest known foreign arrival in Estonia, a giant meteorite which landed here about three thousand five hundred years ago.
I am rather a more recent foreign visitor to this country. I first came to Soviet-occupied Estonia in January 1990 as a foreign correspondent. I became, briefly, the first western journalist resident in Estonia since 1940. Later I was the main shareholder and managing editor of the Baltic Independent, working alongside Estonian colleagues including Tarmu Tammerk, Imbi Hepner, Asta Trummel, and Lisa Trei. My eldest son Johnny was born here in 1993, Estonia’s first Nato baby. I was greatly honoured in 2014 to be the first foreigner to be issued with an e-residency card. I was also honoured to be asked to write the introduction to the newly published English translation of Hõbevalge. My thoughts are therefore based on 35 years of close, affectionate knowledge of Estonia and Estonians, of your history, your geography and of your linguistic, cultural, national and of course electronic identity.
But back to that meteorite. The astonishing sight of a fireball, as large and bright as the sun, streaking across the heavens, visible all over the continent of Europe, and landing on the island of Saaremaa, put Estonia on the mental landscape of the prehistoric world; if they had maps in those days, we would say that it put Estonia on the map. Meri found what he argued were references to this spectacular, unforgettable event, handed down through generations in oral history and recorded in ancient myths and legends, and in the chronicles of antiquity.
But historical and geographical presence is subject to distraction and misunderstanding. Those clues that Meri uncovered were long-lost, their meaning obscured by people who found other interpretations more convenient, more familiar. Some things don’t change. More about that later.
On one level, Hõbevalge is a reminder that if we interrogate ancient texts with an open mind, we can come to surprising, though necessarily speculative conclusions. Put briefly – and this should sharpen your appetite to read the book, not sate it — Meri argues that what is now Estonia is none other than the mysterious Ultima Thule, the most northerly location mentioned in classical Greek and Roman literature and cartography. If true, that conjecture turns on its head much of what we think about the ancient world’s understanding of geography.
But there was another point to Meri’s scholarly detective work.
Meri was writing in the mid-1970s, when those two old enemies, history and geography, were conspiring against his country’s identity, indeed against its survival. As a child in England in the 1970s, I could find Estonia on my great-aunts’ Times Atlas of the World, published in 1924. But on my school atlas, the Baltic states appeared only as “Soviet Socialist Republics”—small provinces of the Kremlin’s empire. Outsiders rarely travelled there.
Lies were piled on crimes, crimes upon lies. People often said Meri was irrepressible. This is true. It was hard to make him do anything he did not want to do. It was hard to get him talking when he wanted to be silent. It was sometimes hard to get him to stop him talking. Yet the term “irrepressible” in his case was misleading. For he had been repressed. He was deported to Siberia aged 12 for the “crime” of his family background. He survived on stolen potatoes. His crime was being the son of his father Georg-Peeter Meri, a pre-war diplomat and Estonia’s foremost translator of Shakespeare. Few in the outside world knew about such stories.
At the time that Meri was writing, the deportations were over, but linguistic, cultural and demographic russification was in full swing. Within a decade or two, Estonians would be a minority in their own country; from a Soviet standpoint, they were backward and irrelevant, a bourgeois nationalist dead end, footnotes to the grand story of proletarian internationalism. Who remembers the Republic of North Ingria? Who still speaks Votic, Izhorian, Vepsian?
That Estonia would only 15 years later regain its independence seemed as unlikely as the re-emergence of Atlantis from beneath the waves. Or as remarkable as the discovery that Ultima Thule, far from being mythical, actually existed.
In his characteristically subtle and mischievous way, Meri was making a profound point when he wrote Hõbevalge. It was an act of defiance, of resistance, for Meri to root Estonia and Estonians in time and space: as a place and people whose existence is evidenced for millennia—and thus long predates their Russian colonial masters. The result is a manifesto of the imagination, for Estonia’s past, present and future existence.
And this is the first lesson that Europeans, indeed all outsiders, need to learn. Estonia is a real place, with a real history, populated by real people, with real hopes, real fears, real loves and real loyalties. It is not a cartographical construct, a historical accident, a Nato garrison state, or a square on the geopolitical chessboard.
Sitting here in Vabamu, exquisitely designed, evocative and informative, celebrating 35 years of restored sovereignty, it might seem redundant to make this point. Who needs reminding that Estonia is real? But that’s the second lesson. Estonians have to struggle to be mentioned, to be remembered, to be understood, to be heard.
Those two lessons, Estonia is real and Estonia is overlooked, can be hard for outsiders to understand. Nobody questions the existence of France, Britain, Germany, Italy or Sweden. They are in no danger of being wiped from the map, or muddled up in history books. It behoves people from these countries, and those whose mental maps are filled with them, to remember, once in a while, what it is like for people who feel their story, their identity, is always teetering on the edge of an abyss, of oblivion.
At this point I would like to quote another the world’s best-known, and perhaps also least competent, amateur historian. Speaking in 2005, he described Estonia’s history in the interwar period like this.
“Russia and Germany did a deal under which Russia handed over territories to German control. This marked the beginning of Estonian statehood. In 1939, Russia and Germany did another deal, and Germany handed these territories back to Russia [and] they were absorbed into the Soviet Union. Let us not talk now whether this was good or bad. This is part of history. This was a deal, and small countries were the bargaining chips in this deal. Regrettably this was the reality of those times…[1]
At this stage, our influential auto-didact was treating the past as some kind of geological process, with no moral component, and of no relevance to the present day. But he changed his approach. Here he is again, writing in 2020.
In autumn 1939, the Soviet Union, pursuing its strategic military and defensive goals, started the process of the incorporation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Their accession to the USSR was implemented on a contractual basis, with the consent of the elected authorities. [2]
This interpretation of history represents a profound political attack on the Baltic states. This not only legitimises the occupation, but it turns the post-1991 independence into something conditional and therefore temporary. If it happened before it can happen again.
Nobody saw this more clearly than Meri. Few people here will need reminding of his withering condemnation of Russia’s amnesia towards the crimes of the Soviet past, in a speech in Hamburg on February 25th, 1994.
Why does the new, post-communist Russia, which claims to have broken with the evil traditions of the USSR, stubbornly refuse to admit that the Baltic nations — Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians — were occupied and annexed against their will and contrary to international law, in 1940, and once again in 1944, and subsequently brought to the limit of their national existence through five decades of sovietisation and russification?[3]
Contending that Estonia had joined the Soviet Union “voluntarily” was he said, “little short of the statement that tens of thousands of Estonians, including my family and myself, had ‘voluntarily’ let themselves be deported to Siberia by the Soviets.”
It is worth noting that this mild admonition provoked the head of the Russian delegation to lead his colleagues in a walkout, slamming the door demonstratively behind him, before they had a chance to eat their dinner. That official, at the time the head of the St Petersburg committee for foreign economic relations, was to become better known in later years, not least, indeed, as an amateur historian. Indeed, those two quotes I read earlier represent some of his most prominent output, the first from 2005 in response to a question from the Estonian journalist Astrid Kannel, and the second in a 9,000 word article for the American periodical The National Interest.
Long before the rest of Europe began to see that Stalin and Hitler were two sides of the same coin, the Estonians, along with the Latvians and Lithuanians (and Poles and others) knew that the second world war was not a simple black-and-white struggle between good and evil, not the picture-book portrayal of Hollywood films. They know it did not start with the invasion of Poland in 1939, let alone with the Barbarossa onslaught of 1941. They know that it didn’t end neatly in 1945. For Estonia the real end came in September 1994, with the final withdrawal of the occupation forces back to Russia.
Indeed one could argue that even today it is not really over. Where is the presidential insignia, seized following the Soviet occupation? What happened to the collections of the Estonian Art Museum and of Tartu University? In Moscow, all of them. Even in the supposedly halcyon days of the 1990s, Russia showed no willingness to give them back.
History remains a weapon. A politicised interpretation of the past, particularly fetishizing the Soviet victory in 1945, is the battering ram of Russia’s new ideology. The manifesto for the full-scale invasion of in Ukraine was our amateur historian’s bizarre 5,000 word essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Ukraine is depicted not just as an artificial creation, but a place run by neo-Nazis on behalf of their foreign backers. The same slurs are directed at Estonia, supposedly a country where neo-Nazis run riot.
In truth, the only riots in Estonia in living memory have been notable for the lack of Estonian participation. There was the attempt by Interfront to storm Tompea Castle in May 1990, and of course the Bronze Soldier night in 2007, when valiant Russian patriots smashed up fascist bus shelters, and looted fascist liquor stores.
We are making some progress here. The idea that Putin’s ethnonationalist policies echo those of Adolf Hitler towards the Volksdeutsche of the Sudetenland 80 years ago used to be shocking. Now it is commonplace. In 2008, the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism put Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity into the same category of 20th-century disasters that had blighted the European continent, though it also said that each system of terror should be judged separately.
But Western epistemic privilege remains. Ideas and arguments put forward by British, German or French public figures in their native languages count for more than voices that come from countries in the supposedly backward, not-quite-Western, not-quite-serious countries of “eastern” Europe. Borat is a historian now. How amusing.
As a result, ignorance, arrogance, naïveté, complacency, stubbornness, cowardice, and most of all greed still distort our understanding of history. Estonians may have got Western countries to rethink the past, but not yet to rethink its relevance to the present. It’s quite common to hear Westerners say “we should have listened to the Baltic states”. It’s rather less often that they actually stop talking and listen.
But what Estonians do say matters. Estonians have been right a lot of things. Not the just the threat from Russia, so presciently outlined by Meri in that speech thirty-two years ago, not just the relevance of history to the present day, but about many other things too.
Start with economics. Estonians understood the challenge of transition far better than many people in the region and beyond. They knew that it was important to have real owners, so they privatised their state-owned Soviet industries by auction, not with phoney voucher schemes.
They knew it was important to have real prices, that reflected supply and demand, not a bureaucrats’ whim or political pressure. So they abolished subsidies and all the other meddling mechanisms of the planned economy.
They knew that it was essential to have real money, with real worth, real stability, real convertibility. This would signal Estonia’s determination to make a fundamental break with the Soviet planned economy, its corruption, distortions, shortages and waste.
That sounds like common sense now. But this was a time when a visiting IMF official was arguing that the ex-Soviet region should have what he called “a common currency from Tallinn to Tashkent”.
Not for the first time, Estonians listened politely and ignored the bad advice from abroad. On June 20th, 1992, Estonia became the first country to dump the rouble, those greasy, flimsy notes we remember so unfondly. I still remember the firmness with which Estonians used to say ei vene raha. Any foreign currency was better than the “O.R.”, or occupation rouble. Nor did they want any funny-money, the vouchers, coupons and other transitional currencies that were much in vogue at the time.
Shock therapy in Estonia came at a cost. In 1992 alone, industrial production fell by 62 per cent; GDP declined by 38 per cent between 1989 and 1995. Outside bemoaned this. What they did not realise was that much of this so-called output was valueless. Factories where the products were worth less than the raw materials they consumed. As the great Polish economist Jan Winiecki pointed out, the Soviet cow drank more milk than she consumed. The ex-Soviet cow did not change her habits. She carried on eating. And the milk, in a market economy, was less and less valuable.
When outsiders said hit the brakes, the Estonian government pushed the accelerator. No subsidies. No price controls. Auction off all state industry, putting it in the hands of real owners. Flat income and profits taxes. A land-value tax – something at economists in other countries can only dream of because of its simplicity, low cost of collection and fairness.
It worked. In 1992 Estonia’s national income per head was one-sixth of the European average, it was two-thirds of that level by 2008.
The story since then is less encouraging. In retrospect, many things could have been done differently or better. A construction free-for-all has scarred the Tallinn skyline for a generation. The banking bubble before 2008 made the financial crash that followed particularly painful. The easy money of transit trade with Russia turned out to be not so easy. Big public investment projects, from roads and railways to nuclear power plants have been plagued by delay and indecision. The demographic outlook is grim. Public finances are no longer as solid as they were. Productivity growth has stalled. Estonia’s friends yearn for it to recover its innovative mojo, exemplified by Skype, Wise and perhaps the best-known: e-government.
Whereas the economic miracle of the first 15 years mainly involved government getting out of the way, the digital transition took a diametrically opposite approach. This was not Adam Smith’s invisible hand, but the conscious exercise of a firm, and expert guiding hand, the creation of a strong digital identity to access public and private services, and the linking of those services on the X-road infrastructure.
Again, the Estonians behind this leap into the future had to battle unhelpful advice. Instead of going for a big procurement contract with an international contractor, they adopted a frugal approach, using open-source solutions and working with small local companies. That is now international best practice. Richer countries have wasted billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, on systems that work less well than those that Estonians take for granted in their daily life.
Estonia also had to put up with unhelpful advice on a third front, the language and citizenship laws. Two really bad ideas, particularly prominent in the early 1990s, were that Russian should be a second official or state language, and that citizenship should be granted on the “zero-option” principle, meaning that any and indeed all Soviet-era migrants, stranded in Estonia by the collapse of the empire, should automatically have citizenship.
The arguments against these were strong and simple. No other country would be expected to do this. Estonia was not deporting Russians. It was not banning them from speaking their language. Broadly speaking, anyone who would take the trouble to learn Estonian, to accept Estonia’s history and culture, could become a citizen. The naturalisation process was far more liberal than in some countries that were most forthcoming in giving uninhibited, unsolicited and I would say uninformed advice. Estonians were asserting their right to have a collective identity in a world that could see rights only through a lens of individual choices. Yet convincing visiting journalists, foreign officials, and people who said they were human rights experts, was hard.
Estonians won that one too. The Baltics did not become the scene of what patronising Western journalists liked to call “Balkan-style ethnic conflict”.
My third and final lesson to the outside world is listen to Estonians. Listen to them when they talk about economics. Listen to them when they talk about innovation. Listen to them when they talk about digital identity. Perhaps most of all, listen to them when they talk about security.
Estonians were not just right about Russia. They were right about defence and deterrence. They maintained defence spending at 2% of GDP at a time when other countries reduced theirs to shamefully low levels. If other countries had done that, we would not now be facing a US public, and a US president, who believe that European allies are freeloaders.
Estonians also pioneered the idea of citizen defence with the Kaitseliit, plus the Naiskodukaitse, the Noored Kotkad, the Kodutütred), 29,000 volunteers in all. The mobilisation registry includes a total of 230,000 people with military experience or duties, or fully one fifth of the population.
Again, Estonia has had to battle bad advice. Territorial defence at the time you joined Nato in 2004 was seen as an anachronism. Other countries had abandoned it. Estonia didn’t. Now those countries are hurriedly trying to restore those capabilities. I hope they are ready in time. As Europe scrambles to rearm, its first line of defence is here in Estonia. It should be more grateful. Ukrainians bought us time. Estonia used that time wisely. Others, not so much.
Defence is not just about military spending. Disinformation is now regarded as a deadly threat to democracy. Again, Estonia was on the case early, both in tracking foreign information operations and in countering them with strong messaging in Estonian and in Russian. 20 big Western countries regarded this threat with scepticism. Not any more.
And then there is counter-intelligence. Kapo published its first report in 1999, covering the previous year,[4] in the teeth of opposition from partner services. In those days, the conventional wisdom in the spy world was that the less you said the better. Why let the Russians know what you know? Why worry the public? Estonia’s decision to issue a public report was regarded as rash and regrettable.
That has changed. We now have annual reports from security services and indeed threat assessments from foreign intelligence services, and increasingly from military-intelligence agencies too in many countries in the Nordic-Baltic region. As with so many things that start in Estonia, it’s regarded as a common sense approach. And as with so many things that start here, nobody says sorry for pooh-poohing the idea at the time. Nobody praises Estonia for having had the idea first.
It is well worth rereading that first Kapo report. It starts with history, noting that 90% of the former employees of the pre-war republic’s Security Police had been killed prior by the end of the second world war. Some of the preoccupations seem as quaint as the computers. Who now remembers the Eesti Rahvuslaste Keskliit? Or the Kazan mafia? Or the days when bombings and weapons smuggling were big problems, taking up many paragraphs? The report also notes the threat from Russian espionage. Few now recall the year that a Russian intelligence officer was expelled from Estonia? It was 1996. As Estonians will explain to those ready to listen, the problems with Russia predate Putin. And they will outlast him too.
Lots of countries have problems with Russian spies. A smaller number of countries do something about it. For the past 35 years, the tendency in most of these countries is to hush it up. You expel the intelligence officer. Whoever they recruited is sent into early retirement, or to some non-job in a far-away country. What they don’t do is prosecute. Why wash your dirty linen in public?
Estonia takes the opposite view. Estonia unhesitatingly deports foreign spies, and fires and prosecutes traitors. Perhaps the most damaging was Herman Simm, the most senior Russian spy to be unearthed in Nato. Estonian officials let me interview him in prison for my book Deception. This approach can be embarrassing at the time, but it is exactly the right thing to do. It does not undermine public confidence, it bolsters it. It strengthens deterrence too. The Estonian spy-catchers and prosecutors who deal with these cases, and the politicians who give them unflinching backing in their work, deserve gratitude. And not just from Estonians.
[1] Answering a question from the Estonian journalist Astrid Kannel, about the Molotov Ribbentrop pact
[2] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982
[3] https://president.ee/en/official-duties/speeches/51828-address-he-lennart-meri-president-republic-estonia-matthiae-supper-hamburg-february-25-1994
[4] https://kapo.ee/sites/default/files/content_page_attachments/Annual%20Review%201998.pdf