Riots in Estonia expose wounds of Soviet occupation

The emotions of World War II and the post-war Soviet occupation are still fresh in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The year before the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army conquered the three nations. But the week before the Nazi invasion, hundreds of thousand of Balts were deported to Siberia, resulting in conflicted memories of what the Russians call "The Great Patriotic War" among the Balts. And after the Soviets drove out the Nazis in their drive to Berlin, more deportations followed.

Each March, a rally by veterans and supporters of the Latvian Legion, soldiers who fought alongside the Nazis against the Red Army during World War II, is confronted by ethnic Russian protesters. It is commonly accepted as fact that the Legion was a Waffen SS unit. However, most of the men were conscripts.

In 2004, the Lithuanian film Utterly Alone dramatized the story of the Forest Brothers, groups of guerrillas in the Baltic States--as well as Poland, Ukraine, and Romania, who resisted Communist rule. The freedom-fighters managed to hang on into 1950s.

But currently the most tense situation is in Estonia, the northernmost and least-populated of the Baltic States. For the last two nights, rioting by ethnic Russians has disrupted the capital city of Tallin. The unrest was sparked by by the removal of a Soviet World War II memorial in the nation's capital of Tallin. It's believed that the remains of fourteen Red Army soldiers were buried at the memorial site--the Estonian government plans to exhume those bodies.

Police broke up the riots with water cannons and rubber bullets, one man was stabbed to death.

Both Estonia and Latvia, but not Lithuania, have tough-native language laws that effectively deny citizenship to the large ethnic Russian population--about 30 percent in each country. The prewar borders of all three Baltic nations were changed after the Soviet Union annexed the countries, leading to border disputes that have yet to be resolved.

All three nationns are members of the European Union and NATO.

I've been to Latvia, and the nation to an extent defines itself by its break from the Soviet Union. In the old city of Riga, Latvia's capital, the Museum of Occupation is located in the building that in Soviet times housed the Latvian Rifleman Museum. They were soldiers who fought with the Communists during the Russian Revolution. Not much good it did for them--most of the Latvian Rifleman were killed during Stalin's late 1930s purges.

Thanks for the link: Эстония в мировых СМИ

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