He shouldn’t have worried. Moscow was again sending a message and the convoy was allowed to breeze – or at least judder – through the three Russian checkpoints to reach the frontier.
At the Salla border post Sami dropped to his knees to touch the ground. The Finnish officials questioned and fingerprinted him, then gave him a paper that recognised him as an ‘irregular migrant’. His unroadworthy vehicle was confiscated and dumped in a scrapyard beyond the customs hall, along with as many as a thousand other Ladas and Volgas rusting away beneath the trees. He told a medical officer that he felt ‘so tired’. He named me as his next of kin. He was surprised that no one asked him for money; not during the interview, not in the sleeping hall, not in the minivan to Kemijärvi and Helsinki.
The flow of migrants and refugees on the Arctic route was tiny compared to the hundreds of thousands who have fled through Turkey and the Balkans over the last years. Yet both flows were used – to a greater or lesser extent – as weapons, funnelled into Europe to stoke the continent’s migration crisis and to undermine its unity, to tear apart the EU.
Moscow has always striven to control its ‘near abroad’, the tsars’ cavalries, Red Army tanks, cyber warriors and now migrants sent forth to ravage its adversaries. Its strategy has been to attack (or counter-attack) as a means of defence. So it was that Sami – a bereaved, moonwalking, almost-ever-talking African – became one of its unwitting foot-soldiers, a human time bomb calculated to spark an explosion, somewhere, someday in Europe.
ESTONIA
18
Home
‘Welcome to the front line,’ said Kristjan, unfolding his arms to embrace a gusty sweep of shoreline. ‘Welcome to my home.’
I had stepped out of the largest country in the world into one of the smallest, from a land with a million men at arms to a pocket-handkerchief-sized state with 6,000 soldiers. An arrow-straight rail line had carried me out of Russia towards the ferry port, slicing through dense conifer forests washed by salty sea air. Dilapidated wooden villages had given way to neat thatched-roof farmhouses, solid medieval castles and busy towns with teeming high streets. Copses of birch trees had stepped down to the Baltic. Across the water, islets were scattered like plump cushions trimmed with jetties and boats.
I felt elated, my spirits lifted in the borderland, thrilled to see Kristjan again. We’d first met ten years earlier in Berlin when he was the Estonian defence attaché to Germany. Now we gazed together across the ferry’s bow towards the tufted pines and emerald grass of his low-lying island home.
‘No soldier wants to fight a war on home turf,’ he said, the wind snatching away parts of every sentence. ‘We Estonians have no choice.’
Kristjan’s military career spanned the three dramatic decades: drafted into the Soviet Army, booting them out as part of the Estonian Defence Forces, lecturing on leadership for NATO, serving on peacekeeping missions around the world. Over the years – on the journey from collectivism to free economy, dictatorship to democracy – he had helped to build the now-independent nation.
‘My island – Saaremaa – was the last part of the country to fall to Knights of the Sword in 1227,’ Kristjan said, his high forehead, long straight nose and strong chin giving him a natural air of authority. ‘It may be the last place to fall to Russians in twenty-first century, when they attack.’
‘When they attack…’ I repeated, his certainty startling me. ‘Not if ?’
‘The Russian threat is nothing new to us,’ he replied as our ferry pushed through the sea spray. ‘What is new is that we are now an ideological threat to them. Our economic and social success shames them.’
I’d never thought that shame could spark an invasion but then I’d never spent a weekend with a lieutenant-colonel.
‘Russians are proud, a trait which most Europeans have put behind them,’ he explained. His short dark hair was peppered with grey but his light blue eyes and elastic, boyish demeanour made him appear younger than his fifty-four years, younger than a man who carried the weight of so much history within him. ‘To sustain their sense of superiority, they work to weaken their neighbours. They also dress up their failures as successes, as you’ve seen. Like I said, the threat is nothing new to us.’
Estonia is less than half the size of Portugal but as strategic as Gibraltar. Its people – one of Europe’s earliest indigenous tribes – have been shaped by seven centuries of occupation under Danes, Teutonic knights, Swedish kings and the tsars. Russia governed the country until 1917 when – for neither the first nor last time – the Estonians drove them away. But the country’s location, at the head of the Baltic, able to defend or lay siege to nearby St Petersburg, doomed their fragile independence. With the hated Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the dictators’ dirty deal that divvied up Eastern Europe in 1939, the Soviets enslaved Estonia for another half century, plus three war years when the Nazis nabbed it for themselves.
‘We’ve learned a thing or two about invaders over time,’ said Kristjan, his smile sharper than a bayonet.
At Saaremaa, the largest of Estonia’s 1,500 islands, our ferry dropped its ramp to disgorge bearded woodsmen, a vanload of folk dancers in long red skirts and a newly-wed couple on a Ural motorbike (with sidecar and bridal flower crown). Kristjan and I motored inland behind them and scruffy family hatchbacks, past waterside cottages and yellow-painted homesteads ringed by pines. In the old-growth forests lived wolves, moose and red deer. In the swamps were beaver, and mosquitos ‘as big as moths’. Overhead, high mares’ tail clouds brushed the heavens like a gauze of egg white.
Every mile or two an overloaded Skoda or a battered SUV peeled off onto a dirt track, kicking up clouds of dust. I watched them vanish between trees. Estonians – like most Russians – still have roots in the countryside, returning to their ‘summer houses’ as often as possible, Kristjan among them. But the link is not simply a holiday convenience, he told me, rather it’s central to their identity.
‘The secret of our success is our size,’ he volunteered. ‘And that the Soviet occupation lasted only two generations.’
Kristjan’s maternal grandparents had lived on Saaremaa until deported along with tens of thousands of others during the Second World War. The men and boys had vanished into Siberia, never to be seen again, but his grandmother and mother-to-be, aged just one at the time, managed to escape from the transit camp and return to the island.
‘Their survival – and that of my paternal grandparents – meant I grew up hearing the truth. My teachers had no chance with their fake stories,’ Kristjan said. ‘At school we were told that such-and-such a person had been a communist hero. Then later at home my grandmother revealed that the man had been a thief or had emigrated to Canada.’
As we drove deeper into the ‘island land’, Kristjan recounted the tale of Mikhail Pasternak, a captain with an NKVD/KGB destruction battalion (Putin’s father had served in a similar istrebiteli unit). In 1941 Hitler had reneged on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, launching his ruinous attack on Russia through Ukraine and the Baltic states. To cripple the German advance, the retreating Soviets destroyed everything that might be useful to their enemy, torching villages and fields as well as robbing and murdering locals (the destruction battalions’ initial duty had been to undertake ‘internal ethnic cleansing operations’). On the outskirts of the capital, Tallinn, a farmer named Johannes Loopere had awaited them at his dinner table. When Pasternak burst in with drawn Nagant revolver, Loopere had killed him with a single shot to the head. After the war, when the Soviets reoccupied Estonia, the KGB caught wind of the incident and unearthed the body. In an outrageous revisionist whopper, they proclaimed Pasternak to be a hero who’d died fighting the German invaders, overlooking the fact that his pockets had been full of stolen watches and jewellery. A photograph of his ‘valiant’ skull – with the single bullet hole in the forehead – was plastered across all of Estonia’s newspapers.