‘But the farmer, Johannes Loopere, was my grandmother Aliise’s cousin. When she told me the truth, I – as a nine-year-old schoolboy – told my classmates. We all started to joke about Pasternak, this “people’s hero”. We all refused to join “his” Young Pioneers. His story and photograph soon vanished.’
It’s been said that tyranny is not as terrifying as submission to it, that silence in the face of it is much more frightening. Kristjan’s family did not submit. His widowed maternal grandmother Helmi raised three children alone despite the confiscation of her Saaremaa farm. His paternal grandmother kept a secret shelf of banned books by Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Eduard Laaman and Johannes Hiiemets (which she loaned out ‘one by one so we’d learn never to fall for the lies’). His grandfather, the historian Harri Moora, survived both Nazi and Soviet prisons.
In the twentieth century, Estonia had suffered ‘only’ two generations of occupation, Kristjan had told me. Belarus and Ukraine – borderlands I was yet to visit – had had a different experience. Because those countries were occupied for three generations, no living memory had remained of another way of life.
But no grandmother’s truths could keep young Kristjan out of the Red Army. After his first year of university, he was conscripted to serve as a tank crew commander in the Caucasus. On his return to Tartu University, he again stood up for principles, telling his Russian superiors that he – along with other reserve officers – would not fight for the Soviet Union in the event of war.
‘So I was forbidden to graduate,’ he said with a laugh, his lively, self-effacing humour deflating any hint of self-importance. ‘Do you know the joke about the difference between NATO and Soviet military fences? NATO fences point outwards to keep intruders from entering the camp. Soviet fences point inwards to keep soldiers from escaping it.’
At first our island tour seemed a little haphazard, and lacking a single destination. We visited medieval Kuressaare Castle. We followed noble beech avenues to ruined German manor houses. We pulled up the weeds around his grandmother’s grave in her old village of Saikla. With sure-footed military stride, Kristjan marched me around Valjala hill fort, one of the last places in Europe to be Christianised.[10] Finally at sunset, on a dry rise of land, he showed me a sacred boulder chiselled with palm-sized pockets. Into them islanders ancient and modern had poured prayers and coins, the kopecks, kroons and Euros lying undisturbed for decades.
‘And this was my command post,’ Kristjan said over a bachelor-like supper of breaded herring, rosolje beetroot salad and coal-black rye bread. Our night was spent in the Valjala clergy house, a long, austere wooden building in the shadow of Estonia’s oldest surviving country church. ‘My duty was to prepare the island for war.’
During tsarist times, Saaremaa had served as a sea fortress to protect the Russian shipping lanes. Germans took the island during both world wars. Soviets then turned it into a vast missile base, denying access to all but local residents. After the collapse of communism (and his belated graduation), Kristjan joined the Defence Forces’ Baltic battalion because ‘Estonia had changed and I had to change with it.’ For four years he commanded the island’s volunteer defenders: establishing protective positions, stockpiling food, upgrading medical facilities and planning for the arrival of up to 100,000 mainlanders.
‘I asked the local council how the hospitals would cope, where to house refugees, and where to bury the bodies of enemy and Estonian combatants,’ he said, adding with a wry grin, ‘If you can’t start at the beginning then start at the end.’
In the lamplight as he spoke I noticed the slight downward slope of the left side of his face. His left eye barely lifted when he smiled. He wore a collared shirt and woollen polo-neck sweater buttoned at the throat.
‘Saaremaa is Estonia’s “strategic rear”, separated from the mainland by the strait with an open air corridor to the west,’ he told me. ‘It will be our last front line, our last line of defence.’
I slept poorly, perhaps unnerved by Kristjan’s certainty of imminent war, perhaps because – as I later learned – the Bolsheviks had once used the clergy house for their interrogations. All manner of historical figures – Northern Crusaders, Knights of the Sword, SS Einsatzgruppen death squads and political commissars – stomped across my dreams, making such a racket that I woke with a start. I could hardly keep track of the waves of invaders.
In the soft morning light, beneath furrowed banks of high Baltic cloud, I wandered across the lane to St Martin’s church. Its massive walls and lofty, narrow windows had been built to serve as a refuge in yet another time of trouble. Above its vaults was a secret safe room that could be reached only by a ladder, which could be pulled up during an attack. Its tower – said Kristjan – had been built in part from archaic pre-Christian tombstone fragments. Likewise, almost all of the old Soviet radar stations and coastal installations had been reduced to rubble after the withdrawal of the Red Army.
Kristjan knew of one surviving missile base, a few miles to the south of the hill fort. We drove from Valjala to Kallemäe, then followed a leafy track through the woods into an open clearing encircled by oak and birch. Nothing remained of the base’s three barracks, save a foundation or two overgrown with brambles. Yet beyond them, across a marsh and hence inaccessible to the government grinders, spread the rusted relics of empire.
Together we picked our way around ugly concrete storerooms, built without skill or care, and marked with faded Cyrillic warning signs: Chemical Weapons, Do Not Smoke, Crush the Fascist Vipers! Two or three bunkers were open to the elements, their bombproof doors having been removed and sold as scrap metal. Saplings had taken root in the shells of missile truck garages, cracking their tarpaper roofs, dislodging and distorting brick walls so that their tops were wildly uneven like broken teeth in a child’s drawing.
During the Cold War, dozens of S-75 Dvina and S-125 Neva surface-to-air missiles had been sited at Kallemäe. Beyond the mouldering guardhouse, a gaping, horizontal steel tube thrust into the burnt earth. The camouflaged fifty-metre missile silo appeared to have been built to house a heavy mobile launch vehicle, perhaps an SS-1 Scud or even a nuclear weapon.
‘And the Russians claim that they brought us culture,’ said Kristjan as we stepped around the snaking cables and rusted spirals of barbed wire. ‘They claim to be insulted because we aren’t thankful.’
We perched for a moment on the remnants of a makeshift crane, fashioned from missile casings. In the tainted glade, it was impossible not to think of the invader’s return, not least because small groups of Russian ‘tourists’ have started visiting Saaremaa in military-style four-wheel-drives, camping along the coast and surveying the island in secret. Moscow’s latest war games also demonstrate that Estonia’s fears are no fantasy. In recent years Russia’s armed forces have twice rehearsed an attack on the Baltics, with a simulated nuclear strike on Warsaw to deter Western attempts to interfere with the invasion. Russian aircraft have also practised nuclear assaults on both Sweden and Denmark, the latter timed to coincide with the annual Bornholm festival (where a single real bombing raid could annihilate the entire Danish leadership as well as 90,000 guests).
10
In the thirteenth century, crusaders had breached the fort’s ramparts, destroyed the statues of the hammer-wielding god Tharapita and subjected the pagan Saarlanders to a mass baptism. Legend has it that afterwards those independent souls had scurried away to the nearest river to wash off the foreigners’ Christianity.