Once again I couldn’t help but wonder why the Kremlin remained so unwilling to live in peace with its neighbours, flexing its military and virtual muscles, giving oxygen to radical thinkers such as Aleksandr ‘Rasputin’ Dugin, the ultra-nationalist who wants to hasten the ‘end of times’ with all-out war. Of course the origins of Russian delusion lie in its history, in Moscow’s enduring messianic belief that it alone can save mankind; as the last bastion of true Orthodox Christianity,[11] through the divine right of the tsars, with international communism and now in the theory – put forth by firebrand Sergey Kurginyan – that it will be the world’s saviour from capitalism.
‘Russia wants to return to a mythical place of power and glory, not to help to build a more stable world,’ said Kristjan. ‘Nations – especially insecure nations – dream up such wishful fictions.’
Estonia could never win a conventional war, so it will not fight one. Since 1918 the volunteer Estonian Defence League, the Kaitseliit, has helped to preserve the state, maintaining order during the Russian Revolution, preventing a communist coup in 1924, surviving undercover through both the Nazi and Soviet years. Now, as then, its part-time soldiers train to be insurgents: bivouacking in the winter woods, improvising explosives in the field, learning to fight far behind enemy lines, preparing for the inevitable.
In front of us paraded uniformed harbourmasters with small Estonian flags fluttering from their bayonets. Fresh-faced policewomen in battledress trooped by with sub-machine guns clamped to their chests. Retired nurses rode in a hand-me-down Swedish armoured personnel carrier. Four beefy butchers sucked in their stomachs to sit tall in a venerable Willys jeep. After a cat had ambled across the road came two ranks of Young Eagles, boys and teenagers not yet old enough to be issued with their own weapons. Next three dozen housewives, librarians and council workers marched by in the crisp dress uniforms and blue boater hats of the Naiskodukaitse Women’s Home Defence corps.
After Saaremaa, Kristjan and I had returned to the mainland and made for Rakvere, a pretty town no more than a grenade-toss from the Russian border. Nearby, thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance rusted in the Tapa forests, once a Red Army artillery range. Thirty years after their withdrawal the region’s tap water is still said to be inflammable – Tapa põlev vesi – as so much Soviet aviation fuel was dumped at its military airfield.
In the shadow of hills, alongside the parade route, Leclerc battle tanks of the 1er Régiment de Chasseurs idled alongside a Challenger II of the Queen’s Royal Hussars. A dozen British squaddies handed brochures to locals then quick-marched behind the Estonians. Overhead buzzed a couple of American Apache and Black Hawk helicopters from the US 10th Combat Aviation Brigade. Their symbolic presence in Estonia – along with a handful of other NATO troops – had motivated Putin to order Russians to prepare for ‘a time of war’.
‘Partisan war is our way,’ said Kristjan, explaining how an ‘imaginative insurgency’ evened the odds against a powerful army, as Americans had learned to their cost in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘We can’t touch the Russians’ armour but we can damage their supply convoys and terrify their soldiers. Usually.’
With a quick laugh he recalled an operation that hadn’t gone as intended.
‘Once, during the war, a plan was hatched to commandeer a Russian supply train,’ he told me. ‘Three Kaitseliit volunteers agreed to stop the train by pretending to be Russians. All went well, the Estonians sharing cigarettes and winning over the guards, until suddenly one of them lashed out and punched a Russian to the ground. As the Estonians ran away, their plan in ruins, they asked their friend why he had hit the guard. ‘“Because that Bolshie had such an ugly face,” he replied.’
As well as by deep-rooted independence, many Kaitseliit volunteers had been inspired by the Forest Brothers. These wartime partisans (or ‘enemies of the people’ according to Moscow’s propagandists) had hidden in Estonia’s woods for years, harrying the occupation forces. By 1947 some 15,000 of them had been arrested and executed. Two years later the Brothers’ support base was destroyed by the deportation of a further 20,000 Estonian men, women and children. In spite of – or perhaps because of – these devastating losses, the Forest Brothers fought on for three more decades, living and working in groups of six or ten, acting without a central line of command that could be broken by arrests and torture. In 1978 one of the last of their number, August Sabe, was caught by two KGB agents posing as fishermen. When ordered to surrender, Sabe jumped into a lake and drowned himself. He wanted to end his life as a free man.
After the parade, border policewomen mingled with Latvian Volunteers and American GIs chatted up Finnish Reservists. Kaitseliit lieutenants kissed partners, held babies and retouched their lipstick. Stalls had been set up to entice recruits to join the police or the regular Estonian army. Schoolkids collected posters on medicinal forest herbs and Russian armoured vehicles. Families took horse-carriage rides around the lanes. Food carts served sausages and beer. A Rifles Regiment band started to perform classic pop hits including – not inappropriately – the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. At a town square cafe, I ordered coffee and, while we waited for it to arrive, asked Kristjan about home.
‘Home?’ he said, his look direct and enquiring. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean Heimat or homeland,’ I said. ‘I mean the individual identifying with the nation. For me it’s a dated, dreamy concept: Ulysses’ homecoming, Coriolanus back from the wars, the Hollywood hero returning to the family farm and marrying his childhood sweetheart as if life were inevitably a cyclical journey.’
‘National identity is the myth that built the modern world,’ he replied.
‘Exactly, and in larger nations it’s mostly made up.’
Nation builders invent a mythology to bond together individuals who may share nothing other than inhabiting the same piece of land. Americans claim to have always been united by their exceptionalism. Russians stick together as if they’re surrounded by enemies. Brits tell themselves that they’re all plucky islanders.
These myths lie at the root of the concept of home. There is some geographical or historical basis to them but their main purpose is as glue. People – the bydlo – need to be convinced to support their country, even to fight and to die for it. Hence the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies and Soviet May Day parades. Hence Putin’s Immortal Regiment and Patriot Park. Hence the romancing of the French Resistance and the exploitation of the heroism of the Battle of Britain. The myth of a nation bonds us while it deludes us, priming us for patriotism yet also for racism, xenophobia and even genocide.
‘People are conditioned to see their country as an extension of themselves.’
‘That doesn’t make it true,’ I said to Kristjan. ‘But is it different for a small country?’ Estonia seemed to have survived – and thrived – because of the years of occupation, rather than in spite of them.
‘We have seen many empires come and go,’ he said as the coffee arrived at our table. ‘We have learned that the better our preparation, the longer the battle can be postponed. But we do not kid ourselves. We know war is coming.’
Estonians’ engagement with history has taught them bitter lessons: defend yourself, fight for independence and expect no mercy from a conqueror. If you surrender, the nation will lose much more than its battle casualties.
11
Russia’s sense of messianic mission was magnified further by the 2018 split of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Moscow Patriarchate. The schism was called the most significant rift in Eastern Christendom since 1054, when Eastern Orthodoxy separated itself from what is now the Roman Catholic Church. But the break had less to do with faith than with power, and Putin’s use of the Church to legitimise many of his actions.