![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Notes
* This article would not have been written without the remarkable patience, encouragement, and friendship of Guntis Smidchens and Daniel Waugh at the University of Washington, Seattle. Similarly, I give enormous thanks also to Matthew Klingle and Jay Taylor for pointing me into fruitful new directions of inquiry. And to Linda Kongo, Jaan Eilart, Gregor von Helmersen, and Edgar Tõnurist (two of whom I never had the pleasure of meeting), endless thanks for their work, tolerance, and eternal kindness.
1. In 1989 Estonia comprised only 0.2% of the territory of the USSR and less than 0.6% of its population of 286 million. The republic's diminutive size may have helped ease Soviet concerns about tolerating experimental politics in the region, for, in theory, any reforms that might get out of hand could be more easily suppressed there than, for instance, in the much larger Ukrainian Republic.
2. Didion, The White Album, 146. Epner was the director of Lahemaa National Park in 1986. He is buried in the park's serenely pastoral and wooded Ilumäe (Beautiful Hill) Cemetery. When I visited the site late on a May evening in 2002, the only grave in the entire cemetery with a burning candle was Epner's. See Epner, “15 aastat Lahemaa Rahvusparkii,” 38. Unfortunately, not all Lahemaa residents shared Epner's veneration of the park and its treasures. On 14 May 2002, for example, Postimees (Tartu, Estonia) reported that one of the park's landowners sold some of its timbered land from which the new owner promptly, and illegally, harvested some 6,000 trees. The fact that this story occupied almost the entire front page of Postimees, Estonia's largest daily, does, I suggest, speak of the general outrage about the action. See also fns. 55 and 57.
3. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of this article for the astute comments regarding Estonia's “indigestibility.”
4. See, for example, Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 47–48. A remarkable 1969 editorial in Kommunist, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's (CPSU) theoretical journal, hinted that party ideologues themselves recognized the difficulty in achieving this goal, even if ultimate victory was still being posited as historically inevitable:
-
Each Soviet nation and nationality brings its own significant contribution to the successful construction of the new community. In the process of creating communism, they achieve widespread prosperity and ever closer rapprochement with one another. For all nations the common characteristics increase in all spheres of the material and spiritual life of the Soviet people. However, the rapprochement of nations and their international unity should not be viewed as a merger. The elimination of all national differences is a long process, and it is possible only after the complete victory and consolidation of communism in the entire world. (“Torzhestvo leninskoi natsional'noi politiki,” Kommunist, no. 13, April 1969, 10)
5. The term “modernization” in this context does not describe an essential process. Rather, as Dean Tipps notes, once the term is “stripped of its scientific pretensions, the concept of modernization becomes little more than a classificatory device distinguishing processes of social change deemed ‘progressive’ from those which are not.” Because diverse aspects of the modernization process tend to aggregate at the national level, and because “both critics and advocates alike tend to assume the basic utility of the idea of modernization itself,” Tipps concludes that “the greatest areas of agreement tend to be on those points which are most superficial.” As such, “there is general agreement that whatever else it may be, modernization is a type of social change which is both transformational in its impact and progressive in its effects.” Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies,” 199–226.
6. Brezhnev's policy stood in sharp contrast to that of Nikita Khrushchev, a devout adherent to Soviet prometheanism. See, for example, Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, 83–84 and passim.
7. Kask, “Lahemaa Rahvuspark 25—olla või.”
8. Taagepera, “Ecological Problems in Estonia,” 307.
9. Borodin, “Okhrana pamiatnikov prirody,” 298–99.
10. More often than not, however, as Rein Taagepera rightly asserts, “As for activities of the Kulturträger for the benefit of the indigenous peoples, they all too often boiled down to taxes, booze, and learning one's place at the bottom of the conqueror's social ladder.” Taagepera, The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State, ix. For more on Baltic German contributions to later developed Estonian landscape practices, see Smurr's unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Perceptions of Nature, Expressions of Nation.” For more on Baltic singing traditions and institutions, see the unpublished doctoral dissertation by Smidchens, “A Baltic Music.”
11. The concept of an “Estophile activity” based on Herder's agitation I take directly from Ea Jansen's fine analysis in “Eestlaste rahvuslik ärkamisaeg,” 90.
12. Wolschke-Bulmahn, “The Nationalization of Nature and the Naturalization of the German Nation,” 196, 199.
13. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 89.
14. Kreutzwald, as cited in Eilart, “Kraevedenie i okhrana prirody,” 64.
15. “Eesti rahvusliku pargi asutamise küsimus,” Loodus, May 1923, 173. Paasvere is located in Virumaa, a region of northeast Estonia that later suffered enormous environmental devastation from careless oil shale and phosphorite mining. Vilberg [Vilbaste], “Rahvuslik park ja looduskaitse,” 284. In 1921 the naturalist J. Piiper also researched some 30 square kilometers of the Paasvere forest, but found the new Sonda-Mustvee railroad to have degraded its biological worth. See, for example, Varep, “Looduskaitse küsimusi Eesti NSV-s,” 80.
16. For more on Bannikov, Shtil'mark, and the concept of the zapovednik, see Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, esp. 394–99.
17. Zobel, “Viktor Masinguga teoreetilist ökoloogiat avastamas”; Masing curriculum vitae: ⟨http://www.botany.ut.ee/viktor.masing/cv.html⟩; idem, Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia aastaraamat, 2000, 6, 33.
18. Kaasik, “Development of Lahemaa National Park,” 171.
19. An alvar (lood) is a limestone region characteristically covered by thin soil and stunted vegetation.
20. “Lahemaa Rahvuspargi põhimäärus.”
21. Here I am using Anthony Smith's definition of ‘cultural nationalists’ as those who believe “the nation is a primordial expression of the individuality and the creative force of nature. Like families, nations are natural solidarities, they evolve in the manner, so to speak, of organic beings and living personalities.” Smith finds it was under Johann Gottfried Herder's influence that this type of nationalism “took root” especially in Eastern Europe. See Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 178.
22. Estonians accounted for 88.2% of the republic's population in 1934, 68.2% in 1970, and 61.5% in 1989. Comparative statistics for Slavic residents are: 8.2%, 28.1%, and 35.2%. An overwhelming number of the newer Slavo-Soviet immigrants settled in Estonia's northeast to work in the notoriously polluting oil shale and phosphorite mining industries. Between 1945 and 1988 the total number of non-Estonians increased by 26 times (relying on a base figure of 23,000 non-Estonians in January 1945 and 602,000 in January 1989). See Kirch and Kirch, “Kuidas jõuda kultuuriautonoomiani Eestis?,” 67; Raun, “Ethnic Relations and Conflict in the Baltic States,” 158, 160.
23. Varep, “O naselenii v Lakhemaaskom natsional'nom parke,” 42, 51; Nõmmsalu (First Deputy of the ENSV Ministry of Forestry and Nature Protection), “Rahvusparkide rahvusvahelistest kontseptsioonidest ja nende organiseerimise praktikast,” 20.
24. Varep, “O naselenii,” 51; idem, “Man's Role in Changing the Landscapes of Lahemaa National Park,” 127, 135.
25. Archaeological evidence suggests that there was already some agricultural activity in the Lahemaa region at least 2,500 years ago, one of the oldest such finds in Estonia. The park has 14 former German manors within its borders; that at Palmse (owned by the von der Pahlen family from 1677 to 1923) and another at Kolga are its two largest. Epner, “15 aastat,” 38; Kink, Loodusmälestised 10: Harjumaa, Lahemaa, 5.
26. Viiding, Lahemaa Kivid, 60, 70. Whimsical and harmless as its latter-day creators may have originally deemed the pyramid (presently about two meters high and four meters wide), subsequent critics have noted that their practice “has made the open area more vulnerable to erosion by the sea.” Tarvel and Kurepalu, Altja, 36.
27. Estonia recorded 31.6 inhabitants per square kilometer in 1980, but Lahemaa only 13.7. See Varep, “Man's Role,” 134; Nymmsalu, Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park, 21–22; Kaazik, “Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park, ego ucherzhdenie,” 3; Kaasik, “Development of Lahemaa National Park,” 171.
28. Kaasik, “Development,” 171; Vilbaste, “Märkmeid Kunda ümbruse linnustikust”; Kaasik, The Lahemaa National Park, 5, 9; Sander, “Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park kak prirodnyi etalon v bioindikatsionnom issledovanii severnoi Estonii”; Eilart, “Osnovnye printsipy ukhoda za landshaftom” 41–42; Kaasik, “Development,” 171. The Ministry of Forest Management and specialists from the Estonian Nature Protection Section of the Tartu Naturalists Society conducted surveys of Lahemaa from 1968 until its founding in 1971. According to A. Kaasik, however, even in 1970 the territory of the park had still been little studied. Kaazik, “Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park,” 3–5.
29. Ruutsoo, “Vastupanu mitu nägu”; Tõnurist, “Saateks” Lahemaa uurimused, I, 9–10.
30. Ernits, “Tõnurist ja Eilart—ELSi loojad.”
31. So significant were the activities of the ELS, and so well respected were many of its leaders—including Tõnurist, Eilart, and the famed ornithologist Erik Kumari—that some later observers, such as the writer Ülo Tuulik, “personally [saw] in the activity of the ELS also the birth of the national independence movement.” Aare, Fosforiidisõda, 59.
32. Niisuke, “K garmonii obshchestva i prirody,” 44.
33. Edgar Kask, “Lahemaa Rahvuspark 25—olla või.”
34. Ernits, “Tõnurist ja Eilart—ELSi loojad.”
35. Ilmar Epner joined Tõnurist in fighting for the restoration of Palmse manor. See Sikk, “Robert Lepikson ostis Palmse unikaalse mööbli”; “Vägagi Õiged Tähelepanek,” SL Õhtuleht, 18 February 2006.
36. Ruutsoo, “Vastupanu mitu nägu.”
37. Masing, Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park, 4–5. Contemplating the prevalence of views such as those expressed by Tõnurist, the landscape scholar Y¨rjö Sepänmaa noted: “It is paradoxical that the town, which as a man-made environment should be designed precisely for his needs, has so often failed to fulfill one essential area of value and related needs. A town-dweller must then seek environmental aesthetic pleasure from untouched nature and from the deserted rural cultural landscape.” See Sepänmaa, The Beauty of Environment, 146. Kenneth Erickson made an astute observation when he examined the role of “ceremonial landscapes” in modern cultures. Writes Erickson: “Perhaps all preserved and protected areas, even the few ostensibly reserved for science, are essentially ceremonial landscapes. If this be so, a geographical paradox is close at hand: the few remaining natural landscapes will be products of human decision and protection, and thus, in time, artifacts of culture.” Erickson, “Ceremonial Landscapes of the American West,” 39–47.
38. Lennart Meri, the Estonian Republic's first post-Soviet president, once described this region of northeastern Estonia as “an open-air geological museum” owing to its abundance of glacial erratic boulders and unique limestone formations. Similarly, the geologist Herbert Viiding described Lahemaa National Park as “a real open-air museum … Due to its abundance of glacial erratic boulders.” Indeed, the park today still imbues such viewing habits. For example, a trail from the quaint inland settlement of Oandu follows the scenic Altja Creek for several kilometers through dense forest to the seaside hamlet of Altja. From there it progresses along the coast of the Gulf of Finland to a nearby “open air museum” of glacial erratic boulders. See Meri, “Ubytochnaia pribyl',” 3.
39. For more on Clark, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, 94. To my knowledge, no polls were ever conducted in Soviet Estonia that might have canvassed respondents' attitudes toward individual natural objects in Lahemaa National Park (or anywhere else in the country, for that matter). It is even far less likely that such polls, were they to have been taken, would have been delineated by nationality. Numerous polls and statistics, however, do indicate that the great majority of non-Estonians living in the Soviet Republic had no or very limited proficiency in Estonian. It is reasonable to extrapolate that a fundamental difference in linguistic competence had great implications for cultural awareness (or lack thereof). For examples of linguistic statistics and the consequences of the Estonian–Russian linguistic gulf, see Hion et al., Life-Styles in Contemporary Estonia; Lauristin, Massovaia kommunikatsiia i okhrana sredy, passim; Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 237; Misiunas and Taagepera, The Baltic States, 216–17, 296–97; Misiunas, “Baltic Nationalism and Soviet Language Policy,” 206–20.
40. Legendary Estonian characters such as the eponymous hero of the national epic Kalevipoeg, the widely known imp (or devil) Vanapagan (lit., Old Pagan), and Suur Tõll were all believed capable of carrying enormous boulders around the countryside, of throwing them and other objects great distances, of wading across deep bodies of water and leaving their traces across the land. See Laugaste et al., Muistendid Suurest Tõllust ja teistest. Eesti muistendid: Hiiu- ja vägilas- muistendid II, esp. Eesõna and Sissejuhatus; Laugaste, Mustendid vanapaganast; and Kreutzwald, Kalevipoeg.
41. Ansel Adams, as quoted in Schama, Landscape and Memory, 9. Twenty-five of Lahemaa's large glacial erratics (including rock fields) are under strict nature protection. Kink, Loodusmälestised, 24; Kask, “Jaani-Tooma Suurkivi,” 360; Viiding, “Lahemaa hiidrahnud ja kivikülvid,” 45; Kaasik, Lahemaa Teejuht, 30; Viiding, Lahemaa Kivid, 3–11.
42. Viiding, “Eluta Looduse Kaitse Ajaloost Eestis,” 6.
43. Schwartz, “Nature, Development and National Identity,” 105.
44. Latvia was the first to follow Estonia's model by founding the Gauja National Park in 1973. Lithuania followed the same course when it established the Aukstaitija National Park in 1974. Nõmmsalu, “Rahvusparkide,” 9.
45. Pryde, Environmental Resources and Constraints in the Former Soviet Republics, 19; Nõmmsalu, “Rahvusparkide,” 20; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, 109. See also Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 5.
46. Olwig, “Reinventing Common Nature,” 380.
47. Jaan Eilart, interview with author, 12 November 1998, Tartu, Estonia (handwritten notes in possession of author). Heino Luik, Estonia's former chief environmental minister and founding board member of Lahemaa National Park, expressed the same sentiment in an earlier interview. He went so far as to regret the creation of new national parks in post-Soviet Estonia, claiming that their primarily “natural character” should have no part in a “national” park. Luik, interview with author, 3 November 1998, Tallinn, Estonia (handwritten notes in possession of author). Eilart insists, however, that he was in no way inspired by any anti-Soviet sentiment when he conceived the idea for a national park. He nevertheless concedes that the park eventually did assume that role.
48. Kohtla-Järve was the center of Soviet oil shale production in Estonia. It was notorious for enormously wasteful production and massive environmental despoliation. The heavily Russified town also captured the essence of a colonial relationship that remained a cornerstone of Russian–Estonian policy, for the gas pipeline that resulted from Kohtla-Järve's shale mining was first completed to Leningrad (Russia) in 1948 and not extended to Tallinn (Estonia) until 1953. Similarly polluting and wasteful, the cement operation at Kunda itself was so enormous, and the pollution controls so inadequate, that each year an entire kilogram of dust fell on every square meter of earth within the town. Roose, Estonia Built on Oil Shale, 13–16; Soot, “Estonia,” 101; Pryde, “The Environmental Basis for Ethnic Unrest in the Baltic Republics,” 17; Raud, Estonia, 125; Aarna, Chemical Engineering in the Estonian S.S.R., 26–27; Kallaste et al., “Ametkondade äri Virumaa elanike arvel.”
49. Younghusband, as cited in Sepänmaa, The Beauty of Environment, 147; Viiding, Lahemaa Kivid, 3–5; Kask, “Jaani-Tooma Suurkivi,” 360.
50. Officially, Moscow recognized national parks only after Russia established its own parks of that designation (the Losinyi Ostrov and Sochynsky National Parks) in 1983. See Kaasik, “Development of Lahemaa,” 172; Kaazik, “Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park,” 6, 7; Kink, Loodusmälestised, 8. The closely linked Estonian words rahvas (n.—folk, people, nation, public) and rahvus (n.—nation, nationality; & adj.—national) convey an added sense of perceived organic ties between the folk (rahvas) and the nation (rahvus).
51. Here I am using “Estonian” in the ethnic sense. If we include Russians and others, we reach a ratio closer to one in six. I have based these statistics on loose estimates reported by the park administration. In 1987, for example, Arne Kaasik and Valdur Lahtvee reported that approximately 50,000 tourists visited the park on organized tours. They extrapolated that the number of casual visitors was triple or quadruple that number. Entry into the park was free, unrestricted, and unmonitored, therefore a precise number of visitors was impossible to determine. Kaasik reported similar figures for the late 1970s. See Kaasik and Lahtvee, “Rahvuspargis nii ja teisiti,” 397. Most of the park's visitors were either Estonians or Soviet citizens. Indeed, although the park had become well known to Finnish conservationists by the late 1970s, Soviet restrictions permitted very few of them to actually visit Lahemaa. Haapanen, “Partnership in Nature Conservation between Estonia and Finland,” 69–74.
52. Löfgren, “The Nationalization of Culture,” 5–24. Lahemaa's coastal area in particular captured the interest of ethnographers owing to the significant influence of Finnish in the dialect. The region was found to be especially “rich in folklore, dances and music.” This culture was revived in 1976 by Viru Säru, a locally formed song and dance ensemble. See Varep, “O naselenii,” 44; Kaazik, “Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park,” 6.
53. White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change, 153.
54. Loksa was characterized by “high reproduction, few elderly, and high immigration.” See Liiber, “On the Demographic Situation of the Estonian Small Towns and its Relationship with the Level of Social Infrastructure,” 127–35.
55. Aare, “Rahva ökoloogiline kontroll”; Kaasik, Lahemaa Teejuht, 38.
56. In 1944, for example, 36 villagers fled by sea, two died while fighting as volunteers in the Finnish Army against the Soviet Union in 1943–1944, a family of three was deported to Siberia, and most of those left behind departed for cities to look for work. Tarvel and Kurpalu, Altja, 8; Kareda, Estonia in the Soviet Grip, 8–10.
57. Kuutma and Vainsalu, as cited in Nymmsalu, Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park, 74; Tarvel and Kurepalu, Altja, 12. The similarly quaint seaside village of Käsmu now speaks of the most recent past century (i.e. the twentieth) and its enduring traces of Soviet domination. For here in 1993 Aarne Vaik, a Tallinn-born Estonian who claims to have 300-year ancestral ties to the village, opened the Käsmu Maritime Museum in the very same building that housed Soviet border guards until the collapse of the empire. Today, an abandoned guard tower looms just outside the museum, and a large cement pad used to train troops in tracking techniques still elicits visitors' attention. According to Vaik, the pad, indented with numerous human and animal footprints, served to aid Soviet border troops in distinguishing the traces left by possible defectors or infiltrators on smoothly raked regional beaches. Today, Vaik prefers to treat the pad, the tower, and broken klieg lights simply as visual reminders of the quotidian absurdities commonplace in a bygone era; he is far more interested in drawing attention to the museum's collection of photographs and documents that speak of Käsmu's formidable pre-Soviet maritime tradition. Vaik, interview with author, 20 May 2002, Käsmu, Estonia (handwritten notes in possession of author).
58. Nymmsalu, Lakhemaaskii natsional'nyi park, 77. See also Tarvel and Kurepalu, Altja, 20.
59. A wonderful example of a well-intentioned change was the resurrected “Altja Pub” (Altja kõrts). Only traces of the original pub's foundation remained at the time of the park's founding. So, rather than rebuild the original pub, park administrators decided to restore another pub, the Kõrve kõrts, on the one-time site of the Altja kõrts. The Kõrve kõrts—originally located at the more distant and well-heeled Palmse Manor—had also been destroyed. Carpenters used old photographs and detailed drawings to reconstruct the thatched roofed Kõrve kõrts in its new location, but they rededicated the new (old?) structure with the name of place (Altja kõrts) rather than the name of the architecturally emulated object (Kõrve kõrts). Perhaps this slight to the memory of the original Kõrve kõrts can be overlooked, since, in any event, the rebuilt structure turned out to be much larger than the original pub. There is an obvious up-side to this “invented tradition,” since the new Altja/Kõrve pub “plays an important role in feeding tourists visiting this area.” Tarvel and Kurepalu, Altja, 12, 17.
60. Tõnurist is now buried in the park's Ilumäe cemetery, a stone's throw away from Ilmar Epner's grave. Kink, Loodusmälestised 10, 8. See also fn. 2.
