The 1972 Memorandum to the United Nations and its repercussions: Émigré politics and Soviet Estonian dissent during the ‘era of stagnation’

ABSTRACT

The Estonian dissidents’ Memorandum to the United Nations, drafted as a call for national self-determination in 1972, set new standards for the émigré community’s campaigns. Although its political message was initially dismissed as utopian, the subsequently emerging cooperation between émigré and homeland activists via intricate courier networks significantly strengthened the authority of Estonian voices in the West. By the early 1980s, the political alliances across the Iron Curtain eventually bore fruit. The Memorandum’s core demands reappeared in political debates on Baltic issues on both sides of the Atlantic, foreshadowing the massive Western support for the Baltic cause during the Singing Revolutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold war
• East–West relations
• dissent in the Estonian SSR
• émigré politics
• non-recognition doctrine
• United Nations

Acknowledgment

The research was supported by the European Union through the European Social Fund (Mobilitas grant No. MJD347) and by the Swedish Research Council (International Postdoc Program). The article is based on a presentation given by the author at the history seminar ‘40 ja 30: Eesti iseseisvumisele teed rajanud dokumendid’ [40 and 30: Documents that paved the way for Estonia’s independence] at the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn on 25 January 2013. The seminar, which was jointly organized by the Museum of Occupations and the Office of the Member of the European Parliament Tunne Kelam, gathered former Estonian dissidents and historians in order to commemorate the anniversaries of the drafting of two documents that, in hindsight, were interpreted as decisive milestones on the path toward the restoration of Estonia’s independence: the Memorandum of the Estonian dissidents to the United Nations of October 1972 and the European Parliament’s Resolution on the Situation in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, issued in Strasbourg in January 1983.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It was first after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, which paved the way for the high tide of Western protests against the violation of basic human rights in the Soviet bloc, that Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian dissidents left anonymity behind and proceeded to openly signing their appeals.

2. Already in 1969, the number of Western visitors to Tallinn was estimated at 15,000 per annum (Küng 1971, 12). The same year, Soviet Estonian radio announced a rapid increase of the number of Estonian émigrés among the incoming tourists, mostly from Sweden, but increasingly also from North America (Personal Archives of the Estonian National Library, RR, f. 3, s. 37, n.pag.).

3. Andres Küng, one of the most ardent second-generation activists of Estonian origin in Sweden, claimed that, according to the data that he had been able to access during his two visits to the Estonian SSR in summer 1970, merely 0.2% of the Soviet republic’s population had obtained a permit to visit capitalist countries in 1967 (Küng 1971, 12).

4. The information about the smuggling channels was kept deliberately vague, most probably in order not to endanger the involved couriers. Even later accounts written by Estonian émigrés on the topic of smuggling networks between dissidents and émigré organizations in the West exercised careful discretion, as can be illustrated by a statement in one of Andres Küng’s internationally acclaimed books: ‘Dissident messages to the West must seek illegal and devious ways, sometimes via several countries, to avoid Soviet censorship’ (Küng 1981, 3).

5. Bibles were not explicitly prohibited in the Soviet Union, although they were printed ‘in extremely small quantities.’ Entering the Soviet Union with a Bible was thus not illegal per se. However, when two Swedish women attempted to debark the ferry from Helsinki with a substantial number of Bibles in December 1976, they were denied entry by the Soviet custom officials in the port of Tallinn and immediately sent back (Küng 1981, 99). One of the Swedish Bible smugglers published reminiscences of her trips to Soviet Estonia in the 1970s and 1980s (see Lahti 2010).

6. According to Tunne Kelam, Baptists in Finland maintained direct communication with Estonian émigré organizations in Stockholm (Kelam 2011). The fact that it was the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Stockholm that received the Memorandum to the UN and the accompanying letter to Kurt Waldheim from the hands of the couriers strengthens the hypothesis that the smuggling had been carried out by religious networks.

7. Based on a thorough analysis of the texts, the political scientists and émigré activists Juris Dreifelds, Toronto, and Rein Taagepera, Irvine, CA, stated: ‘Were these memos really written in Tallinn, or are they Western fabrications? We are not certain. But some of the thoughts (e.g. parallels with Austria, 1938; Estonia doing relatively well economically; proposed voting rights for Estonian-born descendants of recent immigrants but not for immigrants themselves, in the proposed Constitution Assembly) are strikingly at variance with those in the exile press. Also, the Estonian text has expressions which are frequent in the Soviet Estonian press but rare in the exile press (e.g., “arveid õiendama” – “to settle accounts,” with use of violence implied). If it be a Western fabrication, it would be an unbelievably good one’ (Baltic Events 1974, n.pag).

8. Even the remarkable postwar modernization of Baltic industries, due to which Estonia and her Baltic neighbor republics became the most developed parts of the USSR and enjoyed the highest standard of living, was seen through the lens of colonial discourses, as Baltic state enterprises, sovkhozes, and kolkhozes served as the main suppliers of high-quality products and food to Russia proper (Thomson 1988, 101).

9. The custom control procedures for both incoming and outgoing passengers were extremely strict and could, as one Finnish visitor to Soviet-era Tallinn remembered, take up to 4 hours (Laurén 2014, 1133).

10. In their letter to UN Secretary-General Waldheim, dated 23 December 1974, the dissidents stated: ‘As we have heard by radio, our appeal, dated 24th October 1972, has finally reached the United Nations Organization, in spite of considerable delay’ (qtd. in Newsletter from Behind the Iron Curtain 1975, 8).

11. ‘Disciplined’ is, however, a rather relative term. The KGB kept a close eye on incoming Finnish visitors who were known to smuggle huge quantities of deficient but highly coveted goods across the border such as coffee, groceries, and clothes and also electronics, bubble gum, and pornography, which were traded illegally or sold on Tallinn’s thriving black market (Kuusi 2013, 218; Laurén 2014, 1137).

12. During a press conference held on 30 April 1974, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam stated: ‘Our policy in regard to the Baltic States is the same as that of our predecessors. We recognize the existence de jure of the states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but in practice we are looking away from it. Everyone is looking away from it’ (qtd. in Dunsdorfs 1975, 54).

13. The news about the reaffirmation of the traditional line of nonrecognition, which efficiently illustrated the limits of détente, not only fueled political activism among the Estonian communities in the West but also boosted the morale of oppositional circles inside the Soviet Union. The awareness of the fact that Estonia, according to international law, was not ‘in a legal marriage with Moscow’ was crucial for the dissidents and their political sympathizers in the Estonian SSR (Kelam 2011).

14. The Baltic operatives who, with the help of the intelligence services of Sweden, Great Britain, and the United States, had managed to land on the Soviet Baltic coastlines were either immediately killed or imprisoned, while others were turned into double agents and forced to engage in the KGB’s disinformation campaigns (Ekecrantz 2003, 203).

15. As Enn Tarto, one of the leading Estonian dissidents who maintained close contacts with Ants Kippar in Stockholm during the late 1970s and early 1980s, stated, many Estonian activists in Sweden argued that any attempt to directly contact the Soviet Estonian underground would inevitably entail repressive measures against the dissidents and their families on the part of the KGB (Tarto 2011). This was the reason for the prevailing conviction among the political leadership of the Estonian community in Sweden that direct communication between the émigré and homeland societies should be limited to family visits, which usually entailed only minor interference on the part of the Soviet authorities (National Archives of Estonia, ERA.5008.1.17 1981, 110).

16. For a detailed account on the accusations, see the verdicts of the Supreme Court of the Estonian SSR, dated 16 December 1983 and 19 April 1984, in Pesti (2009, 460–69, 528–34).

17. By then, Baltic dissidents had already proceeded to sign with their full names, leaving anonymity behind in order to increase the impact of their message to the West (Tarto 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union through the European Social Fund (Mobilitas grant No. MJD347) and the Vetenskapsrådet (International Postdoc Program).

Notes on contributors

Lars Fredrik Stöcker

Lars Fredrik Stöcker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University, and a visiting fellow at the Department for East European History, University of Vienna. His research focuses on East–West contacts during the Cold War and economic transformation processes in socialist and post-Socialist Europe.