'Among the Russians'

“I drove west from Leningrad towards those troubled Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – whose tragedy has been their tiny size, squeezed as they are between the twin bludgeons of Germany and Russia.” In Among the Russians (1983), Colin Thubron describes the Estonians as a battered people, not entirely without hope, enduring the mindless, incompetent and cruel Soviet regime. At least, the Estonians fare better under his pen than Russians who figure largely as staggering drunks, long-suffering women, and disillusioned intellectuals.

Lest we forget! - it is astonishing that nothing much sems to have changed in today’s Russia while the Baltic states regained independence in 1991, joined the European Union and NATO in 2004, and have spent the last 34 years rebuilding democracies, based on their own cultures, as well as on Western liberal values.

That year, 1991, when Ukraine also gained independence, was an opportunity for the West to work more closely with the collapsing Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev; however, it did not, with lasting consequences.   

“I picked up a hitchhiking student: a haggard Estonian,” writes Thubron. “He lifted his booted feet, and ran nervous fingers through a thicket of dripping blond hair.” His guest talked without fear: “Every student – almost every Estonian – loathed the Russians. The trouble was that the population growth of the Estonians and Latvians was virtually zero while Russians were pouring into their cities to take up jobs in industry. The republics had the highest standard of living in the Soviet Union, but their people were headed for extinction.”

Flying to Rīga from Tallinn, Thurbon describes the Estonian flatlands as rectangular fields of yellowing grain, cattle in pasture, and forests. “A land of pig-breeding, potatoes, grain, flax. Latvia, too.”   

Thubron tires of searching for an open restaurant or café in Rīga, and returns to his hotel: “The rat-scuttling electricity still didn’t work and I jotted down the events of my evening – precisely because they were so ordinary – by the glow of the state advertisement sprawled across the opposite roof, ‘The ideas of Lenin … ‘.”

Which is to imply that socialism does not, and cannot work. As soon as a government removes the incentives on citizens to work in their own and their families’ interest, the economy will collapse as does society. This doomed experiment has been tried repeatedly at various times and places around the world, always with the same depressing result.

At the end of our cycle tour of Estonia, as we near Tallinn, we pass through an urban centre that does not appear to have a centre. We ask passersby for a café, and discover no one speaks Estonian or English. Not speaking Russian ourselves, we are all but unable to communicate. Eventually we are directed to a supermarket and shopping complex. All signage is in Estonian, with no one in Maardu to read it. We buy pastries and mineral water – speaking a basic Estonian at the till, in the hope of a reaction and receiving none - slug it all down, and pedal on in lingering disbelief.

A friend later tells us that Maardu is not the only Russian-speaking enclave in Estonia; the Soviets built several industrial parks and housing for workers. Maardu’s reason for existence appears to have been the production of the white, silicate bricks out of which Estonia’s socialist architecture was built, the ruins thereof strewn across the countryside, the bricks too useless to be recycled.