Europe > Estonia > Tallinn > Tallinn > Articles > Tallinn and Riga

What a curious substance, human memory! It can be compared to an overflowing rubbish-bin, which our brain, this amnesiac dustman, chronically forgets to empty. Having forgotten many useful addresses, I still remember this one in Tallinn: 12, Sakala Street. It was there that the city's only camera repairs shop was located in 1966, when our family was spending summer holidays in the Tallinn's suburb of Pirita. At the age of twelve, I was already a keen amateur photographer and kept snapping right and left, especially on vacations, with my crude "Smena" photo-camera. When it started malfunctioning - due to over-exploitation, I assume - my mother and I had to have it repaired.

It took us hours to find the place. Tallinn passers-by, whom we repeatedly stopped for guidance (due to an inexplicable Soviet paranoia, city maps were non-existent), would politely direct us elsewhere. We ended up criss-crossing the whole town before accidentally stumbling upon the blasted shop. Unbeknown to us, we had found ourselves on the receiving end of the so-called "passive protest" - the only way the natives of the Baltic republics of the USSR (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) could voice their angst at what they rightly perceived as the Soviet occupation: the three republics were forcibly "annexed" by the Soviet Union in 1940 in the wake of the treacherous Molotov - Ribbentropp Pact.

Apart from sending visitors to the opposite end of town when asked for directions in Russian, the locals practised another form of the "passive protest" by totally ignoring Russian speakers at a public place, be it a restaurant or a morgue. The staff would simply look through you, as if you were an empty space which once made my granddad, an old Bolshevik and the Civil War veteran, loose his temper. "Russians and dogs are not welcome here, are they?!" he exploded in the face of a dispassionate doorman of a Pirita restaurant who had staunchly refused to take any notice of us.

Despite this obvious downside of holidaying in the Baltics, we used to do so often. It was the closest one could come to the West, still firmly out of our reach. In defiance of blatant "russification" , the three small nations were desperately clinging to their national identities, languages and culture and kept surprising visitors from elsewhere in the USSR with higher living standards, civility and style they had somehow managed to preserve. It was in Estonia, in the late 60s, that I had my first experience of self-service "supermarket" - an establishment unheard of in the rest of the Soviet Empire. The thing that baffled me most was a special shopping basket for every customer. "How come the baskets don't get stolen?" I was wondering. Among few other "Western-looking" products, they sold jam in tubes. And although the jam, when squeezed (or, in my case, sucked) out, had a distinct taste of lead, I could not have enough of it and kept walking around with the tube protruding from my mouth cigar-like - as once captured on film by my mother, when I inadvertently allowed her to hold my faithful "Smena".

All black-and-white snapshots of my childhood have been lost for good, yet many of them are so firmly imprinted in my memory that it only takes closing my eyes to bring them back to life. This is probably why I couldn't help the constant feeling of recognition during my recent trip to Tallinn and Riga, my first experience of Estonia and Latvia as independent states.


Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, to where I returned after 30 odd years, was covered with melting snow, and thawed patches of black earth were showing through the white slush here and there. Like in my childhood photos, the city was all black-and-white! And not just in terms of colour. Whereas Russian signs, cars and monuments have disappeared completely, it was Russian that most people in the streets were fearlessly speaking. The "passive protest" has gone. In a free market society, ruled not by a dogma, but by the mammon, it was unnecessary. Money speaks no languages, except for the language of profit - its own internationally accepted Esperanto. It has no prejudice, except for that of a class.

The predominance of Russian speech in the streets of Tallinn, where only about 40 per cent of the population are officially Russian-speaking, could be explained by the fact that Estonians are generally taciturn and, like their neighbours Finns, prefer meaningful silence to idle verbal exchanges. No wonder if we remember that Estonian, a tongue-breaking Finno-Ugric language, has 14 case endings; two different infinitives, yet just one word for "he" and "she"; no future tense, and, to cap it all, something called "the partitive plural". This is not to mention ubiquitous double vowels and consonants, as if the alphabet itself suffers from chronic stutter.

Tallinn's Old Town, where my five-star Schossle Hotel was located (it was skilfully built into the robust frame of a 13th century mansion) remains one of the best-preserved in Europe. And one of the cosiest too. There are amazingly few cars, and parking is hardly a problem. With proliferation of well-stocked shops and brand-new restaurants of all imaginable cuisines and with prices 4-5 times lower than in London, modern Tallinn has few visible signs of poverty, endemic to most European capitals. Crumbling and neglected in Soviet times - it is now a secret tourist paradise, a living proof of the creative might of capitalism.

In this all-embracing and somewhat idealistic world, a place was found for The House of Russian Culture" - a grim "Stalin Gothic" structure in Mere Street. Inside, one can spot the Soviet national emblem - the last remaining in Estonia, and the sullen-faced patrons still addressing each other "Comrade".

"Undress! Are you deaf, or what?! Undress immediately!!!" Pyotr Nikolayevich, an old, ruddy-faced doorman of the "Ostap" restaurant bellowed (in Russian of course) at an unsuspecting Estonian, who tried to sneak inside in his overcoat ("to undress" in Russian means both "to strip naked" and "to take off one's coat" - the doorman obviously meant the latter). I thought that his manners and appearance betrayed an ex-Soviet serviceman, possibly a KGB officer, and I was right.

"We were sent here in 1946," he said, having dragged the coat off the recalcitrant Estonian's shoulders. "Stalin told us: stay here and serve our Motherland - and that's what we did: stayed and served for 50 odd years…"

For patrons of "Ostap", irrespective of their nationality, there was no danger of being ignored by this vigilant doorman, for whom every deposited coat meant a possible tip.


Standing on Toompea Hill, I was looking down at Tallinn's impressive panorama, mentally comparing it with my long-lost photo, taken from the same spot 35 years ago. At the first glance, little has changed, and the main landmarks: tiled Gothic roofs; church-spires; the guard towers Fat Margaret and Kik in de Kok (Peep into the Kitchen); the medieval Town Hall, topped with the weather-vane figure of Vaana Toomas (Old Toomas), Tallinn's main mascot, were still in place - as was the Soviet-style railway station (railway stations all over the world are resistant to change). Yet something was definitely missing. I recalled that my old photo had been largely ruined by three tall ugly masts sticking out of the ground and spoiling the view. Those were special jamming towers built by the KGB to interfere with "corruptive" radio and TV broadcasts from neighbouring Finland - just 8 miles away across the gulf (the fourth one was hidden inside the spire of the magnificent 12th century St. Olaf's Church!). The town's tallest structures, they were eye-sores in more than one sense: the over-intensive round-the-clock jamming was also affecting the quality of reception of the politically correct programmes from Moscow, and the picture on the locals' TV screens was constantly blurred and jumpy.

The towers have gone, and the vision and sound on all 20 odd TV channels (a couple of Estonian, a dozen German and only one Russian) in my hotel room were crystal-clear, although at times I wished they were not. Estonian news featured such ground-breaking stories as:

- Tallinn Mayor's (unofficial) visit to a well-known striptease bar, also housing an underground brothel. "But there was no show there that day," he said when confronted.

- Estonian Prime Minister using the photograph of the opposition leader as his target during a shooting exercise. Unlike the hapless Mayor, the Prime Minister admitted the misdeed and publicly apologised.

And so on. In despair, I flicked over to the Russian channel, on which a professorial bespectacled weatherman was delivering a forecast: "Tomorrow the temperature will fluctuate between five and zero degrees, snowfall is not excluded, but if a woman becomes pregnant she can rely on Pregnavit!" It took me a while to realise that they have turned the weather forecast into a commercial, at which point I felt a momentary pang of nostalgia for the jamming towers of yesteryear!

"…but what am I going to do with fallen yellow leaves in the park?…" The poignant refrain of a song, performed by a Russian busker, was echoing in the freshly painted Art Nouveau facades of Riga's Old Town… It was late afternoon in March. Stray cats were copulating frantically on time-beaten cobbles. A plush Volvo of latest make was crawling up a narrow lane squeezing itself into the gap between houses like a gleaming dagger into a tight sheath. The sedan's owner must have been wealthy enough to afford paying 5 Lats (£5,50) per hour for entering the Old Town. He obviously did not belong to the Russian busker's metaphoric "fallen leaves" - those by-passed by Latvia's post-Communist boom.

Or could it be that by "yellow leaves" the busker meant his numerous fellow-Russians (60 per cent of Riga's population are officially Russian-speaking)? Indeed, Russians in Riga have been turned into an overwhelming ethnic minority. Even menus in Russian restaurants are printed exclusively in Latvian, the republic's only official tongue. Russian schools are being closed down at an alarming rate, and a respected Riga publishing house has recently launched a students' competition for the best project of the Russians' deportation.

Such nationalistic excesses can be partly explained by the fact that out of the three Baltic republics of the USSR Latvia had suffered most from "russification". By the 1980s, Latvian language and culture were on the verge of extinction, and some drastic measures were needed to galvanise them after independence. Latvian nationalism was like a forcefully depressed spring: the tighter you press it (and the longer you hold it) - the higher it will jump when released.

My old photos of Riga were much clearer in my memory than those of Tallinn. I often came to Riga on holidays and on journalistic assignments in the 1980s. During one of those assignments I met Borya, a Riga-born satirist of Jewish origins, who had become one of my best friends. The hotel, where I was put up, had no water (hot or cold), and Borya kindly offered me to stay in his flat, located in an exclusive apartment block for party functionaries in Lenin Street. Not a functionary himself, he lived there courtesy of his mother-in-law, who worked at Latvia's Communist party Central Committee.

Ironically, this house is now an equivalent of a council estate, inhabited by the poor. Its smelly littered courtyard was the only place in Riga where I spotted a dozen rusty Ladas. As for Borya, he lives in Israel with his family (including his mother-in-law). Lenin Street has been renamed Liberty Street, and "Shalom", a small Jewish restaurant, is doing brisk trade in the basement of the house next to Borya's - a little Israel on his former doorstep.

Unlike Borya, his elder brother Sasha still lives in Riga and has the official status and passport of an "un-citizen", due to the fact that his parents "only" came to Riga after World War II. His whole salary goes on rent, and he has to rely on his wife's casual earnings to survive. A "fallen leaf" in the blooming park of capitalism, Sasha still speaks about "us" and "the West", not realising that "the West", with all its pros and cons, has returned to Latvia after fifty years of exile, and he had found himself there without emigrating.

Jauniela, a quiet and unremarkable Art Nouveau street in Riga, used to be the Soviet Latvia's most photographed site (I remember using the whole roll of film in it once). The reason was simple: the hard-currency-starved Soviet cinema industry chose it as a natural film location for the movies set in the "decaying" West. It was there that Sherlock Holmes' Baker Street flat from the popular Soviet TV serial was located. It was there that Geneva and Berlin-set scenes of "Seventeen Moments of Spring", a blockbuster spy-thriller, were shot by the inventive Moscow film-makers. All it took was removing the "Let's Pull Together" slogans from the facades, sweeping the pavement - and bingo - "the West" was there, with all its seductive un-Soviet neatness.

The most photographed Riga attraction these days is the Freedom Monument, also known as Milda - Latvia's own Statue of Liberty. Built in 1935, it survived untouched all fifty years of Soviet domination, even if those who ventured to lay flowers to it, were whisked away to the near-by KGB headquarters. The Monument was now undergoing a face-lift and was covered with scaffolding. Looking at the solid wooden box, hiding bashful Milda from public view and trying to remember what she looked like, I had to summon up another old photo of mine which featured the statue of a graceful Latvian girl, holding three stars, representing three provinces of Latvia, high above her head. A couple of years ago, Milda became victim of an embarrassing boo-boo, when British Airways' High Life in-flight magazine called her "Mother Russia", and the three stars in her hands - the three Baltic states! The symbol of free Latvia had lived through half-a-century of Soviet occupation only to be destroyed by the errant verbal bomb, dropped by British Airways!

For all the insensitivity of this mistake, it represents the abysmal lack of knowledge about the Baltics in the minds of many a Westerner. Bernhard Loew, the Austrian manager of Riga's Grand Palace Hotel, told me that Americans routinely come to the Baltics with suit-cases full of food, thinking they had arrived in the war-torn Balkans. He showed me an official letter from a US-based business consultancy firm, referring to Riga and Tallinn as "two of Lithuania's secondary cities".

The British Airwaves duly apologised for the mistake and promised to publish another article about Latvia. Hopefully, Milda will emerge from under scaffolding in all her unscathed beauty - as she once appeared on one of my black-and-white holiday photos. Only after re-visiting the Baltics, I no longer see these photos as black-and-white: they have gained colours - the dazzling and often conflicting colours of the free world.

Articles

• More from Vitali Vitaliev