On March 25-28, 1949, occupying Soviet forces deported more than 90,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians from the Baltics, including more than 20,000 people from Estonia alone, to Siberia under Operation Priboi. Some managed to return, however many ended up remaining there.

“I think we need to get to know this Soviet system, which is in fact constantly ongoing today,” Paju said. “The same pattern is playing out in Ukraine – the same human rights violations, and crimes against nature, humanity and peace.”

Russian philosopher and culture critic Andrei Arkhangelsky, a good friend of Paju’s who is currently in exile in Berlin and whose analyses Paju has always read, pointed out a very important fact.

“In Russia, [kids] were not taught in school that there is good and evil within everyone; rather, in the Soviet Union, we were taught that evil always comes from outside, that someone is always to blame,” she explained. “We teach that we all have these feelings inside of us, and we learn how to recognize and control them.”

According to Paju, Estonia’s history has been described as very power-driven, but that is no help; the information war is likewise fueled by envy, egoism and nihilism.

“It’s a heavy burden to bear,” she said regarding the March deportation of 1949 as well as what’s currently happening in Ukraine. “But my experience was that when I went to study in Helsinki, I could see for myself from behind the Iron Curtain how strong the Kremlin’s propaganda is in shaping the lives of Estonians and life in Estonia, or even calling into question the continuity of the Estonian state.”

Dealing with the past is therapy, the Estonian writer said. “But how you phrase that you’re going to give that past love and understanding – empathy is such a volatile feeling – that you have to deal with constantly,” she explained. “It’s not just ‘I’m rehashing all the horrible things that happened in the past,’ but that you are making sense of them too.”

During the Soviet era, essayism, or the culture of meaning, was forbidden as well – there was opinion journalism and ideology, Paju recalled.

“In Western culture, what has been important is an individual, such as Anne Frank,” she explained. “A story is told through their suffering; through their story unfolds the entire tragedy. But this takes courage; it’s taken courage from me too.”

According to Paju, who first released the documentary “Memories denied” in 2005, people have been gaining more of this courage, and want to tell their stories.

“If we are afraid and think, ‘I’m not going to say anything, I’ll spare myself that way’ – actually, courage breeds freedom,” she said. “But you have to work on that courage and your vocabulary – how you express something. These stories will create a future. Behind the tragic stories, there are also stories of courage – where someone else, an Estonian, a neighbor protects another. This is a collective trauma; we just need to talk to each other more.”

Source: ERR

The post Imbi Paju on March deportations: Courage talking about this breeds freedom appeared first on Writer Imbi Paju.

Editor’s note:

Arnold Susi (1896 – 1968) was a lawyer and the minister of education in the Estonian government of Otto Tief, established on 18 September 1944 during the Second World War – just before the Soviet troops occupied Estonia again.

Susi was soon arrested by the Soviet authorities. While held at the KGB Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1945, he befriended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who would later become the writer renowned for The Gulag Archipelago (first published in Russian by a French publishing house in Paris in 1973) – a book that describes the horrors of the Soviet forced-labour camps.

While in prison, Susi got Solzhenitsyn acquainted with the principles of the European justice system and court practice as well as with the democratic principles of the constitution of the Republic of Estonia.

In 1963, the two men met again in Estonia and Solzhenitsyn hid at Susi’s country house to write The Gulag Archipelago. He entrusted Susi with the original typed and proofread manuscript of the finished work, after copies had been made of it both on paper and on microfilm. Arnold Susi’s daughter, Heli Susi, subsequently kept the “master copy” hidden from the KGB in Estonia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In early 2019, The Heli and Arnold Susi Mission Award for the Courage to Speak Out was initiated by the Estonian ministry of justice. The award recognises the courage to love Estonia, the freedom of Estonia and the truth. It also recognises the dedication to have it as one’s literary mission – and to be successful internationally in this mission.

The first person to receive the award was Imbi Paju, a Helsinki-based Estonian journalist, writer and filmmaker. “Imbi Paju has presented topics regarding the Estonian historical memory with her films and books in almost all European countries as well as in Asia and North America. The subject under the question is always the same – occupation, human rights and vulnerability of human life,” Urmas Reinsalu, the minister of justice, said while presenting the award.

Paju won international attention with Memories Denied (2005), a documentary film and a book by the same name. Both the film and the book deal with her mother’s experiences in a Soviet slave labour camp, the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the attempts by totalitarian regimes to destroy human memory. Memories Denied has been translated and published in Estonian, Finnish, Swedish, English, Russian and German. In 2007, it was selected for use in the Swedish school programme, Living History, which deals with both Nazi and Communist crimes.

Estonian World publishes Imbi Paju’s speech (in a lightly edited and shortened format) she gave at the ceremony for the Heli and Arnold Susi Mission Award for the Courage to Speak Out on 4 January 2019.

***

Firstly, I am grateful for the exceptional honour of being the first to receive the Heli and Arnold Susi Mission Award for the Courage to Speak Out. Behind the actions of every person is a story which is, on closer examination, related to our collective sub-consciousness, the life, life-stories, achievements and contradictions of society.

In order to see this all more clearly and to perceive the impact that certain people have on us and our actions, we must keep these stories constantly in our minds, especially now that the world is wavering again.

The examples these people and their stories set, create and reinforce the identity and understanding of oneself – on a country level as well – keeping our heads clear and helping us stay on the democratic path at a time when populism, ideological stigmas, fake news and other noise cause uneasiness, to the point of people talking about a post-truth era. We need a compass right now.

When preparing this speech, I talked to many people who have a deep interest in the actions and stories of Arnold Susi, Sworn Advocate, minister of education during the government of Otto Tief, and Arnold’s daughter Heli.

I will start with examples from our neighbours. Finnish non-fiction author and historian Erkki Vettenniem has just published a book, which has also been translated into Estonian, Solženitsyn. Elämä ja eetos [Solzhenitsyn. Life and Ethos], revealing the part that Arnold Susi, Heli Susi and other Estonians played in the creation of Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago. The book revealed the Soviet Union’s crimes against humanity and gave human suffering a face and a voice.

Heli Susi, as an involved party, has said that the book remains a bit superficial. The writer admits this but explains that Estonians themselves have not made this story important to the world. One could only hope that some Estonian museum of occupation would make the story permanently visible on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Solzhenitsyn; that it would be visible in the Estonian anniversary year’s cultural project focusing on foreign countries; that this is the time when the state of Estonia reacts and moulds this into a large narrative.

Arnold Susi a key figure of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago

I mention this fact because the name of Arnold Susi, thanks to whom this masterpiece was created, is referred to as a key figure of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in large international periodicals and newspapers such as The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent and others.

The name of Arnold Susi was also internationally mentioned in the eulogies written for the writer, Jaan Kross, in 2007, because this national writer when a young lawyer stood for the independence of Estonia and was a member of the National Committee of the Republic of Estonia (a self-styled resistance movement in German-occupied Estonia, established in March 1944 – editor) where Arnold Susi was one of the key figures.

But even so, Arnold Susi is internationally still too little known. He wrote a thousand pages of memoirs, without really believing they would be published, and yet they were published and his book, Võõrsil vastu tahtmist [Unwillingly Abroad], would definitely raise interest outside Estonia as well.

Last year, which was the 90th year of activity of the Estonian Centre of PEN International, I found in my mailbox a letter from the novelist, poet and translator, Kätlin Kaldmaa, the president and foreign secretary of the Estonian Centre of PEN International; she proposed in this letter that we should choose Heli Susi to be an honorary member of PEN – precisely because she risked her freedom and life when helping Solzhenitsyn when he wrote The Gulag Archipelago.

The idea seemed wonderful, and being inspired by the PEN decision, I organised a small discussion on the topic during the Võtikvere Book Village literary festival in August of last year. Unfortunately, Heli Susi was unable to participate in that small forum, but the topic was introduced by Ivar Tröner, a cultural historian who studies Russian literature. He was joined by journalist and thinker Jüri Estam, a close acquaintance of Heli Susi.

Ivar Tröner reminded us that no other world writer nor Nobel laureate has written about Estonians as respectfully and warmly as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Jüri Estam recalled that when Arnold Susi was imprisoned in the Lubyanka, he met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was then a Marxist, and organised a “night university” for him in the prison, changing thoroughly Solzhenitsyn’s notions of democracy and a state based on the rule of law.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in the first part of The Gulag Archipelago: “Thanks to his horn-rimmed glasses and the straight lines above the eyes, his face became severe, perspicacious, exactly the face of an educated man of our century as we might picture it to ourselves. Back before the Revolution he had studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Petrograd, and throughout his twenty years in independent Estonia he had preserved intact the purest Russian speech, which he spoke like a native. Later, in Tartu, he studied law. In addition to Estonian, he spoke English and German, and through all these years he continued to read the London Economist and the German scientific “Berichte” summaries. He had studied the constitutions and the codes of law of various countries – and in our cell he represented Europe worthily and with restraint.”

I wrote a story on that topic for the cultural portal of the Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) and mentioned that perhaps we should memorialise the names of Heli and Arnold Susi in the form of a human rights and democracy day.

Incidentally, I believe the archive of the Estonian Public Broadcasting as well as the articles and interviews with Heli Susi that have been published in our magazines are a great achievement of memory work, containing as they do a lot of cultural historical material. Journalist Martin Viirand, whose father also participated in the National Committee of the Republic of Estonia, adopted, with the help of Heli Susi, a mission to memorialise the actions of Arnold Susi and the National Committee during the restoration of the independence of Estonia in 1944. The actions of the National Committee were extremely important in the sense of the continued existence of the state of Estonia.

The actions of Arnold Susi, Heli Susi and others in helping Solzhenitsyn write The Gulag Archipelago were also memorialised by the late Mati Talvik in an Estonian TV programme Ajavaod [Wrinkles in Time] with a subheading “Mees, kes usaldas eestlasi” [“The Man Who Trusted Estonians”].

The Soviet regime encouraged mistrust

The Soviet regime was determined that people should not trust each other. It began with joint apartments which promoted tale-telling. Privacy was taken from people. People were collectively controlled. Curricula lacked the psychology of individuality. A lot was done during the Soviet regime to discourage close relationships. Solzhenitsyn came to Estonia and found here privacy and altruism. Friends even had to warn him that the KGB operated in Estonia as well.

I am glad that the minister of justice, Urmas Reinsalu, decided to emphasise the courage to speak out and the mission when he established the Heli and Arnold Susi Award. As we know, the current minister has worked as an adviser and undersecretary to former Estonian president, the late Lennart Meri, where he was undoubtedly schooled in preserving memories. Lennart Meri, in turn, had worked with Enn Sarv, a lawyer who worked on the National Committee in 1944 and who was repressed by the Nazi as well as the Soviet authorities.

Enn Sarv was one of the advisers for my film, Memories Denied. In the film, I tried to find answers about the nature of the malice and treachery of the regime that transported my under-aged mother to a Gulag in 1948. Sarv became my good friend as well as an interpreter of history and eras.

I was able to share with him the mindset that we must constantly define the things that make a good and caring life, the things we strive for. This new good thing can be learning new things, learning to notice life and make acknowledgement, being merciful and forgiving, in order to be the best you. According to the classic representative of psychology Carl Gustav Jung, every person represents in principle the entirety of humankind and its history. That which is possible in the history of humankind in a larger sense is possible on a small scale for every person.

Can culture save the world?

I returned to this wisdom when reading the memoirs of Arnold Susi. Last year, I met students from Seattle University via Skype who had watched my film, Memories Denied, and read the opinion piece in which I posed the question whether culture can save the world. And therefore, they asked me whether it can. I did not know how to answer because every day I look for the answer myself.

I know that my mother survived in the Gulag because she was reminded of a poem by Marie Under, or perhaps she forgot herself and sang a Schubert serenade and imagined herself in another time, a free time; when she finished, the people around her cried. Arnold Susi also writes in his memoirs that he was comforted by music, something that he was able to engage in from time to time even in prison.

Arnold Susi writes how prisoners from Estonia studied languages in the concentration camp, even though there was little chance of survival, and how he once saw fellow prisoners attentively listening to a man. This man was theologian Elmar Salumaa who provided others with spiritual assistance. He became a spiritual guide who tried to elevate and encourage his pessimistic fellow prisoners as a spiritual, yet also a dashing and witty, speaker.

Poet Artur Alliksaar, who was imprisoned and starving, asked to be sent philosophical articles from home. The popular notion today that in order to engage in intellectual things you have to be rich was not believed back then.

Stories and speeches have a deep and significant task

While I was writing this speech, the collections of speeches by Lennart Meri were on my table. As a historian, writer and filmmaker, he was masterful in telling the type of stories that change the course of history.

Among others, I was very affected by a speech that Lennart Meri gave at the 48th session of the UN General Assembly in 1993, addressing the topic of Russian forces being withdrawn from Estonia and finally talking about reforming the UN – that small countries who make up the largest proportion of all the world’s countries have the obligation to redefine the world order. His speech was successful because the Red Army was withdrawn from Estonia in the following year. If this had not happened, today we would not be members of NATO and the European Union.

What I mean by this is that the stories and speeches that we share with others have a deep and significant task. In addition to us sharing information, the things we share place us in our time and place, telling who we are and where we come from. These stories tell us how we see the meaning of life. Plato had already talked about the effect of stories on creating a country, what values and ideals the stories share.

The story of Arnold Susi and his courageous companions bound together by fate contains everything that is significant and related to our country and mentality – and is worth being passed on. Today, stories are used as weapons of information and psychological warfare in order to set people against each other, generate anger and cause shame.

“The best dish for an Estonian is another Estonian” is a Stalinist mantra

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Estonians”, offers so much recognition and love to the people and the land of Estonia that it has a therapeutic effect in today’s world in which we repeat the Stalinist mantra created by the KGB and the late Gustav Naan (an Estonian physicist and philosopher, and a loyal communist and opponent of Estonia’s pro-independence movement – editor) that the best dish for an Estonian is another Estonian. People who lived before the war and occupation and who I interviewed do not know this saying; it is completely foreign to migrated Estonians as well. Solzhenitsyn writes about Estonians sticking together in the Gulag; he is moved by a scene from the novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, where two Estonian prisoners do everything together, go to work together, eat together, talk to each other and care for each other.

In the essay “Estonians”, he describes a reunion with Arnold Susi in 1963, just when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been published. As a matter of fact, it had been translated by Lennart Meri and Enn Sarv who were also helped by a former Gulag prisoner, the politically ostracised Artur Alliksaar.

“Among this small nation, on this small land was cast the translation of Denisovich as a spark – the first one in the Soviet Union, furthermore, as a cheap mass edition; I remember thinking: one book per four to five families, incredibly more than in Russian. In Estonia, almost everyone had read this book – and I was surrounded here by such a homelike ambiance, general friendliness which I had never encountered in the Soviet world – and back then, Estonia was the most beloved for me precisely because of its lack of the Soviet spirit. That is why I felt back then that I would be unable to leave it behind effortlessly and permanently.”

Acting against totalitarianism irrespective of its colour

Arnold Susi fought and acted against totalitarianism irrespective of whether its colour was brown or red. Not once did he hesitate when the fate of Estonia was under question. He was an old-school person, not only an intellectual but an intellectual in the largest sense possible, accompanied by a respectful attitude towards his fellow humans.

Memory researcher and literary scholar Rutt Hinrikus has written that thinking about the generation born at the end of the 19th century, the generation of Arnold Susi, one is immediately reminded of the phrase man of honour.

One of our greatest thinkers, the late Fanny de Sievers (an Estonian linguist, literature researcher and essayist – editor), has said that a person may be educated but if he lacks that something that originates from respect towards his fellow humans – and altruism – his education will turn into an acid that will begin to destroy.

It has been said that the activity of the National Committee was connected to the Nazis. Today, the word nationalism generates ambivalent emotions, but back then it meant the attitude, “we are Estonians and Europeans”.

The old-school lawyers, Arnold Susi, Otto Tief, and the young lawyers Enn Sarv and Jaan Kross, were nationalists in the sense that they worked in the name of the independence of Estonia and democracy. Cultural researcher Ivar Tröner reminded me that the late Linnart Mäll (an Estonian historian, orientalist, translator and politician – editor), who grew up in the Soviet time, continued, whether knowingly or unknowingly, the work the National Committee and Arnold Susi started, writing down the declaration of independence for small countries and being in turn supported by Russian researchers from Moscow when the KGB made his life hard in Estonia.

Remembering is the only guide to the future

Lawyer, writer and repressed restorer of human rights Enn Sarv, who has been mentioned several times, has left us this saying as a legacy: “It is very important to remember the past again and again, to fight against intentional and unintentional forgetting because a short memory gives an undeserved clean conscience to the parties involved. Remembering is the only guide to the future that can be trusted. Therefore, remembering is an obligation.”

In recent years I have heard the opinion from those of our people who are involved in culture and politics that Estonia should not focus on its past but that we should look to the future, that we should not present ourselves as victims to the world because this would shame us, it would be inappropriately tragic.

I will talk about an experience of mine. Last year, before Europe Day on 8 May, I was contacted by the University of Regensburg in Germany. The students, who were organising Europe Day, had read Memories Denied and invited me to be the guest of honour for the day in order to discuss the darker side of humankind and the history of Estonia. Based on the experience of Estonia, we discussed the topic of what it means to be a person under occupation.

A similar question was raised in September last year in Bucharest where people of culture from the Baltic states and Central Europe had gathered. The question of what it means to be a human is very important in today’s world but in order to find an answer to it, it is necessary to know your history. It is sometimes said that history is a matter of interpretation but concentration camps, political persecution, mass murders, repressions are not a matter of interpretation but instead the dark side of humanity. Paraphrasing Freud, it is a sickness, our thoughts and world-view becoming blurred.

Director Moonika Siimets, whose film, The Little Comrade, has won several international awards, told me about a similar experience. Mankind has experienced wars, and successive generations inherit unnoticed traumas from those wars. The director talked about an experience in Korea where the viewers identified with the film’s story because they have a painful history with the Japanese, but sharing stories helps to get rid of the burden, gives a release from the victim status, creates empathy.

The novel, Pobeda 1946, by writer Ilmar Taska is similar – it reveals marvellously all the archetypes that are bred by any kind of totalitarianism. The book touches readers because these stories are the stories of all of us, and we must be vigilant in order not to let the darker side of mankind overcome us. History is not history – it is us right now; understanding history alone releases us from crimes and creates a more empathic today.

We are all in a reciprocal symbiosis with our lives, life-stories, history, achievements and contradictions of society. Our mission is to understand ourselves and follow the golden rule of life: do not testify against a fellow human being! This was also followed by Arnold Susi and those close to him, his daughter and those people such as Lembitu Aasalu, Georg Tenno and many others, thanks to whom we are free today.

Source: Estonian World

The post Imbi Paju: Remembering guides us forward appeared first on Writer Imbi Paju.

TALLINN – Every day seems to bring a new revelation about Russia’s political meddling in Western countries. From Twitter trolls sowing discord among voters, to the Kremlin’s alleged support for extremist groups, Russian propaganda is undermining trust in democratic governance. And although Western politicians may talk tough in response to the Kremlin’s efforts to upend the status quo, their actions often betray a weaker hand. Russia’s ability to influence journalism and literature is a case in point.

The Finnish author Sofi Oksanen once observed that Russia’s information warfare works because its targets are often willing participants. During the Cold War, for example, Finland’s economic dependence on raw materials and technology from Russia left its leaders loath to antagonize the Kremlin. This phenomenon – “Finlandization” – helps explain why, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was translated into Finnish in 1974, the first edition was printed in neighboring Sweden.

Even Britain has succumbed to this calculus. In 1944, the British establishment tried to prevent publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm; then-editor T.S. Eliot argued that the book’s anti-Soviet “point of view” was “not convincing.” No one, it seemed, wanted to anger Stalin, who was then an ally of Great Britain.

This type of indirect pressure continues to claim victims today. In the Baltic states, people are increasingly worried that geopolitical competition over the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Russia to Germany will affect writers’ freedom of speech to opine on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

I don’t blame them. I am acutely aware of how dangerous it can be to run afoul of Russian interests. In 2009, I edited a series of essays with Oksanen documenting official practices in Estonia when it was part of the Soviet Union. Our book Fear Was Behind Everythingdetailed the terror that gripped Estonia under the Soviet system. For a half-century, any book that was critical of the communist regime was banned in the Baltic states and was not published in Finland, either. Our volume marked a turning point. Or so we thought.

The idea for our book was inspired by an incident in 2007, when the statue of a Soviet soldier, the symbol of occupation forces in Estonia, was relocated from central Tallinn to a military cemetery elsewhere in the city. Russia protested the move, and deadly riots erupted amid rumors that the government was denying Estonian Russians the right to mourn their war dead.

The next year, Johan Bäckman, a docent at Helsinki University, published a book about the incident, The Bronze Soldier, in which he called Estonia an “apartheid state” led by incompetent leaders whose citizens were incapable of coming to terms with their own history. His publisher was an Estonian-born journalist and former KGB officer, Vladimir Ilyasevich, who had worked in Finland and in other Nordic countries during the Cold War.

Bäckman then trained his pro-Russian vitriol on me. First, he attacked a book I had written about my mother’s trauma in a Soviet gulag, and then he helped organized protests against the release of Fear Was Behind Everything.

Because of these threats, we requested armed police protection on the day of the book’s launch in 2009. And, while Bäckman has since left his teaching job and directs most of his attention to spouting other pro-Putin falsehoods, the Russian-backed propaganda war he helped wage continues to affect my sense of security. Simply put, the old Soviet system of fear continues to wreak havoc on the truth and punish those who defend it on the page.

While Russia’s propaganda efforts may be aimed at influencing governments, it is individuals who suffer the consequences. As the chief executive of the Estonian International Center for Defense and Security, Dmitri Teperik, recently argued, information wars are most dangerous for “civil activists” – like journalists, writers, and authors – because we are the ones on the front lines.

Nearly three decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia maintains its Soviet-era proclivity to prey on peoples’ fears and insecurities. Its operatives are happiest when their opponents cease their activities – when writers stop writing, or publishers stop publishing. Unfortunately, Russia succeeds more than it fails because it is easy to misinform; as Noam Chomsky once said, people don’t know what they don’t know.

The best chance truth has is if writers and authors persist in presenting readers with facts; every now and then, we are rewarded for these efforts. Earlier this year, the Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro took Bäckman to court, after having become a target of his malice since 2014, when she started exposing the Kremlin’s social media “troll” factory.

The outcome of that case is pending. But, with any luck, Bäckman will be punished for his harassment and baseless attacks. His trial could even mark a definitive moment in the history of efforts to counter Russian propaganda, giving beleaguered writers and journalists the courage they need to stand up to Russia in ways that governments rarely have.

Source: Project Syndicate

The post Russian Propaganda’s Western Enablers appeared first on Writer Imbi Paju.

Estonians know Ilmar Taska as an award-winning short story writer and film- and television director, producer and writer. Pobeda 1946 aka The Dream Car is Taska’s debut novel, and after reading it I’d like to exclaim: it’s perfection! The work could be molded into a film and a play, and why not an opera, too. The novel will undoubtedly gain international acclaim if the author locates the right publishers – but Taska, being the Hollywood man he is, certainly has the all the necessary professionalism required The book has already been translated into Finnish by Jouko Vanhanen and the largest Finnish publisher WSOY is releasing it in May 2017. Cornelius Hasselblatt is translating it currently into German and Christopher Moseley into English.

Taska’s work contains all the archetypes, to which the Soviet era gave rise: victims, resistance fighters, collaborators, informants and torturers, survivors, silent sufferers, exiles, and the New Soviet men transplanted into occupied Estonia – the latter being a phenomenon, which the new regime used to stake out its superiority over the previous lifestyle; not to mention over people in various stages of ruin committed by that same regime. Taska gives everyone a voice in this moral grey-zone, into which the Soviet system thrust its subjects. Even so, Pobeda 1946 aka The Dream Car deftly avoids black-and-white attitudes and dispositions. The work is tactful and psychologically believable. Each character in it is the main protagonist of his or her own life through their logic and personality; through their goodness and evil.

The work’s main characters are simply referred to as “the woman”; her young son, a.k.a. “the boy”; and a mysterious figure who drives around in a brand-new Pobeda, luring people into the snares of the KGB – appropriately named only “the man”. Two other fascinating characters are woven into the story: an Estonian opera singer named Johanna, who is the woman’s half-sister; and her lover – London-based BBC Radio News anchor Alan, who is striving to get her out of the country. The alliance between the Soviet Union and the UK has chilled and Europe is being divided by the Iron Curtain. A small independent country – Estonia – is now a western Baltic province of the USSR with a large influx of immigrants. The travel ban enforced by the Soviet Union have forced Alan and and Johanna to communicate surreptitiously via Alan’s radio broadcasts. They don’t receive each other’s letters anymore because the letters are diverted to a desk of the secret police.

The work draws readers into predicaments that skillfully violate an age-old truth: never rat on your neighbor! Under the new regime, fellow citizens have become potential “enemies of the people”, whom the man must uncover and apprehend. Yet, a friendship planned between the man and the boy turns fateful for the whole triangle. The boy’s character might indirectly represent Taska himself, who was born after Stalin’s death to a family of Estonian intellectuals, whom had been deported to Siberia. In any case, the grand narrative that unfolds – one, which commences before the author’s own birth – makes itself known in his creative DNA.

Pobeda 1946 aka The Dream Car, reveals how the “sacred” notion of that new era rapidly dissipated. The materialistic Soviet selfishness that accompanied the new system diminished both empathy and a willingness to help one another. The lives of each character teeter on the brink of peril with any showing of camaraderie, while the new political atheism swiftly led to manipulation, exploitation and travel ban. Fear lurked behind everything in one of the most closed societies in human history.

The reader’s attention is riveted by scenes, in which the man’s behavior – dictated by the occupying regime’s guidelines – trivializes a value that is so vital to us all: trust. Monument to the cessation of trust (a binding element in love for one’s neighbor) is a situation, where passion erupts between two people who are ruled by a state of heightened sensitivity.

Taska has a fantastic ability to utilize all of the human senses while bringing his story to life: hearing, sight, smell, and touch. This sensory register is almost entirely absent from Estonian novels, save for poetry. Shedding light on a bygone era of turmoil, Pobeda 1946 aka The Dream Car undoubtedly speaks to us today as we steer through the world’s increasingly troubled waters.

Translated by Adam Cullen

Imbi Paju is an internationally renowned writer, journalist, and director. Her works, including the English-language documentary book and film Memories Denied, primarily focus on Estonia’s troubled 20^th-century history.

Adam Cullen is a translator of Estonian literature and poetry into English. His translations were nominated for the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s annual prize for literary translation in 2014 and 2015. 

Source: UpNorth Magazine

The post Pobeda 1946 aka The Dream Car: A Novel Of Startling Beauty appeared first on Writer Imbi Paju.

In this essay, written originally for Estonian cultural journal, Sirp, Imbi Paju looks at 2015 Noble Prize in Literature laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s work on the wartime trauma of Soviet women.

Last year the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to Belarusian author, Svetlana Alexievich, reminded us that writing is something more than just a well thought out story. It has the capability of bridging non-fiction and fiction: to create a relationship where people are presented as they are, with their virtues as well as their faults. And where simple phenomena, like the scent of a flower, clean spring water or the help of a traveling wanderer can dramatically affect their fate whether in the literary context of a dark and even event or the coming of a miracle.

This is what Alexievich’s celebrated book “The War’s Unwomanly Face” does. It’s a depressing and tragic story of Soviet women who enlisted in the Red Army during WW II. They were not forced to go to war, but rather many had to practically force their way into the army. Girls ranging in age from fourteen to twenty were ready to fight and die. About one million women fought in the Soviet Army, leaving behind their homes and their parents. In place of dresses these women put on men’s uniforms, rifle in hand and among them, snipers, tank drivers, foot soldiers, machine gunners, pilots, etc.

They left behind them concerned parents and family. No one knew how long the war would drag on. At the same time Stalin’s reign of terror continued. One could never be sure about what one could be blamed for: “Together with father they wouldn’t allow me, but I only had one thought: “Go to the Front. Go to the Front.”All of those posters that are today on display at the museum: “Mother, Your Country is Calling You.” “What Have You Done for the Front Line of Battle? Those Soviet war posters always left a strong impression on me. They were always forced on us.
And what of the songs about the war? “Now cheer up land without borders, and make a dash to the duel …” as Jevgenia Sergejevna Sapronova, who was a sergeant and airplane mechanic, recounts in her recollections to the writer.  For the mythological Soviet heroes from the Second World War or as the Soviets called it, The Great War of the Fatherland and The Holy War, there was no recognition of loss, mourning and fear. Death was just an end point on a Soviet created yardstick of life.

The way that you’ve written about the war is incorrect said a censor to Alexievich. According to the state, one should never make teary stories about history nor should a person ever be viewed as a victim in history.
“That is wrong!” said the state censors. “Such treatment of this history slanders our soldiers who freed half of Europe. We do not need such little personal histories, we need a grand history. A history of conquest. Your history does not embrace our heroes or our big ideas. Marxist and Leninist ideas.”  Aleksijevitch has chosen to look at the other side of the Soviet narrative of the war.

”Everything that we know about the war, was written from a male perspective and voice. We all impose a mental masculine appearance and a masculine role model in war; which are all encapsulated by a man’s words. But women remain silent. No one other than me has ever asked my grandmother or my mother any questions.” she writes.

How is it that during the war these women could fight for so long for the regime, which simply treated them as cannon fodder? Alexievich has searched for women who went to the front, to investigate how they really felt, how their lives were interrupted and what their lives were like during and after the war. The writer investigates the so-called Soviet “holy war” that is connected with its World War II victory, and looks deeper, behind the narrative of Soviet heroes and reaches into the souls of the women who were at the font. She begins to correspond with these women. In the beginning she talks to them about courage. Just small talk, until she arrives at a moment when her subject is able to distance herself from the prescribed ideological norm of the mythical holiness of the war, and finally connects with her true experiences. Her story continues to grow from its opening passages. “Then she is no longer, for me, a mute proletariat of history. Her soul tears her open. What then is my conflict with power? I have understood that a big ideas requires small people – a big person isn’t necissary . But I am looking for exactly that person. I’m looking for a small, big person. That person has been knocked down, minimized stomped on and hurt. She has journeyed through Stalin’s camps and betrayals and has still won. It’s an amazing wonder.”

The young men and women who fought in the Second World War were born in 1917 during the time of the Russian Revolution or after the arrival of the Bolshevik coup. The spirit of the tsarist-era generation was destroyed and many intellectuals, people of culture, and gentry escaped to the West. (They also came to Estonia but were arrested in 1940 and deported to the Gulag.) The loss of a very large army of writers and journalists caused Russia to fall behind culturally. The doors to schools and universities were wide open to indoctrinate the new generation of the revolution, Communist state ideology.

Propaganda was forced its way into homes, schools and into the Soviet collectives. Old tsarist-era libraries were destroyed and history was rewritten. One particular story involved Lenin’s wife, Nadezda Krupsakaya. Embedded in the school curriculum was Communist ideology and the militaristic-patriotic teachings which made very clear what a women’s wartime role should be. Stalin told his people that a single man’s contribution on the battlefield are insignificant, that it was the total mass of the people that mattered. Because of this, women fulfill the role of warrior while giving birth to future Soviets at the same time. And so those girls went off when duty called them, rifle in hand! Those who were captured and imprisoned by the enemy were considered traitors. Women believed that after the war everything would change and that Stalin trusted and believed in his own people. “The war hadn’t yet ended, but the echelons were already rolling towards Magadan.  Echelons full of combatants who had won the war … They arrested those who had been imprisoned and managed to stay alive  in German prisoner of war camps, those been deported to work in Germany  – and anyone else who had seen Europe and could describe what life without communism looked like”.

People were spiritually broken before the war broke out. Brainwashing was offered as a kind of consolation and was engineered to promote happiness. Even if life was miserable, one could at least die for one’s country. For the young Russian women, a life as a soldier was not a choice: they had no awareness of what their lives meant or the history they were living in. The individual person, their worries, sufferings, what they had lived through and the after effects of real trauma weren’t acknowledged int the Soviet totalitarian system nor were they allowed. Translations of Sigmund Freud’s work appeared in Tsarist Russia, which would have helped people examine their inner selves, but the Bolsheviks (as later on in Hitler’s Germany) destroyed a much of Freud’s work.

Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother (1906) had a large influence on the new state religion where one family’s life with an alcoholic father, under the reign of terror, is depicted. Novels were often used to create a model female hero character, who became the role model for thousands of soviet women – but any mention of family violence was hidden and silenced. The female hero was required to fulfill the state’s ideal of sacrifice. Through the novel “Mother” we can see how ideology uses the Russian woman as a victim.

Self-sacrifice is always connected with the ego and narcissism. In her work, Alexievich examines the lack of empathy felt by mothers towards their daughters. “I returned to my village with two state awards and medals. I was back for three days, and on the fourth day, early in the morning, when everyone else was sleeping, my mother woke me up from bed and said: “Daughter, I have prepared a bucket for you. Go away. Go away. Your two younger sisters are still growing up. Who will take them for a wife? Everyone knows that you were together with men four years.”

For the Women who went to war just about all of them experienced the same psychological loneliness. They began to live within a predefined role just to bury their pain. Faking it helps to protect a broken identity. ““How did our country receive us?” I can’t talk about it without crying … Forty years have passed but right up until now my cheeks are red. The men are quiet, but the women … they yelled at us: “Yes we know what you did! You tempted the young ones … our men..” Those women faces unspeakable insults … the Russian language is rich with such words”

“The War’s Unwomanly Face” was first published in 1985 with two million copies printed. But  ultimately and without any fanfare, Alexievich’s was only published when the Soviet Union crumbled, at a time when studying history was no longer considered a crime. That is about the same period of time it takes people to recover from their traumas – a half a century or even more. The reverberations of totalitarian history and the conditions it has created has meant that the door to understanding it remains partially closed. As such, Aleksjivitch is no hero in her country. She is regarded simply as a woman who is watering down history.

What really motivates, Aleksjevitch’s writing is a determination to help ensure that horrors of war never repeat. Sadly, we can no longer be sure of that either.

IMBI PAJU’S “SISTERS ACROSS THE GULF OF FINLAND” (with subtitles)

IMBI PAJU ON HER NOVEL “SISTERS ACROSS THE GULF OF FINLAND”

My psychological-hictorical novel, Sisters Across the Gulf of Finland, is a story about how Estonian, Finnish and other European women around the Baltic Sea networked together to prevent, with their own actions, the onset of crisis and war.

My work describes the choices of European women and sisterhood before the war, as well as the verbal and psychological conflict that the propaganda propelling from the prejudices of the Soviet Union has left for Europe as a legacy. When the war broke out between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the occupied areas succumbed to terror which destroyed the women of other Baltic countries and Poland. After the Second World War, the Estonian members of Naiskodukaitse (Women’s voluntary defence organisation) were transported to Gulag and the Finnish Lotta Svärd organisation was declared fascist and banned on orders from the Soviet Union. And an important part of the history of European women fell into oblivion.

In my book I want to show the pains left to us as an inheritance by the past. I examine the way in which we look at each other, ourselves and our history. The stories of women in my work refresh our memories and call to mind the pages of our story hidden in the silence of history.

However, my book is not solely a story about the past, but it is also a story about the necessity of dealing with the past, with the geopolitics of emotion. History is a collection of lost moments which intertwine in the subconscious, when the events of different eras are being looked at and reminisced from a different time, the present. With the film and stories one can examine lived moments and find parallels with present day. One can finally feel the joy, but also the sadness, fear and loneliness.

This type of courtship with the past is not always pleasant. It demands sensitive and critical self-analysis. But the perspective is the same and present everywhere in the world, where people have been subjected to the dark side of the human mind: threats, humiliation, and torture.

I have intentionally written this work to be therapeutic also, so that it can help restore people’s moral memory. This is essential, so that political and economic crises never again destroy our world, our country or ourselves as people.

Imbi Paju’s article was translated by Vivian Napp and edited by UpNorth.

Source: UpNorth Magazine

The post Women At the Mercy of War and Confined By The Words Of Men appeared first on Writer Imbi Paju.

Although I have often participated in other types of seminars in many other countries, this is the first time that I have participated in a seminar supported by a government and which specifically addresses memory and how it affects people’s destinies.

Why is this connection so important?

My experience has shown me that museums, universities, film and literary festivals and theatrical performances are the venues through which most people discover and explore the traumas of wartime scars and remember wartime occupations – or their escape from them. These are the places where people can talk about the pain of loss and the political violence that caused it. Often politicians are less interested in the human suffering of ordinary people or in how memories of traumatic experiences affect them. For me it is very important that presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, defense ministers, and their staffs also explore these traumas through the haunting imagery of films, books and other media.

Understandably, a nation’s destiny – and that of its citizens – is shaped by political decisions. I have written about this in my book Memories Denied – which was published in German last October. My book investigates patterns of political violence, looking at them through the lens of historical fact, psychological impact and poetic language.

I felt it was important to find an emphatic language to retell history, which is, after all, the retelling of lives lived. I wanted to bring to the forefront an often hidden side of humanity, the violence which ordinary people endure in their everyday life. Where there is a history of political violence, there are also collaborators and victims; those who resist and those who remain silent. It was important for me to explore the patterns of violence that emerge from political systems so that people could see where we’ve been and where we might end up again if we are not aware of how violent modes develop. Such violence can completely remold our attitudes, our beliefs and our morals. Behind the violence there is always fear, but films and books – and other cultural media – can help people overcome their fear.

For Estonians, overcoming their fear requires looking back more than seventy years, to September 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. The fate suffered by Poland made the Estonians very anxious. My mother was 9 years old at the time. Her father had died 4 years earlier, because his health had been ill effected during the First World War. My maternal grandmother went on to raise her children alone, while keeping a small farm. In my book Memories Denied, as well as in my documentary film of the same name, I searched for the answers to what happened to my mother in Estonia during the political turmoil of the wartime years.

She was just 18 when the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, abducted her and her twin sister, along with hundreds of other Estonians. They were transported from Estonia thousands of kilometers east, to forced labour camps in Siberia.

Years later, as I was growing up, my mother had recurring nightmares. I remember hearing her cry out for help in her sleep. The whole family knew that she was dreaming that she was back in one of Stalin’s forced labor camps, from which she could not escape.

In the morning, she would be sitting at the table drinking coffee and looking out the window, her face was like stone. Finally, when Estonia became independent in 1991, and people dared to start talking, I learned more about what had happened to her and thousands of other Estonians.

Only after I finished making my documentary about her experiences from 70 years ago, did my mother´s nightmares disappear. She also regained her sense of smell, which she had lost at the age of 18, when she was deported to a forced labor camp in Soviet Russia.

My documentary included the stories of other women also sent to Siberia. I had a very hard time finding women courageous enough to talk about the physical violence and abuse that they were subjected to during interrogations. That is why I am especially grateful to my mother and her twin sister, who sadly passed away in September, for being the key women in my documentary. They gave me a wealth of information about their traumatic experiences. It took five long years, going through a very difficult emotional process, to create the film. Along the way I learned about the practices of the Soviet secret police: they routinely stripped victims naked and deprived them of sleep – to wear them down. By the year 2000 I was piecing together the full story of the Soviet occupation of my small country and the suffering of its people.

After the occupation of Estonia, the Soviet forces sent all the members of Estonia’s Parliament, as well as its ministers and police to Siberia, along with their families. The President was imprisoned and later sent to a psychiatric hospital. All military officers were shot. A total of 30 million books were destroyed. They were replaced by new Soviet history books and Soviet propaganda. The Soviets sought to destroy memory of Estonians and their sense of pride in their independent country.

Finnish psychoanalysts said that my work could be compared to psychoanalysis. And I was glad that my work was well received by ethnic Russians living in Estonia. Their parents had been sent to Estonia after it was occupied. (Under the Soviet Union, when a person graduated from school, he/she was sent to work somewhere. There was no such thing as self-employment.)

In both of my books and documentary films, I begin by examining the 1939 crisis and how the newspapers in various countries wrote about it. War was already in the air, but it hadn’t started yet. Every European nation was seeking ways to stay clear of it. Suddenly the solidarity of the European countries became markedly weaker. International newspapers followed the struggles of the Soviet Union’s leader, Stalin, to get England and France to negotiate a tripartite agreement. At the same time, he was also negotiating with Hitler, working to divide Europe. With the signing of the secret protocol of the Molotov-Rippentrop agreement, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to the division of Europe into two spheres of influence, giving Stalin control over the Baltic countries, Finland, and half of Poland.

After signing of the agreement, Soviet airplanes began to fly over the Baltic States. Under the threat of their attacks, the Baltic republics were pressured into signing an agreement that allowed Soviet military bases to be established in their territory. Events of the last few months have brought back fearful memories to many Estonians of those events of over seventy years ago.

Edward Lucas, Senior Editor at The Economist has written: “It is fashionable in some quarters to say that Estonians are neurotic about their history. Yet the real cause of neurosis is repression.” Estonia is a small country, with just 1.3 million inhabitants. The memory of the violence inflicted upon Estonia and the other Baltic republics is still so fresh that people here are quite anxious.

They are holding their breath and gathering signatures for petitions that ask France not to sell Mistral warships to Russia. Such a sale would endanger our security because we sit right on the Russian border. Our fear is not exaggerated. During the last few months, those of us who cross the Baltic Sea, traveling between Tallinn and Helsinki, have seen Russian submarines violating Estonian and Finnish maritime boundaries and endangering civilian marine traffic.

I have had my own fears while writing my books and making my documentaries. The kind of psychoanalytic historical research that I do requires quite a bit of courage, especially if one is a woman entering the predominantly male world of research historians. I have wanted to film interviews with the faces of the women turned away in order to protect them. It is extremely difficult, for example, to examine the subject of physical and sexual violence against women: rape was often used as a tool of warfare in Estonia and the Baltic states.

In Estonia and Finland, where all of my films and books were conceived, I’m surprised that that there is not a single woman working in the domain of the traditional researcher of history. In its official history, Finland is considered clever to have fought for its independence, while Estonia succumbed to Soviet pressures. In my opinion this is a very narrow, patriarchal view, which omits a discussion of why the countries bordering the Baltic Sea failed to work together when they had a chance to prevent the devastation that the war brought upon them.

It has been my experience that, where the citizenry of a country fails to discuss serious issues and share difficult experiences, that process is left to the next generation. I was acutely aware of this phenomena in October, when I made a series of presentations in five German cities, after my book Memories Denied was published there. I have also seen this in Taiwan, in Israel and elsewhere where my film has been shown. Life experiences are of universal importance for all people. Remembering them lessens fear and creates warmth and empathy between people and between different cultures. This is precisely how we become a part of these experiences.

I would like to recall what French-Jewish philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “No matter whether people have done good or evil, they want good done to them. This hope is holy within us.”

Keeping memory alive is only of use if it prevents the ignition of new wars. War is never a measure of life, but LIFE is a measure of life.

Source: UpNorth Magazine

The post Women’s Faces: Symbols of Violence Denied and Courage Remembered appeared first on Writer Imbi Paju.