Among the Russians by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9780330339506
Publisher: Picador
Published: 1983-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5. On The Baltic

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 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. The clouds which had been butting along the skyline all morning loosened and grew dark towards noon. At Narva, whose castles confront each other half-ruined over the fast-flowing Narova river, I crossed the boundary into the Soviet republic of Estonia, while to the north the Baltic Sea showed shipless and sombre in the rain.

I picked up a hitch-hiking student: a haggard Estonian. He lifted his booted feet gingerly onto the mattress which replaced my passenger-seat, and ran nervous fingers through a thicket of dripping blond hair. Such moments were perfect for honesty. Alone in a British car, met by chance and not even knowing one another’s names, we talked without fear. He was reading archaeology at Estonia’s Tartu University. Every student, he said—almost every Estonian—loathed the Russians. Official protestations of brotherhood with the Soviet Union were a degrading farce. The trouble was that the population growth of the Estonians and Latvians was virtually zero, while the Russians were pouring into their cities to take up jobs in industry. In the Estonian capital of Tallinn (we were already in sight of it) the Russians almost outnumbered the natives; in the Latvian capital of Riga they already did. The republics had the highest standard of living in the Soviet Union, he said, but their people were headed for extinction.

He clasped my shoulder with a fierce intimacy before parting. Little Estonia was lovelier than all Russia, he said. Had I liked Leningrad—that cold classicism? Well, Tallinn was more beautiful, more human. He said an Estonian goodbye—Hääd aega (it sounded defiantly Scandinavian)—and walked away through the thinning rain.

No wonder nationalism is the Kremlin’s nightmare. The Baltic population may be stable, but that of the Moslem republics is increasing at five times the Russian average and within twenty years may have swollen to a third of the young populace. National consciousness has been fostered, not dimmed, by evolving education, and now matches Russian patriotism with thwarted feelings all around it. Within a few years the ethnic Russians—already only fifty-two per cent of the total populace—will be a minority in their own empire. Moscow may conceive the federal states as in transition towards a society of Homo Sovieticus—and Russians occupy powerful, quasi-independent positions in the Party branches of every republic—but the republics themselves show every sign of wanting to freeze or elevate their status into greater autonomy.

In the campsite at Tallinn I found many Estonians from Sweden or Finland, where they or their parents had fled in 1944 before the fleeting independence of the Baltic states was strangled by Stalin. They returned to Estonia on holiday now. Their big cars gleamed among the camping huts; their transistors roared; their wives and children were bright in Scandinavian cottons. Released from the restrictive Finnish drinking laws, they celebrated into the night in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.