“Abandon all hope ye who enter here”. This phrase from Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” could easily have been inscribed on the gates of the many so-called corrective labor colonies of the former Soviet Union, often referred to colloquially to this day as the Gulag prison system of the USSR. The highly unpleasant character of this large network of scattered prison facilities hasn’t changed all that much since its creation in the 17th century by the Russia Tsars as the Katorga camps, located largely in the then newly conquered and sparsely populated areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East. These camps or “colonies” continue to operate in the present day in the Russian Federation. It is a dank and overcrowded realm removed from the world outside, where thousands upon thousands of the citizens of Soviet-annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were unjustly imprisoned after WW II, alongside great numbers of other men and women from all over the many ethnically varied constituent parts of the then-communist Russian Empire. Although capitalism of a twisted sort has now replaced outright Soviet style communism in the Russian Federation, the camps themselves remain.
Among the unfortunate ordinary deportees (folks who simply seemed suspect to the Stalinist authorities), there was a smaller and particularly determined subset of clearly political prisoners from the so-called Pribaltika area, the members of which ended up – after Khrushchev’s thaw – bearing particularly long and grueling sentences within the “corrective” colonies of the East. In earlier times, they might easily have simply been executed. Few among them knew these grim institutions better than Mart Niklus, an Estonian who recently breathed his last (on Christmas Day) at a care facility in southern Estonia. I knew him well.
Pribaltika is a Russian-language term, which means “by the Baltic Sea“, but is reserved only for the three Baltic countries, and not other lands on the littorals of the Baltic Sea such as Denmark or Germany. The continued use of the Pribaltika phrase by some Russian public figures stems from the desire to continue to treat the Baltic nations as part of the so-called “Russian sphere of influence”, which the three managed to cheekily abscond from some 34 years ago (the first time they managed to do so was roughly a century ago).
During recent years, Mr. Niklus had been the senior member of the now dwindling community of Estonia’s hard core political prisoners who were disappeared into the vast network of those bleak, alien and cruel camps by the secret police of the Soviet Union during and after WW II.
Educated to be an ornithologist, Niklus would eventually be revealed as the years passed to be a great son of a small nation.
He was born in 1934 in the prewar Republic of Estonia. Mart Niklus was until his recent death among the relatively few people still around who have childhood memories of an independent country that was for all intents and purposes wiped off the map of Europe after Adolf Hitler, Josif Stalin and also the Japanese had set off the Second World War.
The few westerners who visited the independent Estonia of Niklus’ earliest years described its farm country as bucolic, and the ancient old town and spires of the country’s capital as enchanting. All of this contented landscape (visually roughly comparable to that of Denmark or Switzerland) would to soon be disfigured by Allied carpet bombing, modern warfare and the hurried establishment – after Estonia’s forcible incorporation into the USSR – of tens and tens of crudely built Soviet collective farms and cheaply constructed tenement blocks in the cities.
Mart Niklus was still in his early 20s when the Soviet occupation regime sentenced him to eight years in the camps of the Gulag archipelago for the first time in 1958. He had been preceded in Siberia some 20 years earlier by hundreds of Estonian statesmen and senior officers of the country’s armed forces, along with thousands of ordinary citizens, and two huge waves of crudely carried out deportations from the annexed Baltic lands that followed in the forties.
The time of Niklus’ first imprisonment coincides with the period when hunter-killer units of the Soviet Army, the paramilitary MVD sent from Russia, and partially locally recruited “destroyer battalions” had, with great effort, finally managed to kill or imprison almost all of the many thousand armed members of Estonia’s post-war resistance movement.
As the sixties arrived, more than a decade after the annexation of the Baltic states, a large number of Estonians began to join the collaborationist Estonian Communist Party. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. But back in the fifties, even after Stalin’s death, the foreign regime that had “liberated” Estonia was still busy with mopping-up operations, which involved, among other things, the arrest and imprisonment of rosy-cheeked members of defiant youth groups and university students. Niklus’ contemporary and fellow political prisoner Enn Tarto – the other best-known figure among Estonia’s prisoners of conscience during the 20th century – was at the forefront of this brotherhood and sisterhood of young rebels in November of 1956, when he and his patriot friends had distributed leaflets in support of the Hungarian revolution.
Into the Maw of a Cruel and Surreal System
The resistance activities of Niklus, Tarto and a number of their companions resulted in their being sent deep into the Soviet penal system, which was (and is to this day) a brutal realm in which prisoners of conscience are even now denied any protection from malevolent prison guards and many criminal prisoners. This was a system that preyed by design upon the weak, but weak is not a phrase you’d apply to Niklus or Tarto. Back in the day, Finns and Estonians were known for their stoic quiet stubbornness, perhaps even to this day. Niklus never gave an inch before the local collaborationist prosecutors and judges of the kangaroo courts of Estonia’s huge Eastern neighbor. This Estonian group, along with political prisoners from the other parts of the Baltic area, self-identified as freedom fighters and fighters for the rule of law and dignity, which came at a grievously heavy price, meaning a total of some 17 years in the camps for Niklus, many of which he spent in the most infamous of the colonies.
The men and women of this Gandhi-like unarmed resistance also had to suffer being maligned and lampooned by the massive state-run propaganda organs of sovietized Estonia. During the periods when they were back home and not in prison, they were avoided by some people concerned for their own safety. The more comfortable forms of employment weren’t easy to come by for political ex-cons.
During more than half a century of Soviet Russian occupation, many Estonians bent with the wind, having been forced to live with and within the system. Many of these ordinary folks can’t really be blamed, as year after year passed. While a part of the Estonian population collaborated willingly and others had their arms twisted into cooperating with the regime, Niklus remained a contrarian for as long as he lived. We can find his signature on any number of letters of protest and petitions submitted to the Soviet authorities.
The Baltic Appeal helped to set in Motion the Events that Led to the Eventual Restoration of the Independence of the three Baltic States
If there is one action that Niklus is particularly known for, along with a number of fellow stalwarts from all three Baltic countries, it was the inception, signing (at his home in the university town of Tartu) and the subsequent successful distribution at the end of summer in 1979 of the Baltic Appeal. This was a bold letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the leaders of the Soviet Union, East and West Germany, and the signatories of the Atlantic Charter by 45 Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian citizens. The document was sent abroad on August 23 of 1979. on the 40th anniversary of the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (MRP), which had divided Europe up between Hitler and Stalin.
The Baltic Appeal demanded public disclosure of the Pact and its secret protocols, annulment of the MRP, and restoration of the independence of the Baltic states.
The appeal received a certain amount of attention in the world press, and on January 13, 1983, the European Parliament passed a resolution in support of its demands.
If You’re a Journalist long Enough, you Eventually end up Kind of Sharing the Prison Cells of the Political Prisoners
How do I know all of this stuff? For a dozen years, mostly during the eighties, I worked for the Estonian Service of the now embattled American-funded Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (RFE-RL) international broadcasting organization. One of the beats assigned to me was the abuse of human rights in the USSR, and particularly in the three occupied Baltic States. I’ve never lost touch with the topic afterwards either.
My comfortable life as a journalist hasn’t compared one iota to the stone-cold hard time that the prisoners of conscience of the many nations of the Russian Empire spent at hard labor and in the dismal confines of their barracks and prison cells, but what happens if you report for years on these things is that over time you get mentally, emotionally and even spiritually drawn into the privations suffered by the people you’re researching and writing about. Drawn into the hunger, the cold, the interrogations, the abuse, and the entire spectrum of dreadful conditions they endured. And it only gets worse. Niklus, for example, was confined to some of the particularly notorious “special regime” camps, such as Perm-36 near the Ural Mountains. Eventually one ends up knowing about and vicariously thinking a lot about the beatings, the interrogations, the transport of prisoners in unheated freight cars, the forced labor, the separation and destruction of families, the suffering of family members, and the early and unnecessary deaths. You learn about the way the system works, and the details of the authoritarian Soviet Criminal Code, and the corridors and the stench and the tuberculosis prevalent in the system you’re studying and reporting on. About the scarcity of fresh air and the poor food and the near-absence of sunlight. Of loneliness and hardship. About a hell on earth, as in earlier times elsewhere, as described by Victor Dumas in “Les Miserables”. It makes you think deeply about the limits of human endurance and the struggle to remain sane and human under such conditions. You end up getting into the heads of the prisoners of conscience, and you track the developments in their lives as occasional information trickles out.
How did I and my colleagues learn about these things? Mostly through the specialist media, consisting of reports by research institutes, the newsletters and little newspapers of various Soviet nationality groups in exile, and many odds and ends about the USSR gathered from here and there by the scholar-researchers working in the rooms next to ours at RFE-RL. One would pore through underground news items that had been smuggled out of occupied Estonia. One invaluable source for my particular language service was a censorship-free self-published (samizdat) periodical publication known as “Additions to the Free Spread of Thoughts and News in Estonia”. Issues of this underground journal were laboriously and conspiratively disseminated in Estonia using typewriters and multiple layers of carbon paper. After being photographed, pictures of these pages would be smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain. I’d then go into the broadcast studio of RFE-RL, then located in Munich, and read these items and articles verbatim on the air, which ensured (I was by far not the only person at Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty and at other Western broadcasters doing this) that news items and features such as these finally reached many listeners in the countries that were then referred to by people in various exile communities as “captive nations”. This work would eventually also bring me and my colleagues into personal contact with many of the towering figures of the resistance movements of Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, and places even further afield, such as Petro Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, and later on with Vytautas Landsbergis and even the Dalai Lama.
I Never use the word Dissident to Characterize the Political Prisoners of the Baltic Countries Removed onto the Territory of the USSR
It’s important to choose words carefully, as we’ve been taught by writers such as George Orwell and the late British critic John Carey. Thus I always avoid the use of the phrase “dissident” when referring to the likes of Mart Niklus, the late Latvian prisoner of conscience Gunnars Astra, and the Lithuanian Tomas Venclova.
Russia herself does of course have dissidents, meaning persons who wish or have wished to change their own homeland and their own society for the better from within. These are protestors and opposition members such as the late Boris Nemtsov, and even the anti-war singer and Russian pop icon Alla Pugacheva.
Baltic political prisoners inevitably ended up being in close contact with famous and also more obscure Russian dissidents, and they were kindred spirits in many respects. Witness for example the cooperation between the imprisoned Estonian statesman Arnold Susi and his family and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, particularly when it came to hiding the original manuscripts of the “Gulag Archipelago”.
Most native residents of the Baltic States would enthusiastically approve of a return to democracy and cooler-headed normalcy in Russia, but the fact of the matter is that all Mart Niklus and his band of imprisoned Baltic brothers and sisters were ultimately interested in (other than freedom, plain and simple) was just one thing. “Russia: Get out of the Baltic States”, as said the bumper sticker widely distributed by Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in exile in the US prior to the tumultuous events of the early nineties. All of this did in fact culminate in active-duty members of the Soviet Armed Forces actually being recalled to Russia from the Baltic States, East Germany and other areas a few years before the end of the millennium.
Redemption, or Back to Being Free Again
During the heady later years of perestroika, the KGB tried to coerce many political prisoners into signing agreements that would obligate them to begin cooperating with the secret police, if they desired an early release from captivity. Some signed these papers, while others didn’t. The exact details may never be known to the general public. Considering Niklus’ obstinacy and judging by his later activities as well, it seems extremely likely that he was among those who didn’t sign, even though he’d been held during the eighties at the particularly notorious Perm-36 “special regime” camp.
One way or another, Mart Niklus – finally released from prison – with his hair still shorn very short and in his prison uniform, arrived by train via Moscow to his home town of Tartu in Estonia on July 13, 1988, where he was jubilantly greeted at the station by his relatives, supporters, and friends.
One of the high points of my career was managing to reach the freshly arrived Niklus by telephone from Munich – telephone calls to the far side of the Iron Curtain being a rare occurrence back then – and conducting an interview with him. He was exuberant, and so was I. Niklus’ face was beaming with joy on that day, as can be seen on old photographs, and this was followed by a jubilant public reception for him in Estonia’s capital city of Tallinn.
There are many more tales that might deserve telling in this eulogy, such as the time during which Niklus and the essentially martyred Estonian professor of chemistry Jüri Kukk were both tried in Tartu in early 1980, ending in the death of Kukk at the hands of his captors while on hunger strike just weeks after his sentencing.
Niklus lived to tell these stories, which he did while on tour in Western Europe and North America, to include a stop at Ronald Reagan’s White House.
Niklus was an intellectual who spoke remarkably good English, in addition to Russian, German, Swedish and French. His English was so good that during his imprisonment, he surreptitiously translated Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” into Estonian, among other works, to include the Universal UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Estonian got her national independence back. I moved to the country of my parents, and Mart and I became friends. Both of us were members of the Congress of Estonia, and Niklus later also took his seat for a spell in the Riigikogu – Estonia’s parliament.
Even so: not Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows Everywhere for Niklus and his band of Brothers and Sisters
Mart Niklus was accorded several high state honors, and towards the end of his life, also received a pension supplement paid not by his Soviet tormentors, but by the taxpayers of Estonia.
Niklus and many allies of his were not satisfied with the way that Estonia was evolving after the country regained its independence in 1991. Many of the things he hoped for never materialized, such as a broad-based Nuremberg-like set of trials that would have brought communist bad guys to justice. Neither has Estonia herself as a restored political entity tackled this task seriously. He and the many other victims of the Soviet Russian system hoped that at least the local perpetrators of injustice would be brought to trial, but in large part, that hasn’t happened either. Some of Niklus’ tormentors are still alive and running around scot-free, if I do not err.
Niklus believed it to be important that at least some of the hundreds of thousands of the sometimes belligerent Russians settled in Estonia during the occupation period (in contravention of international law and the laws of the Republic) return to Russia on their own, or failing that, that formal decolonization of Estonia should take place. Clearly he foresaw the dangers inherent in what has happened in Ukraine’s Donbas area in recent years.
Niklus and his relatively small group of political allies wanted lustration to be carried out. Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe parlance means that public officials or candidates for public office should have their pasts vetted for evidence of collaboration with the secret services and the militia (police) of the communist regime, not to mention the barring and outright removal in Estonia’s case from office of high-ranking members of the Soviet nomenclature. While forms of lustration were indeed employed in various parts of post-communist Europe (generally half-heartedly), it can’t be said that Estonia belongs to the countries where this was done with any degree of logical, legal or moral rigor. Neither the satraps, executioners, jailers nor the petty tyrants of the communist bloc have been brought to justice in Estonia.
Niklus advocated for the desovietization of Estonia, but the fifty-plus years of communist Russian occupation had taken its toll. Among other things, the USSR literally destroyed huge numbers of its opponents, while tens of thousands of Estonians managed to also escape its clutches, finding refuge in Western countries. In other words, an entire important segment of Estonia’s population had been physically eliminated or forced to take flight. This is the segment in Estonia proper that could and would have supported Niklus more vocally in his quests, had they been spared.
Among older Estonians who remained, many now still yearn for what they perceive as “the good old times” of the Soviet era, a time when many of the men and women in the street pretended to work, and the regime pretended to pay them a decent wage. Thus lots of these older folks – nostalgic for some curious reason for the communist times they’d grown used to – would probably be members of the German AfD (the Alternative for Germany political party) if they’d been born in East Germany, instead of Estonia. “Ossies” (easterners) then, as they say about this particular cohort in Germany.
During the darkest years in Mart’s life, it was primarily the Estonian communities in various countries abroad who were able to use their limited political clout to demand his release from Soviet thrall as a political prisoner. As the restoration of independence neared in the late eighties, protestors appeared on Estonia’s streets with placards too, demanding the release of Mart Niklus and his fellow prisoners of conscience.
Kind of an Outsider until his End
It can’t be said that the general public of Estonia has yet to whole-heartedly embrace what Niklus and his fellow freedom fighters struggled and stood for, which is both a paradox and a national tragedy. To a substantial degree, Mart Niklus (who was never one to compromise, or known to have had pandering tendencies) remained an outsider in Estonian society. Many tries to have him presented with the title of Honorary Citizen of the City of Tartu went unheeded.
Me, I think the explanation for this might be fairly simple. Estonians are a pragmatic people, and Niklus represents to many of them someone who just rocked the boat too much. Someone who curiously went and “stuck his head into the fire”, as the Estonian saying goes.
The Gulag Continues to Grind on
The dismaying thing about all of this is that by now, it’s clear that in next-door Russia, the practices and tendencies described here may just turn out to be a never-ending story.
Vladimir Putin likes to talk about the purported root causes of things, but in reality the root cause of what endangers Europe today and Central and Eastern Europe in particular is Russian chauvinism and the long-existent Russian bent for expansionism. The last countries of Western Europe got out of the business of gunboat diplomacy and the maintenance of colonies on foreign soil more than a half a century ago. The Kremlin, on the other hand, keeps lusting for more land and domination on its periphery, even though Russia in her territorial hugeness happens to be one of the least densely populated countries in the entire world.
The USSR appeared for a while to have fallen apart some 35 years ago, but that turns out to have been more of a temporary contraction and even an optical illusion of sorts.
From 1985 on (the approximate beginning of perestroika) until 2007, when Vladimir Putin gave his famous accusatory speech in Munich, lots of people believed that the West had triumphally reached the “end of history” and that the so-called peace dividend might last forever. Robert Gates of the US, for example, felt: “The ideas of freedom and human rights had proved their appeal and their primacy over the powers of oppression and lack of freedom.” In reality, all of this misplaced optimism turned out to merely be a reprieve.
Skeptics understood early on that the replacement of the Communist Party in the Russian Federation by veterans of the KGB in 2000 was a really bad sign. During the final phase of his life, Mart Niklus was among those who recognized what was actually coming.
The Russian Empire is a construct that has lasted for at least five centuries, and the communist phase of it’s history called the USSR was just a peculiar and temporary detour of sorts. A mere blip. Actually, the more that things change in that corner of the world, the more they remain the same. Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported recently that tanks as ornaments on Russian Christmas trees are a common sight.
In order to better understand the gruesome continuity of all of this, one need not look beyond what’s presently being done to Ukrainian prisoners – both military and civilian – in various Russian penitentiaries. “Russian authorities have subjected Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian captives to torture, prolonged incommunicado detention, enforced disappearance and other inhumane treatment, which amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”, says Amnesty International, as corroborated by many other reports and human rights organizations.
Ukrainians are held incommunicado, forcibly disappeared and tortured in Russian captivity. Some POWs are simply killed with impunity. Accounts of Ukrainians who have been brought to the notorious Taganrog SIZO-2 torture facility near the Ukrainian border detail how new arrivals are forced to run a gauntlet where one is beaten to a pulp. When you regain consciousness on the floor of your cell, you piss blood.
Small wonder then that many Estonians, still far for the moment from the din of the cannons and the incessant buzz of the weaponized drones are uneasy, if not outright frightened. The Damocles sword of possible Russian return hangs threateningly over our heads.
The root cause of the present disequilibrium in Europe and tension on Russia’s borders lies not in Putin’s suggestion that Mother Russia is supposedly in mortal danger from outside, but rather in the fact that the Kremlin itself is morally sly and disingenuous, pathologically belligerent, and unrepentant. In order for peace and normalcy to arrive, something has to give sooner or later.
One could possibly hammer out something that looks like a peace accord with Ukraine, quite possibly at the expense of the victim, but the underlying irritant will remain, and the likelihood that a lasting and soothing peace will then arrive on Europe’s doorstep isn’t something that I’d place a wager on.
Color me simplistic, for the world is not fully black and white, but I agree with the late Ronald Reagan and what he said about the Evil Empire. Mart Niklus was one of the good guys – one of the cowboys with the white hats. He stood not only for the rights of the small Estonian nation, trampled badly underfoot, but also for the values of the Western world more broadly.
A True Historical Reckoning still waits in the Eaves
A lot remains to be done when it comes to coming to terms with a reasonably honest narrative of modern Russia and its victims.
I like to think that a generation of young Estonian historians has already been born or will be born who will recognize Niklus and his Baltic prisoner of conscience friends as who they really were, meaning freedom fighters, who deserve to broadly be recognized as such throughout the classrooms and public spaces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Until then, one can simply say “Go with God, Mart Niklus”.
Jüri Estam
Jüri Estam is a retired journalist who grew to adulthood in the communities of Estonians in exile in several Western countries, and then went to live to the country of his parents nearly 35 years ago, meaning the country he should have been able to grow up in, if things had gone otherwise. He’s now working on the manuscripts of more than one future book.
In Memory of the Former Political Prisoner Mart Niklus, Viewed Through the Hopes and Fears of Modern-Day Central and Eastern Europe