Tallinn in the 60s was quite a different city
Perhaps the readers of Vaba Eesti Sõna might be interested in this brief reminiscence of Tallinn in the 1960s.
I was then serving as an officer of the American embassy in Moscow. Soviet travel restrictions on foreigners were severe, but my colleagues and I traveled all we could, trying to get a better understanding of what was going on in the USSR, than we could glean from the lying Soviet media.
Tallinn was the only place in Estonia that we were permitted to visit, and only by overnight train from Leningrad. I went to Leningrad and onward to Tallinn several times. Sometimes, when we visited cities elsewhere in the USSR, the Intourist agency would arrange a visit to a local branch of the Soviet writers’ union, or to a university or institute. Once, when I traveled to Siberia with a colleague from the Australian embassy, we were even able to tour the great hydroelectric station at Bratsk. But I do not recall ever being able to visit any sort of institution in Talllinn other than a theater or museum—or a café. In Moscow there was no such thing as a café, but in Tallinn there was. I would walk into a Tallinn café and could almost imagine being in Helsinki or Vienna.
In the USSR it was acceptable to join strangers at a table in a restaurant—or a Tallinn café. If I saw a table occupied by a single Estonian I would join him or her. Of course I would tell my tablemate that I was an American diplomat and was certainly being followed by the KGB. No matter; within several minutes the Estonian would fill my ears with hatred for the Soviet regime and what crimes it had committed in Estonia. Once I encountered in Tallinn a former professor of mine from Dartmouth College, a Bulgarian American astronomer named George Dimitroff who was spending a sabbatical leave visiting Soviet observatories. Despite the Soviet travel restrictions he had been able to visit the observatory in Tartu, and he told me of the strong nationalist sentiments that were expressed to him by his counterparts at the Tartu university.
In Moscow, I got to know a number of Soviet writers, among them the late Vasily Aksyonov, the genuinely most popular younger novelist. One of his novels described young Soviet hipsters who found in Estonia a (relative) freedom they had not known in Russia. (Aksyonov’s wife was able to visit Czechoslovakia on an Intourist tour, and she told my wife and me on her return to Moscow what a marvelous place Prague was: “Almost like Europe, even better than Tallinn!”)
I cannot recall in detail what our Moscow embassy reported to Washington in the 1960s about the situation in the Baltic republics. We could not foresee the breakup of the USSR. It was clear that the Soviet economic system was terribly inefficient, but the Soviet police system was quite efficient and would presumably be able to control the situation for the foreseeable future. It was also clear to us that Estonian nationalism remained strong. What seemed to me the greatest long-term threat for the Estonian nation was the low birth rate, coupled with the influx of Russians.
I have never returned to Estonia– I ended my career as ambassador to Somalia – but I enjoy reading of Estonia’s progress.
Peter Bridges
