Yesterday Tallinn, today Gori, tomorrow... ?

The other day, SVT Rapport showed some pictures which really strongly affected me. When discussing the war in Georgia, they showed pictures from the "liberation" of Tallinn or sometime later when Soviet tanks were rolling on the streets of Tallinn. In a street I know, a couple of hundred meters from my home, along Pronski street, by the crossing of Liivalaia and Tartu Mantee, where Stockmann is today to be precise.


Let's not forget that until Russia invaded Georgia, except for the problems of armed conflicts with rebels in South-Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia was a civilized and democratic place with friends and connections throughout Europe. Heck, my favorite restaurant is the Georgian "Embassy" in Tartu, Georgians have struggled and achieved independence from the Soviets like the Estonians did and now they are pleading to the international community to help them maintain their freedom from opression in their own homes and cities!

Regardless of what the Russian regime claims, it should be beyond clear to any westener that the Neo-Soviet Putin is protecting the South-Ossetian and Abkhazian Russian citizens almost exactly like Hitler protected the Czech Sudet Germans. We don't want Russia to come protect anyone here...

PS. We don't however, mind being protected by the space robots :-)

(Update: It seems those particular pictures were from the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt (that's good reading by the way, as is that of Estonian SSR) in which tanks rolled into every capital in the union to gain control over TV towers and similar. In Estonia they were stopped by unarmed masses by the Tallinna teletorn since fortunately, international media were already present to prevent a massacre)

R.I.P. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918 - 2008 (August 3, aged 89)

This last Sunday, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian: Алекса́ндр Солжени́цын) a true hero of the Soviet people, passed away from a heart attack (DN writes about it here, SVT Rapport obituary here).

While serving in the Soviet Red Army Solzhenitsyn was in a kafkaesque fashion convicted to an eight-year labour camp prison term for making some joking comments about the communist leaders in a private letter to a friend. After serving that term, he still had to suffer an "internal exile" which among other things meant he just barely could get his lifethreatening cancer treated.

During his internal exile after the prison term, with risk for his own life, Solzhenitsyn wrote and managed to smuggle his monumental work The Gulag Archipelago (Russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ) out of the Soviet Union. For this he was awarded with the 1970 Nobel prize in literature.

"The Gulag Archipelago" describes the structure of, and life in the Soviet prison system. The Gulag is the name of the prison system as such, forming an "archipelago" with it's "islands" present throughout Soviet cities and in the wilderness in the form of detention prisons, transit prisons and labor camps. The book is so detailed that the cruelty of the system becomes almost surreal and humorous as Solzhenitsyn paints an impressive picture of the thoughts, characteristics and actions of these people who in any other situation would be considered innocent but in the Soviets were prisoners.

It is said to have been Solzhenitsyn's biggest dream to get to return to his beloved Russia as a free man, and so now he finally did. He was particilarly respected by the Swedish people because of how he with a gentle hand enlightened us of the scale of a genocide well comparable to the holocaust.

(Update: Since this is a blog and not some official obituary, I'll allow myself to mention another Estonian hero in the struggle for freedom from the Soviets. Andres Küng (his old homepage here) was a Swedish-Estonian journalist, writer, politician and entrepreneur who wrote numerous books about the nation, being exiled from his parents' Estonia up until just before it gained independence. I have been reading his book Estonia Awakens (the book seems only available in Swedish translation) and it is amazing to read Estonian history told "from the middle" so to say (the book is published in -88). Because, as is said in The Black Swan, history is written going backwards)

(Update 2: Apologies for that my bio of Solzhenitsyn may be both incomplete and erroneous, I'm simply no expert. Also it's worth reading La Russophobe that writes, next to a picture of Solzhenitsyn shaking hand with "president" Putin:

As Viktor Sonkin, a literature columnist for The Moscow Times Context section and a teacher of cultural studies at Moscow State University, wrote in his column: "Solzhenitsyn understood Western society only superficially, and many alarming things he said about it were simply not correct. Rejecting the 'bad totalitarianism' of the Soviet type, Solzhenitsyn was promoting a kind of 'good totalitarianism,' as if there were such a thing in the world."

Solzhenitsyn may have been a hero, but lately he seems to have been generally considered unfit by many. Maybe not so strange considering the experiences he suffered)