History using in the bilateral relations

Looking at Russia-Estonia bilateral relations and the political use of history, one cannot start before examining the Soviet occupations in Estonia and how the two parties see that history.

Developments such as the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the re-emergence there of pre-Communist and pre-Soviet conflicts, as shown by Karlsson (n.d.), have certainly stimulated historical consciousness since 1990. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Russian population faced a comprehensive identity crisis (Bagger, 2007, p. 109) and like Estonia, also began searching for its identity and roots. In the public domain the crisis gave rise to a lively debate that to a large degree revolved around the nation’s past which according to Scherrer (as cited in Bagger, 2007) was a wave of nostalgia, called “the longing for history” and that there was actually talk of a “worship” of the past. Additionally, Scherrer also found that Putin, more clearly than Yeltsin, later stressed the tradition of the powerful state, and that he had abandoned his predecessor’s anti-communist position. The Soviet national anthem had been reintroduced with a new text, and the army’s banner was once again red. Instead of allowing the Soviet period to be a culde-sac leading away from the main road of Russian history Putin had sought to place this period within a power-political continuum, focusing on its positive aspects – first and foremost the heroic achievements of “the Great Patriotic War” (p. 115).

It is a well known fact that Estonia has a totally different understanding of the Soviet era and has difficulties finding something positive about this time. While Estonia sees that the Soviet Union occupied and forcibly annexed Estonia,...

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... and therefore, although the boarder treaty is signed, Russia refuses to ratify it. One of the later issues involves the Russian-German gas pipeline project, which Estonian officials, together with their Lithuanian counterparts, have criticized, and Poles initially even called it a new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Latvian criticism in this case has been muted (p. 50). In addition, during the 20-years of regained independence, there hasn’t been a clear change in the coalition and opposition parties in Estonia. The center right parties have always been in power with the only exception in 1995. Likewise, the annual commemoration of the Estonian soldiers, who fought in the German army during WWII, by Estonian nationalist, also the citizenship policy and the recent school reform concerning Russian minorities, continue to preserve tensions between Russia-Estonia relations.