David and Goliath, or How Little Estonia Brought Down the Empire
1975 – The Soviet Union signs the final act of the Helsinki conference on security and co-operation, undertaking formally to respect human rights. Dissident movements in the USSR spring up.
December 1986 – Mikhail Gorbachev frees Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel peace prize winner and the most famous of dissidents, from house arrest; Estonian dissidents are also freed from prison.
23 August 1987 – At the demonstration in Hirvepark, Tallinn, people demand from Soviet authorities that they acknowledge the existence of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
At what point did Communism begin to crack? In history dates of origin are always problematic. One might even say that, because Marxism-Leninism was a false doctrine, communist systems were doomed from the moment of their inception. But how did these repressive and inhumane regimes survive for forty years in Europe and even seventy years in the Soviet Union?
The long life of these regimes was guaranteed not by the support of the people but by the all-powerful internal security apparatus (KGB), directly controlled by the communist party and its small leadership. Self-initiative of the people had been suppressed everywhere in the Eastern Bloc: autonomous associations, spontaneous gatherings, independent self-expression were forbidden. As a result, the citizen was alone and defenceless against the regime. These are the methods of all dictatorships.
Just as all other dictatorships, communist regimes lived on violence. The Soviet ideology preached openly about the dictatorship of the proletariat (the working class) and about revolutionary terror. During Joseph Stalin's reign the terror grew into mass murder. But after Stalin's death, when Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Juri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko held the power, violence was directed only against the most dangerous enemies. Then, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the programme of creating a “Socialism with a human face”, Communism without violence. But this was not possible!
The first to exploit the possibilities opened up by the languishing of terror were the dissidents. The crucial role of these determined opponents of the regime was to wake and unite people in an early stage of the revolution. The anti-communist struggle was not led by “internal subversives” - young careerists who had joined the Party – but by dissidents. Interestingly, there was nothing very special about the dissidents, except for the fact that contrary to their fellow citizens they had almost nothing to lose. Most of the dissidents had been detained in prison for many years, lost their education and career. This is why they risked more in defying the KGB. At the same time their only motivation was a clean conscience and remaining faithful to their beliefs. But in a society, in which most of the people were forced to compromise with their conscience, living in truth was a privilege.
The Estonian dissidents came out in force on 23 August 1987. At a protest in Hirvepark they courageously recalled the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded in 1939 between the USSR and Nazi Germany, and demanded the disclosure of the secret protocols. Moscow had denied the existence of these protocols for decades, because to acknowledge them would have meant recognising the illegality of Stalin's occupation of the Baltic States. The slogans were bold for the time. Hirvepark set things moving. After that there came the plan to turn the Estonian SSR into an independent economic unit, the first political party was created, etc.
Estonians like to think that they destroyed the Soviet empire, that little David killed the giant Goliath. Indeed, Estonia was an important catalyst in the collapse of the USSR, but we cannot neglect the Latvians and the Lithuanians. The Latvian dissidents were the ones who organised the first anti-communist demonstration, when they commemorated the victims of the Soviet deportation of 1941, on 14 June 1987.