Back in the USSR

BACK IN THE USSR

Ajit Chaudhuri – May 2013


The closest I had been to the erstwhile USSR was when working in northern Afghanistan in the provinces bordering Tajikistan, and while visiting northern Norway, near the Koyla Peninsula in Russia, in 2001. This changed in April 2013, when I took the opportunities afforded by an academic conference in Germany, some free time, and the Schengen Agreement (which enables a visa for one European country to allow for travel in others) to visit Estonia.

Estonia is the northern-most of the three countries (that include Lithuania and Latvia, to its south) that line the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea. It is also bordered by Russia in the east, where the border is about 100 km from the city of St. Petersburg, and by Finland a short distance away across the sea. Estonia has not seen much time as an independent state – it was part of the Danish and Swedish empires before being ceded to the Tsar in the 18th century, it obtained freedom in 1918 and kept it until first Stalin walked in (1940), then the Nazis walked in (1941) and then the Russians walked in again (1944) to make it one of the Soviet Union’s smallest member states. It obtained independence again in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR, and has subsequently gained admittance into NATO, the European Community and the European Monetary Union. It has a population of 1.3 million staying in a country larger than Netherlands (which has more than ten times the population), and its capital Tallinn, according to signs in the city, was first put on to the map of the world in the year 1175 by the Arab cartographer Al-Idrisi.

Had I planned my trip better, I would have travelled to Germany on Finnair with a stopover at Helsinki, and done the 60 kilometres to Tallinn across the Gulf of Finland on a hovercraft. The other alternative was getting into a bus in Cologne and doing the journey along the route taken by the German advance towards Leningrad in 1941; across Germany (via Berlin), Poland (via Poznan), Latvia (via Riga) and a small part of Lithuania – about 34 hours in a bus around the Baltic Sea each way. Instead, I chose a cheap-ish but bizarre flight sequence – Cologne north to Hamburg (60 minutes), Hamburg south to Frankfurt (70 minutes), and then Frankfurt northeast to Tallinn (135 minutes) – and back in the same sequence in reverse, with lots of time in Lufthansa lounges in between flights. Had I opted for what I actually wanted, i.e. only Frankfurt-Tallinn-Frankfurt, it would have cost me double! As they say, as a traveller, ‘ours is not to make reply, ours is not to reason why.’

I landed in Tallinn at 2335 on Thursday night and ventured out only the next morning. The weather was a rude shock after warm and sunny Germany – cold (1 to 3 degrees c in the early afternoon), rainy, and generally miserable, entirely normal for the 60 degrees latitude that it is at, and reminding me why I had brought my woollen gloves, inners, and double layer parka from Delhi. The old town of Tallinn is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is a beautiful and authentically preserved medieval urban area. Walking around on the narrow cobble-stoned streets was a pleasure, despite the weather, and I did this on Friday as part of a tour organized by the Tourist Information Office.

Nightlife in the old town offers the choice between the No. 1 Gentleman’s Club (where one doesn’t have to be a gentleman) and the Golden Dolls Live Strip Show (open from 1000 to 0600 every day)! Beautiful women are among Tallinn’s other attractions – tall, blonde, and open on matters sexual (like Scandinavia) and relatively poor, un-emancipated, and with fewer livelihood options (unlike Scandinavia), which combine to make for a thriving sex industry. Tallinn is popular on the ‘stag party’ circuit, wherein groups of single men (or maybe not single men) come to get wasted over the weekend. I met two straggling members of one such party at a bar (the others had moved on to other pleasures), and they explained the economics of it over two beers; the ferries from Stockholm and Helsinki and low cost airlines from Britain bring the party-cipants over conveniently, booze and women are plentiful and available at prices that would be unimaginable in their own countries, and they go back to their ordinary lives as carpenters and bus drivers having had a damn good time, with reassuring memories of being men and not mice.

Sadly, there was a music festival on in town as well and a top US jazz group, the Charles Lloyd New Quartet, was playing in the National Opera House – so I gave the ‘golden dolls’ a miss and stumped up for a ticket to see (and hear) Charles Lloyd on the saxophone, Jason Moran on the piano, Reuben Rogers on the base and Gregory Hutchinson on the drums. This was an unforgettable experience – the music was jazz at its best, with the artists taking turns to lead and accompany, and playing some really great stuff! I made a mistake regarding dress code, though, turning up in jeans and expecting to have to put up with teenagers smoking stuff. But apparently Charles Lloyd had played here in 1967, with much resistance from the Soviet authorities (who saw the devil in exposing commies to dilettante western music), and he was being honoured by the state upon his return – there were ministers around, everyone was in formals, and most of the audience looked as if they had been there back in 1967. I felt like Bridget Jones in a bunny suit! In the process, I learned that music is important to Estonians – their independence struggle is termed as the ‘singing revolution’, group-singing events attract huge crowds, and there is a certain formality to musical occasions. I spent another evening at a bar listening to live blues music, just a singer and a pianist, again very enjoyable despite much of it being in Estonian (in fact, the only number I recognized was ‘Georgia on my Mind’). Tallinn would be a paradise for the music lovers among you, and, Eric Clapton is playing here in July 2013.

Now, for the sake of that segment of my readership that will want to know what happens in Golden Dolls and similar places, I confess that I did drop in one afternoon to check (ah, the sacrifices that I have to make for you!). The deal is that you pay 5 Euros for entry and another 5 Euros for 250 ml of beer (available in normal bars at about 1.5 to 2 Euros) and then make yourself comfortable on a sofa around a stage with a pole in the centre. I was the only customer at the time, which was awkward because after every number the dancer would come up, sit down with me, and try to entice me into one of the inner rooms for a private number. The third young lady, a beauty called Mira, draped herself on my lap and insisted on me buying her a drink, which I duly did (10 Euros for a Baileys). She soon figured out that I was not a john and got her clothes on, sat me down at the bar, and made pleasant chitchat for about 15 minutes. I liked her – a girl I would have happily taken out to lunch! On the whole, a good experience and a visit that I propose to repeat when I am a dirtier old man (be nice, and you may be on the guest-list for my 70th birthday party here). Those looking to enhance their blackmail incomes, sorry, I have informed my wife (tried to act cool, but her eyes said ‘Good God, what have I married?’) and children (who were unambiguously deeply impressed).

Moving from music and sex to governance and public policy – Estonia is a small country with a history of being road-kill in the power struggles between the Russian and German empires, and it is a young country with a dark Soviet past. As they say, ‘you can fight history but you can’t fight geography’ – it will always have Russia to its east, and it’s main foreign policy objective is to never be a vassal state again. To enable this, it is determinedly westward looking – a liberal democracy, aligned economically and militarily to every possible western alliance (the EU, NATO, etc.), enthusiastically contributing soldiers to the war effort in Afghanistan, and following market-friendly economic policies. Its public finances are well under control, its openness and transparency standards are of the highest order, its social development indicators are great, and it is a ‘good boy’ for multilateral agencies.

But western values take time to set in, and they haven’t quite, as yet, in Estonia. It has positioned itself as a place to visit to express your dark side in ways not possible in your own countries, and to pay for the pleasure – the rich come to hunt bear and wolf, the frustrated come for booze and women, one can also try out assault weapons in shooting galleries, and hotels are fine with you bringing in a ‘guest’ for the night. This is a pity! The countryside is heavily forested and with many lakes and water bodies, the coastline is long and beautiful, all the towns have three distinct architectural styles (old towns with cobbled stones, functional Soviet-style construction, and glitzy modern buildings) and no traffic jams – there is more to it than a dirty weekend.

Estonia is also the world’s most IT-enabled country, to the extent that free WiFi is seen as a human right. Most governmental and commercial functions are done via Internet (including voting). In fact, in 2007, Russian hackers jammed the Internet here in the aftermath of some minor tensions and disabled the state in what is seen as the first ever cyber war. This turned into a blessing in disguise – NATO subsequently set up its cyber defence headquarters in Estonia. Despite all this, educated youth prefer to leave, and work in other parts of the EU (especially Finland) where salaries are considerably higher. There are worries of a rapidly greying society.

The other main policy issue is that of managing the 25 percent Russian-Estonian minority – people settled under Stalin’s ‘russification’ policies who speak Russian, watch Moscow TV, are eastward looking in mentality and world-view, and whose presence is a reminder of unhappy past memories. Estonian and Russian communities live separately, do not inter-marry, and have distinct identities (the young lady sitting next to me on my flight into Tallinn introduced herself as ‘I am from Tallinn, but I’m Russian’) in a manner that Gujaratis would find familiar, leading to issues around nation building.

To conclude, as I’m sure is obvious, I had a good time here!