Tallinn tales

During the Twenties and Thirties, the Estonian capital of Tallinn was known to be a centre for espionage, infiltrated by White Russian intriguers bent on blocking Bolshevik access to north-west Europe. Graham Greene first visited in the spring of 1934  — ‘for no reason’, he writes in his memoir Ways of Escape, ‘except escape to somewhere new’. He spent many happy hours in Tallinn, he records, ‘when I was not vainly seeking a brothel’. (The brothel had been recommended to him by Baroness Budberg, a Russian-Estonian exile living in London and mistress of, among others, H. G.Wells.) Though Greene failed to find the brothel, he did conceive of a film sketch, Nobody to Blame, about a British sales representative in Tallinn for Singer Sewing Machines, who was a spy. The film was never made, but it contained the bare bones of what was originally Our Man in Tallinn, later Our Man in Havana.

Inevitably, Tallinn attracted political adventurers as it was the Baltic port closest to Leningrad. Arthur Ransome, the amateur angler and sailing enthusiast, married Leon Trotsky’s private secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, in Tallinn in 1924. As an apologist for Bolshevism, the future author of Swallows and Amazons may even have had a hand in the Communist putsch that failed to topple ‘bourgeois’ Tallinn later that year. Other Englishmen visited the Baltic outpost at this time. Anthony Powell, whose father was attached to the British Military Mission in nearby Helsinki, arrived in the autumn of 1924. Powell’s second novel, Venusberg, contains descriptions of medieval guildhalls and twisting cobbled streets that are recognisably Tallinn’s.  

All these Englishmen had known Estonia during the heyday of its inter-war independence and could not have imagined its fate during the second world war.