Today Crimea, tomorrow Estonia?

 Tallinn, Monday

 ‘I have some sad news,’ says the Estonian politician, as we sit down to dinner. ‘War has broken out.’ The pain in his voice is palpable. For this patriotic man, and many like him, Russia’s invasion of Crimea has reawakened memories of an era everyone here hoped was over. Wandering the cobbled streets of Tallinn, Russia seems a long way away. You could be in Bremen or Lubeck. Yet Tallinn’s European heritage is only half the story. It’s been Estonia’s capital for just 45 years, from 1918 (when Estonia first won its independence) to 1940 (when Stalin invaded) and again from 1991 (when Estonia regained its independence) to today. About a quarter of Tallinn’s population are Russian speakers, as are about a quarter of all Estonians — roughly the same proportion that exists in Ukraine. Recent events have also rekindled memories of 2007, when the Estonian prime minister decided to move a controversial Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the outskirts. Local Russian speakers rioted. Estonian news, government and banking websites were disabled. Estonia accused Russia of orchestrating a covert cyberwar. Russia denied it. Estonia’s two language communities still keep their distance. Tens of thousands of Russian speakers only hold grey ‘Alien’s Passports’ rather than the full passports granted to non-Estonians who’ve passed the state’s Estonian language test. Russians have always lived in Tallinn, alongside the Germanic merchants who made this one of medieval Europe’s most prosperous ports. After it was conquered by Peter the Great, it became Russia’s gateway to the West. But many of the Russian speakers who live here today were shipped in from the USSR after 1945, in an attempt to undermine Estonia’s identity. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Estonians were transported to Siberia. Others — both Estonians and Russians — just disappeared. One of them was the grandfather of Jana, a translator I met in Tallinn.