Europe shivering in the new Cold War
Pastor Dale Morgan
Europe shivering in the new Cold War*
Tensions are rising between Moscow and the West as the Russian giant
flexes its muscles again in the old territories of the Soviet empire. In
Estonia, one of deepest faultlines of the confrontation, the conflicts
of the past are throwing a shadow over hopes for the future
Jason Burke in Narva
Sunday June 3, 2007
The Observer
At the end of Europe yesterday afternoon, a man in a straw hat warmed up
to go jogging, a father and teenage son in matching jeans and denim
jackets shared a packet of cheap cigarettes, a small girl made
sandcastles and two border guards strolled under the narrow single-span
bridge over the swift-flowing Narva river. To their left lay Estonia, to
their right, on the other bank, Russia.
'We are not too worried about politics here,' said one guard, fiddling
with his holstered handgun. 'We prefer sitting drinking beer with
friends on a bench in the sun.'
Yet the bucolic scene and the border guard's insouciance seem
increasingly out of place. For the slightly dilapidated, calm streets of
Narva, Estonia's third largest city, are now at the centre of
geopolitical tensions not seen in the region since the collapse of the
Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Some analysts are calling it 'the
new Cold War'.
The concern spreads far beyond Narva and the frontier. Estonia, known in
Britain largely for the bars and pubs of its capital city, Tallinn, has
been hit by riots linked to the tensions. New disputes pit states that
emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union throughout much of Eastern
Europe against their former overlords. And there is an international
crisis setting Moscow against the European Union and against Washington.
'I suppose we are in the eye of the storm,' said Gregor Ivanov, a former
factory worker, sitting on a bench in the sun on Narva's Puskini Street.
'It's a shame... everything was going so well.'
The storm is large and potentially very dangerous. Locally, Russia is
blamed for stoking riots in Tallinn last month in which one died and 153
were injured, for the roughing up of Estonian diplomats in Moscow and
for a massive 'cyber-attack' on the infrastructure of the small Baltic
state.
According to Andres Kasekamp, director of Tallinn's Foreign Policy
Institute, the Russian government is mounting a deliberate attempt to
destabilise former Soviet republics. 'This strategy is intensifying as
Moscow's attitude to the US, the UK and the EU becomes more aggressive
and assertive,' Kasekamp said. 'They are seeing how far they can push
us, the European Union, Nato, the Americans, everybody.' Some Estonians
even fear Moscow may be searching for a casus belli. At the
international level the Russian testing last week of an
inter-continental ballistic missile led to an extraordinary diplomatic
spat between the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - who deplored
Moscow's 'missile diplomacy' - and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who
attacked American 'imperialism'.
For the UK, already strained relations were put under new stress when
the dispute with Moscow over the poisoning in London of Russian
dissident and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko six months ago took
another turn for the worse. Last week the prime suspect, whose
extradition has been demanded by Britain and refused by Russia, surfaced
on Wednesday in Moscow. Andrei Lugovoi told TV cameras that the British
secret services were behind Litvinenko's murder.
Then there are profound disagreements over the future of Kosovo and
policy on Iran, a row over the rights of major British commercial
investors to parts of the massive Siberian gasfields, harassment of
British officials and diplomats in Moscow, and a series of apparently
state-encouraged propaganda pieces in the Russian media against the
West. Analysts are talking of relations between Moscow and London being
at a 25-year low.
'This is a delayed confrontation between the Soviet past and the
European future,' Igor Grazin, an Estonian MP, told The Observer. And
his country, home to 1.3 million, is in the middle.
Narva is 130 miles from Tallinn. There is a huge difference between the
depressed north-eastern old industrial town and the booming Estonian
capital with its stunning medieval architecture, new industries, strip
clubs and groups of drunken British stag-nighters staggering through the
narrow streets in fancy dress, football strip or matching T-shirts
saying 'Well in in Tallinn 07' or 'The Tallinn Job'.
It is at the gleaming new 9,000-seat Lillekula stadium on the outskirts
of the capital that the England team will play their crucial qualifying
European Cup match against Estonia on Wednesday night. The stadium is
sold out.
'Of course, all the tickets have gone,' said Jan Sepp, a newspaper
seller near to the ground. 'Beckham is coming.' In fact, the Los Angeles
Galaxy's new star signing is not the only cause of the recent Estonian
enthusiasm for football. As with so much in Estonia - such as the recent
riots - the Baltic state's complex and painful history plays a part. For
decades the favoured local sports were volleyball and basketball. There
was no national team and soccer was identified with the Soviet Union and
thus with repression and occupation. The result, analyst Kasekamp
explained, was that, when Estonia formally won its independence from the
collapsed USSR in 1991, football surged in popularity. Estonia's
membership of the European Union, finalised three years ago, merely
confirmed the trend.
'Now people look to the Premier League, the Italian teams, the European
championship; soccer symbolises Europe and the new Estonian future,'
Kasekamp told The Observer
This turning towards the west is repeated in almost every field. The
ruling coalition in Estonia, returned to power after elections in March,
has continued the fiercely Thatcherite-Reaganite economics of its recent
predecessors. A single flat income tax of 22 per cent, low business
taxes and cheap, weak welfare provision have, government supporters
claim, led to a spectacular annual economic growth of more than 10 per
cent and negligible unemployment - outside the poorer industrial and
agricultural areas. Even in and around relatively poorly off Narva,
unemployment has dropped from 30 per cent 10 years ago to 8 per cent now
- with a drop of 2 per cent in the past six months. Money is coming from
the West too. The overwhelming majority of foreign investment originates
in Finland and Sweden or Western Europe and less than a tenth of trade
activity involves Russia. Huge numbers of Estonians now work in Finland,
Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Britain.
In foreign policy, Estonia tilts towards the Atlantic. Its tiny army has
deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where one was wounded fighting
alongside the British in the south last week. 'We are successful,
democratic, economically liberal, pro-American, pro-EU. We are
everything that the Russians are not,' said Raimo Poom, political editor
of the major Esti Paevaleht newspaper. 'It's no wonder they don't like us.'
For James Nixey, of Chatham House - the Royal Institute of International
Affairs, based in London - Russia's recent broadside against Estonia is
part of a wider vision of the region. 'It seems that Russia feels that
those countries around it which are democratic and have liberal
attitudes are a threat and those that are illiberal and autocratic are
not,' he said last week.
So Moscow's relations with Latvia and Lithuania, which joined the EU
three years ago with Estonia, are frosty at best, those with Uzbekistan
or Turkmenistan warm, and those with Alexander Lukashenko, the
repressive leader of the former Soviet republic Belarus, depend on how
vehemently anti-Western the latter's rhetoric at any given moment might
be. Moscow, Nixey pointed out, similarly supported hardliners in Ukraine.
Analysts and diplomats are working to decipher the logic behind Russia's
hardening stance. The missile test last week was partly provoked by
American plans to install an anti-missile defence system in Eastern
Europe. 'The most explicit message from Moscow was that Russia is the
main strategic partner for America,' said Thomas Gomart, of the French
Institute of International Relations in Paris. 'It's a way of
marginalising the Europeans and other emerging powers.'
But domestic factors are also important. With parliamentary and
presidential elections within the next year, Putin is playing to the
crowd and strengthening the position of his possible successor, the
Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov. 'To an extent it's theatre,' said one
UK-based diplomat. 'And it is logical that Estonia has a key role.'
Part of the reason is simple pride. Estonia was ruled by Russia
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Kadri Liik, director of
Tallinn's International Centre for Defence Studies, said it was 'very
difficult for Moscow to accept that a part of the former Russian empire
is now part of the EU'. That resentment has recently crystallised around
one issue: a memorial to Russian soldiers killed in the Second World
War, known as 'The Bronze Soldier'. It was the relocation of the
memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a military cemetery on the city's
outskirts that provoked the riots last month.
The riots were clearly orchestrated. The question is by whom and for
what purpose. No one is sure of the answer. 'Reports that there were
Russian state agencies involved in some capacity are credible,' said one
Western diplomat in Tallinn. Others talk of SMS campaigns, secret
networks, even money changing hands. Yet Moscow vehemently denies any
involvement.
But, even if there was some outside interference, the demonstrations
around the memorial and the riots were a powerful reminder to Estonia's
government not to forget the country's ethnic Russian minority.
The road from Tallinn towards Narva follows the flat coastline of the
Finnish Gulf, slicing through thick pine and birch forest, farmland and
wide, empty marshes before reaching the open, windswept industrial
heartland of the plains before the Russian frontier. Though some
sections have been recently widened with some of the massive European
structural aid now pouring into the country, along much of its length
the road is little more than a rutted single carriageway running between
the fields, old mines and historical memorials.
The drive reveals Estonia's chequered history - and explains why
feelings still run so high that the relocation of a statue can cause
chaos. 'The statue is just a trigger, the issue has profound roots in
recent and in ancient history,' said Nixey.
After declaring its independence from Russia in 1918, Estonia was
forcibly and bloodily incorporated into the USSR in 1940. A year later
it was wrested from the Russians by the Germans. Just before Narva, war
memorials and tombs line the Tallenberg Hills where German SS divisions
held back a Russian onslaught for six months in 1944.
Over the four and a half decades that followed, after a period of
massive purges, violence and emigration, the Soviet Union ran Estonia
with an iron grip, settling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians in
the small country, most of whom stayed after independence in 1991.
Integrating this minority into a new Estonian nation has not been easy.
Narva is considerably closer to St Petersburg, physically and
culturally, than to Tallinn.
'This is a country in permanent transition,' said Professor Rein Raud,
chancellor of Tallinn University. 'Its biggest challenge is to create
political space for minorities and to engender loyalty to the Estonian
state while allowing those that want it to maintain their traditions.'
This bloody history explains why issues such as The Bronze Soldier can
be so easily exploited. But though the Russian minority, concentrated in
the northeast, is still poorer and less educated than most of the
population and about 140,000 still do not speak enough Estonian to
qualify for citizenship, the economic boom has meant that the chronic
unemployment and hardship of the immediate post-communist time is almost
gone. 'It's better now,' said 63-year-old Tamara Yevchenko, a flower
seller in Tallinn. 'It's still tough, but it's better. Before, I wanted
the USSR to come back, but now I am happy with the way things are.' And
though HIV levels and drug use remain high and male life expectancy
remains low, Grazin, one of seven MPs (out of 101) of Russian origin,
plays down ethnic tension, dismissing recent claims by international
human rights organisations of massive discrimination against Estonian
Russians as exaggerated. 'There's work to do but a lot of progress has
been made,' said one Western diplomat. Suggestions by others that the
Russian minority should be 'sent home' are 'ludicrous', according to Poom.
But even if this particularly problematic legacy of Estonia's bloody
past is slowly being resolved, the drive to Narva exposes other dark
elements of the past of a country that many like to paint simply as
plucky, outnumbered democrats who have always stood up to brutal,
conquering communists. The German soldiers resisting the Russians
included many Estonians - and local police battalions guarded the forced
labour camps where tens of thousands of Jews from all over Eastern
Europe were worked to death. The process of coming to terms with that
history continues. Last month a new synagogue opened in Tallinn,
replacing those destroyed by the Nazis.
At the new synagogue, near the docks in Tallinn, Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot
said antisemitism in the region was 'more or less' a thing of the past.
'I feel safer here than in London or Paris,' Kot said. 'I can't say for
sure, because the Estonian way is to keep things hidden, but in general
we feel safe.'
But last week such confidence in an entirely untroubled future was not
necessarily that widespread. On Wednesday the G8 nations will meet for
three days of talks at the German Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm.
Estonian leaders are looking to the EU nations present to make their
anger at Putin's strong-arm tactics known. They may be disappointed. The
leaders of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy,
Russia and Japan will debate climate change, efforts to stop uranium
enrichment by Iran, aid to Africa, currency exchange rates and global
growth. Emerging economic powers such as China, Brazil and India are
there as non-members. Diplomats hope that it will be a chance to calm
angry tempers, not fuel fires.
Foreign Office spokesmen were conciliatory last week. 'There are areas
such as the rule of law and human rights where there is not a meeting of
minds and we raise our concerns frankly with [the Russians] there,' said
one. '[But] Russia has to be part of our policy... we have to engage.'
For Liik, the Tallinn-based analyst, there is a longer-term concern. She
says it is important to focus on the sentiments of 120 million Russians,
not just the rhetoric of their leaders. 'Putin is telling the Russian
people what they want to hear and doing what he thinks they want him to
do. That says some very worrying things about Russian society and does
not bode well for the future,' she said. 'What sort of a generation are
coming through now who have been raised on all this aggressive,
belligerent propaganda?'
Few believe that the calm at the border crossing over the River Narva is
anything but surface deep.