Estonia's history: the state that never legally ceased to exist

Who ruled the land before the Estonians did

The medieval population of this coast was among the last in Europe to adopt Christianity, and it did so under conquest. Pope Celestine III called for a crusade against the pagans of northern Europe in 1193. Crusaders working out of Riga began raiding into what is now Estonia in 1208, the Estonian commander Lembitu was killed in a battle in 1217, and in 1219 Valdemar II of Denmark landed with an army on the northern coast at the site of Tallinn. The last indigenous stronghold, on the island of Saaremaa, fell in 1227.

Sovereignty over the territory changed hands repeatedly across the seven centuries that followed, and the class that held the land did not change with it. The country was divided between the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order and the bishoprics of Dorpat and Ösel-Wiek, and Tallinn took Lübeck town rights from the Danish king in 1248 and joined the Hanseatic League at the end of the thirteenth century. Northern Estonia and Saaremaa rose against their German-speaking landlords in the St George's Night Uprising of 1343. Four elected Estonian leaders were killed at Paide during peace talks that year, and in 1346 the Danish crown sold its remaining Estonian possessions to the Livonian Order for 10,000 marks.

Britannica's account records what that arrangement produced: the Germans dominated the government, the commerce and the church of the territory for the five centuries after 1346, and the Estonians, Latvians and Livs became the serfs of their conquerors. Russian rule arrived with the capitulation of Estonia and Livonia in 1710, confirmed by the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, and even then the legal system, the Lutheran church, the town governments and the universities carried on in German into the late nineteenth century.

How a peasant people became a nation

Serfdom was abolished in the Governorate of Livonia in 1816 and in the Governorate of Estonia in 1819, before it was abolished anywhere else in the Russian Empire. Agrarian laws followed: free movement in 1863, the end of the landowners' right of jurisdiction on their estates in 1866, and the abolition of the corvée in 1868. By the end of the nineteenth century Estonian peasants owned two-fifths of the privately held land in the country. That is what paid for a national movement, and it is why the movement dates from the middle of the century.

What came first was the word. Johann Voldemar Jannsen began publishing the first successful Estonian-language weekly in 1857 and popularised eestlane as the name an Estonian used for himself. The national epic Kalevipoeg was published in 1861 in Estonian and in German. The first nationwide song festival was held at Tartu in 1869 and Estonian theatre was first performed in 1870. In 1878 the movement split: the moderate wing under Jakob Hurt concentrated on culture and Estonian schooling, while the radical wing under Carl Robert Jakobson demanded political and economic rights.

The empire then pulled the other way. Russian criminal and civil codes replaced the Baltic ones, Russian became the language of instruction in 1887 in place of German and Estonian, and the University of Dorpat was Russified in 1893. Literacy had arrived first: by 1886 only about 2% of Estonian army recruits could not read. When the revolution of 1905 reached Estonia, a congress of 800 delegates met in Tallinn on 27 November and voted on both wings for political autonomy. Martial law followed and workers burned manor houses in the countryside. The repression that came after it is given as 328 people shot or hanged in one account and as some 500 executed in another.

What the War of Independence settled

The collapse of the Russian Empire produced an Estonia that was a single administrative unit. The Provisional Government granted autonomy in April 1917 and merged the two Estonian-speaking governorates, and a provisional assembly, the Maapäev, sat from 14 July 1917. Estonian Bolsheviks under Jaan Anvelt drove it underground that November. Between the Bolshevik retreat and the arrival of German troops, the Maapäev's Salvation Committee issued the declaration of independence at Pärnu on 23 February 1918 and proclaimed it in Tallinn the next day. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk transferred sovereignty over the Baltic countries from Russia to Germany on 3 March 1918.

Germany capitulated on 11 November 1918 and handed power back to the Estonian provisional government on 19 November. The Red Army crossed into Estonia on 28 November 1918, reaching a point 30 kilometres from Tallinn. Johan Laidoner opened a counter-offensive in January 1919 with Allied weapons, a British naval squadron and a Finnish volunteer force of 2,700 men, and by the end of that February no Soviet troops were left on Estonian soil. A Constituent Assembly was elected between 5 and 7 April 1919 on a turnout of 80%.

The fighting ended on 2 February 1920 with the Treaty of Tartu, in which Soviet Russia renounced in perpetuity all rights to the territory of Estonia. Estonia entered the League of Nations in 1921. The wording of Tartu mattered again seventy years later, because the case made in 1991 was that a republic recognised in perpetuity in 1920 could not have been lawfully extinguished in 1940.

How the first republic governed itself

Twenty-two years of statehood produced three constitutions, one coup from inside the government and a body of law that outlived the state. The cultural autonomy act of 1925 let any minority of at least 3,000 people with longstanding ties to Estonia run its own schools and cultural institutions. The Jewish community counted 3,045 members, applied, elected a Jewish Cultural Council in June 1926 and had its autonomy declared. That law was reinstated in 1993.

How the land changed hands

The Constituent Assembly passed a land act in 1919 that expropriated the large estates of the Baltic nobility and redistributed them among farmers and, above all, among volunteers of the War of Independence. It ended in a single measure the arrangement six centuries had rested on. Economic links with Russia dissolved, trade turned towards Scandinavia and western Europe, and oil shale mining was developed at home.

How Päts came to rule by decree

The 1920 constitution established a single-chamber Riigikogu of 100 members elected for three years by proportional representation, headed by a chief of state who was also the premier. No party could win a majority under it: Britannica counts 20 coalitions under 10 heads of government between May 1919 and May 1933, and another account counts 21 governments between 1920 and 1934.

The Great Depression broke the arrangement. The anti-parliamentary Vaps movement put a constitutional reform to a referendum in October 1933 and it passed with 72.7%, replacing the parliamentary system with a strong presidency and setting up a presidential election in April 1934 that the movement expected to win. Konstantin Päts, then acting chief of state, declared a state of emergency on 12 March 1934 instead. Opposition leaders were arrested, party activity was banned, and parliament did not sit between 1934 and 1938. The Vaps movement was banned in December 1935, and 143 of the 150 members tried on 6 May 1936 were convicted and amnestied in 1938. A National Assembly wrote a new constitution in 1937, under which a bicameral sixth Riigikogu was elected on 7 April 1938 and Päts was elected president that same month.

How Estonia was annexed without a battle

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 placed Estonia in the Soviet sphere of influence. On 24 September 1939 the Soviet Union threatened war unless it was given military bases, and on 28 September Estonia signed a treaty allowing 25,000 Soviet troops onto its territory for the duration of the war in Europe. A naval and air blockade took effect on 14 June 1940, the day after Paris fell, and two Soviet bombers shot down the Finnish airliner Kaleva on the Tallinn to Helsinki route that morning. An ultimatum of 16 June 1940 demanded a government Moscow approved of. The Estonian government judged resistance hopeless and complied, and some 90,000 further troops entered on 18 June.

The forms were completed afterwards. Elections were held in which every candidate who was not pro-communist was disqualified, the new parliament proclaimed a Socialist Republic on 21 July 1940 and asked to be admitted to the Soviet Union, and on 6 August 1940 Estonia was annexed as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Nothing in that sequence met the requirements of the Estonian constitution, and the gap between the two is the ground every later continuity claim was built on.

Who was arrested and who was deported

More than 8,000 people were arrested during the first year of Soviet rule between 1940 and 1941, among them most of the country's leading politicians and officers, and about 2,200 were executed inside Estonia. On 14 June 1941 roughly 10,000 civilians were deported to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union, and nearly half of them died there. Britannica puts the toll of the first twelve months higher, at more than 60,000 killed or deported.

What happened under German rule

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and held Estonia until 1944 as part of Reichskommissariat Ostland. Sovereignty was never on offer, and a draft introduced in 1942 sent some 3,400 men across the Gulf of Finland to serve in the Finnish army instead. Of roughly 4,300 Jews in Estonia before the war, between 1,500 and 2,000 were caught by the Germans, and an estimated 10,000 Jews deported into camps in Estonia from elsewhere in Eastern Europe were killed there. The volunteer Estonian legion raised in 1942 had become a conscript division of the Waffen-SS by 1944, and seven ethnic Estonians have faced trial for crimes against humanity since independence was restored. In February 1944 Jüri Uluots, the last prime minister of the republic before 1940, appealed by radio for men born between 1904 and 1923 to report for service, and 38,000 volunteers came forward. Tallinn fell to the Red Army on 22 September 1944, four days after Uluots had appointed a government under Otto Tief, which fled to Stockholm.

How the state survived outside its own borders

On 30 June 1940 the foreign ministry in Tallinn, by then answering to a government installed by Moscow, recalled every Estonian diplomat. Most refused to return and protested the occupation instead. On 23 July 1940 the acting United States Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, issued the declaration refusing to recognise the annexation of the Baltic states, and Baltic representatives kept their standing in the diplomatic corps in Washington. A law of 5 August 1940 classified anyone who refused to come home as a traitor, ordered their property confiscated and condemned them to be shot within 24 hours of identification. The ministry itself was abolished on 11 September 1940.

Two posts outlasted all of that. The consulate general in New York operated until 1991, under Johannes Kaiv as consul general carrying out an ambassador's duties until 1965 and under Ernst Jaakson afterwards; Jaakson spent 79 years in the Estonian diplomatic service and presented credentials as ambassador to the United States on 25 November 1991. The embassy in London held its building at 167 Queen's Gate from 1920 to 1989, with August Torma serving as ambassador until his death in 1971. The Estonian foreign ministry's own account describes itself as the one Estonian public institution that went on existing between 1940 and 1991.

The people who carried that continuity paid for it. Fifty-two diplomats who had worked at the ministry between 1918 and 1940 were arrested, 12 were executed and 31 died in prison camps or in exile. A government in exile also operated, dated to 1944 in one account and to 1953 in the foreign ministry's own, and no government ever recognised it officially.

Non-recognition was tested. Australia began formally recognising the annexation in 1973 and the government that followed it reversed that after 1975, the European Parliament condemned the occupation in 1979, and from 1982 the United States president signed a Baltic Freedom Day proclamation each June.

How Soviet rule changed who lived here

Armed resistance went on after 1944. The Forest Brothers reached their peak between 1946 and 1948, with an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 people involved at different times, and the last of them is thought to have been caught in September 1978. In March 1949, 20,722 people, 2.5% of the population, were deported to Siberia, and collectivisation was completed shortly afterwards. Britannica estimates that as many as 80,000 Estonians were deported between 1945 and 1953.

The change in who lived in Estonia went deeper than the deportations. Ethnic Estonians were 97% of the population in 1945 and 62% by 1989 in one account, and almost 90% before the war and about 60% by 1990 in another. The ethnic Estonian share of the republic's Communist Party fell from 90% in 1941 to 48% in 1952 and stayed near half thereafter. Closed military zones covered about a fifth of the land and the whole of the surrounding sea, with a permit needed to reach the coast.

Contact with foreign countries was permitted again in the late 1950s, and from the 1960s Estonians could watch Finnish television. By 1981 Russian was being taught in the first grade of Estonian-language schools and in pre-school teaching.

How independence was restored without bloodshed

The first mass protest was about phosphate. Soviet plans for large mines in Virumaa produced the Phosphorite War of 1987, and on 23 August 1987 a meeting at Hirvepark in Tallinn demanded that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact be published. Twenty United States senators had written to Mikhail Gorbachev beforehand asking that it be allowed to go ahead, and Voice of America broadcast the letter three days early. The Popular Front of Estonia formed in April 1988, and the Estonian National Independence Party became the first non-communist party registered in the Soviet Union. On 16 November 1988 the republic's legislature asserted the primacy of Estonian law. On 23 August 1989 about two million people formed the Baltic Way, a human chain of 675.5 kilometres across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Then came the argument that shaped everything after it. The Popular Front proposed declaring a new, third republic whose citizens would be everyone living in the country at that moment. A citizens' committees movement started in 1989 on the opposite premise, registering pre-1940 citizens of the Republic of Estonia and their descendants on the ground that the republic still existed in law. By early 1990 over 900,000 people had registered, and on 24 February 1990 they elected a Congress of Estonia of 464 members, 35 of them delegates of refugee communities abroad. A Supreme Council was elected separately on 18 March 1990 by every resident, including roughly 50,000 Soviet troops stationed in the country. Estonia had two elected bodies working from two theories of what the state was.

A referendum in March 1991 was opened to all residents, a decision every major party backed in order to send an unambiguous signal abroad. Turnout was 82%, and support for independence came to 64% of everyone entitled to vote against 17% opposed. During the attempted coup in Moscow the Supreme Council passed its resolution on national independence on 20 August 1991, now a national holiday. The compromise between the two camps was a text confirming Estonia as a state independent of the Soviet Union and offering to re-establish diplomatic relations, which avoided both the word declaring and an explicit assertion of continuity. Russia recognised it on 25 August, the United States on 2 September and the Soviet State Council on 6 September, and Estonia entered the United Nations on 17 September 1991. The last Russian troops left on 31 August 1994.

What state continuity has meant since then

A constitutional assembly formed on 20 August 1991 by the Congress of Estonia and the Supreme Council sat until 10 April 1992, and the constitution it drafted was approved by referendum on 28 June 1992. The seventh Riigikogu was elected on 20 September 1992 on a turnout of 67%. In 1992 Heinrich Mark, the prime minister of the government in exile acting as president, presented his credentials to the newly elected Lennart Meri, which closed the exile chapter by handing it over.

The sharpest practical effect was on citizenship. In February 1992 the Riigikogu put the citizenship law of 1938 back into force, amending it in January 1995. Citizenship therefore descended from the pre-1940 republic, and residents who had arrived during the Soviet period applied for naturalisation, with requirements that included proficiency in Estonian. As of 2 July 2010, 84.1% of residents were citizens of Estonia, 8.6% were citizens of other countries and 7.3% held undetermined citizenship. A 2008 United Nations Human Rights Council report called "extremely credible" the description of that policy as "discriminatory". The reasoning on the Estonian side, stated by the citizens' committees in 1989 and again in the Riigikogu's ratification act of 2005, is that the annexation was never lawful and the body of citizens therefore continued across it.

A referendum on 14 September 2003 approved accession to the European Union with 66.83% in favour on a turnout of 64%. Estonia joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the European Union on 1 May 2004, entered the Schengen Area on 21 December 2007, and replaced the kroon with the euro on 1 January 2011.

The doctrine still has edges that cut. Estonia and Russia signed a border treaty in Moscow on 18 May 2005, and the Riigikogu ratified it on 20 June 2005 with a preamble referring to earlier documents that mentioned the Soviet occupation and the uninterrupted legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia. The Russian foreign ministry then stated that it had no intention of becoming a party to the treaty and regarded itself as unbound by it.