Bitterness lingers in Estonia's wired world
Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world - people even vote online - but, for the past three weeks, it has been under a massive cyber-attack that has disabled the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks and private companies. Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip directly accused Russia of being responsible and appealed to Nato for action. Things are getting seriously foolish in eastern Europe.
It was provocative for Estonia's right-wing government to remove the Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn on April 27 and re-erect it at a military cemetery on the outskirts of town. The Russians take their 30 million dead in the second world war very seriously: parliament deemed the act 'blasphemous and barbarous', and urged President Vladimir Putin to break diplomatic relations with the small Baltic republic. He did not do that, but he may have found another way of making the Estonians pay.
This is about history and passions run high on both sides. The Estonians won independence from the Russian empire in 1918, but lost it in 1940 as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in which Stalin got a free hand to invade and annex Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and eastern Poland and Hitler got the rest of Poland.
The Soviet communists only murdered 5 per cent of the Estonian population during their occupation, whereas the Nazis slaughtered 20 per cent of Poland's people. But, then, the Soviets only had just over a year to do so, because Germany invaded the Soviet Union in mid-1941 and liberated Estonia.
At least, it felt like liberation to most Estonians, although for 5,000 Jews the arrival of the Nazis meant exile or death. But the Soviets reconquered Estonia in 1944 and they called that a liberation, too. For the Estonians, it was another 46 years of Soviet occupation, during which tens of thousands were sent to the camps and so many Russian immigrants arrived that it is today almost one-third Russian-speaking. They saw the huge bronze statue of a Red Army soldier as a symbol of occupation, not liberation.
This situation can be managed and contained if authorities on both sides do not exploit it for domestic political purposes.
The Estonian government, which says at least a million computers worldwide were taken over by Russian hackers to launch three waves of cyber-attacks that paralysed Estonian websites, has largely solved the short-term problem by denying access to e-mail from all foreign addresses. Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo concedes 'there is not sufficient evidence of a [Russian] governmental role'. It could have been outraged Russian nationalists acting on their own.
It would help if Moscow could be more grown-up about it, and stop interfering with transport and trade ties with Estonia. If the Estonians had been more saintly, they would have left the statue where it was, but they neither desecrated nor destroyed it. They just moved it to a less conspicuous place. It's time to move on.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
