Origins

The Estonians in Canada trace their heritage to a country in northeastern Europe which had never functioned as a distinct state until the twentieth century. Estonia is located along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea and includes several offshore islands, the largest of which is Saaremaa. The country, which in its entirety is slightly smaller than Nova Scotia, is bordered by Russia in the east, Latvia in the south, and the Gulf of Finland to the north, on the other side of which is Finland. Despite its location, Estonia’s climate is moderated by the Baltic Sea, which allows it to be the northernmost productive agricultural area of Europe.

The Estonians speak a non-Indo-European language that belongs to the Finno-Ugric linguistic family. Estonian is most closely related to Finnish and is completely different from languages spoken by the country’s Slavic (Russian) and Baltic (Latvian) neighbours. Like the Finns, the Estonians trace their origins to the Ural Mountains from where they migrated to this Baltic coast at least 3,000 years ago.

Always small in number, the Estonians were to be ruled by whatever power was strong enough to control the eastern Baltic region. Initially a borderland territory of Kievan Rus’ (Tartu was founded as Iuriev in the eleventh century), Estonia came under the hegemony of Denmark in the early thirteenth century and soon after by the Germanic Knights of the Livonian Order, who came to control the entire country after 1346. It was the Livonian Knights who were responsible for bringing Christianity to the Estonians. Under Livonian rule, the country’s social structure was basically divided along nationality lines: the peasants were primarily Estonians; the landowners, townspeople, and government administrators German colonists or Germanized natives who together eventually came to be known as Baltic Germans. Under Livonian rule, the country prospered through trade, since several of Estonia’s cities (Pärnu, Tallinin, and Tartu) were part of the Hanseatic League that connected northern Europe’s Baltic trade routes with Muscovy/Russia in the east. At the height of its power in the sixteenth century, the Livonian Order also accepted the Reformation, so that Estonians were brought within the fold of the Lutheran Church. Lutheranism remains the dominant religion among them to this day.

After Livonia’s collapse in 1561, the entire Baltic region was contested by Muscovy, Poland, and Sweden, which by 1645 had finally come to control Estonia. Under Swedish rule, the power of the Baltic Germans was curbed, the status of the peasants improved, and a university was established at Tartu (1632) that was open to all the country’s inhabitants, regardless of social class.

Nevertheless, Muscovy had never given up its goal to expand to the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, and this was finally achieved after the Great Northern War (1700–21) that pitted Sweden against the newly renamed Russian Empire of Tsar Peter I. For the rest of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth century until World War I, Estonia was an integral part of the Russian Empire. Initially, tsarist rule had a negative impact upon Estonians: Tartu University was closed, the peasantry was reduced to the status of serfs, and the economic and social privileges were restored to the Baltic German nobility who were to remain the leading social stratum within Estonian society virtually until the end of the Russian Empire.

Beginning with the outset of the nineteenth century, tsarist rule brought some advantages to the Estonian population. The University of Tartu was reopened (albeit with German as the language of instruction, 1802), serfdom was abolished (1816), and a series of other reforms in the local government and the judicial system were introduced. Financial difficulties forced many, mainly absentee, landlords to sell land to Estonian peasants, leading to the creation of a class of independent farmers. The simultaneous growth of cities also opened up new commercial and intellectual opportunities for Estonians. Many young people responded quickly to the modern, liberal-romantic nationalism centred largely at the University of Tartu. Consequently, an Estonian national movement began that was characterized by the publication of folklore and literature, a vigorous cooperative movement, and the formation of numerous civic organizations and secondary schools. Before the end of the nineteenth century illiteracy was wiped out and there came into being a large group of nationally conscious Estonians who could become potential leaders should the country’s political situation ever change.

Such change did come in 1917 when the tsarist Russian Empire collapsed. That same year the Estonians formed a national council, which on November 17 proclaimed an independent Estonian Democratic Republic. Estonian independence was immediately challenged by the new Bolshevik rulers of Russia as well as by Germany, and it was not until the German Army retreated and a treaty was signed with Bolshevik Russia (1920) that Estonian statehood became a reality.

For the next two decades Estonia functioned as an independent country. Land reform created a strong Estonian middle class, agriculture prospered, and industry (textiles, chemicals, and oil-shale exploration) was developed. Efforts at creating a functioning democracy were hampered, however, by frequent changes of government, especially between 1919 and 1933, and by periods of authoritarian rule.

Estonia’s independence came to an abrupt end during World War II. In 1940 the Soviet army invaded the country and arrested thousands of government, civic, and religious leaders, who were deported to the Soviet Union or killed. Thus, when German forces drove the Soviets out in the summer of 1941, they were viewed as liberators. Soon, however, economic exploitation and conscription prompted open and clandestine resistance against Nazi rule. When the Soviet army reentered Estonia in 1944, about 80,000 Estonians (8 percent of the population) fled to Sweden and Germany, including much of the intelligentsia and many people from Estonia’s offshore islands.

The Soviet presence allowed Communist activists to form the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was politically and economically subordinate to the Soviet Union. During the immediate post-war years, tens of thousands of Estonians were sent to Siberia, while hundreds of thousands of Russian speakers settled in Estonia. Such developments were to have a profound impact on the demographic structure of the country. In 1938, of Estonia’s 1.1 million inhabitants, 88 percent were Estonian; by 1989, after four decades of Soviet rule, only 61 percent of the country’s 1.4 million inhabitants were Estonian. The remainder were mostly Russians (30 percent) and other East Slavs.

The demographic threat to Estonian national survival, together with discontent over restrictions on Estonian language and culture, as well as the shortcomings of an ailing Soviet economy, were all factors that prompted Estonians to agitate openly against the Communist system. This became possible in the late 1980s, when the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, called on the country’s citizens to criticize openly the existing system. As Soviet rule and authority declined further, Estonian political demands led to sovereignty within the Soviet Union (November 1988) and the re-establishment of an independent republic (August 1991). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, Estonia has been struggling to create a democratic state with a free-market economy that is linked to other countries in Europe, most especially in the Baltic region.