I was barely an hour in Tallinn, Estonia, when it became obvious what at least some of the local people think of their near neighbour, a country that formerly twice occupied them. I was having a coffee outside a cafe in the picturesque Town Hall Square, where there were a couple of blackboards outside the cafe next to the one I was sitting at. First I assumed they carried the day’s menu. Then I looked more closely. One was in Estonian, the other in English.
Chalked in the English version were these blunt words: “Dear Putin. Let’s speed up to the part where you kill yourself in a bunker.” It was the most central and public part of all of Tallinn, and contained an additional reference to Hitler, whose Nazi Germany occupied Estonia in between its Russian occupations, which ended with independence in 1991.
Cafe Maiasmokk, which specialises in marzipan, is a sombre cafe that has been in operation since 1864. It’s a long-established local place that also attracts tourists to drink coffee under its gilded ceiling, sit on its curved bentwood chairs and take in the atmosphere of a former era.
All the way along the street opposite the cafe were barriers covered in anti-war posters and banners. A police van and two policemen were present whenever I passed, which was several times a day. There were Ukrainian flags draped along the barriers, soft toys left at their bases, rotting yellow roses, and many handwritten signs in Estonian, Russian and English. “Putin killed Navalny” read one. “Stalin was a psychopath. Putin IS a psychopath,” read another.
Tallinn in mid-March was still bitterly cold, with sleet falling on more than one day. The wind sweeps in from the Gulf of Finland like blades of ice. The hotel I was staying in had a roaring fire going in the lobby around the clock.
I went one morning to visit the Hotel Viru, which opened in 1972. Built by the Russians and operated by the state Intourist company, it was the first hotel built for western tourists to Tallinn. The Russians wanted some of the West’s currency, and western tourists were curious about Soviet-occupied countries.
Some rooms on the 23rd floor at the top of the hotel – which still operates as a hotel today – have been preserved. The KGB operated from this floor, tapping phones of some of the more high-profile guests, or simply those they suspected of trying to influence local people. It also monitored listening devices in the restaurants.
In those days a staff member was placed on each floor with a notebook to record the comings and goings of guests. Some of the recording devices, tapes and machines used are on display in a room on the top floor: a sobering legacy of hyper-conscious surveillance. All that effort, suspicion and man-hours spent listening in to ordinary guileless tourists for what end?
Surveillance for local people was far worse. Our guide told us her grandmother was transported to a gulag for 14 years after being informed on by a neighbour for singing an anti-Russian song at a private house party. Her mother was one year old at the time of her grandmother’s departure, and 15 when she returned. “It messed her up, and you could say my mother not having a mother all those years messed me up when she herself became a mother,” she told us, a group of 12 strangers from Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Britain.
I took a backstage tour of the opera building some 90 minutes before curtain up. As I left my coat at the cloakroom, I wondered what the piles of small black bags on the counter were for. On return, I saw women who were arriving for that evening’s performance in floor-length dresses change their boots for heels, depositing their outer footwear in these little cloakroom bags.
The first time I saw bear on the menu in Tallinn, I thought it was a joke. It was not. The Olde Hansa restaurant, a kind of candlelit Bunratty with servers in medieval costume, offered “King of the Forest, the bear, served with saffron sauce and the best side dishes of the Grand Chef” for €68 a portion.
“We cull bear here,” the waiter told me. “There are too many bears. They are coming out of the forest and into the towns.” He added, “We cook it in a kind of stew. It’s very good.” I did not try the bear in saffron sauce, and now I regret it, for how often do you see the ursine creature on a menu?
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On the bus to Riga in Latvia, we drove for four hours through dense forest, where the unsuspecting bears must reside.
