Estonia and Egypt are two very different cultures, right? Different histories, peoples, climates, religions--pretty much everything about them might seem as unlike as one could imagine! Yet we've found during these early weeks in Estonia that we have so often been reminded of the four months we spent in the Middle East in late 2009, particularly the six weeks we spent in Cairo (with sixteen St. Olaf students during the college's "Term in the Middle East").
Some of the reason Cairo's been on our minds even here in Estonia has, of course, been the widespread coverage of the grass-roots movement for democracy by ordinary Egyptians in recent weeks. We have the BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle (the German news station), and Euronews on our apartment's television, and especially until Mubarak resigned (see the photo above right of that evening as we saw it here), and our eyes were glued to the events as they unfolded. We were moved by the courage and spirit of the movement, and wondered how the Egyptians we'd gotten to know (many for a second time, as we were there in 2000 as well) might be faring. Our deep hope is that the transition to real democracy will be fulfilled, and that much brighter futures for Egypt's young people will become a reality (see the photo above left of two couples chatting along the Nile River, right near where recent events unfolded).
But what might all this have to do with Estonia? Estonia, too, though twenty years ago, also experienced a grass-roots movement to win independence from the Soviet Union and to restore democratic rule and personal freedom (independence was won in 1991). There are of course important differences between the movements in Egypt and Estonia: Estonians were resisting rule by a large, strong (if beginning to crumble) foreign state which had incorporated Estonia (and much of eastern Europe) after World War II, while the movement in Egypt has overthrown an autocratic ruler in power for a generation. But in each we see the courageous mobilization of ordinary people who did not have the hindsight to know that they would prevail rather than be imprisoned, exiled, or killed. They could not know they would succeed, that their risks would be worth it.
One particular difference between the movements has to be mentioned. While both have been movements based on organizing thousands of people using non-violent means (rather than armed rebellion), the movement here in Estonia was based on an unlikely cultural tradition (unlikely to those like us without it!): singing and song festivals. For centuries Estonians have gathered to sing together (the first "modern" festival is dated to 1869, when Estonian nationalism was developing during earlier Russian rule). These song festivals, held about every five years, were an important way through which Estonian identity, tradition, and language have developed and been expressed.
During the 1980's, song festivals could bring together a third of the total population, with massed choirs of over 20,000 (!). Over half a million people gathered for the 1990 festival, and flew the Estonian flag for the first time since World War II. When Estonians sang songs together like this, it was an important part of what inspired people to take the risks ordinary people usually avoid. The black and white photo below is from the Tallinn History Museum, from the time of the independence movement; the color photo on the right shows the 2009 song festival, drawing hundreds of thousands of Estonians. (Your local library may carry the excellent documentary "The Singing Revolution," if you want to learn more about this.)
We heard a local girls' choir, Tütarlastekoor Ellerhein, give a wonderful concert just before the annual celebration of Independence Day (February 24th) here--the day when freedom from Russia was first won in 1918. It began with a singing of the Estonian national anthem, which the audience rose to join. Perhaps it was all the time I'd spent watching the struggles in Cairo's Tahrir Square, or perhaps it was the heartfelt singing of Estonia's song and the spirit with which those present sang it (parents and others who'd lived through the independence movement), but for the first time in my memory I felt tears running down my cheeks while singing the anthem of another country.
A p.s.: some might note another possible, if very indirect, connection between Estonia and Egypt. OK, not Egypt, but Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim part of the Soviet Union still today. In 1991, when Soviet troops were ordered into Tallinn to take over important buildings, the Soviet commander was a Chechen (Dzhokhar Dudayev) who later became the leader of the independence movement there after the Soviet Union collapsed (what's now a military/guerilla movement). He refused to fire on Estonian crowds, and said he would turn the guns eastward instead. He was killed by the Russian military in 1995.
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