This year marks the passing of 80 years since the battles of 1941 in Estonia. They were part of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union that began in June. The Nachumsiedlung (post-resettlement) of the Baltic Germans, the sending of the greater portion of political prisoners imprisoned by the NKVD in 1940 and 1941 to Gulag camps, and the mass deportation of June, 1941 all took place in the first half of 1941. Several thousand civilian inhabitants and forest brothers (Estonian patriotic partisans) were killed at the time of the battles of 1941, the so-called Summer War, along with thousands of German soldiers and Red Army soldiers, and sailors of the Soviet Baltic Fleet. Tens of thousands of people were taken from Estonia to Russia as evacuees and mobilised soldiers. The terror continued during the German occupation and more than 5,000 people additionally fell victim to that terror by the end of 1941, including about 1,000 Estonian Jews. Estonia lost 10% of its population in 1940–1941, which is the largest human loss of the 20th century in such a short time period.

The focus of Estonians on history has affected the way Estonians themselves consider 1941. For this reason, the world war that was fought in Estonian territory has sometimes been overshadowed to this day in the everyday consciousness of Estonians by the struggle between nationalist forest brothers and Soviet NKVD destruction battalions. Both occupying regimes amplified this direction of thought, first the Germans and later the Soviets, who continued to propagate it right through to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most Estonian historical literature published after the restoration of Estonia’s independence has generally also featured the role of Estonians on the background of World War II and the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Although more than three quarters of a century has passed since the war, its theme remains topical in international politics. Last year in connection with the passing of 75 years since Germany’s surrender, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin published an article in the USA presenting his vision of the connections between the results and consequences of World War II and the present time. As a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Estonia participated in carrying out a discussion on World War II, in which representatives of 80 countries participated. Russia’s head of state and the representatives of Eastern European countries once again phrased their established postulates. The latter stressed that 1945 did not mean liberation for a large part of Europe, but rather falling into the clutches of another totalitarian dictatorship or being subjected to its influence. In this context, the world that has become globalised by the 21st century and the changing of points of emphasis has been left in the background. For a large proportion of Asian countries, World War II did not begin or end on the dates that are written in the history of Europeans. For them, the secret protocols of the mutual non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939 between the Soviet Union and Germany are only a fact in the distant history of distant lands. Liberation for their countries began in 1945, but not so much from Japanese rule as from the rule of European colonial empires.

The first half of the 20th century was the era of large navies of great powers. This also directly affected Estonia, which was part of Russia’s European sea gate and Peter the Great’s naval fortress, which was supposed to be completed at the time of World War I and was designed to seal off the Gulf of Finland to hostile navies. The naval fortress did not get its baptism of fire because Russia collapsed on the ground front and in its capital cities. Yet the mighty German show of force in the course of its amphibious landing at Tagalaht in Saaremaa demonstrated the importance of naval superiority in the eastern region of the Baltic Sea. The Germans sent their Baltic Sea Division under the command of Count Rüdiger von der Goltz by sea to Finland in the early spring of 1918. This division played a key role in the victory of the White forces in Finland’s Civic War (bellum civile, kansalaissota in Finnish, a neutral term that combines what some refer to as Finland’s War of Independence and others call Finland’s Civil War). Russia’s Baltic Fleet abandoned its strongholds on both shores of the Gulf of Finland and took refuge for 20 years in Kronstadt. The Soviet Baltic Fleet restored its positions in the eastern part of the Baltic Sea in the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1940 by way of the military bases agreements forced on the Baltic countries and as a result of the Winter War against Finland. The battles of 1941 in Estonia lasted several months because the Red Army defended the positions of the Baltic Fleet as tenaciously as the Germans tried to capture them. In 1944, the Baltic Fleet returned to its bases along the Estonian and Latvian coasts. Instead of Hanko, which the Soviets demanded from Finland in 1940, Porkkala, which is near Helsinki, was rented out to them in 1944. Saaremaa was supposed to become a mighty stronghold for coastal defence artillery. After Stalin’s death and the start of the rocket age, the sunset of the era of the great warships began. Kaliningrad remained the Baltic Fleet’s forward position and Porkkala was given back to Finland. One of the main tones in the tonality of Soviet propaganda in Estonia from 1940 to 1960 was the blood brotherhood between Tallinn’s workers and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in the struggle for communist ideals. The crumbling obelisk dedicated to the Baltic Fleet’s Ice Cruise stands at Maarjamäe in Tallinn as a memorial to that.