Moscow compromises with Estonians
USSR the special session of the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR, which caused such serious disagreements....Let us be frank, a series of points in the draft changes in the constitution of the USSR were seen by the majority of the population of the republic as a rejection of the sovereign status of the republics inscribed in the present consitution and the line of the Nineteenth All-Union Communist Party Conference on streng-
THE ELECTIONS for the new Soviet parliament on March
26 seem to be shaping up in the Baltic republics into a serious test of the Communist Party's to ride the winds of liberalization. In one by-election already in Lithuania, a candidate of the local People's Front, Vaisvila, won 62% of the vote, leaving his Communist Party opponent with only 15%.
In an article in the January 26 International Herald
Tribune, Michael Dobbs quoted the successful candidate as saying: "The party is panicking because they think they might lose." The Lithuanian CP chief, Algirdas
Brauzaskas, whose appointment last fall had aroused great hopes, was said to be suffering from disillusionment created when he used this popularity to prevent the republic's parliament from falling in behind the demands for sovereignty raised by the Estonian legislature.
"That tactical success is costing him votes," Dobbs wrote. "In order to recoup the political ground lost to
Sajudis [the Lithuanian People's Front], Lithuanian party leaders have now promised to support a totally revised version of the Lithuanian constitution, including the controversial sovereignty clause"
GERRY FOLEY
LONG WITH Armenia, tiny
A
Estonia has posed the sharpest challenge to the prevailing relationship between Moscow and the formally sovereign republics. Its example is particularly important for its neighboring Baltic republics, Lithuania and
Latvia. The Estonian people number barely a million. They still constitute about 60 per cent of the population of the republic, and speak a non-Indo/European language closely related to Finnish, which Russians tend to consider unlearnable.
The Estonian parliament aroused a violent reaction from the central authorities by demanding the right to decide whether or not all-Union laws were to be applied in the republic and that Estonian was to be the language of the republic. It seems also that a considerable part of the Estonian language press slipped out of the control of the party authorities. Attacks on it were contained in an article by republic parliament deputy Koltakov in Pravda of November
26 ("Why I voted against" [that is, against the sovereignty resolution of the Estonian Supreme Soviet]) and in one by the chief editor of Eesti Kommunist in Pravda of December 3.1
For the moment, the confrontation between the Estonian parliament and Moscow seems to have ended in a compromise. The Estonian linguistic law adopted offered extra guarantees to Russian speakers. And on January 16 Pravda, for the first time, opened its columns to a direct answer to its attacks on representatives of national movements and national demands. It was a half-page article on page 3 by M. L Bronshtein, a member of the Estonian Academy of Science. (In fact, the entire page was devoted to three articles on the question, putting Bronshtein's piece in the context of a general discussion of the problem.)
Bronstein explained that the decisions of the Estonian parliament had to be understood as a means of maintaining the CP's political control.
"Now I want to take up the decisions of thening economic and political demостасу....
"Justified fears of Estonian population"
"There was a rapid and strong reaction. And the Communist Party of Estonia would have been isolated from the overwhelming majority of the population, would not have fulfilled its task of consolidating all the healthy forces and isolating extremist elements raising the demand for separation from the Soviet Union, if it had not taken into consideration the justified fears of the population. In this extremely sharp and tense situation in the republic, certain changes were made in the constitution of the Estonian SSR to reinforce the sovereignty of the republic in the economic (primarily control over natural resources) and political spheres."
The sovereignty of the republics, he went on to explain, raised uncertain unresolved constitutional problems, which is hardly surprising because it has not existed in reality since the bureaucracy seized political power.
"Most of the disputes were tied up with the change in Article 74 of the constitution of the Estonian SSR, formulated as follows: *Laws and other regulations of the USSR will go into effect on the territory of the Estonian SSR after being registered according to procedure established by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian SSR.' This decision conflicted with the present constitution of the USSR. But here, I cannot fail to note the problems that exist. What is to be done if a disagreement arises between all-Union and republic organs? Not push the thing, as some irrational hotheads proposed, to the point of threatening to leave the Union. Some constitutional form of reconciling the two is necessary."
Bronshtein responded to the outcry in the Soviet central press against the demands raised for limiting immigration into Estonia.
"Try to understand the psychology of the older population of our republic, the Estonians. The land on which their ancestors have lived for thousands of years has been threatened by ecological disaster (and the threat would have become a reality, if the corresponding all-Union minister had begun the planned phosphate mining). As a result of the extensive development of industry and the resulting importing of labor 1. See IV 155, January 23, 1989.
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International Viewpoint #156 • February 6, 1989
USSR from various regions of the country, the specific weight of the Estonians in the population of the country has been declining, from 90% down to 60%. And if this trend continues, we can predict exactly when the older population will become a minority on their own territory. The range of the use of the Estonian language has been steadily declining. When the Estonian people decided to link their fate with that of the Soviet Union in 1940, they could hardly have expected these circumstances."
In this last formulation, it is hard to know whether Bronshtein was being deliberately ironic. Unlike the case of other republics, such as Ukraine for example, there was nothing voluntary about Estonia's union with the USSR. It was simply occupied. Resistance, real and potential, was crushed, resulting in the death, deportation or exile of one quarter of the Estonian people, mainly in the most energetic age groups. (References to this in the Estonianlanguage press are one of the things that have come under sharpest attack in Pravda, for example.)
Ecological threat from mining projects
The recent Estonian restiveness was sparked by a TV broadcast in the fall of 1986 that revealed plans for developing phosphate mines in the northern part of the republic. This scheme threatened to pollute the ground water in a third of the republic, a region inhabited by a 400,000 people. Oil-shale mining in Estonia for the benefit of Leningrad has already ruined large stretches of countryside and had a disastrous effect on agriculture. The ministry authorities at first denied the phosphate mining scheme, but as a result of glasnost, it was possible for the Estonian journalist Juhan Aare to get the facts out.?
Bronshtein explained: "It has to be understood that the tension that arose between the republic and all-union organs is not the result of some plot by 'bourgeois nationalists' or anti-perestroika forces (although they might make advantage of it for
He chided the central press, especially Pravda, quite sharply for one-sided and tendentious reporting of the Estonian