On 20 August 2021, 30 years passed since Estonia’s independence was restored. Before this, for more than half a century, Estonia was occupied – by the Soviet Union for most of that time, but also by the Germans for three years during World War II.

Like Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. The incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet sphere of influence was agreed upon by Vyacheslav Molotov, the people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the USSR, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister. On 23 August 1939 they signed a non-aggression pact between their two countries, which included a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into their respective spheres of influence. This day was commemorated 50 years later, on 23 August 1989, when the Baltic nations attracted international attention with the Baltic Way – almost 2 million people stood in peaceful protest in a 400 mile long human chain, stretching from Tallinn, Estonia to Vilnius, Lithuania and focused attention on the injustice of the half-century-long Soviet occupation and the tens of thousands of victims. The date of 23 August is now commemorated as a day of remembrance in Europe.

Resistance to the occupation in Estonia began immediately in 1940. For instance, opposition candidates were nominated for the staged puppet parliamentary elections in July 1940. This was bloodless civil disobedience, but in the summer of 1941, when the Second World War reached Estonia, armed resistance began. Especially after the deportations of June 14, 1941, men and women sought refuge from Soviet persecution and terror by fleeing to the forests. They organised themselves into local units, and despite a shortage of weapons, the partisans, known as Forest Brothers, were able to seize power in many parts of southern Estonia and raise Estonian flags before the German troops arrived.

In the summer of 1941, the German occupation authorities refused the Estonians’ request to restore their independence. They also refused to recognise it when Jüri Uluots, the last Prime Minister, acting in the role of the President of Estonia, instructed his deputy, Otto Tief, to form an Estonian government in September 1944. An Estonian government was formed, but only in exile in Sweden. Most Western countries refused to officially recognise the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Thus, in many countries, the diplomatic missions of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia continued to operate.

In the autumn of 1944, after the return of the Red Army and the Soviet authorities, armed resistance by the Forest Brothers continued – in some places, it persisted until the early 1950s. Soviet security forces arrested thousands of people. The mass persecution and terror culminated in the deportation of more than 20 000 people in 1949. Most of these were women, children and the elderly. The strength of the Forest Brothers started to falter due to despair – they had neither hope of foreign assistance nor equipment, and the deportations and the elimination of private farms had destroyed their last remaining strongholds. This was crucial in the Estonian climate, since one needs a safe household to hide in. The Forest Brothers acted in small groups, having no or very little contact with other units. It was a spontaneous resistance in the name of national freedom. More than half of them were arrested by the Soviet security forces and 10% were killed for protecting their country.

However, resistance did not end. In many places, school students formed secret societies. These defied the Soviet regime with pro-Estonian activities, the hoisting of the banned national flag and other actions that demonstrated their rejection of the occupation forces and their desire for the restoration of Estonian independence. Many of them were sentenced for 10–15 years of imprisonment in Soviet prison camps.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the dissident movement gained momentum. However, unlike dissidents in Russia, who opposed the regime for what it was, dissidents in the Baltic states aimed to draw attention to the illegality of the occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and to demand the restoration of independence. They publicly criticized the Communist regime and reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications (samizdat), often by hand, passing the documents from reader to reader, thereby also communicating information about Communist crimes to the free world as much as possible. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread because typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access them. As ridiculous as it may sound for this activity, dissidents were often sentenced for around 5 years of imprisonment in prison camps or forced into mental hospitals, another method of repressing people in Soviet Union.

In the late 1970s, Soviet society increasingly started to show signs of decline. For Estonians, the seemingly unchecked influx of non-Estonian-speaking people from other parts of the USSR was an increasingly serious problem. The same was true of Russification – the pressure to switch to Russian-speaking administration in many areas of life. The semi-spontaneous riots by Tallinn schoolchildren in the autumn of 1980, which were brutally suppressed by law enforcement agencies, prompted forty intellectuals to write an open letter in protest. Known as the “Letter of the 40,” it was sent to major newspapers in Estonia and Moscow. Those publications, of course, did not publish it. However, this text made its way abroad and was also secretly disseminated in Estonia. The signatories to the letter were not imprisoned, but many were no longer permitted to continue working in their fields. As a consequence, the Soviet Union became well known for having manual workers with an extremely high education.

Refugee communities played an important role in keeping international attention focused on the freedom struggle of the Baltic nations. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of people had fled the Baltic states to the West – initially in the hope that they would be able to return soon thereafter. They informed the governments and residents of their host countries and international organisations about the situation in their occupied homelands and called for the non-recognition of the occupation to continue. They raised their children to be Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians and maintained their national cultures, education, intellectual pursuits and economics in their mother tongues. After regaining independence, they supported their homelands’ return to the Western world and a final separation from the post-Soviet sphere.

In 1991, this struggle was successful. Estonians restored their independence. But that was not the end of the story: all Estonians must continue to work every day to maintain this independence and freedom.