Travel Guides | Tallinn Travel Guide
Tallinn Travel Guide
The turn of the tide
The Brits have a maddening habit of muddling up ‘the Baltics’ and ‘the Balkans’. Perhaps it’s because both regions have turbulent, often tragic, pasts. The Danes seized Tallinn in the 13th century, but sold the troublesome territory to the German Teutonic order (for a shockingly small sum), before Sweden, then Russia, moved in. The Russian Revolution gave Estonians the chance to break their chains and establish the ‘first republic’: in the brief period of independence between the two World Wars, the standard of living exceeded that in Finland. Both Stalin and Hitler dragged their war machines through the country, which was then illegally occupied by the Russians for nearly 50 years. Free again in 1991 following the implosion of the Soviet Union, the country lost no time in modernizing itself and was the first former Soviet republic to be invited to join the European Union.
It’s well over a decade since Estonia slipped out of the communist yoke, so it’s no surprise that locals find the epithet ‘post-Soviet’ rather tedious. In any case, Tallinners will tell you, they were never entirely Soviet. Physically, the city looked grim, but spiritually, the westernmost outpost of Uncle Joe’s unholy empire had a special glow. The memory of democracy and hard-won freedom was silently passed down the generations, and, after Stalin’s demise, Tallinn had a relatively liberal cultural climate.
Tabula Rasa
Estonia’s second bid for freedom coincided with the revolution in information technology, a heady combination. Veterans of the neverending waiting lists for landline telephones leapt at the chance to buy mobile phones, while the new banks didn’t bother with chequebooks. The government’s introduction of paper-free meetings drew attention from around the world; there was even talk of renaming the country ‘E-stonia’. Today, Tallinners use text messages to pay parking fines and purchase condoms, and it is hardly unusual to find the following note on the door of a temporarily closed museum: “Exhibition continues on the internet.” A certain youthful arrogance accompanied this ruthless enthusiasm for wiping away the past. The first prime minister was 32 (his foreign minister just 26); the current prime minister, Juhan Parts, is the youngest in Europe, elected at the age of 36 in 2002.
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