TALLINN, Sep 19, BNS – Speaking at an event commemorating the interim government of Otto Tief formed in Estonia in September 1944, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves on Tuesday repeated his call to set up a memorial to victims of communism in Estonia.
The president previously pronounced a similar initiative at a meeting on the 20th anniversary of the 1987 pro-independence meeting in Hirvepark, Tallinn, on Aug. 23 this year.
“I repeat my appeal to establish an honorable memorial to the tens of thousands of victims of communism in Estonia. Not only to the victims of Stalinism, because this would nullify the suffering of those who were imprisoned, repressed, and persecuted between 1953 and 1988,” Ilves said.
“Unfortunately, we still do not know the names of all the victims. Our job is to find out and chisel them in stone,” the president said at the opening of a photo exhibition of the members of the Otto Tief government at the Bank of Estonia
“I am proud, extremely proud, of the Otto Tief government. In the name of democracy and freedom they met their pre-determined fate, so that no one in the future could say that Tallinn was ‘liberated’ in September 1944,” he said.
The flag that the Red Army tore down from the tower of the Tall Hermann was the Estonian blue-black-and-white, not the Nazi swastika, said the president.
He recalled the Atlantic Charter announced by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941, which listed the principles whereby of the Western allies would act after their victory, and declared that they recognize the right of all peoples to decide their own system of government and to determine their own fate.
“This declaration was very important to the occupied nations. It provided hope for restoring lost independence. It resulted in the belief that help would arrive from the Western allies,” said the president.
The fate of the National Committee formed in February 1944 and of the members of the Tief government that assumed office in September 1944 is very symbolic of the situation at the time, he said.
First they were arrested by the German occupation authorities. Thereafter, those who were not able to escape were arrested by the Soviet NKVD. They were all repressed: some were killed, the rest imprisoned.
“Seeing the fates of Estonia‘s democrats, there was no difference between the Nazis and communists, said Ilves.
“The Germans arrested those they could, and when the Russians arrived, they arrested them again. Neither Nazis nor communists tolerated Estonia or democracy,” he said.
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