Founded New Party in Estonia - Dagens Nyheter 1988-02-21 Osmo Vatanen interview
Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia is now 14 years old
Our Encyclopedia recently received a wonderful opportunity for a major renewal on its 14th birthday . After many years of growing our Encyclopedia had become bit slow and sometimes even decided not to answer when people knocked on the door.
A very big thank you and blessings to Dmytro Rudiy (rudiy.nl) for his great work in upgrading the server, website and all of the infrastructure and helping make TBE fast and reliable again for everyone!
We kindly ask our readers to help us cover the cost of this important upgrade and also help with the ongoing costs of keeping the Encyclopedia alive and freely available.
or card
Every little donation helps and every one is deeply appreciated. 🙏🙏🙏
OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM 🙏🙏🙏
May blessings shower down on all of yous 🙏🙏🙏
Article
About this article
| Original newspaper | Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), Sunday, 21 February 1988, page 7, in Swedish |
|---|---|
| Author | Osmo Vatanen |
| This text | English translation published by the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) in Daily Report: Soviet Union, FBIS-SOV-88-042, Thursday, 3 March 1988, pages 45 and 46, under the heading "Emigre Estonian Dissidents Interviewed" (FBIS number PM021459) |
| Original title | "Founded New Party in Estonia" |
| Subject | Vello Väärtnõu and Eke-Pärt Nõmm, expelled from the Soviet Union to Sweden on 13 February 1988, speak about the November 1987 demonstration in Pärnu, the idea of an independence party (the ERSP), Buddhism and their life in exile. |
Emigre Estonian Dissidents Interviewed
PM021459 Stockholm DAGENS NYHETER in Swedish 21 Feb 88 p 7
[Interview with exiled Estonian dissidents Eke-Part Nomm and Vello Vaartnou by Osmo Vatanen: "Founded New Party in Estonia" - Estonian names as published, disregarding diacritics]
[Text] Just in time for the 70th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia Moscow expelled freedom activists Vello Vaartnou and Eke-Part Nomm to Sweden. They have called for freedom for Estonia and been involved in the formation of an independence party. This was more than the policy of glasnost could tolerate.
This is the second time in a relatively short time that the Soviet Union has expelled Estonian freedom activists. Last fall worker Tiit Madisson was given his marching orders shortly after arranging a meeting in Tallinn in August which was attended by several thousand people and at which he and many others demanded the publication of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.[1] It was the basis for the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic states in 1940. The demonstration showed that there was scope for protests and these came thick and fast. Last September, for example, four high-ranking Communists, including the deputy chief editor of party organ RAHVA HAAL, were already demanding a new administration [foervaltning] specifically for Estonia, foreign investment, and elements of a market economy.[2]
Vello Vaartnou told me about a demonstration in November in the city of Parnu at the monument to those who fell in the 1918-1919 war of liberation. The meeting was arranged by the same group to which Madisson belonged. Vello Vaartnou had the megaphone.
"The authorities urged us to go to the the town hall, but I shouted to the people that 'you have been listening to those loudspeakers for 50 years; how much longer do you intend to do so?'" Vaartnou said, recalling the demonstrators' applause when he also made a plea for a struggle for Estonia's independence.
Nomm also remembers the charged atmosphere before the meeting:
"A group of 150 Russian youths with a Soviet flag at their head went around the streets of Parnu to demonstrate that the Russians have come to stay. But after that there was fighting on a large scale between Estonian and Russian youths."
In December the idea of a "people's independence party" was hatched.
"We were forced to test the limits of the new politics, for Estonia has no other possibility. Estonians will soon be a minority in their own country," Vaartnou said.
"If we had worked more cautiously and more slowly, the Communists would still not have changed their policies in the long term. Nor do we think that Gorbachev will succeed with his policies, because the Stalinists still have their state posts."
Nomm's and Vaartnou's group at home in Estonia is continuing its work on the party. The next thing on the agenda is the drafting of a party program.
"Hundreds of people are working to bring the party about," Vaartnou said.
He is originally an artist, 37 years old,[3] and was forced to leave his wife, Natali, in Tallinn, but she has been promised that she will be allowed to follow him. He is a practising Buddhist, studied the religion and its teachings in a monastery near the Mongolian border[4] for several years, and is able to read the basic texts without problems.
"But the fact that I have a shaved head is because I was in a labor camp and prison for a couple of years and thought that it was most convenient," said Vaartnou, who was sentenced for an attempt to flee the Soviet Union during a visit to Karelia in his youth.[5]
For Nomm on the other hand his bald head is a sign of his religious affiliation. He is only 22, but found Buddhism for himself, and had his faith strengthened when he met co-religionist Vaartnou.
"For me Buddhism stands for internal and external freedom and the struggle for freedom is therefore something completely natural in this context," said Vaartnou, who now intends to stay in Sweden, as does his colleague.
"Stockholm is closest to Estonia."
At 1100 hours yesterday another Estonian expelled from the Soviet Union arrived at Arlanda airport. Rein Mets in the leader of a religious group and one of the organizers behind the planned demonstrations in Tallin next Wednesday [24 February]. At Stockholm's Baltic Information Center the Soviet authorities' actions are seen as an attempt to strangle these demonstrations.
Notes
- ↑ The Hirvepark meeting in Tallinn on 23 August 1987, organised by the MRP-AEG group (Estonian Group for the Publication of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
- ↑ The proposal for an economically self-managing Estonia (IME), published in the Tartu newspaper Edasi on 26 September 1987 by Edgar Savisaar, Siim Kallas, Tiit Made and Mikk Titma.
- ↑ Vello Väärtnõu was born on 17 July 1951, so in February 1988 he was 36 (the age given in Soviet Nationality Survey 1988). The article's "37" is kept as printed.
- ↑ The Ivolginsky datsan near Ulan-Ude in Buryatia, where Vello Väärtnõu studied from 1978 to 1986.
- ↑ Vello Väärtnõu was arrested twice for trying to leave the Soviet Union: at 17, after which he spent three years in the Vezaika camp in Komi (his own memoir of 2021), and in Karelia on 5 November 1982 together with Tarmo Urb. See Vello Väärtnõu Arrested in Karelia in 1982 and Held as a Political Prisoner - reports in the Estonian exile press, 1983 to 1986.
Source
- FBIS Daily Report: Soviet Union, No. 042, 3 March 1988, pages 45-46 (Internet Archive): https://archive.org/details/micro_IA1176915_0196