Lennart Meri Speech Hamburg, Germany February 25, 1994, Matthiae-Supper of Hansa Cities

In this episode, we look at how Estonia developed itself into a market economy. We also learn how Estonia began to integrate itself into Europe and a discussion was started about the eventual acceptance of Estonia into NATO.

Perestroika has arrived and the Soviet Union gets more than what they expected with the new reforms.

Lennart Meri Speech Hamburg, Germany February 25, 1994, Matthiae-Supper of Hansa Cities

In this episode, we learn what modernity did for Estonia, which was to allow it to get a small glimpse of the outside world with Finnish television broadcasts being picked up in Northern Estonia and also Radio broadcasts that came in from the west. We also learned about the Letter of 40 that spelled out clearly the years of Russification that Estonia had to endure.

In this episode, we learn more about student protest groups, who were really the lifeblood for retaining Estonian dignity and culture. We mostly cover the third wave of Russification which put Estonians as a minority in the cities.

In this episode, we take a look at the political leadership of the Estonian SSR during the 1950s-1970s.  We learn about the Komsomol student groups and how they made their impact felt in Estonia. We also learned a little about how the suppression of the Prague Spring put a stop to liberalization in Estonia.

In this episode we see how Estonian industry and agriculture was collectivized under the Soviet Union.

The war is over and the Soviet Union took power in Estonia. Many politicians are shuffled around as Moscow is intent on keeping Estonia Politically Correct. In Marxism, bourgeois nationalism is the practice by the ruling classes of deliberately dividing people by nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion, so as to distract them from engaging in class struggle. It is seen as a divide-and-conquer strategy used by the ruling classes to prevent the working from uniting against them; hence the Marxist slogan, Workers of all countries, unite!

In this episode the Soviet Union is able to regroup and push back against the invading Germans and eventual retake Estonia. In this episode, we see how and when this is accomplished.

In this episode we cover the invasion of Estonia by the German Army. We briefly look at the local uprising against Soviet rule and the fight for Tartu before learning what German rule meant for every day Estonians.