Sofi Oksanen's "Purge"

“Purge”, a novel by Sofi Oksanen, a Finnish-Estonian author, spans three generations of Estonian women caught up in the traumas of world war, occupation and the break-up of the Soviet Union half a century later. It follows the story of Aliide Truu, an elderly lady who, in recently independent Estonia in 1992, takes in a dishevelled young girl she finds lying in the yard of her farmhouse. As the two women circle each other mistrustfully, we read of Aliide’s jealousy in her youth for her elder sister, Ingel, who found happiness in her marriage to Hans, a local peasant boy with whom she, Aliide, was infatuated. The family is broken apart by Soviet occupation during and after the Second World War. The girls’ parents are arrested and disappear, never to be seen again. Hans, having enlisted with the Germans fighting on the eastern front, returns to join the resistance to the Soviet occupiers in the forests, and is hidden by the sisters in the family home. Suspecting them of being in contact with Hans, the local communists interrogate, humiliate and sexually abuse the sisters, as well as the little daughter of Ingel and Hans.

Traumatised, Aliide marries an Estonian communist, Martin, in order to protect herself. Ingel and her daughter are deported to the far corners of the Soviet Empire, leaving Aliide, with Martin, to take over the family home. Unbeknownst to Martin, Hans, overwrought with grief for his wife and daughter, is still hidden in the house. Now Aliide has Hans to herself. She will look after him and, without Ingel to eclipse her, surely, she hopes, he will at last see her own virtues…

The young girl, Zara, a Russian who speaks Estonian, as Aliide observes, has also been a victim of political upheaval in the lawlessness of the breakup of the Soviet Union; trafficked, forced into prostitution and sexual slavery by men much like those who had abused Aliide decades earlier. Now they are gangsters, but one of them is ex-KGB. The times change; the men don’t. Zara’s experiences shock us with the appalling human degradation suffered by some amid the euphoria of the collapse of communism. Zara has fled their clutches, and now is desperate to make her escape complete before they catch up with her. As we guess from an early stage, and as Aliide eventually discovers, Zara is in fact the granddaughter of Ingel, who, in her desperation, has come to the only address she knows in Estonia, written by her grandmother on the back of a photo of a young Ingel and Aliide.

It is a powerful story about how lives are wrecked in the upheavals of their times; about how fraught times throw up pitiless people for whom no amount of cruelty is too much. And about the compromises and ambiguities that some are forced into. Aliide is abused. But in her fear and in her consuming jealousy of Ingel, she commits acts of great evil.

As to the men, they are less finely drawn than the main female characters, to some extent caricatures. Hans appears to be everything wholesome and noble in a man, the simple peasant, handsome, strong, devoted and loyal, who defends his country. The portrayal of Martin, by contrast, elicits not only moral disapproval, but physical revulsion. Oksanen dwells on his fetid armpits, the hair in them matted with sweat. The smell of his armpits sticks to Aliide’s hair and skin, and stays in her nostrils all day. Ingel comments that Aliide is starting to smell like a Russian, like the hordes of Russians pouring in to work in the new factories in Estonia. There are repeated references to the Russian habit of wiping their mouths on their sleeves, which Martin, and eventually Aliide adopt. The inference seems plain: the Russians are not just brutal occupiers; they are uncivilised barbarians. Without downplaying the terrible Estonian experience under Soviet rule, such images read like racial slurs. It is all a bit much.

The German soldiers who visit the family home during their turn at occupying Estonia are, by contrast, nice, wholesome, polite young boys. This is a not uncommon perspective in the Baltic states, where the experience of Soviet occupation is generally remembered as having been much worse than that of the relatively benign Germans. It is, of course, a view which can be sustained only if one forgets the slaughter of the Baltic Jews, in which some Baltic people participated. Oksanen makes only a passing reference to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Germans; a brief mention of a Jewish family that fled to Soviet territory before the German advance. The only other reference to Jews is that the man of the family, having returned with the Soviets, is present at one of the sessions of interrogation and abuse of the sisters at the town hall. This appears gratuitous. Only two references to a Jewish family, and they were after all collaborators in the brutality of Russian occupation.

Oksanen acknowledges the ambiguities and difficult choices that many had to make. Most notably Aliide, who accommodates herself to the regime that had abused her in order to survive, although her jealousy and spitefulness towards Ingel takes her well beyond the collaboration required for survival. Revulsion towards Martin is perhaps slightly mitigated by the fact that he is no hypocrite or cynic in his devotion to the communist ideal. A true and enthusiastic believer in the communist dream, and all its promises of a better world, in later life he struggles to come to terms with the emptiness of the dream brought home by the Chernobyl disaster.

It is a fine novel. But the unremitting negative stereotyping of Russians, even down to personal hygiene, mars the book. And it sits uneasily with the much more skimpy and positive portrayal of the German occupiers.

Latvia and Estonia

Spending a couple of weeks in Estonia in February and March, I inevitably found myself making comparisons with my experiences in Latvia six months earlier. In many ways, Estonia has tremendous advantages. Efficient, well-run, self-confident, benefiting from the close relationship with nearby Finland. Not afflicted by the corruption that burdens Latvia, economically successful, a trail-blazer in internet technology, one of the earliest ex-communist adopters of the Euro, Estonia is a thoroughly modern country, with a bright future.

When the prime minister asserted recently that Estonia would be among the five richest countries in Europe (a claim that would be laughed out of court in any other ex-communist country), even many foreigners in Estonia were convinced they would do it. Proud of their achievements, for example in having successfully fought off an organised cyber attack a few years ago, many Estonians are convinced they are one of the most developed, most advanced countries in Europe. They are years ahead of almost every other country in terms of IT penetration, they assert, waving aside the doubts of foreigners that their on-line systems, including internet voting, as well as on-line banking and sophisticated ID cards, might be open to fraud as elsewhere in the world. They are simply better and more advanced than the rest of us, they maintain. Is this smugness, or just an honest appraisal of their strengths?

That self-confidence is in marked contrast to Latvia, buffeted as it has been by the recent global economic crisis, racked by multiple corruption scandals. Yet in important respects Latvia seems healthier, more at ease with itself than Estonia.

The two countries share in common a heritage of deep trauma from the Soviet period, with its mass murder, deportations, colonisation by Soviets, the drip drip effacement of the native Baltic cultures and languages. Both of them have struggled to come to terms with the large Russian populations that remain. Latvia contains more Russians than Estonia, yet seems to have had greater success in integrating them, and in earning their adherence to the independent Latvian state.

It is striking that in Estonia, despite the large proportion of the population that is Russian, there are very few Russians in prominent positions. That the mayor of Riga is a Russian, that the head of Latvia's anti-corruption office was a Russian, and that prominent positions in other state bodies have been held by Russians, seems to have been widely accepted by Latvians. In Latvia, Russians have become an important factor on the political landscape that cannot be ignored. Not so in Estonia, where many Russians complain of feeling unwanted, treated like aliens. Why is that?

One suggestion put to me was that there was quite a large number of Russians in Latvia, especially in Riga, even before the colonisation policy that followed the Second World War, going back to the annexation of the territory to imperial Russia in the 18th Century. Russians have been a part of Latvian life for a long time. Many of the longstanding Russian residents are educated people, well-integrated, able to take on prominent roles. In Estonia, by contrast, there were relatively few Russians before 1945. Most of the Russians who came since then were industrial workers, not educated people, who have since lost out and been marginalised by the decimation of old Soviet industries in the 1990s. Perhaps that is a partial explanation.

It seemed to me that the two countries have different approaches to citizenship. That in Latvia, they have gone further towards embracing a more civic understanding, according to which all citizens, whatever their national origins, can be accepted as belonging, and can participate equally in the country's life. Watching a film about Soviet rule in Estonia, and the independence movement at the beginning of the 1990s, with its stress on Estonian folk traditions and songs, I felt there was a more 19th century type of ethnic belonging at work here, according to which only ethnic Estonians could ever be truly felt to be part of the national life and culture of the country. That Russians would always be outsiders, no matter that they may have been born there and have no other country.

The result is that, whereas Russians have taken big strides in Latvia, many of them being well integrated in the country's public and business life, that has not been the case in Estonia. There, by contrast, a large Russian population feels unwanted, resentful, marginalised. But they are not going to go away. Most Russians who wanted to move to Russia did so long ago. Fearing the threat from their big neighbour, many Estonians seem anxious that their Russian population might be a potential fifth column. That the majority of them are not Estonian citizens, even 20 years after independence, seems not to trouble them unduly, however. Most Estonians are unwilling to take steps that would ease the naturalisation of more of the Russian residents in their country. But that is surely a mistake. As fully integrated, Estonian citizens, would not the Russians of Estonia be more likely to be loyal to Estonia? I believe that is the lesson from Latvia that Estonians would do well to learn. Not to say that everything is perfect with the Russians in Latvia. But in bilingual Riga, Latvians and Russians appear more at ease with themselves and with each other than is the case in Estonia. Being rich will not solve all Estonia's problems.