Soviet occupation
The Soviet occupation's impact on Estonia's minority peoples — the Tatars among them: cultural genocide, russification, deportations and the destruction of minorities' sacred sites and cemeteries.
Cemeteries and sacred sites under the occupation, mapped
Minority peoples in the Soviet Union
Soviet policy toward minority cultures
The Soviet Union's policy toward minority cultures moved from the indigenisation of the 1920s to Stalinist russification. For a Turkic-Muslim people like the Tatars and for occupie…
Read →Sürgün — the deportation of the Crimean Tatars
The Sürgün (Crimean Tatar Sürgünlik, “the Exile”) is the Crimean Tatars' name for the 1944 deportation, when the Soviet occupation authorities removed an entire people from Crimea…
Read →The life of Muslims in the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union held one of the world's largest Muslim populations — 45–50 million people by the 1980s: Volga Tatars, Bashkirs, the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and C…
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Repression and russification
Communist crimes against Estonia's minorities
The Soviet occupation (1940–1941 and 1944–1991) brought Estonia mass repression that also struck the country's ethnic and religious minorities. Deportations, executions and the Gul…
Read →Estonian Swedes
The Estonian Swedes (Estonian rannarootslased or eestirootslased; Swedish estlandssvenskar) are a historical Swedish-speaking minority who lived for centuries along the coast and i…
Read →Estonianisation: how the Mišär Tatars became an invisible minority
The historical Estonian Tatars — the Mišär merchant community, already well integrated into the pre-war Republic of Estonia — largely dissolved into Estonian society during the dec…
Read →No one escaped the Soviet Union
Under the Soviet occupation the authorities systematically razed a series of historic cemeteries in Estonia — above all those of the minority communities and the old congregations.…
Read →Russification
Russification is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians adopt Russian culture and the Russian language as a result of state policy. It was pursued by both the Russia…
Read →The cultural genocide of the historical Estonian Tatars
The cultural genocide of the historical Estonian Tatars by the occupying Soviet Union's officials in Estonia either through state policy or gross negligence.
Read →The economic impact of the Soviet occupation on Estonia
The Soviet occupation (1940–1991) took an open, agriculture-and-export economy that in the late 1930s stood roughly level with Finland's, and over half a century reduced it to a fr…
Read →The Estonian President's Chain of Office
The badge of office of the President of Estonia — the Collar of the Order of the National Coat of Arms — is the insignia worn by the head of state. The original has been in Russia'…
Read →The Holodomor
The Holodomor (Ukrainian for “death by hunger”, from holod “hunger” and mor “extermination”) was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban in 1932–1933 in which millions of…
Read →The mass deportations
The Soviet occupation authorities used mass deportation — the forcible removal of people from their homes to distant places of exile — as a tool to break whole peoples. Estonia was…
Read →The shadow language of the occupation
During the Soviet occupation (1940–1991), under constant surveillance, the Estonian Tatar community developed a shadow language — everyday words took on hidden meanings so that peo…
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The destruction of sacred sites and cemeteries
Desecrated sacred sites in Estonia
Estonia's sacred sites — churches, synagogues, prayer houses, mosques, monasteries and natural holy places — were desecrated by the two occupations of the 20th century. The Soviet…
Read →Orthodoxy under the Soviet occupation
The religious policy of the Soviet occupation was state atheism — the aim was to eradicate religion. Yet the treatment was not equal: the Moscow-Patriarchate Russian Orthodox Churc…
Read →Reburials under the Soviet occupation
When the occupation authorities closed and razed Estonia's cemeteries, the dead often had to be reburied elsewhere. This page gathers what is known about the reburials — chiefly th…
Read →The destruction of sacred sites and cemeteries in the Soviet Union
The destruction of the Estonian Tatars' Muslim cemetery was not a local exception but part of a policy that spanned the whole Soviet Union. Nothing was sacred to the Soviet occupat…
Read →Why the Soviet Union destroyed cemeteries
The Soviet occupation razed, closed and built over hundreds of cemeteries in Estonia and across the whole Soviet Union — in Estonia and Union-wide. Why? No document says “we are de…
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The razed cemeteries
Kalamaja cemetery
Kalamaja cemetery (German Fischermay Friedhof) was one of Tallinn's oldest cemeteries, in the Kalamaja district — the burial ground of Estonians and Swedes, chiefly the fishing and…
Read →Kopli cemetery and cemetery park
Kopli cemetery (German Friedhof Ziegelskoppel) was Tallinn's largest Baltic-German cemetery, on the Kopli peninsula. It is the third great Tallinn cemetery razed by the Soviet occu…
Read →Mõigu cemetery
Mõigu cemetery (German Friedhof von Moik) was the cemetery of Tallinn's Baltic-German nobility and wealthier burghers. It is one of the cemeteries razed by the Soviet occupation au…
Read →Tallinn's old Jewish cemetery
Tallinn's old Jewish cemetery stood at Magasini Street 27 in the city centre, beside the Inner City (Alexander Nevsky) cemetery — in the same quarter as the Tatars' Muslim cemetery…
Read →Tallinn's old Roman-Catholic cemetery
Tallinn's old Roman-Catholic cemetery — known popularly as „Poolamägi” (Poland Hill) — lay as part of the Inner City necropolis. It is one of the minority congregations' burial gro…
Read →The Narva German military cemetery
The Narva German military cemetery held the graves of German soldiers of the Second World War. As in Rakvere, it was destroyed during the occupation and restored only after the res…
Read →The Rakvere German military cemetery
The Rakvere German military cemetery held the graves of German soldiers of the Second World War. During the occupation it was destroyed, and it was restored only in the 1990s.
Read →The Rakvere old town cemetery
The Rakvere old town cemetery was the town's main burial ground for over a century and a half. During the occupation it was liquidated and turned into a park.
Read →The Siselinna military cemetery
The military section of Tallinn's Siselinna (Inner City) cemetery is a burial ground for soldiers. During the occupation it was desecrated and the traces of foreign military rememb…
Read →The Tartu Muslim cemetery
The Tartu Muslim cemetery was a small Islamic burial ground in the Raadi-Kruusamäe district — one of the few Muslim burial places in Estonia outside Tallinn, Narva and Rakvere. Onl…
Read →The Tartu old Jewish cemetery
The Tartu old Jewish cemetery was the town's first Jewish burial ground, in the Raadi-Kruusamäe district. Today a single gravestone remains.
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The Soviet Union in the Second World War
Lend-Lease and the Soviet Union in the Second World War
Lend-Lease was a United States program through which the U.S. (and, in parallel, Great Britain) supplied its allies during the Second World War, including the Soviet Union, with mi…
Read →The Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war, officers and members of the intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in the spring of 194…
Read →The Kremlin Letters: the psychology of the Big Three's correspondence
The Kremlin Letters (eds. David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, Yale University Press 2018) publishes and annotates Stalin's wartime correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt —…
Read →The Soviet Union needed help to fight its former friend
This page is a summary of what kind of country the Soviet Union was — and what that meant for the occupied. It was not enough for Stalin to pressure Estonia into giving away its fr…
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