Latest articles
All public articles of the knowledge base, newest first.
Estonian history
Why the Soviet empire collapsed
Why did an empire held together by the world's largest army, nuclear weapons and half a century of fear collapse? There is no single cause — historians argue about the weights to t…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Estonia in the world's indexes
A country whose independence was restored from the Soviet occupation only in 1991 stands today at the top of the world's freedom rankings. This page gathers Estonia's positions in…
Read →Estonian history
The Winter War
The Winter War (30 November 1939 – 13 March 1940) was the Soviet Union's war of aggression against Finland: 105 days in which the state with the world's largest army tried to subdu…
Read →Estonian history
A secret declaration of war: the pact, the bases, and the crime against Estonia
This page makes an argument. The 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its consequences for Estonia should be read not as diplomacy but as crime: the pact's secret protocol was a covert…
Read →Soviet occupation
Eduard Profittlich — Estonia's first Blessed
Eduard Profittlich (11 September 1890, Germany – 22 February 1942, Kirov prison) was the archbishop of Estonia's Catholic Church, who under the Soviet occupation stayed with his sm…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Foreign Estonia
Foreign Estonia (Välis-Eesti) is the network of Estonian communities outside Estonia — the language, church, school, press and social life that the refugees built abroad after the…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Baruto: an Estonian at the summit of sumo
Kaido Höövelson (born 5 November 1984 in Väike-Maarja), ring name Baruto Kaito — “Baruto” is the Japanese name of the Baltic Sea —, is Estonia's first professional sumo wrestler: a…
Read →Russia
The Russian military's supply system
The Russian military's supply system has been a source of recurring scandals even in peacetime — before the full-scale war of 2022. Through theft, embezzlement and contracts handed…
Read →Soviet occupation
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 →Soviet occupation
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 →Estonian Tatar history
Rafik Moksanov (Raffi Moks)
Rafik Moksanov (born 1926), later known in Canada as Raffi Moks, was one of the three Estonian Tatar Finnish Boys known by name — alongside Ibrahim Zarip and Ahmed Haerdinov. He se…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Estophilia
Estophilia is the love of Estonia and Estonian culture by people who are not themselves Estonian. Long before Estonia was a state, Baltic German scholars — Estophiles — studied, wr…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Explorers from Estonia
From the small soil of Estonia came men whose names are on the world map to this day — from Antarctica to the atolls of the Pacific and the ice-fields of the Arctic. They were born…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Estonian science that changed the world
A small land, a large trace: Estonia — above all around the University of Tartu and its old observatory — has produced discoveries still taught in every school on Earth, and workin…
Read →Interesting Estonia
The Baltic German heritage belongs to Estonia
Karl Ernst von Baer, founder of embryology. Fabian von Bellingshausen, discoverer of Antarctica. Krusenstern, Kotzebue, Seebeck, Lenz, Uexküll — a line of world-changing names, bor…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Ernst Jaakson
Ernst Jaakson (1905–1998) was an Estonian diplomat who, through almost eighty years of unbroken service, kept the Republic of Estonia legally alive throughout the Soviet occupation…
Read →Interesting Estonia
The Estonian Socialist Party's Foreign Association (ESPVK)
The Estonian Socialist Party's Foreign Association (ESPVK) was the exile organisation of Estonia's social democrats, active in Sweden after the Second World War. During the occupat…
Read →Interesting Estonia
The Kersten Committee
The Kersten Committee was a US House of Representatives select committee (1953–1954) that investigated the forced and illegal incorporation of the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia a…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Women's suffrage in Estonia: 1917, before the USA and France
Estonian women gained the right to vote in 1917 — before Britain, before the United States, before France. And more remarkable still: The Estonian state has never held an election…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Estonian sport that amazed the world
A small nation, big sport: Estonians have written pages of world sporting history larger than the country itself. The story runs through three flags — tsarist Russia's, under which…
Read →