Latest articles
All public articles of the knowledge base, newest first.
Interesting Estonia
Hemingway and the Estonians: an Estonian in every port
The most famous line by a foreign writer about Estonians circulates in Estonia as: “in every port in the world there is at least one Estonian”. It was said by Ernest Hemingway — bu…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Estonian roots in the world
Estonia's roots reach far. Some people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent, have become famous abroad — in space, in technology and elsewhere — carrying a fragment of Estonia with…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Estonians in exile
When Estonia was struck by the Soviet occupation, tens of thousands of Estonians fled west — and many of them became world-famous abroad. Poets, composers, artists, scientists and…
Read →Russia
Swan Lake in Russian culture
Swan Lake is Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet — the most famous in the world. In Russian culture it carries two roles that could hardly be further apart: the crown jewel of the imperial…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Bernt Notke's Danse Macabre
In Tallinn's St Nicholas' Church (Niguliste) hangs a painting like no other anywhere in the world: the Lübeck master Bernt Notke's Danse Macabre is the only medieval Dance of Death…
Read →Interesting Estonia
The Kaali meteorite crater
At Kaali on the island of Saaremaa lies the place where the sky once fell to earth: the Kaali crater is the first scientifically proven meteorite crater in Europe, and one of the f…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Arvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935 in Paide) is an Estonian composer who for years on end has been performed more than any other living composer in the world. The tintinnabuli style…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Tenet in Tallinn
Christopher Nolan's science-fiction thriller Tenet (2020) — the story of objects inverted in time and the saving of the world — was filmed in large part in Tallinn. It was the bigg…
Read →Estonian history
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is the treaty concluded in Moscow on 23 August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Officially named the “Treaty of Non-Aggression between Ge…
Read →Interesting Estonia
The world's first Christmas tree
Tallinn carries an honour few cities in the world share: here, on the Town Hall Square, stood in 1441 a tree held to be the world's first public Christmas tree. Riga (1510) contest…
Read →Interesting Estonia
Tchaikovsky and Estonia
Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), one of the world's best-loved composers, spent the summer of 1867 in Haapsalu, Estonia. Out of that summer came the piano cycle Souvenir de Hapsal (“…
Read →Russia
Xenophobia
Xenophobia (from the Greek xenos “stranger, foreigner” and phobos “fear”) is an intense dislike, distrust or hostility toward people perceived as foreign or outside one's own group…
Read →The Tatar world
The Uyghurs today
The Uyghurs today are a Turkic-speaking, Sunni Muslim people whose homeland is East Turkestan — the region China calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They number about 11–1…
Read →Estonian history
The Continuation War
The Continuation War (1941–1944) was a war between Finland and the Soviet Union, part of the Second World War and a sequel to the Winter War of 1939–1940. In it Finland fought as a…
Read →Soviet occupation
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 →Russia
Russophobia
Russophobia is a compound of Russo- (Russia, Russians) and -phobia (from the Greek phobos, “fear”, extended to “aversion, hatred”). The word literally denotes fear or aversion towa…
Read →Russia
A psychosocial analysis of Russian culture
A psychosocial analysis of Russian culture examines the cultural-psychological patterns that scholars have observed in Russia's dominant state and political culture, and how histor…
Read →Soviet occupation
What an ordinary Russian is taught about history
Russia’s state account of history has grown steadily more unified and centrally directed through the 2020s. In September 2023 schools adopted the first compulsory single history te…
Read →Soviet occupation
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 →Concentration camps in Estonia
Filtration camp No. 0316
Filtration camp No. 0316 was a Soviet-occupation control-and-filtration camp in northern Estonia near Paldiski, at Põllküla.
Read →