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London Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 1 No. 4, September–October 1977, pp. 5–6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Detailed accounts of a large student disturbance in the Estonian city of Tartu have reached the West. Our sources – the right-wing British journal Soviet Analyst and an Estonian nationalist journal published in Sweden called Sonumid – are not necessarily trustworthy. But the fact that the official Soviet press refers to the incident and the wealth of detail in the eye-witness account printed by Sonumid indicates that the reports are authentic.
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Estonia is one of the three Baltic states annexed by Stalin after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Tartu is one of its main cities. All the Baltic states have experienced outbreaks of popular resistance to the Soviet regime since the war. The national question, cultural and religious rights have figured prominently in these outbreaks.
On 7 December 1976, the official Soviet Estonian paper Edasi (Forward) carried an article entitled An Evening of Recorded Music with Additions about events that had occurred 4 days previously at the Estonian Academy of Agriculture Student Club in Tartu. The article said there had been some trouble, first because more people had bought tickets for a show than could be accomodated in the Club Hall; secondly, because the advertised programme was cancelled because it was “too slight”, and thirdly, because some “hot-heads – with added courage gained from the bottle – started raising a rumpus”, then went “carousing around the town”.
The eye-witness account in Sonumid written under the name of Studiosus presents a very different version of what happened. In the first place, the reason for the large crowd and for the cancellation of the advertised programme was the fact that the show had political overtones, though formally a cultural event. The censors stepped in and changed the programme to the playing of gramophone records. As the Soviet press account admits the police were called in to disperse the students, but instead of dispersing they encircled the police outside the hall and started chanting a revised version of a traditional children’s song: “Who’s in the garden? Uncle Fuzz is in the garden.” When police re-enforcements arrived the students threw bricks and bottles at them and started singing My Homeland is my Love, an old Estonian national anthem.
The police retreated and the students took up a proposal that the student festival recently forbidden by the authorities, should be proclaimed there and then. They marched from Toome Hill where the club is situated towards the hostels where students from the Agricultural Academy and from the University lived. The student hostels on [Bel]son and Tiigi Streets were contacted and the crowd of demonstrators grew considerably. Groups went into each hostel to explain what was happening while the rest stayed outside on the street shouting “Out! Out!” When some students asked why, the answer was “In the name of student solidarity!” and “Demand student democracy!” At one of the hostels the police tried to block the entrances, so people climbed out of ground floor windows to join the demonstration. Crowds of students came out of the hostel on Beton Street to join the demonstration.
The column, by now at least 100 yards long and numbering 1,000, headed towards City Hall Square in the centre of the city. Greetings were chanted to institutions and buildings on the route: “Long live the kindergarten!” when they passed the kindergarten; “Meat and smoked sausage!” when they passed a food shop; when they passed the KGB headquarters they shouted “Out! Out!”. The chanting became more political: “Open up the borders!” and “Freedom of Assembly!” and also “Live up to the Constitution!”. This last slogan was met with a loud “Hurrah!” from the crowd and shouts of “Long live the Constitution!”.
Then a struggle with the police broke out on a broad front and the demonstrators’ unity was broken. Some dispersed, others retreated to Toome Hill with the police vans in hot pursuit. Students were beaten and dragged into vans. When one student, dragged off by the police was freed by his friends some police fired shots in the air. By 2:30 a.m. the clashes had come to an end.
During the march the police kept at a distance both at the front and the rear, calling on students to leave the march and shouting “You’re only doing yourselves harm”. At first some people shouted ‘Down with the Police!” but later, according to Studiosus, for self-protection, they responded to police calls with “Long live the Soviet police!”.
The column entered Kingiseppa Street and as they passed the War Commissariat, which was heavily guarded by police, they shouted “Today a demonstration, tomorrow the Army!” perhaps referring to a standard form of victimisation of students in the USSR. They also shouted “All power to the students!”
All the streets leading to City Hall Square were blocked by police and police vans. Flashbulbs beamed light on the students as the police photographed the demonstrators for later identification: students pulled up he collars and hoods on their coats. A struggle broke out with police lines and some students forced their way into me square, tearing down a banner put up in celebration of Soviet Constitution Day.
The majority of those arrested were eleased before morning after signing statements. During the following week all students were required to submit written explanations of what they had been doing on the night of 3 December.
Subsequent events in the higher educational institutions in Tartu are not known. But this incident illustrates two important general features of the situation in the Soviet Union today. First, the way in which efforts on the part of the authorities to suppress any open political life result in the tendency for such apparently innocuous cultural events as a student musical evening to become charged with acute political tensions. And secondly, when placed alongside other outbreaks of spontaneous mass protest in other parts of the USSR, the events in Tartu give extra evidence of preponderance of such actions in the minority republics. Since the mid-1960s, it has been above all in the Ukraine, the Baltic states and among the smaller nationalities like the Crimean Tartars, the Volga Germans and the Jewish populations that we have seen significant mass actions for political demands, as opposed to isolated protests from handfuis of intellectuals. The national question is undoubtedly one of the most explosive points of tension in a Soviet tate where the Russian population now constitutes only a bare majority of the population.
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