The Baltic States
Day 15 Tue 2nd June Tallinn Full Day Tour - Helsinki, Finland In the morning you will be transferred to the cruise ship terminal where you will board a ferry to the medieval city of Tallinn, Estonia. Upon arrival, be met by a local guide and enjoy a 2-hour sightseeing tour of the city.
Tallinn
Tallinn offers a charming blend of medieval tranquillity and modern urban life. The medieval Old Town is a busy place with its many shops, galleries, souvenir markets, outdoor cafés and restaurants. The tour takes you around the old medieval city walls and into the Old Town where you will see; Toompea Castle, Dome Church, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, medieval Old Town Hall and the Great Guild Hall (entrances not included).
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral
After the tour, enjoy some time at leisure. Alternatively, you may like to join an optional lunch at a medieval restaurant in Tallinn. In the afternoon you will embark on a short cruise back to Helsinki by ferry and be transferred to the hotel.
Lunch at a medieval restaurant in Tallinn (We have paid for this).
Olde Hansa restaurant
Estonia (Wikipedia article)
1918, Estonian Declaration of Independence
1939, Estonia declared neutrality, but this proved futile in WWII.
1940, Estonia was formally annexed by the Soviet Union. Hundreds of people were executed and, on 14 June 1941, c. 11,000 Estonians were deported to Russia, where most were killed.
1941, Nazis invaded as part of Operation Barbarossa.
1944, Soviets invaded again.
1949, about 20,000 Estonians were deported to Siberia.
1987, Introduction of perestroika by the Soviet government led to the independence movement.
1989, Two million people formed the Baltic Way.
1991, Declaration of independence.
1994, Last units of the Russian army left Estonia.
2004, Estonia joined both the European Union and NATO.
2011, Estonia joined the eurozone and adopted the EU single currency.
After existing as an independent country for twenty-one years, Estonia was occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in June 1940 during World War II.
In 1941–1944, Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany.
From February to November 1944, the German forces were expelled by the Red Army. The Soviet rule was re-established by force, and sovietisation followed, mostly carried out in 1944–1950. The forced collectivisation of agriculture began in 1947, and was completed after the mass deportation in March 1949. The Soviet authorities confiscated private farms and forced peasants to join collective farms. An armed resistance movement of forest brothers was active until the mass deportations. A total of 30,000 participated in or supported the movement; 2,000 were killed. The Soviet authorities fighting the forest brothers also suffered hundreds of casualties. Some innocent civilians were killed on both sides. In addition, a number of underground nationalist schoolchildren's groups were active. Most of their members were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
The punitive actions decreased rapidly after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953; from 1956 to 1958, a large part of the deportees and political prisoners were allowed to return. Political arrests and numerous other kinds of crimes against humanity were committed during the occupation period until the late 1980s. In the end, the attempt to integrate the Estonian society into the Soviet system failed. Although the armed resistance was defeated, the population remained anti-Soviet. This helped Estonians to organise a new resistance movement in the late 1980s, regain their independence in 1991, and then rapidly develop a modern society.[6]
Novel: Purge – Sofi Oksanen.
A modern classic (set partly in Estonia) that deals with Soviet occupation, memory, and survival—powerful for understanding Estonia’s 20th-century history and resilience.
An international sensation, Sofi Oksanen's award-winning novel Purge is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them.
When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide's home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other's motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia's Soviet occupation.
Sofi Oksanen establishes herself as one the most important voices of her generation with this intricately woven tale, whose stakes are almost unbearably high from the first page to the last. Purge is a fiercely compelling and damning novel about the corrosive effects of shame, and of life in a time and place where to survive is to be implicated.
