In the second of three reports from northern Europe, Graham Reid stays in a hotel where the walls once had ‘ears’.
On the 23rd floor of the swanky Hotel Viru in central Tallinn there are a couple interesting but small rooms. Exceedingly small, actually; you’d be hard pressed
to play table tennis in either.
This is the KGB Museum – guided tours only and you’re wise to book – and it offers a glimpse into the Cold War era when Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union and KGB spies kept an ear and eye on everyone, especially the hotel’s international guests.
Our guide, Palvar, is a droll fellow who promises to release us back to the bright shiny world of capitalism later. He jokes the walls of the hotel were made of micro-concrete: “50% concrete, 50% microphone”.
The hotel, being the biggest and best in the country at the time, drew many international guests from the early-70s, and after resistance groups sent a plea for independence to the UN, the KGB took great interest in them – installing cameras, listening devices and, on every floor, a babushka (old woman or grandmother) whose sole job was to record the comings and goings of the guests.
Today, the busy hotel employs fewer than 150 staff, back then it was more than 1000, most on the KGB payroll. The agents and their informants were installed until the collapse of the Soviet Union and Estonia’s independence in 1991. The many thousands of hours of tapes will remain sealed for decades. I guess – like those other files we keep hearing about – it’s not in the authorities’ best interest they be released.
Palvar draws much black humour out of this period, noting it was very safe in those days “because Big Brother was watching over you all the time. So, this is very safe. Is it not?” This goes past the two teenage girls from Finland but their mother and I laugh.
The KGB Museum is not the only place that preserves this unpleasant part of Estonia’s recent past, a country occupied by the Nazis from 1941-44, then “liberated” by the Russians, who clung on to it for 47 years.
In Kumu, the Estonian Art Museum to the east of the Old Town and central city – quite a walk and worse on slippery, iced footpaths, I can attest – there’s a whole floor permanently dedicated to the art of the Soviet era, much of it as you might expect. Here we see loyal tractor drivers working in the collective, geometric Suprematist design and an especially striking portrait of Lenin from the late 1960s by Ilmar Malin, where the great leader’s head appears to float above a colourful Steiner school painting and a collage of citizens and industrial machinery. By the end of the Soviet era, Estonian artists were well-attuned to international movements, and there are some powerful works on display. This is especially so in the permanent exhibition of Estonian art in the 1990s under the heading The future is in one hour.
The past laid bare
Some countries deal with the problematic parts of their past better than others, with a kind of unblinking clarity – the Museum of Communism in Bucharest lays out in great detail what living under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu was like; there’s Stockholm’s Judiska Museet (Jewish Museum); Vietnam often graphically presents its tragic 20th century; and there’s Bristol’s clear-eyed account of the city’s shameful history with the slave trade. Other countries, as we have witnessed recently, would prefer to expunge uncomfortable or inconvenient periods or events from their history.
Close to home, you get the impression some would prefer never to hear of Te Tiriti o Waitangi again. That seems strangely myopic when the best research into changing demographics says our future population will become more brown. That’s not some surreptitious “replacement theory”, just analysis and prediction from available information.
There are worldwide social, cultural and demographic trends worth paying attention to. According to an essay by Jim Tankersley in The New York Times, “about half of the European Union now speaks English as a foreign language, a share that rises to 70% for young Europeans”. Today, fewer than half the residents in Britain, France and Germany identify as Christian and “the ranks of the [religiously] unaffiliated are growing”.
Change is a constant in a time of political and economic refugees, as it has been for generations. At the KGB Museum, Palvar casually mentions 10% of Estonia’s population fled to Sweden when the Nazis invaded in 1941 after Soviet occupation. Russians today make up about 20% of Estonia’s population.
Our bright hopes
When history is presented clearly, it has resonances far beyond the images, artefacts and documentation; it speaks to the present and the future. And the future isn’t arriving in an hour, it’s here now. I would see it when lecturing at the University of Auckland: all those young people whose names and deeds may never make the news but who are our brightest hopes.
An email from my wife tells of a young friend’s excitement about starting uni this year: she speaks both her parents’ languages and English, keeps me informed about K-pop bands – still a mystery – but is pursuing what I, with a lowly BA, would call high-end academia.
My 12-year-old bilingual grandson in Sweden has been studying Baroque music in school, plays rock guitar in a band, passed through Kurt Cobain and is now into Jeff Buckley, especially his version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. We took him to an exhibition of Nick Cave’s ceramics in Stockholm – more interesting than you might think – and later he watched in thoughtful silence a clip of Cave singing Into My Arms as the audience offered it quietly back in a moment of collective reverie.
Two days later, he bought some cassettes for his Walkman: one by a Czech metal band, the other by a Ukrainian black metal outfit. Did I mention he’s immersed in astrophysics and can talk your ear off about black holes, planetary orbits and so on?
How can we not be optimistic when we see such youthful curiosity, especially at this dark time? The future will be better for such young people being in it.
Palvar shrugs when I ask if many school groups come through the KGB Museum. “Hmm, not so many,” he says. And is this history taught in schools? He looks at me as if I’m a slightly simple child. “Of course!”
The future was being written one floor above that permanent exhibition of Soviet era art in Kumu: artists experimenting with AI and virtual reality, and incorporating Jean Baudrillard’s studies of simulacra and signs into the keyboard-dependent contemporary world. Here, artists were working with lenticular photography and prints, grappling with the omnipresence of Google Street View, exploring ideas about the creation of another person from the Pygmalion myth to Siri.
This is provocative stuff as the artists embrace the rapidly changing technological environment, trying to rein it in or repurpose it into artistic expression. This was, in its own way, sociopolitical art but a world away from the dogma and propaganda of the Soviet-era art just half a century ago and one floor below. Past, present, future all in one place for consideration. Now. Not one hour in the future.
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