Speech #1000154942

In free Estonia. his birthday would have been celebrated yesterday. February 23. In an interview following his emigration to the West. veteran Ukrainian political prisoner Danylo Shumuk described the fate of Estonians in Stalins death camps in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Between 1945 and 1953. the largest proportion of those who died were Estonians. They found it especially difficult to master Russian and they did not adapt to the Gulags conditions as quickly as the Ukrainians. Lithuanians. or Latvians. The Estonians would work until they dropped and then die of hunger. Following Stalins death. the repression in Estonia became more subtle. but no less harmful. Free political expression was out of the question. as was unhindered travel abroad or emigration. Many works of preoccupation literature and music were banned. historical monuments destroyed. and the Estonian language downgraded in schools. The history taught in those schools was distorted beyond recognition in a vain attempt to keep Estonian youth from learning the truth about their nations past. Moreover. immigration of nonEstonians has threatened to make Estonians a minority in their own country. In a sense. Estonians are being punished for their own industriousness. their stubborn refusal to turn their formerly prosperous little nation on the Baltic into a typical Sovietized wasteland.