The history of Estonia

Estonia lies on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland, the northernmost of the three Baltic states. Its people speak a Finnic language, close to Finnish, and have lived in the region for thousands of years. In the thirteenth century German and Danish crusaders conquered them, and for seven centuries a German-speaking nobility and burgher class ruled Estonian peasants under the Livonian Order, Sweden and the Russian Empire in turn. A national movement in the nineteenth century led to independence in 1918, but the country was occupied by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during the Second World War and held as a Soviet republic until 1991. Since restoring its independence, Estonia has joined the European Union and NATO and become known for its digital government.

Hunter-gatherers moved into the area as the ice sheets melted, and the oldest known settlement, at Pulli on the Pärnu river, dates to about 9000 BCE. The Kunda culture, named after a site in the north, lived by hunting elk and seals and fishing. Pottery of the Narva culture appeared around 4900 BCE, and the Comb Ceramic culture, from about 3900 BCE, spread across the eastern Baltic; many scholars link it with the arrival of the ancestors of the Finnic peoples, though the timing is debated. Farming took hold slowly, with the Corded Ware culture around 2800 BCE.

In the Bronze Age, from about 1800 BCE, the first fortified settlements were built at Asva and Ridala on Saaremaa and at Iru near Tallinn. Around the eighth or seventh century BCE a meteorite struck Saaremaa and made the Kaali craters. Stone-cist graves and field systems of the Iron Age show a settled farming society, and by the first millennium CE the land was divided into parishes and larger counties, each with its hill forts and elders, without a single ruler.

During the Viking Age, Estonians from Saaremaa and the coast were seafarers who traded and raided across the Baltic; Scandinavian sagas mention them as pirates, and in 1187 raiders from the eastern Baltic, possibly including Estonians, sacked the Swedish town of Sigtuna. Ship burials found at Salme on Saaremaa, of Scandinavian warriors killed around 750, show that violence went both ways. Princes of Kievan Rus' and later the Novgorod Republic campaigned into southern Estonia, and Yaroslav the Wise founded a fort at Tartu, called Yuryev, in 1030 that the Estonians soon recaptured. The Estonians kept their own gods and resisted conversion to Christianity.

At the end of the twelfth century the papacy extended the Crusades to the pagans of the eastern Baltic. From their base at Riga in what is now Latvia, German crusaders of the Order of the Sword Brothers advanced north from 1208, while Danish forces under Valdemar II of Denmark landed in the north in 1219 and built a castle on the site of Tallinn. The Estonians fought back for two decades. Their leader Lembitu was killed at the Battle of St Matthew's Day in 1217, and the last stronghold, on Saaremaa, fell in 1227.

The conquered land became part of Terra Mariana, the Land of Mary. The north, Harju and Viru, was Danish; the rest was divided between the bishoprics of Dorpat (Tartu) and Ösel-Wiek and the Sword Brothers, who after their defeat by the Lithuanians at Saule in 1236 became the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order. In 1343 Estonians in Harju rose in the St George's Night Uprising, killing many German landowners and clergy, but the rising was crushed by the Order. In 1346 the Danish king sold his Estonian lands to the Teutonic Order.

For the next two centuries Estonia was part of the Livonian Confederation, a loose union of the Order and the bishops. German vassals held the land as manors, and the Estonian peasants were gradually reduced to serfdom. Tallinn, known to the Germans as Reval, Tartu, Pärnu and Viljandi joined the Hanseatic League and grew rich on the trade between western Europe and Novgorod; Tallinn's medieval old town is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The townspeople and nobility were German, while Estonians were mostly peasants, servants and craftsmen. The Protestant Reformation reached Tallinn and Tartu in the 1520s, and the Lutheran church kept its hold on Estonia for the next four centuries. The first surviving book with text in Estonian, a Lutheran catechism, was printed in 1535.

In 1558 Ivan the Terrible of the Tsardom of Russia invaded Livonia, starting the Livonian War, which lasted until 1583 and devastated the country. The Livonian Confederation collapsed. Tallinn and the northern nobility submitted to Sweden in 1561, Saaremaa was bought by Denmark, and southern Estonia passed to Poland-Lithuania, later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By 1629 Sweden, under Gustavus Adolphus, held all of mainland Estonia, and in 1645 it gained Saaremaa from Denmark.

Estonians later remembered Swedish rule as the good old Swedish times. Gustavus Adolphus founded a university at Tartu in 1632, the crown set up village schools for peasants, and in the 1680s the government took back many noble estates and tried to limit the powers of landlords over their serfs. The Bible was translated into the North Estonian language in 1739, after the Swedish period. The memory was coloured by what came next, for Swedish rule ended in war, plague and famine.

In the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia, Peter the Great took Tartu in 1704 and Tallinn in 1710, and the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 confirmed Estonia as a Russian possession, divided between the provinces of Estland in the north and Livonia in the south. The tsars, who were building their new capital at Saint Petersburg, guaranteed the privileges of the Baltic German nobility, who governed the provinces through their own diets and courts and supplied the Russian Empire with many of its officers and officials. Serfdom became harsher in the eighteenth century.

Serfdom was abolished in Estland in 1816 and in Livonia in 1819, but the peasants were freed without land, and only reforms from the 1840s to the 1860s allowed them to buy their farms. In the same decades a national awakening began. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald compiled the national epic, Kalevipoeg, published between 1857 and 1861; Johann Voldemar Jannsen founded an Estonian newspaper; and the poet Lydia Koidula, his daughter, wrote verses that became patriotic songs. The first all-Estonian song festival was held in Tartu in 1869, beginning a tradition that continues today. From the 1880s, Russification policies imposed Russian in schools and administration, aiming at the Germans' privileges as well as at the Estonians. Tallinn and Narva grew as industrial towns, and in the revolution of 1905 peasants burned more than a hundred manor houses before punitive expeditions executed hundreds of people.

After the February Revolution of 1917 the Russian Provisional Government united Estonian-speaking lands in a single autonomous province with an elected assembly, the Maapäev. When the Bolsheviks seized power in the Russian Revolution, the assembly declared itself the supreme authority. On 24 February 1918, in the gap between the retreating Red Army and the advancing Germans of the First World War, the Salvation Committee proclaimed Estonian independence in Tallinn. German troops occupied the country the next day, and after Germany's defeat in November the Red Army invaded.

In the War of Independence of 1918–20, the Estonian army, helped by a British naval squadron and volunteers from Finland and Denmark, drove out the Bolsheviks and then defeated the Baltic German Landeswehr in northern Latvia at Võnnu (Cēsis) in June 1919. By the Treaty of Tartu on 2 February 1920, Soviet Russia recognised Estonian independence in perpetuity. A land reform in 1919 broke up the great manors of the German nobility and gave the land to Estonian farmers. In 1925 the republic guaranteed cultural autonomy to minorities, including Jews, an unusually liberal law for its time.

The republic was a parliamentary democracy with frequent changes of government. A communist coup attempt in Tallinn in 1924 failed. During the Great Depression the radical right-wing Vaps movement of war veterans won wide support, and in March 1934 the head of state Konstantin Päts, with General Johan Laidoner, declared a state of emergency, banned the Vaps and dissolved parliament. The following years, known as the era of silence, were an authoritarian but relatively mild regime, and a new constitution came into force in 1938.

The secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 placed Estonia in the Soviet sphere. In September the government was forced to accept Soviet military bases. In June 1940 the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin occupied the country, staged elections with a single list of candidates, and in August annexed it as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Most of the country's leaders were arrested, and on 14 June 1941 about 10,000 people were deported to Siberia and other remote regions, where nearly half died. Päts and Laidoner died in Soviet captivity.

In July 1941 Nazi Germany invaded, and many Estonians at first saw the Germans as liberators from Soviet terror. Of about 4,500 Jews living in Estonia in 1939, more than half had fled into the Soviet interior; nearly all of the roughly 1,000 who remained were murdered by German units and Estonian collaborators by early 1942, and Estonia was described at the Wannsee Conference as free of Jews. Thousands of Jews from Lithuania and elsewhere were then brought to labour camps such as Vaivara and Klooga, where the guards shot some 2,000 prisoners in September 1944 as the Red Army approached. Thousands of Roma and Soviet prisoners of war were also killed, and the Holocaust remains part of the history of the occupation. Estonians fought on both sides of the Second World War, some mobilised into the Red Army and others conscripted or volunteering into German units. As Soviet forces returned in 1944, an attempt to restore independence in Tallinn failed, and some 70,000 to 80,000 people fled west to Sweden and Germany.

Soviet rule was restored in the autumn of 1944. Armed resistance by the Forest Brothers continued in the countryside into the 1950s. On 25 March 1949, during the forced collectivisation of farming, 20,722 people, about 2.5 per cent of the population, were deported to Siberia. Industrialisation brought large numbers of Russian-speaking workers, especially to Tallinn and the oil-shale region of the northeast around Narva, and the share of ethnic Estonians in the population fell from about 88 per cent in 1934 to around 61 per cent in 1989. Estonians nevertheless kept their language, their song festivals and, through Finnish television, a window on the West during the Cold War. Most Western governments never recognised the annexation, and Estonian diplomats kept representing the pre-war republic abroad.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of openness, protests in 1987 against plans for phosphate mining grew into a national movement. In September 1988 around 300,000 people gathered at the Tallinn song festival grounds to sing patriotic songs, giving the movement its name, the Singing Revolution. The Estonian Supreme Soviet declared the republic's sovereignty on 16 November 1988. On 23 August 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, about two million people in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands in the Baltic Way, a human chain more than 600 kilometres long from Tallinn to Vilnius.

On 20 August 1991, during the failed coup attempt in Moscow, Estonia declared the restoration of its independence. It was recognised by Russia within days and by the Soviet Union on 6 September, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Independence was treated legally as a continuation of the pre-war republic, so citizenship was restored to pre-1940 citizens and their descendants, while many Soviet-era settlers had to apply for naturalisation, an issue that strained relations with Russia. The last Russian troops left on 31 August 1994. That September the ferry MS Estonia sank on its way from Tallinn to Stockholm, killing 852 people.

Under Prime Minister Mart Laar in the early 1990s, Estonia carried out rapid market reforms, introducing its own currency, the kroon, in 1992 and a flat income tax. It joined NATO and the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2011. The country became known for e-government: almost all public services are online, and in 2005 it became the first country to allow binding internet voting in nationwide local elections. Relations with Russia remained tense. In 2007 the relocation of a Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier, from central Tallinn led to riots by Russian-speaking youths and to cyberattacks on Estonian websites.

Kaja Kallas of the Reform Party became prime minister in 2021, and national defence dominated politics after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Reform Party won the parliamentary election of March 2023, in which more than half the votes were cast online for the first time. In 2024 Estonia legalised same-sex marriage, and in July that year Kallas resigned to become the European Union's foreign policy chief, succeeded as prime minister by Kristen Michal.