Under the agreement all Soviet citizens were to be repatriated. This brought up the issue of Estonian citizenship very sharply. Even though Estonians who had escaped to the west rejected Soviet citizenship, the problem still depended on whether the host country recognized the Soviet occupation as legal or not.
The repatriation process in Germany was handled in the occupation zones by the UNRRA or by the military government administrating a particular zone. It was with the support of the UNRRA that people were coerced into returning to a newly occupied homeland.
Since the US and British occupation powers opposed forced repatriation, Soviet officials and the UNRRA were dissatisfied with the slow pace of the repatriation. Moscow's answer was to implement a massive propaganda campaign. Brochures, leaflets were distributed en masse; radio broadcasts intensified and ‘promotional' films were screened at the refugee camps.
“Red corners” were established in the camps, displaying appropriate printed material about the essential and positive aspects of repatriation. Relatives who remained in the homeland were ordered to write letters beseeching the refugees to return. The camps were visited by ‘special Soviet representatives who met with the refugees in groups and individually.
In fact Moscow's long-lasting propaganda campaign aimed at the refugee/expatriate community in the West got its energetic start in the waning months of the war and lasted practically till the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. One must acknowledge that publications such as ‘Kodumaa' eventually totally switched its ideological stripes so that its content was the complete political opposite of its preceeding fifty years.
The propaganda and agitation plan devised in June-July of 1945 of the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party targeted Sweden specifically. It saw radio broadcasts directed to Sweden and printed material with print runs of 20,000 to be distributed from the Soviet embassy
in Stockholm. The radio program ‘Kodumaa tund' (Homeland hour) had already started in January 1945, which used prominent intellectuals as the persuaders. Added in September was the program ‘Kodumaa kutsub' (Homeland beckons). Similar programs aimed at refugees in Germany were broadcast from radio station ‘Volga' in East Berlin. A theme that was repeated in many broadcasts and print materials was the concept of “the friendship of the Russian and Estonian peoples” and “Stalin's constitution – the most democratic constitution in the world”.
The Repatriation department in Estonia was anxious that in the British and American zones of occupation in Germany they have their own representative rather that depend on the numerous Soviet repatriation officials. The Latvian, major Liberts in Stuttgart they considered a successful example. They didn't get to find one in Soviet occupied Estonian but in Stuttgart itself, they found Jaak Tari, a former Estonian military officer, probably recruited by Liberts.
Tari proposed a rather ambitious yet utopian plan to the Estonian Repatriation department: articles to be published in newspapers run by the refugees themselves, a series of lectures delivered in the refugee camps, a transition camp for those considering being repatriated. One can see that general ideological stance of those in the refugee camps was such that Tari was totally unsuccessful in implementing any of his ideas.
This was confirmed by a letter from the Repatriation department in Moscow in 1947 which commented on UNRRA official Tari's failures: “Reactionary elements are trying to scare Tari by sending him anonymous letters and threatening death if he doesn't stop his work persuading Estonians to return to the Estonian Socialist Republic.”
Tari's own fate is tragically ironic. Archival documents do not reveal his motives for choosing to return to Estonia himself. One can speculate that he may have been so naïve as to actually believe the nonsense about the quality of life in occupied Estonia that he imparted to others or was convinced that his work as a repatriation official would erase the sins he himself had committed against the Soviets.
His transgressions on the Soviet scale of legality were inordinately huge: in 1941 he had voluntarily joined the Estonian Home Guard and also went along with recruitment into the German SD. In the winter of 1942 he himself recruited anti-partisan agents from amongst Russian police in the Leningrad oblast. Later he was a high police official in German-occupied Estonia. In 1948 Jaak Tari was arrested by the Soviets and sentenced to 25 years in a slave labour camp.
Even Soviet officials were puzzled why Tari, who, without any relatives in Estonia decided to return. They came to their only logical conclusion: he was told to return by his real employer, the US intelligence services. After the post-Stalin amnesty granted by Khrushchev in 1955, the KGB continued to keep surveillance on Tari. A 1957 KGB report stated that Tari, cancer-ridden, was alone in his apartment in his death bed. No visitors had been spotted.
(to be continued)
Laas Leivat
