The status of Estonia’s Russian minority continues to cause problems within the now liberated Baltic state. Here the Independent takes a look at the case of an ethnic-Russian schoolteacher dismissed for his inadequate grasp of Estonian. Language rights in Estonia are a complex controversy, but these remarks from Tass should not be allowed to pass without further comment:
“The Russian news agency Itar-Tass said this was the first time that a Russian-speaking teacher had been sacked for having poor skills in the Estonian language, and poured scorn on the move. Russia’s Foreign Ministry is also likely to wade in. Ethnic Russians make up almost a third of tiny Estonia’s population of 1.5 million, and the agency said that Narva was an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking town. “The population of Estonia’s third largest town [Narva] is 96 per cent Russian,” it said. “It’s extremely rare to hear Estonian spoken there.”
Well, there’s a reason that Narva (a bleak, still heavily sovietized place when I visited in the mid-90s) is “96% Russian”. In 1944 Stalin’s forces flattened the place, pulverizing a city that had been one of the jewels of Baltic Europe. That wasn’t enough, of course. They then supervised the murder and deportation of a large number of the city’s surviving inhabitants, banned others from returning, repopulated the place with Russians, and transferred some of its surrounding territory to Russia, where it still remains today.
Perhaps that is something that Tass would like to mention next time they take up this story.