Dear Rector,
Ladies and Gentlemen!

We have gathered here to the Assembly Hall of Tartu University to celebrate the 110th anniversary of Professor Jüri Uluots. Anniversaries are ostensibly oriented to the past, but in reality look towards the future, and this is how the bond between times becomes evident. Therefore, let me concentrate on just a couple of days in the life of Professor Uluots as a politician; within these days, our presence and our future are especially tightly bound together, and dominate most convincingly over the past.

I presume that with this audience, I need not go into thorough descriptions, and can limit myself to outlining the details. In the political vacuum between the occupations of Hitler's Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, between the two frontlines, Professor Jüri Uluots assigned to Otto Tief the task of forming the Government of the Republic of Estonia on September 18, 1944. The Government was formed in full accordance with the state's constitutional procedures, continued its activities after Professor Uluots's death, and only issued the declaration of concluding its activities in October 1992, when the constitutional power of the Republic of Estonia had been restored in Estonia.

How should we, against this background of the principle of continuity of our state, conceive the fact that the United States of America or other democracies never recognised this Government of the Republic initiated by Professor Jüri Uluots?

From Estonia's point of view, it is important to understand and to evaluate realistically the so-called non-recognition policy of the United States of America, which all the Western democracies gradually joined. The United States of America had announced already earlier that they opposed any changes on the political map of the world carried on by the use of force. After the military occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by the Soviet troops on June 17, 1940, the United States Government formed a working group led by Loy Henderson. In his confidential memorandum, Loy Henderson's position was that the United States should give an unequivocal response to the Soviet occupation. The memorandum reads as follows - I quote: ''Does the United States Government intend to respond with one kind of attitude and behaviour to the aggression of Germany and Japan, and refrain from such response in case of the aggression exercised by the Soviet Union? In other words, will the government apply one kind of policy to Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Poland occupied by Germany, and another to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland? Will the United States continue the non-recognition of the results of aggression independently of who the aggressor might be, or, proceeding from practicality, close their eyes to the fact that some states exercise aggression against their neighbor states?''

Let us remember that Henderson's memo posed the question at the time when Hitler's Germany and its ally, the Soviet Union, had subjected nearly all the continental Europe to their power or their influence, and England alone carried on the struggle against totalitarian aggression. Still, also Vatican fiercely opposed the occupation of the Baltic States, and therefore also the Catholic states of Latin America considered the occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to be an aggression. The pressure from Latin America was one of the factors that hastened the United States to assume the position concerning the fate of the Baltic States. There were also domestic factors - the approaching elections and the need to secure the support of the Baltic national groups for the third term of office of President Roosevelt. Also the fact that the Soviet Union was publicly an ally of the Nazi Germany, made the adherence to the basic American values easier. On this background, the declaration of Sumner Welles, the Deputy State Secretary of the United States of America, was written on July 23, 1940:

''During these past few days the devious processes whereunder the political independence and territorial integrity of the three small Baltic republics - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - were to be deliberately annihilated by one of their more powerful neighbors, have been rapidly drawing to their conclusion.
From the day when the peoples of these republics first gained their independence and democratic form of government the people of the United States have watched their admirable progress in self-government with deep and sympathetic interest. The policy of this Government is universally known. The people of the United States are opposed to predatory activities no matter whether they are carried on by the use of force or by the threat of force. They are likewise opposed to any form of intervention on the part of one state, however powerful, in the domestic concerns of any other sovereign state, however weak.''

This is the briefest summary of the US non-recognition policy, against which background also the formation of Jüri Uluots's government in 1944 and several other issues of practical value, should be evaluated. Seemingly, Welles's text has little practical, but a considerable moral weight. Here, too, we must concede that the moral weight changed depending on whether the Soviet Union was Hitler's ally, an ally of the United States, or the opponent of the United States in the Cold War.

The problems to investigate are the following.

Both Jüri Uluots and Sumner Welles proceeded from the principle of the continuity of the Republic of Estonia. On the one hand, we only need to remember the pedantic correctness of Jüri Uluots, the Prime Minister in duties of the President, when he assigned Otto Tief with the task of forming the government between the frontlines; and on the other hand, the pedantic correctness of the United States in maintaining the diplomatic relations with the legal diplomatic representative of the Republic of Estonia, finally with Ernst Jaakson. All this was everything but extraneous and formal. Estonia's diplomatic mission was financed by the lawful government of the Republic of Estonia, from the resources that had been deposed and, after the occupation of the Republic of Estonia, frozen in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On the one hand, this made the recognition of exile governments impossible for the United States, no matter on what basis they had been formed. On the other hand -- which is much more important - also the treatment of the Soviet administration in Estonia as illegal, which had crucial importance for Estonia during the period of transition, and for the restoration of the Estonian constitutional institutions, is based on this United States principle of continuity.

The non-recognition policy was a tough nut for the Soviet occupation powers already before the final occupation of the Republic of Estonia on June 17, 1940. I would like to point out two documents that would be a rewarding material for historical research. First, there is the Order No. 02622 of Marshal Timoshenko, the Commissar of Defence of the Soviet Union, and Marshal Shaposhnikov, Commander of the General Staff, to Vladimir Tributs, Commander of the Baltic Navy, from June 9, 1940, whose subsection ''d'' reads as follows. I quote: ''To close the Bay of Riga and to block the coasts of Estonia and Latvia in the Gulf of Finland and in the Baltic Sea, in order to prevent the evacuation of the Governments of these states.'' Preparing for the occupation of the Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Soviet administration considered the continuity of our constitutional institutions as a special danger. Of course, the order was confidential, or more specifically ''sovershenno sekretno'' (absolutely confidential) and ''osoboy vazhnosti'' (of special importance). And second, I would like to remind you in this connection, how extensively the Soviet occupation regime invested in the political show to create the illusion of legal transfer of power. Hence, in fact, we get the third subject of research - the contradiction between the Soviet propaganda's wish to picture the liquidation of the independent Republic of Estonia as a legal act, and its simultaneous attempt to display it as the political will of the so-called revolutionary working people, which would not need to be legitimised.

In Estonia, the non-recognition policy has been evaluated in many ways, often with barely concealed sarcasm. And yet, the principles of this policy were an important argument when the Atlantic Charter was drawn up in 1941; they influenced the agreements of Teheran and Yalta, and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, in other words - they kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on the agenda. We could speculate - although this is what I do not intend to do here today - what the fate of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians would have been like in 1944-1955, if there had been no non-recognition policy. The first result of the non-recognition policy, of course, was the fact that in the Western world, Estonians were not treated as Soviet citizens, despite the numerous demands of the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs.

To what extent was Professor Jüri Uluots, when forming the Government of the Republic and designing its political goals, able to take into account the Atlantic Charter and the non-recognition policy of the United States and other Western countries? This crucial question is indirectly answered by Professor Uluots's speech in Tallinna Raadio (Radio Tallinn), on August 19, 1944, i.e. one month before Otto Tief's Government was formed. At the time, Tallinna Raadio bore the name of Landessender Reval, and was censored by the Nazis. Which makes Professor Uluots's resolve to remain true to the principle of continuity of the Estonian statehood even more praiseworthy. ''Let us remember,'' he said, ''that Estonia's situation at the time when peace, or truce, begins, is of considerable and crucial importance to the present and the future of all Estonian nation.'' He continued: ''After the war, the life and relations between nations will have to be arranged. And to arrange means to act lawfully. There can be different opinions concerning the principles of law. But there is one principle of law, without which there would be no law. This principle is: every man must have what belongs to him.''

This position is indeed notably close to that of the United States in 1940, according to which all the countries that lost their independence in the war were to restore it after the war. Both Sumner Welles and Jüri Uluots believed in principles that are immortal and in history that repeats itself.

But history only repeats itself for those who are lagging behind. This is Professor Jüri Uluots's message to today's Estonia, and also the reason why we are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the non-recognition policy this summer: in the history of politics, there are few other policies that have - albeit with uneven success - cultivated the commitment to the principles of international law over such a long period of time.

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