Dear ladies and gentleman, and first and foremost, our dear guest Mr. Gauck!

Sometimes, when at my present post, I happen to think of history, I envisage the following simile: if I took a big structure, and gave it to the physicists, the chemists, or the biologists to examine, I would get quite a specific information on how much water, carbon, nitrogen, and other elements it contained. And yet, I fear, they would fail to tell me that we are dealing with an elephant. We often miss the whole. At the moment, we are in the situation where we try to combine the whole of the details which are in their turn determined and made valuable by the whole.

In order to make my mysterious words a little more understandable, I would like to draw your attention to two fundamental questions to which I so far have found no answer. Or which, at least, are directly connected to the problems that we will be discussing in this hall today and tomorrow, and will hopefully be discussing for many years and decades, as long as the Estonian State lasts.

In 1917, the Estonian people were able to enact the right of self-determination. Yes, the right that in modern times has been put to words to the US President Woodrow Wilson. To enact and to protect with arms. This was the birth of our nation, our War of Liberty, the Tartu peace agreement with the country east of Estonia. This was the time when all the empires fell: the empire of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and those of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs. My question is quite simple: explain me, why a small nation was capable to enact the right of self-determination, and why did the great Russian nation not manage to carry it through? Have we perhaps overestimated what many historians call the revolution, but what could also be considered as the difficult and civil-war related problem of the modernisation of the empire?

The second question that I would like to draw your attention to concerns the activities of of Mr. Gauck, or more specifically, the area in Germany that for a long time was euphemistically called the German Democratic Republic. We know this was a euphemism: there was no democracy in this state, no freedom, and indeed no state - and yet there was something that makes a fundamental difference between this miscreation and the occupied Estonia. Estonia was under foreign occupation, and therefore it was easier to form the fronts. Everything that came to us came from the winner's capital, Moscow. And although those were the times that bereaved Estonia of the quarter of her population, taking them to graves, camps, or to seek refuge where their lives were safe, the frontlines were clear enough and in Estonia, there never occurred any tendency to identify ourselves with this regime, this state, this worldview.

Exactly the opposite happened in the so-called DDR, where the totalitarian regime managed to conjure something that both the eastern and even more se the western observers were later to call the DDR patriotism. This has resulted also in the fact that on the latest elections in the Federal Republic of Germany, in the former DDR area many votes were given to the party calling themselves the PDS, which certainly is not one of the political forces seeing the fortification of the European parliamentary traditions as part of their programme. Estonia is free of this taint. I have been seeking the reasons why. I have two times visited the so-called DDR, but not as a tourist, but just as a wanderer as I have been elsewhere in the world - walking around, taking the tram, not the official state car. One characteristic feature caught my attention at the library of the Humboldt University, where I was reading "The Estonian Nation's Year of Suffering" - which was not prohibited there, as no one there knew Estonian - suddenly, I heard the march playing and ran out to Unter den Linden, where I saw the parade approaching and the people looking at the parade with deep affection. I was helped up to the foundation of a house so I could get a better look; and I mentioned a bit sarcastically that I saw this parade last time in 1938. The man whom I had said this nodded and remarked that indeed, the Kapellmeister was the same.

Try to imagine something like that in Estonia and you will see the huge difference in our fates. We have borne great losses, but I must confess that when I returned from this non-state - which was quite nicely furnished for these times - the first time in 1966, and the second time in 1978, and was back in Tallinn and especially at the Kuku Club, I really felt I had found my way back to freedom. This is the frantic reality that we should also consider, because this too is part of life.

Finally, I would like to say a few words about the efficiency of the totalitarian pressure system, and as these are numbers, I would rather read them to you. In Hitler's Germany, when the so-called "third Reich" was in power, and when also Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were part of it, there were 15,000 people working in the Gestapo. In the so-called DDR, the StaSi had 170,000 unoffical collaborators. In the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet union there were 1,095,678 people working on May 15, 1953, and this number, my dear ladies and gentlemen, did not include the militia! Among others, this was certainly a factor that accelerated the dilapidation of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union failed to build up a functioning economy, it even failed to build up the repressive mechanism! The Soviet Union drowned in its own system.

Thank you!

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