Mr. Chairman,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

The wagon into which I was locked before dawn on June 14, 1941, had originally been meant for cargo. There were two-storey bunks at both ends. There was a funnel-shaped tin tube leading through the hole in the floor: a latrine. The window boards of 45 by 60 centimetres were screwed tightly shut on the left side, but open on the door side. On both sides, the windows were barred. From between the bars, you could put out your hand, but not your head. Therefore we saw the full length of the echelon only after we got out of the wagon in Russia. When I climbed into it with my mother and my brother, it was full of women and children already. Space was made for us on a dark lower bunk. At times, I was allowed up to the window. The sparse chain of the Red Army soldiers stood with their backs to the wagon, arms grounded with the rods on. In the evening, a bucket full of water was handed into the wagon. I remembered my father's last words: "Take care of your mother and brother, you are now the eldest man in the family." After that we had been separated. I was twelve years old. It was only on the fourth day that the echelon crossed the Narva bridge and the Estonian border. A couple of minutes later the train stopped, the convoy and the dogs unravelled into a long chain and started firing. Someone had escaped. Some days later, in the Vologda cargo station, another echelon ran in the same direction on the track next to ours. As luck would have it, the other echelon had the right-side windows open, and I happened to be on the bunk by the window - and my playmate Ülo Johanson was on the bunk by the window of the other echelon, exactly on the same minute and second; and as the trains ran parallel to each other for some time, we had chance to talk. Our next meeting took place after World War II. His mother and father never came back form Siberia. Like us all, he too had been woken from his sleep that night, and guarded by gunmen, and permitted thirty minutes to pack as many clothes as he could carry; we had been separated from fathers and older brothers, and hauled off to Central Russia, two to six thousand kilometres away to do hard physical work - men to concentration camps, women and children to closely guarded areas, one per cent of the Estonian nation.

As you see, ladies and gentlemen, communism is easy to describe but difficult to define, and even more difficult to submit to a dispassionate study. It was only three months ago that I learned that the echelon that had taken me to Russia had borne the number 293, the number of the convoy unit had been 153 OKV (which itself is funny, when you remember, what it means in German), and the convoy commander who had the duty to report to Moscow every day - to give the location of the echelon, the number of the dead and the number of those shot dead on escape was a lieutenant by the name of Donchenko. Today, I also know that he had detailed instructions, which included the ominous clause "G". The clause was short: "Singing prohibited". This too is part of the European history, for the following reason. The Polish officers who were deported to Katyn were good Catholics and sang sacred songs that could have had a demoralizing effect on the Soviet people. The report of the songs of the Polish officers in Polish trains and Polish wagons travelled to Moscow, it was studied and considered, and when our time came, clause "G" was added to Lieutenant Donchenko's instructions: singing prohibited.

I said unintentionally: when our time came. The Estonian history does not know the date, has not seen the document that destined one per cent of our population to deportation. But today I know that the list of persons to be deported from the Republic of Lithuania was approved by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union already on January 17, 1940, at the time when the Republic of Lithuania, as well as the Republic of Latvia and the Republic of Estonia were sovereign neighbour countries to Russia. I assume, although cannot prove, that similar deportation lists had also been drawn up for other neighbouring countries of the former Soviet Union. I can not resist the temptation to refer to the "Special Search List" (die Sonderfahrungsliste, drawn up for the case of the annexation of Great Britain) of the Soviet Union's partner, the Third Reich. It is true that the list only contained 2300 names, but indeed well-known names: H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, and of course, Bertrand Russell.

Thus, communism is easy to describe but difficult to define. In Estonia, the population losses during the first year of the Soviet occupation were three times greater than during the following three years of the Nazi occupation. Such comparison is per se dangerous for three reasons. First, it tempts us to list totalitarian systems in order of preference. Secondly: as communism has been more successful than Nazism in introducing itself as a leftist worldview, it draws all peoples who have had personal experience with it to the ultra-rightist worldview. And thirdly: the investigation of the Nazi crimes has half a century of tradition behind it. It has indeed been a fruitful tradition, as the investigators have had access to the sources. The investigators of the communist crimes, on the other hand, have impatiently been waiting for their turn ever since 1917, and even today, they only have a negligible part of the sources at their disposal. The quality of the investigations may suffer from this, as the temptation to postulate the obvious conclusions first and to look for corroborating sources only afterwards is dangerously strong. As for the availability of sources, the investigator of the communist crimes will be hopelessly at a disadvantage when compared to the investigator of the Nazi crimes, also because after the destruction of the Third Reich, the investigation of the Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity was supported morally and financially by many governments and academic circles - which has unfortunately not been the case with the investigation of the communist crimes.

Therefore, I am especially glad that "The Black Book of Communism" is now available also in Swedish. Sweden needs this book. Perhaps as much as Estonia, perhaps more. The investigation of the crimes of communism calls for qualified investigators, access to materials, but first and foremost the conviction of the need to investigate the crimes of communism. Until very recently, this conviction has been insufficient. Even in the countries that have freed themselves from communism, the investigation is still in the initial stage. But I am very glad to inform all those present here that very soon the book will also be available in Estonian.

Robert Conquest has claimed that despite everything, communism was still better than Nazism, because her ideas and ideals are more beautiful. The historical experience of Estonia and the Baltic States does not agree to this argument. Even though the soldiers of the two totalitarian states wore different uniforms, they were identical twins by nature. One learned from the other, one leaned upon the other in its development. The repressive mechanisms - the Nazi security police and the Soviet People's Commissariat of National Security (NKGB) - were similar and developed on the basis of each other's experience. It is no big difference whether the enemy was an Untermensch or a representative of hostile nation (vrazhdebnaya natsiya).. There is no big difference whether the state economy was led by the State Planning Committee or the Speer Committee. It is not a big difference whether the dictator was called "der Führer" or "Vozhd".

The Nazi and Soviet regimes trusted each other, because each understood the other's motives and driving forces. The Hitler-Stalin pact was the result of long mutual advances and admiration. The fact that Hitler deluded Stalin just meant Stalin's temporary failure.

Totalitarian regimes are capable of unbelievably efficient short-term action, but only on the account of the future. For the building of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Channel and the Dneprogess, obedience was needed, not creativity. Creativity means independent thinking, abolition of fear, civic responsibility. No totalitarian society has been able to afford that

As a result of the Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, Estonia has lost not only the people who were murdered, deported or killed in the wars. Estonia's loss first and foremost means the loss of the Estonian quality of life, the loss of the Estonian ethics, the loss of Estonians' skills. A professor steals the works of his students, a judge issues an ungrammatical sentence; a state official is unable to make clear decisions in accordance with the law. The inertia of totalitarian regimes in Estonia and of course, around Estonia, incl. this country here, which I love so much, is greater than we were willing to admit in the joy of liberation.

Marxist political economists have turned into marketing specialists, lectors on marxism-leninism have become philosophers, professors of scientific communism consider themselves politologists and historians of the communist party today write books about the collaps of communism in Estonia. What will the world look like to the eyes of their students?

Estonians are a small nation. Most of us today have some relative who died in Siberia; someone who was killed in the World War II on the German side and someone on the Soviet side; someone who belonged to the communist party and someone who fled to the West from the communist occupation. For such Estonians, the question whether communism was better than Nazism or vice versa has no meaning whatsoever.

I think that in this sentence there is really more optimism than first meets the eye. It reveals the historical experience of the Estonians, which is broader than that of many European nations. This is what has helped us to preserve our identity despite the loss of 25 % of our citizen. In Sweden, in the correspondending number of losses through communists would have been 1,65 millions.

On August 20, 1991, the 50th birthday of Slobodan Milosevic, Tallinn was occupied by the light tanks of the Pskov landing division. The coup in Moscow was not a success and during the next few days Estonia managed to restore her independence. At the time, few had heard of Milosevic. Today, Milosevic's tanks are in Kosovo. Half of the Kosovo's inhabitants have been driven out or fled from their homes. Just like the Poles in 1939, the Karelians in 1940 and in 1944, the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians in 1941 and 1944, the Germans of East Prussia, Pommer, Silesia, and Sudete in 1945 or the Tadzhik mountain peoples in 1973. For these people it did not matter whether their death was defined as an ethnic purge, a genocide or something else. And whether they were victims of Nazis or communists.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Communism cast a black shadow over the entire world. For those who lived under it, communism created a climate of fear that as Czeslaw Milosc said, kept people in permanent fear and most in the dependant position of children. Overcoming communism is thus for them a process of growing up, of facing the past as well as the future.

It has also cast a shadow over the world, suggesting to many that people have the ability to answer all questions about human life, that any means are justified in building a better future, and that a good future can be built on the foundation of human hubris.

And it continues to cast a shadow not only in that there are still more than a billion people living under it, but also in that the fine crimes of the communist system continue to be denied for various reasons by various people.

We have not had lustration in the East or in the West: no country has purged itself of the communist past as the victorious powers purged Germany of the Nazis, and no intellectual class in the West has purged itself completely from the hubris on which communism was built.

Books like the one we are discussing here can contribute to both processes but only if everyone recognises that the book in question is not closed but open and must remain open so if the world is going to overcome one of its greatest plagues.

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