Excellencies!


The beginning of summer at noon today has taken us into the season of summer holidays. Therefore it was my wish to invite you all to Kadriorg - before you disperse on your holidays -to tell you how grateful I am, how grateful the Estonian people are to you, Excellencies, and to your Governments for having been with us, with the regenerating Republic of Estonia. You have shared with us our inconveniences and difficulties, magnanimously winked at our mistakes, and always helped us wherever and whenever it occurred to us to ask for advice.

To ask is to learn.
He who is shy to ask will be tardy to learn.
Apart from our infant maladies, I know that you, Excellencies, as well as your Governments, have also noticed the progress we have made. The Estonian economy, which is in the process of restructuring, has got through the trough and begun its step-by-step ascent. Estonian foreign trade has become multilateral. The Estonian kroon is stable, and in one year the Estonian gold and hard currency reserves have tripled. Estonia has established close contractual relations with a number of countries, and has her active say in international organizations. And those of you who attended the Youth Song Festival yesterday or watched it on television were perhaps able to discern that mysterious intimate trait which writers light-mindedly call national character: it was raining, it was cold, and yet nearly thirty thousand children were singing exultantly, with some songs encored twice, in defiance of the beastly weather. In our language this national trait is called eesti jonn, which doesn't translate very easily, the nearest approach being Estonian grit with a touch of stubbornness: inconveniences give us strength, difficulties unite us. Just like Thijl Ulenspiegel, we would climb a laborious hill, shouting with joy. But a more significant point, of which I am especially proud, may have passed you unnoticed: those thirty thousand included our Russian schools and Russian youngsters. I know that the Russian Ambassador, Aleksandr Trofimov, must be happy about it, for it is a more convincing proof of the absence of ethnic problems in the Republic of Estonia than any political declarations. Estonia was not a party to the conferences of Tehran, or Yalta, or Potsdam, not to mention the Paris Peace Conference. But the world is one, the world security and cooperation is one, and the old debts have to be paid off according to international law by all those who once engaged in allotting Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania like a bearskin. The most urgent debt to be paid off is the early, orderly and complete withdrawal of foreign troops. At the same time I am proud of Estonians and all the ethnic groups living in Estonia that ours is the only state in Europe where not a single drop of blood has been shed in ethnic conflicts. I, for one, will do everything I can to make everyone in the Republic of Estonia conscious of unswerving respect of human rights, be it a citizen of the Republic of Estonia, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Ukraine, Finland, Sweden, or any other state.

Some think Estonia is too small a state in too wrong a place to be viable in present-day Europe: just a relic of the ice age, of the age of medieval duchies.

I am here to assure you: Estonia is of a proper size in a proper place. Compared to Europe and America, we have another advantage besides our geopolitical position: as a small nation, we have never bargained about the price to be paid for freedom. We have paid and paid, paid in blood and in toil, and for this investment, unreasonable to a foreigner, we have created the Republic of Estonia.

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