Communist Party's Role in Estonia's Fate Revealed
Annotation
In this selection, a member of the Communist Party in Estonia articulates a new role for Communists as leaders of the movement for national self-determination within the existing structures of the Soviet Union. In addition to defining the goals in this excerpt, the remainder of this article focuses on the controversial role of Communists in collaborating in the forced incorporation of Estonia in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. As in Lithuania and Latvia, demands for self-determination in Estonia were reinforced by Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, because historians and journalists continued exposing the falsity of traditional Soviet histories of this moment in the history of the Baltic republics.
This source is a part of the Nationalities and the Breakup of the Soviet Union, 1989-2000 teaching module.
Text
Communist Party's Role in Estonia's Fate Revealed
We can proceed at present only through implementing the right of the Estonian people to selfdetermination. The principle of the peoples' equality is an irrefutable component of international law,
according to which all peoples have a right to determine their political status freely and without outside
influence, and to develop their economic, social, and cultural life. Each nation, being the carrier of its
own history and culture, is at the same time both a subject as well as an object of international law.
Starting from the birth of each nation, the natural environment (territory) belongs to it, having been
acquired for the nation with diverse material, economic, and cultural means. Ambitions on the natural
environment of whatever nation are clearly unlawful. With the new principles of federalism one must also
recognize juridically the ethnic diversity which actually exists. To affirm the state sovereignty of the
peoples of the Soviet Union, it is necessary to adopt first and foremost the constitutions of union republics
and only thereafter to look through the union contract.
Source: Mikk Titma, "Communist Party's Role in Estonia's Fate Viewed," Rahva Haal, August 18, 1989.
Trans. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).
Credits
Mikk Titma, "Communist Party's Role in Estonia's Fate Viewed," Rahva Haal, August 18, 1989. Trans. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).