Enn Tarto

Enn Tarto (25 September 1938 – 18 July 2021) was an Estonian dissident and politician. Born in Tartu, he attended the Kõrveküla seven-year school and Tartu 3rd Secondary School, and later began Estonian philology at the University of Tartu, a course he did not finish for political reasons. Between 1956 and 1988 he served three sentences in labour camps of the Soviet Union—1956–1960, 1962–1967 and 1983–1988—amounting to more than 14 years, and was released for the last time in 1988.

As a secondary-school pupil he helped form the underground Estonian Youth Brigade (Eesti Noorte Malev) and, writing as Mart Kraav, distributed leaflets against the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In August 1979 he signed the Baltic Appeal, a memorandum of 45 citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania sent to the United Nations and other governments. It demanded publication of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocols, a declaration that the pact was void from the outset, and the restoration of Baltic independence; the other Estonian signatories were Mart Niklus, Erik Udam and Endel Ratas. Arrested again on 13 September 1983, he was sentenced on 19 April 1984 to ten years in a special-regime camp in the Perm region and five years of exile. He left the camp on 14 October 1988 and was received at Tartu railway station on 17 October.

After that release he chaired the Tartu committee of Estonian citizens, sat in the Congress of Estonia as head of its Tartu bureau, and was a member of the Constitutional Assembly, chairing its national-defence committee. He took part in restoring the Estonian Defence League (Kaitseliit), became its first honorary member, and chaired its council of elders from 1993 to 2003. He was a member of the Riigikogu for three terms, from 1992 to 2003, and of Tartu City Council for four terms. He also presided over the Estonian organisation of the Paneuropean Union and was one of the leaders of Memento, the association of people repressed under Soviet rule.

In 1996 he received the Order of the National Coat of Arms, 2nd class. In 2011 Tartu named him an honorary citizen and awarded him the Tartu Grand Star. Hungary, Lithuania and Poland also decorated him, and he was included in a published list of 100 outstanding Estonians of the twentieth century. Tarto died in Tartu on 18 July 2021, aged 82.

Early life and education

Family and schooling in Tartu

Enn Tarto was born on 25 September 1938 in Tartu. He later wrote that the family lived at Käärdi farm in Aovere village, in Tartu parish north of the city, and that his father, Mart Kool, had been the parish elder (vallavanem). On the afternoon of 13 June 1941, after Kool was warned in Tartu that vehicles were being gathered, the household left the farm and asked Tarto’s maternal grandmother, Marie Enniko (née Kull), to stay with the house and animals. The family was on the list for the June deportation. Squads arrived toward morning; when Enniko would not say where they had gone she was beaten and threatened, and the household hid in forests in Tartu County while Kool and other men were with the fighters of the 1941 Summer War.

By 1944 the family was still in Aovere. Tarto recalled the Soviet bombing of Tartu on 26–27 March, heavy bombing the same nights of a German decoy airfield on Käärdi land, and going with his father that summer to see wrecks at a decoy harbour east of the city. A biographical lexicon of resistance under communism, written by Viktor Niitsoo, states that Tarto’s father was arrested in 1944, deported into the interior of the Soviet Union, and died in 1947 in a corrective-labour camp at Norilsk. His mother, Linda Tarto, later worked as a postal carrier. His grandmother Marie Enniko lived with the family during his first imprisonment and died on 1 April 1966, aged 86.

He entered the first class at Kõrveküla in 1946 and finished the seven-year school in the spring of 1953. Lessons began in the old schoolhouse, the birthplace of the composer Miina Härma, continued in classrooms at Kalja farm, and ended in a new building on the ruins of the former Tartu parish house; the directors in those years were Alviine Ress, Elmi Tomasson and Aino Kask. He recalled the March 1949 deportation, which took a classmate, Jaan Ploom, and a further removal in 1951 of three sisters from the school. In 1952–53 he refused to join the Komsomol despite pressure from his class teacher. His mother arranged extra Russian at Univere farm with the teacher Karl Rüütli, who, Tarto wrote, told him privately that he would need the language if he meant to work for Estonia. He dated one of his happiest school days to the spring of 1953, when news of the death of Joseph Stalin reached a mourning assembly at the school.

From 1953 he attended Tartu 3rd Secondary School. On 12 March 1956 a group of its pupils, Tarto among them, founded the underground Eesti Noorte Malev (Estonian Youth Brigade). He was arrested on 25 December 1956, still in the final year. He completed secondary school in 1958 at the Sosnovka evening school in the camps in Mordovia and was released on parole on 21 June 1960.

Interrupted university studies

Back in Tartu he worked as a carpenter, and in 1961 an application for a place at the University of Tartu failed. After a second imprisonment, from 1962 to 1967, he took up Estonian philology there by correspondence. Niitsoo’s lexicon states that such a course was ended after two years following intervention by the KGB, but it dates the start to 1959, which conflicts with his imprisonment until June 1960. A compilation on the Estonian democratic movement places the studies in 1969–1971 and the exmatriculation in connection with his patriotic activity. The City of Tartu records that the philology course was left unfinished for political reasons. He did not take a degree, and worked instead at a series of jobs, later as a stoker in a boiler house.

Underground resistance and the first two sentences

The Estonian Youth Brigade and the 1956 leaflets

In March 1956 pupils from Tartu's 3rd Secondary School founded the clandestine Eesti Noorte Malev (Estonian Youth Brigade). Co-founder Jaan Isotamm, cited by the historian Viktor Niitsoo, dated the meeting to 13 March on Toome Hill; Tarto later recalled 12 March. The group had an oath, statutes modelled on those of the Estonian Students' Society, and a programme of preserving national culture and resisting the Soviet occupation; a magazine, Saagem vabaks, was in preparation. The chair rotated every six months, Isotamm until September 1956 and then Tarto. The KGB later counted ten recruited members. They also collected weapons and, through Lembit Soosaar, kept in touch with Armin Tammekand, a former Defence League activist then in hiding.

On the night of 3–4 November 1956, as Soviet forces put down the Hungarian Revolution, members posted about 300 leaflets in Tartu supporting the uprising and calling for freedom for Estonia. One text urged Estonians not to assist the occupiers; another told young people to form classroom groups, citing Hungarian students. About a hundred leaflets were handwritten, and Tartu schools were ordered to set dictations for comparison. The Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur records that Tarto wrote under the pseudonym Mart Kraav.

Denunciations had reached the KGB in the spring. On 23 December officers detained the tenth-grader Heino Taniloo and took his testimony; on 25 December they arrested eight others, including the eleventh-grader Tarto and Isotamm. Isotamm received seven years, Voldemar Kohv six, Tarto five, Jüri Rebane and Soosaar four each, and Tõnis Raudsepp and Jüri Lõhmus three each. Enn-Kaupo Laanearu received two years under article 58-12, for failure to report a counter-revolutionary crime, and article 182, part 1.

Mordovian camps and the Estonian Nationalists' Union

At the end of April 1957 most of the group were sent to political camp ZhKh 385/7 at Sosnovka, in the Mordovian ASSR. Taivo Uibo, already there from an earlier Tallinn prosecution, described a post-Stalin interval of civilian clothes, parcels and sport; Tarto wrote that the easing was withdrawn by 1962. In the summer of 1957 Uibo, Isotamm, Tarto and Kohv formed Kotkas ("Eagle"; Adler in the German dissident lexicon), taking the name from the Tallinn school group Kotkad. They studied Estonian history and marked national holidays.

Kotkas lapsed. On 6 January 1959 Uibo, Tarto and Laanearu founded the Eesti Uusrahvuslaste Liit (Estonian Union of New Nationalists), with Uibo as leader and Tarto as deputy, on the idea that Estonia's future lay with the Finnic peoples. The camp was treated as preparation for work after release. Tarto finished evening secondary school there in 1958. Work credits that shortened sentences were cancelled, including retroactively, on 25 December 1958, but he was released early and conditionally on 21 June 1960.

The 1962 sentence and life between imprisonments

He returned to his mother, Linda Tarto, in Kõrveküla and worked on the Miina Härma collective farm while he appealed. Endel Puusepp, deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Estonian Supreme Soviet, later ruled the ban void from the start. Tarto then joined a carpenter brigade of former political prisoners at the Tartu Repair and Construction Administration. In the autumn of 1961 the law faculty of the University of Tartu would not accept his papers, and KGB officers ordered him off the main-building steps.

Once back in Estonia the camp union was recast, the Finnic programme having come to seem unrealistic, as the Eesti Rahvuslaste Liit (Estonian Nationalists' Union). Its 1961 statute named independence, an end to occupation and chauvinism, and respect for human rights, which Niitsoo notes other youth groups of the time did not demand. Uibo led, with Tarto, Erik Udam and Valdo Reinart as deputies. They met secretly, recruited, spread propaganda and collected weapons. The file was opened on 9 June 1962 after Captain Albert Molok questioned Anatoli Pärttyläinen, a prisoner in Mordovia who had informed since 1959 under the pseudonym Devi. On 26 June an agent, Ülo Niinemets, handed back a borrowed copy of the statute, and officers arrested Tarto with the document.

Also arrested were Uibo, a football coach in Kiviõli; Jarmo Kiik of the Tartu Music School; Priit Silla, a history student; Udam, an engineer at Türi-Alliku; and Reinart, a Tallinn mechanic born in 1936. Reinart and Silla received three years in a reinforced-regime camp under articles 68 part 1 and 70.

Tarto served the full term in Mordovia, first at strict-regime camp ZhKh 385/11, where he received no official parcels and worked for a time as a tractor driver. Moved briefly at the end of 1967 to camp 385/17-1, he was released when the sentence expired. Ten Tartu employers refused him before Edgar Beek took him on as a construction worker at the Avangard collective farm; an official warning had said that a former prisoner without work could be prosecuted for "parasitism." He dated the imprisonment to 1962–1967 and wrote that secret organizations were finished. The next phase was public letters, among them the Baltic Appeal of 1979.

The Baltic Appeal and the third imprisonment

Drafting and demands of the 1979 memorandum

On 23 August 1979, the fortieth anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, dissidents from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania made public a joint memorandum, the Balti apell (Baltic Appeal). Its final text was drafted and copied at 25 Vikerkaare Street in Tähtvere, Tartu, the home of Mart Niklus, by Niklus, Enn Tarto, the Lithuanian organiser Antanas Terleckas and Julius Sasnauskas, then carried to Moscow and smuggled abroad.

The memorandum was addressed to the secretary-general of the United Nations, the governments of the Soviet Union, West Germany and East Germany, and the governments that had signed the Atlantic Charter. It demanded full publication of the 1939 pact and its secret protocols, a declaration that they were void from the moment of signature, and the restoration of Baltic independence. The contemporary samizdat journal A Chronicle of Current Events summarised the requests to the Charter governments as a call to condemn the pact and its consequences, and the request to the secretary-general as a call to raise the question at the General Assembly. Signatories used their own names, and all three nations were represented.

The Chronicle counted 48 Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian signatures. Later Estonian accounts, including the Tartu City Museum and a 2019 commemoration by the foreign minister, speak of 45: the Estonians Niklus, Tarto, Erik Udam and Endel Ratas, six Latvians and thirty-five Lithuanians. Viktor Niitsoo, who added his name later, wrote that Jüri Kukk, Tiit Madisson and he himself associated themselves with the appeal afterwards, and he called Terleckas its initiator and principal author.

Circulation, the European Parliament and further protests

Andrei Sakharov presented the appeal to foreign correspondents at a press conference in his Moscow apartment on the day it was dated. The Chronicle reported support from Sakharov and from members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, including Yelena Bonner, together with other Moscow dissidents including Tatyana Velikanova. The text circulated as samizdat inside the Soviet Union and was published abroad; a later Postimees editorial states that The New York Times gave it space, and Tarto later recalled that such open letters were broadcast back by foreign radio.

On 13 January 1983 the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the situation in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Niitsoo attributed the initiative to Otto von Habsburg and recorded the vote as 98 in favour, six against and eight abstentions; he wrote that the resolution condemned the Soviet occupation and called for independence to be restored. The Tartu City Museum records the Parliament’s support for the appeal’s demands, and the Estonian foreign minister later described the resolution as the first position taken by an international organisation in support of the Baltic states. A Postimees editorial states that, under the appeal’s influence, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed an annual Baltic Freedom Day on 14 June, the anniversary of the 1941 deportations.

Tarto continued to put his name to open letters. The biographical lexicon of the Federal Foundation for the Study of the SED Dictatorship credits him with a petition of 17 January 1980 against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a protest of 3 February 1980 against Sakharov’s banishment, and a congratulatory telegram of 11 November 1980 to Lech Wałęsa of the Polish union Solidarity. His own later account also lists an 11 September 1980 letter to Wałęsa from twenty Lithuanian and Estonian dissidents. He took part in the typed bulletin Lisandusi mõtete ja uudiste vabale levikule Eestis (“Additions to the Free Circulation of Thoughts and News in Estonia”), issued from 1978 to 1987. He later wrote that twenty-five issues appeared and that the KGB did not find the unregistered typewriters used to produce them; reprints were published in Sweden in 1984–88. In December 1987, still in camp, he was named an honorary member of the group formed to publicise the Hitler–Stalin pact.

Arrest, the Perm camps and the 1988 release

Tarto was arrested for the third time on 13 September 1983. Maaleht later quoted the judgment’s finding that he had collected “tendentious and slanderous information” on internal events and helped compile an illegal collection “containing fabrications that denigrated the Soviet state and social order,” and that he had signed memoranda to the United Nations and to Western and Soviet leaders. The court classed him as an especially dangerous recidivist. He later wrote that Amnesty International recognised him as a prisoner of conscience, and he linked his case with the 1983–84 proceedings against Lagle Parek, Arvo Pesti and Heiki Ahonen, in which the underground journal was at issue.

In 1984 he was taken to Kuchino, camp VS-389/36, a special-regime compound in Perm oblast between Perm and Solikamsk. He recalled officers telling new arrivals that they would not be killed but would be tormented until they died, and he called the camp a death camp. Prisoners wore striped clothing, received a reduced food ration, and were held in small cells locked day and night. In a 2006 account he estimated annual mortality at about 10 per cent; later he put it at 10 to 20 per cent. Among those held there he named the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus and the priest Semyon Skalych, known as Ded Pokutnik.

After demonstrations in Tallinn demanding his release, Tarto left the camp on 14 October 1988. He reached Tartu on 17 October, where a reception met him; photographs of the day show Niklus, freed shortly before and still in a striped camp uniform, beside him, and Harry Henn carrying a flag.

The restoration of independence

Citizens' committees and the Congress of Estonia

Tarto left a camp in the Perm region on 14 October 1988 and was received in Tartu on 17 October. He then worked to restore the Republic of Estonia as the continuation of the pre-occupation state, rather than as a new republic leaving the Soviet Union.

On 24 February 1989 the Estonian Heritage Society, the Estonian National Independence Party and the Estonian Christian Union called for registration of citizens of the 1940 republic and their descendants, so that this citizenry could elect a representative body of its own. By 1 March 1990 about 790,000 citizens and more than 60,000 applicants for citizenship had registered, and 557,163 citizens and 34,345 applicants had voted for the Congress of Estonia.

The City of Tartu records that Tarto chaired the Tartu citizens' committee, sat in the Congress, headed its Tartu bureau, and served on the board of both compositions of the Estonian Committee, the Congress's executive body. The German Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship describes him as a deputy chairman of that committee. The Congress opened on 11–12 March 1990 in the Estonia Concert Hall in Tallinn, with Tarto in the front row beside Tunne Kelam. On 30 March 1990 the Supreme Soviet recognised the Congress as the citizenry's representative and as a restorer of state authority; from 8 May 1990 that legislature was styled the Supreme Council of the Republic of Estonia.

On 19–20 August 1991, during the attempted coup in Moscow, representatives of the Supreme Council and the Estonian Committee agreed how to end the transition and restore the republic in fact. Piret Tarto, writing in 2024 from her husband's account, named the Committee side as chairman Tunne Kelam and vice-chairmen Vardo Rumessen, Enn Tarto and Sirje Endre, meeting Ülo Nugis, Marju Lauristin and Arnold Rüütel at Toompea. She wrote that the Congress side rejected proclamation of a new state seeking fresh recognition, that restoration on the basis of legal continuity prevailed, and that Tarto stayed until the morning of 20 August before returning to Tartu. That evening the Supreme Council adopted the decision "On the national independence of Estonia", which provided for a Constitutional Assembly delegated by both bodies and for Riigikogu elections in 1992 under a new constitution. The German foundation also records Tarto's part in concluding that August agreement.

The Constitutional Assembly and national defence

On 3 September 1991 the Supreme Council set the Assembly at 60 members, 30 from each body, with no power to make law and the task of drafting a constitution. It sat from 13 September 1991 to 10 April 1992, in 30 sittings, under Tõnu Anton, with Lauri Vahtre and Ülo Uluots as deputy chairmen. On 27 September he, Sirje Endre, Hando Runnel and Ülo Seppa submitted the text of the 1938 constitution as one draft. On 11 October the Assembly adopted the draft of Jüri Adams's working group as its basis, by 29 votes to 22 for the draft of Jüri Raidla's group.

Tarto chaired the fifth thematic committee, on national defence, with Enn Tupp as deputy chairman; its minutes have not survived. The City of Tartu also names him chairman of the Estonian Committee's defence committee. The fifth committee proposed that defending Estonia's independence, and spontaneous resistance to a violent change of the constitutional order, be the constitutional right of every citizen. At the sitting of 29 November 1991 Tarto argued that the right had to belong to each citizen, so that resistance would remain possible under occupation or without an order from above. The Assembly voted 15 in favour and 10 against to insert the committee's wording.

A minute of the second committee for 10 January 1992 records that, following German jurists, the duty was recast as loyalty to the constitutional order and defence of independence, and the second paragraph was removed. On 14 February 1992 Tarto objected that a right already voted in had disappeared from the draft. Liia Hänni replied that, after editing by the language specialists, it remained as the second paragraph of § 54. In the Constitution of Estonia as adopted, each citizen has a duty to be loyal to the constitutional order and to defend independence and, if no other means are available, the right to resist on his or her own initiative a forcible attempt to change that order. The Supreme Council set the referendum for 28 June 1992 but omitted an additional question, prepared by the Assembly and approved by the Congress, on a temporary ban barring former senior officials of the Communist Party and the Komsomol from important elected state offices.

Public protest and the Soviet military presence

The German foundation records that after his release Tarto became district secretary of the Estonian Heritage Society in Tartu. The city notes that, as a heritage activist, he proposed or arranged several memorials in Tartu and supported a museum in the former KGB cells.

In recollections published in 2014, Tarto described a peaceful march on 8 March 1989 around the Soviet military airfield in Tartu, led by the heritage movement, members of the Defence League and a Memento initiative group, and called it the first such march in Eastern Europe. He wrote that he and Ago Breed had agreed beforehand with General Dzhokhar Dudayev, commander of the garrison, that the protest would remain peaceful.

Parliamentary and municipal politics

Three Riigikogu terms and changing party affiliations

Enn Tarto was a member of the Riigikogu in the VII, VIII and IX compositions, elected in 1992, 1995 and 1999, and sat on the National Defence Committee in each term. In 1992, in district no. 10 (Tartu County and the city), he stood for the coalition Isamaa, received 9,195 votes and a personal mandate. Isamaa won 100,828 votes (22.0 percent) and 29 seats. The list joined the Estonian Conservative People’s Party with Christian-democratic, liberal-democratic and republican groups. The City of Tartu records him as a founder and chairman of that Conservative People’s Party, formed in 1990. It is not the Conservative People's Party of Estonia later registered under the same Estonian name: in January 2020 Andres Herkel said the party founded in Tartu on 21 January 1990 had no connection with the later party and no members in common with it, and Tarto said it was a pity the name had been taken.

A Parempoolsed (Right-wingers) faction existed in the VII Riigikogu from 30 June 1994. In 1995 the party won 27,053 votes (5.0 percent) and five seats, and Tarto took a compensation mandate with 2,814 votes. In 1999 he was elected for Mõõdukad in district no. 8 — Jõgeva County and Tartu County, not the city — with 1,738 votes, a district mandate below the quota. The list won 73,630 votes (15.2 percent) and 17 seats. The city later called him a founder of Rahvaerakond and a member of the Social Democratic Party, “the former Mõõdukad”. Postimees reported on 15 December 2003 that the Moderates were becoming the Social Democrats, and in August 2005 that he had reached that party through mergers, after membership of Rahvaerakond and of Isamaa.

From 12 May 1997 he chaired the committee on the Security Police Board and on people who had served occupying states’ security or military intelligence. In the IX composition he chaired the security-agencies oversight committee created in 2001 and, until 15 April 2002, sat on the inquiry into the KGB’s closure.

Tartu City Council and heritage

He was elected to Tartu City Council four times: for Mõõdukad in 1999 and 2002, for Isamaaliit in 2005, and for the Pro Patria and Res Publica Union (IRL) in 2009. Reported votes were 323 on the Moderates’ list in 2002, 440 in a preliminary Isamaaliit count in 2005, and 176 on the IRL list in 2009.

The city says that, as heritage advocate and councillor, he proposed or organized several memorials and supported the KGB Cells Museum. The museum is the basement of the “grey house” at Riia 15b, an NKVD and KGB pre-trial prison in the 1940s and 1950s. The Tartu City Museum attributes the plan to restore the cells to former members of the pupils’ group Sini-Must-Valge, who found the basement empty. A monument to the Estonian War of Independence, opened in Tähtvere Park on 3 July 1932 and destroyed in 1940, was rebuilt on the same site and reopened on 2 July 2006 at the initiative of Tartu Memento, the work being done by the city government. Tarto, its chairman, later led commemorations there, including one in January 2010 for the 14 January 1919 battle in which Estonian forces retook Tartu.

Positions on historical memory, defence and former communists

On 2 April 2001 the Riigikogu adopted what Postimees called the restored legislature’s first ban on a former member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union becoming Chancellor of Justice. Tarto, then of Mõõdukad, added the clause to a Centre Party bill. Thirty-one members backed it, and he said declaring the party criminal was “only a matter of time”. Peeter Kreitzberg, who voted for the clause, called that step emotional and asked whether Marju Lauristin and Mihkel Pärnoja should leave public life. Tiit Käbin, among 30 votes against the law, said guilt was individual, and Igor Gräzin doubted the president would promulgate a text conflicting with constitutional rights. Later that May, Isamaaliit and Mõõdukad limited a draft declaration to the communist regime and its repressive organs, dropping the names of the Soviet and Estonian parties. Postimees wrote that naming them would have implicated thirty or forty members.

On 15 August 2005 he told the Baltic News Service he was leaving the Social Democrats over cooperation with the People's Union of Estonia: “The past and background of the People’s Union do not suit me.” He said the party had previously stood near Isamaaliit, opposed sending President Arnold Rüütel to Moscow on 9 May, and called People’s Union figures “red barons”, employers in the countryside, while social democrats should represent employees. He kept his council seat and said he would join no other party. The 2002–2005 record notes the resignation; in October he returned on the Isamaaliit list, and the city’s later biography calls him non-party while cooperating with IRL.

In January 2020 he described barring former communists as a rule of the 1990 party, said he could not accept many of the later party’s principles, and called European Union and NATO membership indispensable. In March 2017 he told Eesti Kirik, as chairman of Tartu Memento, that Soviet crimes against humanity must not be forgotten.

The Defence League, Memento and other civic roles

Restoring the Defence League

The Estonian Defence League (Kaitseliit), the volunteer defence organisation dissolved under Soviet rule, was re-established on 17 February 1990 at a conference in Järvakandi. The 125 participants adopted a temporary statute in place of the 1931 rules, formed a provisional leadership with the powers of a central council, asked that body to propose candidates for a council of elders (vanematekogu), and undertook to protect the elections of the Congress of Estonia.

Kaitseliit and later obituaries count Enn Tarto among those who restored the League and describe him as a public advocate for it from 1990. He is recorded as its first honorary member, and he chaired the council of elders from 1993 to 2003.

In the 1990s the revived League was still establishing a place in the security arrangements of the restored republic. A Kaitseliit account of the council’s work in 1993–2003, the years of Tarto’s chairmanship, treated that body as especially important in formulating the principles of the Defence League Act, drafting the bill and seeing the law adopted. After his election to the Riigikogu in 1992 he sat on its national-defence committee while holding the elders’ chair.

Memento and the memory of repression

On 25 March 1989, the fortieth anniversary of the March deportation, former deportees and political prisoners founded in Tallinn the Union of the Unlawfully Repressed, Memento (Eesti Õigusvastaselt Represseeritute Liit “Memento”), later the Estonian Memento Union. Its charter aims were to defend the political, social and economic rights of people who had fought for independence or suffered under terror, to take part in educating the young in democracy, human rights and the idea of freedom, and to gather evidence of terror and record the memory of its victims and of those who had fought for the state. At the founding meeting Tarto was elected to the union’s board, and on 23 April 1989 a Tartu branch of about 450 members chose a five-person board on which he was named first, with Paul Muuli, Heldur Tüüts, Udo-Vello Lamp and Vambola Kruusealle. Tartu’s mayor later referred to him as chairman of that branch.

In Tarto’s later account, the Tartu branch joined the marking of deportations, the restoration of War of Independence monuments, the removal of Soviet monuments and the renaming of streets. It placed a memorial stone to the deported behind St Paul’s cemetery, and on 17 June 1990 the monument Rukkilill (“Cornflower”) was opened opposite the Grey House, the former KGB building. He wrote that in the branch’s early years he received people there on Wednesdays and met more than 5,000 of them. As he described it, Memento brought together political prisoners, deportees, armed veterans and forest brothers, student resisters, people confined to psychiatric hospitals for political reasons, and unarmed dissidents.

He left day-to-day work in Tartu Memento after the 1992 Riigikogu election, in which he received 9,197 votes. Obituaries continued to list him among the leaders of the repressed persons’ organisation.

Human rights bodies, the Pan-European Union and UNPO

A biographical account compiled by the democratic movement states that Tarto chaired the council of the Estonian Institute of Human Rights from 1992 to 1995, and that with Linnart Mäll he helped revive the Estonian association of the Pan-European Union and served as its president. Kaitseliit, Estonian public broadcasting and the Tartu press likewise list that presidency among his posts, without publishing the years. The institute, founded on 10 December 1992, Human Rights Day, at the initiative of President Lennart Meri, presents itself as Estonia’s first independent body devoted systematically to human rights, through information, public education, research and proposals on how those rights should be protected. The International Pan-European Union, adhering to the programme Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi first set out in 1922, is a supranational movement for a Europe united in freedom, justice and peace; its 1995 Strasbourg declaration affirmed peoples’ self-determination after communist rule ended in the east of the continent.

On 5 and 6 September 1990, delegations of nations and peoples not then represented as such at the United Nations met in Tartu. They agreed to found a non-aligned organisation that would offer them a forum and practical help, and that would pursue its aims by non-violent and democratic means. The meeting elected a preparatory committee with Mäll as chairman and Tarto as vice-chairman; both signed the memorandum for the Council of Estonia, with Kalju Oja. Michael van Walt was chosen executive director to convene a founding assembly in February 1991. The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization was formally established that February at the Peace Palace in The Hague by representatives of fifteen movements, Estonia among them, as a forum for peoples without a seat at the United Nations.

Honours

Estonian state and civic decorations

The Office of the President’s decorations register records that the Order of the National Coat of Arms (Riigivapi teenetemärk), 2nd class, was conferred on Tarto by decision no. 682 of 16 February 1996 and presented on 23 February 1996, for his work as a freedom fighter. Lennart Meri was president from 1992 to 2001. In 2003 he received the 1st class of the White Cross of the Estonian Defence League (Kaitseliidu Valgerist).

On 10 February 2011 the Tartu City Council, by decision no. 161, granted honorary citizenship and the accompanying Tartu Grand Star (Tartu Suurtäht) to Tarto and to Marika Mikelsaar; the decision took effect on 14 February 2011. The city records that he was chosen among the hundred great Estonians of the twentieth century, a 1999 public poll by Eesti Entsüklopeediakirjastus, Eesti Päevaleht, the National Library of Estonia, Kuku Radio and TV3, published in 2002 as Sajandi sada Eesti suurkuju (compiled by Tiit Kändler).

Foreign orders and the declined White Star

Those accounts also list the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, without a date, and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Cross of Vytis of Lithuania. Decree no. 2007 of President Valdas Adamkus, of 8 January 2003, awarded the Lithuanian cross to Tarto and other signatories of the 1979 memorandum of 45 Balts, on the twentieth anniversary of a resolution of the European Parliament on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. On 17 October 2014, at the Baltic Defence College in Tartu, Polish ambassador Robert Filipczak presented the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in the name of the Polish president, as recognition of services to democratic change in Eastern Europe.

In February 2006 President Arnold Rüütel awarded the Order of the White Star (Valgetähe teenetemärk), 2nd class. The register records decision no. 977 of 6 February 2006, describing Tarto as a restorer and promoter of the Republic of Estonia, and gives 19 September 2008 as the date the decoration was handed over. Tarto told Eesti Päevaleht that he would not attend the 23 February 2006 ceremony. He said he would not accept a high state honour beside people who had repressed him, or beside persons he called desecrators of the Estonian flag, while twenty-five Estonians punished in the Soviet period for possessing or displaying the national flag were treated as criminals. With Riigikogu member Eiki Nestor he had sponsored a rehabilitation bill, which he said the governing coalition voted down; he would collect the decoration if those convictions were annulled.

On 20 August 2019, at Kadriorg Palace, President Kersti Kaljulaid and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda presented stones cut from the boulder used to defend Toompea in 1991, at a reception for the 28th anniversary of restored independence. Tarto, one of the four Estonian signatories of the Baltic Appeal, received the stone for the signatories; Rein Veidemann received one for the organisers of the Baltic Way.

Writings, public memory and death

Publications and the documentary

In 2009 the Tallinn publisher Grenader issued Kõikumatus usus ja vankumatus tahtes. Kirjutisi ja sõnavõtte 1989–2008, an illustrated hardcover of Tarto’s speeches and articles. Booksellers list it at 354 pages (ISBN 978-9949-448-31-9); copies were sold with a DVD of the documentary Üksinda ja koos. The title repeats the opening of the preamble to the Constitution of Estonia: “Kõikumatus usus ja vankumatus tahtes kindlustada ja arendada riiki”. Academician Uno Mereste’s foreword calls the book a record of a struggle that changed form under Soviet rule and then continued as the work of securing independence. A statement by Tarto printed with it says that he had decided to go on fighting for Estonia, and that strengthening its freedom was still unfinished.

The journal Tuna had published his article “Vastupanu ja represseeritute olukord 1955–1985” (2006, no. 3). There he described himself as a political prisoner of the Soviet Union in 1956–1960, 1962–1967 and 1983–1988, wrote that Amnesty International had recognized him as a prisoner of conscience, and recalled that on 12 March 1956 pupils of Tartu’s 3rd Secondary School, himself among them, founded the Estonian Youth Brigade.

The Estonian Film Database lists Üksinda ja koos (Alone and Together, 2002) as a 56-minute portrait documentary directed, filmed and co-produced by Andres Sööt. Its summary says the film opens at Patarei Prison and alternates his account—leaflets for the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Youth Brigade and the 1979 Baltic Appeal—with newsreel through the Singing Revolution and his return in 1988. In 2008 the Swedish agency Forum för levande historia released a three-minute film by Jonas Öhman, noting three camp sentences between 1956 and 1988 and Tarto’s place among 45 Baltic signatories of the Appeal. In 2017 Elmar Gams interviewed him for Kogu Me Lugu, an oral-history project of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, covering childhood, the family’s escape from the June 1941 deportation, the arrests of 1956, 1962 and 1983, and release in October 1988.

Death, funeral and later assessments

Tarto died on Sunday, 18 July 2021, aged 82, at his home in the Tähtvere district of Tartu.

The funeral was on Friday, 23 July, at Tartu St Peter’s Church (Peetri kirik). The coffin was open from 11:00, the service began at noon, and about 250 people attended. His widow, Piret Tarto, and their children sat in front, with Defence League commander Riho Ühtegi, mayor Urmas Klaas and Riigikogu speaker Jüri Ratas among the others. Ühtegi and Klaas gave the eulogies; Lagle Parek, for fellow freedom fighters, said the greatest thanks for Tarto had been the chance to build the Republic of Estonia. Burial was at Raadi cemetery, with a gun salute.

Ühtegi, for the Estonian Defence League, recalled Tarto’s support for the League from 1990, ten years chairing its council of elders, and his election as an honorary member. Klaas said there was comfort in his having died at home, beside his wife, in a free Estonia. The Riigikogu support group for freedom fighters and the repressed remembered his persistence from the 1950s, his work on national defence and his leadership of Tartu Memento. Its chairman, Anti Poolamets, said Tarto belonged to a generation that did not let the struggle lapse after the forest brothers were suppressed.

On 30 November 2021 the congregation unveiled a stone plaque on the church’s north wall, consecrated by pastor Ants Tooming and inscribed as a life given to Estonian freedom and to his own people. Piret Tarto said he had told her he went to prison three times out of love for the Estonian people. On the June deportation anniversary in 2022 a bench in his name was opened at Tartu’s cornflower memorial; Piret Tarto, their son, Tartu Memento’s Virve Tuubel and Klaas uncovered its plate. On 28 June 2023 the city opened a bench on Toomemägi for the Youth Brigade and named the eight student founders, Tarto among them; the notice credits the idea to Piret Tarto.