Tag #116555 - Interview #78564 (Perle Liya Epshteyn )

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 I took it as conformity. In the West, the Soviet Union was called empire of wickedness and I agree with this definition. It seems to me that the process of the breakup of such a huge empire into independent countries could have been made in a gentler and less painful way to people. But it happened in such a way that all those processes impacted lives of many people and broke many people’s lives.

At any rate, things could have been less rough in such a small country as Estonia. It seems to me our government made a mistake in the first years of independence. When they came to power, the non-Estonian population in Estonia was more than a third, made up of those who came from the USSR. Many people settled in Estonia after war and many people came here in the 1980s in connection with the construction of the Olympic center in Tallinn. Most of those people did not even know that prior to 1940 Estonia was an independent state. In the euphoria of independence, people forgot about that mass of people. They were called occupants, immigrants and demanded that they should learn the state language –Estonian, or leave the country. I think our present problems stem from that approach.