Estonia
From The Long Union, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
Estonia is a small independent nation on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, bordered by the Russian Sovereign Republic to the east and Latvia to the south, with a population of approximately 1.3 million. It departed from the Soviet Union in 1991 and has remained outside the Union of Soviet Sovereign States since the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords of 1992, following a distinct path toward NATO membership and European Union integration that has placed it at odds with Moscow and the broader Union for three decades.
The drive for Estonian independence accelerated in the months before the August Emergency in 1991. The Estonian Supreme Council had declared sovereignty in November 1990 and had begun asserting control over republican institutions. When the State Committee on the State of Emergency attempted to reverse Gorbachev's reforms in August 1991, Estonia saw the moment as a window to formalize independence. Although the coup attempt failed to restore Soviet discipline, the emergency succeeded in opening negotiations over the Union's structure. Estonia and the other two Baltic states refused to participate in those talks. On August 20, 1991, the Estonian Parliament declared full independence, nine days before the emergency ended. Unlike Latvia and Lithuania, which endured Soviet military operations and hostage crises as they departed, Estonia's transition was less violent, though still tense. The Estonian government began issuing its own currency and asserting control over the republic's borders within weeks of independence.
The borderline between Estonia and the Russian Sovereign Republic has remained contested and unresolved since 1991. Under Soviet law, Estonia's territorial boundaries had been fixed by administrative decree, but the pre-1940 borders—the legal baseline the Estonian government asserted—encompassed areas that the Russian Sovereign Republic claimed as part of its own territory. The Vienna Monitoring Office attempted mediation in 1992 and 1993, but neither side moved substantially. The Russians, under Boris Yeltsin, had other priorities; Estonia, strategically peripheral within Union concerns, remained in a state of formal disagreement. The Estonian government took control of the Narva region and other border territories in 1991 and has maintained that control, but Moscow has never formally ceded the disputed zones or recognized Estonia's 1940 borders. This frozen boundary has persisted into the present. A small Russian military garrison remained in the Narva region until 1994, when a withdrawal agreement was reached under international pressure, though Russian security concerns about NATO encroachment have kept the border tense since Estonia's accession to the alliance in 2004.
References
- 1.The Long Goodbye: Soviet successor states and the Union]], Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, 2001, archive series DK-1992–2001
- 2.Baltic Independence: Institutional Legacies and Western Integration]], Toomas Hendrik Ilves, 2003, Baltic Institute Press
- 3.Citizenship and Language Policy in Post-Soviet Estonia]], Statistics Bureau of Estonia, 1995 and 2005 surveys
- 4.Estonia and the Union: Three Decades of Non-Recognition]], Department of Foreign Relations, 2015, official monograph
- 5.Narva and the Border: Regional History of a Contested Frontier]], Aleksander Mänd and Ivo Raag, 1998, Tartu University Press