To me, you are an exciting phenomenon in Estonian cultural history. Although Estonians perceive their culture as very nation-centred, you are one of the few immigrants of modern times who has managed to blend into the inner cultural circle. Your case makes it possible to re-interpret a certain segment of history and, with a bit of exaggeration, to regard it as an example of a functioning multi-cultural society.

You belong to the first wave of immigrants arriving in Estonia after WW II.

You say I belong to the first wave of post-war immigration, meaning immigration from Soviet Russia to Estonia – similarly to Juri Lotman, Zara Mints, Mikhail Bronstein, and Leonid Stolovich [Lotman and Mints were semioticians, Bronstein is economist and Stolovich is art philosopher – Ed], yes? I would like to offer two answers.
No, I do not belong.
Yes, I do.
Both answers are correct.
Everything lies in words: when does the present flowing moment suddenly become the past? After all, history only deals with preserving the texts of historians, journalists, politicians, demagogues and ideologues. In the interest of the Party, ideological aberrations and mythologisations open up endless possibilities. What has been said in the texts and how it has been expressed are the essential questions. Therefore I must – albeit in a few words – pay attention to the context.
I do not belong to the post-war immigration, as nobody can immigrate from one place to another within the same country. The usual description of the recent Estonian past is that Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union for over half a century. To me, this is only a partial description of the situation. Estonia was indeed conquered with brutal force in 1940 and for a second time in 1944. This was occupation, followed by cruel repression. However, after that and due to that, Estonia was integrated into the Soviet system and, together with other parts of the Soviet empire, it shared the political system, economic principles and practices, educational and science system to a certain extent the cultural institutional structure and content, and what’s most difficult, even some mundane behavioural stereotypes. Unlike, say, Alexander’s precarious empire or the powerful Roman empire or even the British empire, the extension of the Soviet area of influence was not a primitive, mechanical occupation and subsequent creation of a conglomerate under a joint ruler. Instead, it was a conquering and reshaping, followed by total unification, because it was not classical imperialism but a novel chimera – imperialism crossed with communist doctrine. The ultimate aim of realising the practical ideologeme ‘New human association – Soviet nation’ was total ethno-cultural entropy.
I graduated from the then Leningrad University in 1951, when state anti-Semitism, deriving from the highest level, was approaching its zenith. I was naturally not accepted into postgraduate courses at the university, and was persistently persecuted, although I was – this is not showing off but to explain matters – one of the best in our year and scored only the highest marks. In addition, I was sacked from the institution where I worked as a student, the city tours office.
I came to Tallinn without any sense of mission, simply hoping to find a suitable job. The same intentions could have taken me to Minsk, Yerevan or Ryazan. Tallinn was closer. I got a job at the Art Institute in Tallinn by pure chance. The person responsible was the then rector Friedrich Leht, who, as an old Bolshevikinternationalist, failed to grasp the new ideas of the ruling party in national politics, and hired a Jew by mistake.
As it turned out, however, I do in a sense belong to internal migration. This side of my biographical antinomy became clear slowly and gradually. It, naturally, requires no genius to understand that I decided to live and work, not just in another part of the Soviet Union, but in a country with its own language and culture, which I had to share. My personal experience of gradual blending into the Estonian cultural context, together with historical circumstances that allowed the contextual specifics to emerge are the main factors that help me to understand and perceive my move and my life in Estonia as a transition to another civilisation and special ethno-cultural tradition. At the same time, I never abandoned the Russian culture within which I grew up. However, participating in Estonian culture and in the Estonian viewpoint made me much more open, and gave me a chance to look at Russian culture, not only from the inside but also from a distance, from the outside. This resembles a kind of spiritual binocular view where two images do not quite merge, which makes it more interesting. Participating in the Estonian mentality naturally helped me to abandon my illusions and affections dating back to my days in the Young Communist League.