This Art Nouveau building was completed in 1912 as a residential house when Estonia was part of the Russian Empire under the last Czar, Nicholas II. After Estonia declared independence in 1918 the Provisional Government met here to direct the War of Independence. Later, in the 1920s and 30s, it was the Ministry of War. Interesting that the Trump has revived that name. Here we should have the National Sickness Service.. Then events took a dark turn.
For almost fifty years it was the headquarters of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR, or NKVD, later known as the KGB and the basements were used as prison cells where they tried to break the spiritual backbone of Estonia. Locked Up Stories; The KGB in Estonia tells about some of the crimes committed in this building. The exhibition tells the stories of political prisoners held at 1 Pangari Street: memories of days and months in claustrophobic, badly ventilated cells and nightly interrogations, solitary confinement; how these political prisoners survived and kept the will to live.
Yesterday afternoon I stepped off the street into this maze of basement cells – not the jolliest way to spend a Sunday afternoon – a grim reminder of Soviet repression.
“The crimes against humanity committed in Estonia are part of European history that must remain history.” Lennart Meri. He knew what he was talking about.
Lennart Meri, born 1929, was an Estonian writer, film director, and statesman. He was the country’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1992 and President of Estonia from 1992 to 2001. With his family he left Estonia at an early age and studied abroad, in nine different schools and in four different languages. In addition to his native Estonian, he spoke five other languages: Finnish, French, German, English, and Russian. The family were back in Tallinn by 1940 when the Soviet Union invaded.
The following year the family was deported to Siberia along with thousands of other Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Heads of the family were separated from their families and shut into concentration camps where only a few survived. At the age of twelve, Lennart Meri worked as a lumberman in Siberia. He also worked as a potato peeler and a rafter to support his family. Against the odds the family somehow survived and got back to Estonia.
On March 5th 1953, the day of Joseph Stalin’s death, he proposed to his first wife Regina Meri, saying “Let us remember this happy day forever.”