The Soviet memorial near down town Tallinn has been controversial for years. It was blocked from visitors do to unrest last year when I visited the site (see my photos here).

On the evening of the 28th of April several hundred Russian youth tried to storm the site, where the statue was being removed and the bodies of the Soviet soldiers buried beneath it exhumed. 200 people were arrested and one young man stabbed to death. The statue has since been re-erected at another cemetery at the edge of town. There have been demonstrations by the Russian youth group "Nashi" ("Ours") and Russian veterans in front of the Estonian embassy in Moscow. Partipants carried banners calling Estonia a "fascist" state, echoing the rhetoric of the Soviet period when the authoritarian regimes of the interwar Baltic were grouped together with Hitler's Germany. Russia has threatened Estonia with an economic boycott. Even local politicians, like the mayor of Moscow Yurii Luzhkov, have called on people to stop buying Estonian products. Even the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has spoken out against the removal of the statue.

According to reports in the German press, the issue is being driven in part by Estonian internal politics as well. The Centrist party under former government head Edgar Savisaar is apparently thought to have "dubious connnections" to Moscow and would be damaged by a trade war with Russia.

Today's anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War is likely to bring a renewal of the recent strife. At the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in 2005, Estonia refused to send a delegation to the ceremonies in Moscow. The Latvian president only attended to offer the Russians face-to-face a clear alternative interpretation of that year.

I don't usually like to recommend policy, but it seems to me that this would have been an opportunity for a counter-memorial. A railroad cattle car parked across the street, for example, would have left the gravesite untouched, but would have been a reminder of the mass deportations of Estonians after their "liberation." Such a project would probably only enflame the situation and lead to more violence, however.

In any case it is not the site as such that is contested in this particular case. The site is significant because it was occupied by the Soviet memorial. It bears no particular significance pre-dating the memorial. As such, it is perhaps reminiscent of of the Russian Orthodox cathedrals which were built in the 19th century in the city centers of Riga, Warsaw, Tallinn and other cities to "mark" Russian occupation. The Poles demolished their Russian Orthodox cathedral after regaining independence. The Soviet Union did not object to the destruction of churches. But the post-Soviet Russian state identifies much more strongly with the symbolic content of its "markers" in what are now foreign capitals.

Update: Ironically, there is a scandal afoot in Russia itself in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. To make way for a new shopping center, several World War Two-era graves were hastily removed, provoking some protest. It would appear that there is a level of real sentiment at one level, but that the issue is a matter of pure political manipulation and populism among Russia's political elites.

Links:
Spiegel.de: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,479809,00.html
The Wikipedia article is quite thorough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Soldier_of_Tallinn

The recent death of Hans Filbinger has sparked another controversy in Germany about the Nazi past. Hans Filbinger, born in 1913, was a judge in the legal service of the German navy during the war. He later went into politics and served from1966 to 1978 as the minister president (essentially governor) of Baden-Württemberg, one of West Germany's largest and most prosperous states, as a prominent member of the Christian Democrats, the conservative party. He was brought down in 1978 by two scandals. His role during the Nazi period had been in the public discussion since 1972. Then, in 1977, several members of the Red Army Faction imprisonsed in Stammheim died in their cells, in the hospital, or were injured. Then, in 1978, his role as a judge for the Nazi regime was revealed. He had had a hand in numerous death penalty cases, including the executions of deserters shortly before the war ended, as well as in disciplinary cases among prisoners of war after the end of hostilities. (Read an obituary in English at The Indepdendent).

His death has caused a stir at the national and local levels here in Germany. At his funeral, the current minister president of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger (also Christian Democrat) referred to him in his eulogy as an opponent of the Nazi regime, information he purportedly got from http://www.hans-filbinger.de/, Filbinger's official webpage. When the storm of protest broke out - including accusations from the Social Democrats that he was "fishing on the far right" and calls for his resignation by the Zentralrat der Juden, the main Jewish reprisentation in Germany, Oettinger stood by his claims and apologized only for having hurt anybody's feelings. Last night the news featured his total retraction of his statements in a forest of microphones. As the commentators noted, he has been politically damaged from the left by his statement and on the right by buckling to the media storm.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Heribert Prantl puts Oettinger's remarks in the context of the longstanding politiization of German postwar history. He follows German historians in dividing German memory of the Nazi period into four phases:

1) 1945-1949: denazification by the occupying powers
2) 1949-1963: denial, ignoring and making light of the past
3) 1963-1985: This phase is bounded by the Auschwitz trials of the 1960s and the famous speech by federal president Weizäcker on the 40th anniversary of the capitulation. It is a 20-year period of confronting the history of the Holocaust. One highpoint of this period, I might add, was the Shoah miniseries in the late 1970s.
4) Prantl calls phase 4 "maintaining the past" as being These kinds of falsifications of history have brought several politicians to their fall since the 1970s.

The whole scandal has revolved around the label "opponent" (Gegner) from Oettingers eulogy. It continued to simmer in the back pages of the newspaper for several weeks as letters to the editor and follow-ups about Filbinger and Oettinger continued to be published.