There are now 16 memorial sites from the Estonian capital online at sites-of-memory.de. The pictures were all taken on the same day in June of last year.

An interesting aspect of the whole collection of them taken together is the way in which the memorial landscape only partially reflects the change in the political landscape. The Lenin statues are gone. Following the memorial symbols on my tourist map, I found a few flower beds where once memorials stood. Passers-by were unable to tell me what used to be there. Other Soviet memorials survive: The Red Army memorial has been modified, but remains well maintained if very controversial. The lawn at the Maarjamae memorial complex is kept by the state, but the memorial itself is falling into complete disrepair. The memorial to trade union delegates killed by the "bourgeoisie" in 1919 is both well maintained and completely ignored. The Germans have re-established their presence by re-building the memorial to the Baltenregiment and keeping up a nice, newly rennovated military cemetery. There are several memorials to writers which survive from Soviet times as well as some new and newly-erected monuments to Estonian independence including the memorial to the fallen from the Landwehr and Russian wars of 1918-1920, pictured here. The most popular will probably be the memorial to the sunken ferry Estonia.

Tallinn itself gave me the impression of a tourist destination which was totally feeding off of its medieval German past. The young women selling postcards were dressed as medieval market women, there were men pulling ancient carts through the streets, countless shops selling folkloric handicrafts, there was a lot of use of the German-style ("gothic") writing in advertizing, and the whole medieval downtown had been renovated. This is presumably an identity that is visually exploitable and attractive without at the same time transporting any danger of political revisionism. The real German minority is long gone and essentially harmless while Russo-Soviet legacy remains both demographically real (albeit not so much as in Riga or Narva) and geopolitically threatening.

There are about 15 more Estonia memorials from the city of Tartu which have not gone online yet.

UPDATE: I would like to thank Andres Kasekamp for contributing background information on several of the memorials from Tallinn.