The singular world of the cold war meant that one half of Europe was dining out expensively, while the other half was standing in queues for meat pasties. Ahead of the game, Tallinn instituted a number of self-financing co-operatives ranging from a public lavatory (where you could relieve yourself for 20 kopeks) to a pie-shop selling cheburechnaya Tatar meat pasties. In the last days of the cold war, the Russian leader made much of the “Estonian model”, by which individuals were allowed to make profits at work but without surrendering (too much) to capitalist enterprise. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the matchbox-sized Minox camera had been invented in Tallinn (by one Walter Zapp, in 1936): it was a favourite with cold war spies.Īs Odd Arne Westad relates in The Cold War: A World History, Estonia was a display case for Mikhail Gorbachev’s long-held plan to transform the monolithic face of communism and east-west tensions. KGB officers (it is now known) had a room up there where they monitored Helsinki radio waves and the hotel’s 60-odd bugged rooms. Guests were forbidden to visit the 21st floor, which officially did not exist. The television in my hotel room was detuned from Finnish to Soviet channels but I was able to pick up Dallas or Miami Vice from across the Gulf of Finland. The Estonian capital of Tallinn typically teemed with Russian money-changers (“Comrade, we do deal?”) and prostitutes from Uzbekistan and other parts of Islamic central Asia. W ith its shadowy John le Carré atmosphere, communist eastern Europe was a melancholy place in the late 1980s.
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