Eyes on Estonia

President Barack Obama on Sept. 3 journeyed to Estonia, a New Jersey–sized nation with 1.3 million persons, and gave a speech, as is his custom. Estonians were wondering how much they should fear their 400-times-larger-by-area neighbor, Russia, home to 144 million humans including one inhumane dictator, Vladimir Putin. Obama said don’t worry: “We’ll be here for Estonia. … You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you’ll never lose it again.”

Estonians are very, very worried. Two days after Obama’s speech, Russian forces crossed into Estonia to kidnap Eston Kohver, an Estonian security officer who was investigating a smuggling ring with top-level Russian connections. On Sept. 12 nine European countries demanded Kohver’s release, to no avail. The Moscow Times reported that “Obama’s promises inevitably now sound hollow.”

I visited Estonia two years ago and saw there a booming high-tech sector that has helped Estonia to have the highest gross domestic product of any of the 15 republics that made up the former Soviet Union. (The Estonian innovation best-known in the United States: Skype.) The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations all give Estonia high ratings as an advanced, high-income country with high life expectancy, literacy, education, and freedom.

In short, Estonia is everything Russia is not, and Vladimir Putin evidently yearns not to emulate it (and so promote progress in his own country) but to steal its golden eggs and probably kill the goose in the process. If he follows his Ukrainian game plan, we can expect agitation in the eastern sections of Estonia that border on Russia: one-fourth of Estonians are ethnically Russian. Over the past quarter-century Russia’s birth rate has declined and so has its life expectancy, so Putin faces a now-or-never situation: Russia will become weaker unless freedom and hope return, or unless it grabs the vineyards and fig trees of others.

Urmas Jarve, a high-tech exec who guided me around his country in 2012, is skeptical about the Obama pledge of support: “If there really is a conflict, then what is the motivation of U.S. … military men (and political administration), to come to die at Narva [Estonia’s third-largest city] for a small country against an opponent that would have nuclear capabilities? To put their own citizens at risk.”

Jarve continued, “Russia is a very dangerous country. … Oil and gas gives Russia the means for it to be a very aggressive state. … Russia has rampant radical nationalism and an economy that is very much controlled by the government. Distrust of almost all other countries (except the almost-puppet governments that it controls) and nationalities. Desire for the return of glory days of empire. That is a dangerous recipe.”

Of course, Estonia has its own dangerous recipe: In one Gallup poll, only 14 percent of Estonians said religion is important in their lives, and the EUobserver declared Estonians the “least religious in the world.” To whom will they pray if the Russians come back and reuse Patarei prison, the former KGB detention center that is the spookiest place I’ve ever visited?

When the prison closed a quarter century ago, guards took off, leaving behind medical and torture equipment, wall posters and graffiti, utensils and bedding. All that debris is still there, in dark cells complete with creaky doors and winds whistling through window slits on the shore of the Gulf of Finland—a version of past hells, a warning about future ones?