Camping with Koržets

“Hey, you got any vodka?” As soon as the man shouted at us he regretted it, because his wife elbowed him hard in the ribcage. “But I was just asking,” he muttered, massaging the pain under his arm.

We had just entered Estonia’s weekend party headquarters, the Lake Peipsi RMK-sponsored campground. It was only five p.m., but the party already raged.

“You can pitch your tent in any of the marked sites,” the friendly gate attendant had said, but there’d been so much music—techno, rap, a little heavy metal—coming from the forested area the other side of the makeshift barrier, that we told him we thought we’d have a look around first. “Sure,” he said. “Park your car. Look around.” And so we did.

In the parking area, as well as at other strategic places around the camping area, guests were greeted and cautioned by a photo of Vladislav Koržets in a half-bug-eyed pose of excitement, finger in the air to make his point. A speech bubble was supplied by RMK, something to the effect of “Only dipshits burn down forests. Use the fireplace provided.” There was no text about what kind of music best complements birdsong, and it was clear that we weren’t going to hear any wrens or sparrows or blackbirds or nightingales. What we were going to hear was DJ Dima and His Posse of Righteous Russian Dudes. Except that for all the partiers were Estonian.

“Weird,” said my buddy Juss, having opened a beer to get into the party spirit. “These idiots are all Estonian.” And so they were. Every campsite was filled to the brim with Estonians, some of them young rullnokkad, Estonian vernacular for primitives fond of cars, but others—like the middle-aged, vodka-begging husband—were older, professional partiers. But where were the Russians? Was the music so bad that even they’d been driven away? “Tiblad are too smart to pay fifty kroons each to camp with these tshuhna,” Juss said. “They’re probably at home where it’s safe.”

And it was looking like home was where we were headed. We left the RMK party center and scoured the shore of Peipsi for a quiet place to pitch a tent, but we were constantly confronted with signs reading PRIVATE PROPERTY or demands by landowners to pay 100 kroons per person to sleep next to a caravan full of Germans. My Estonian companions had nothing against Germans; rather, since they considered themselves true Estonians, they were categorically opposed to being remotely near any other human being. “Camping here would be like putting up a tent at the song festival grounds,” said Juss, shaking his head out of disgust that his Canadian friend could never grasp the Estonian need for solitude. To me, our party of four (including our occasionally chattering wives) had already ruined any opportunities for solitude, so what were a few Germans in a caravan? Anytime we found a possible camping place, if there was even a single sign of other life, Juss would dismiss it as “another damned song festival.” Although it was a warm, late-summer weekend, and though we were near one of the most heavily trafficked parts of Estonia, Juss was still convinced we would find a solitary and absolutely free campsite with no neighbors inside a 500-meter radius.

As we searched for this paradise, we became hungry. We stopped at a fish stand to buy smoked bream. A friendly local Russian—a Russian, at last!—sold smoked bream, flounder, and salmon.

“Salmon!” Juss erupted, “there aren’t salmon in Peipsi.” Juss took me aside to point out that this kiosk’s SMOKED FISH sign was suspiciously similar to all the others we had seen on the road. Juss believed we were about to be the victims of a McDonald’s-like scam to sell us fish caught elsewhere. “You know that the bream they sell in Selver comes from America?” Juss tried to whisper but was so wound up he shouted. “Lake Michigan! They catch the damned things in Lake Michigan and ship them over here!” Juss paced back and forth like Hercule Poirot solving a case, and then he stopped and struck a pose resembling Koržets, his finger held declaratively in the air. “This is American bream and Norwegian salmon!” he declared. “How dumb do they think we are?”

“I’m hungry,” cried Juss’s wife, Ivi, from the car. “Are you two going to buy anything or not?”

“These aren’t Peipsi fish,” Juss shouted to her. “They’re selling salmon!”

“Well,” Ivi said, “buy some onions then. But get something.” And so Juss returned to the kiosk and ordered a bream.

“My father caught this fish,” the girl said in very good Estonian. “And he’s never been to Lake Michigan.”

“What about this salmon?” Juss demanded.

“Well, salmon do swim up the Narva River, but this one came from Selver. What can I say?” she shrugged. “Some people want to buy them.”

“Maybe they’d buy shark, too.” Juss wouldn’t leave it alone.

“Maybe,” the girl shot back. “Do you know where I can get some?”

“I can’t even find a camping place on hundreds of kilometers of Peipsi shoreline,” he confessed. “Do you think I could find a shark?”

The girl laughed and directed us five kilometers north where she said there was an RMK campsite.

“Oh, we’ve seen that one,” Juss dismissed her.

“No you haven’t,” she insisted. “This one is where normal people go.”

And so we decided to give it a chance. It was only five kilometers to find out what this girl’s definition of normal was. Would there be campers swinging from the trees and smashing empty vodka bottles against each other’s heads? Or would the campers be a young tribe, out to break a Guinness record for loudest outdoor disco?

There, greeting us at the gateway to the park was Vladislav Koržets. “Haven’t we been here before?” Ivi asked.

“This is where normal people come,” Juss said. “But it does seem like déjà vu.” He killed the car’s engine and we sat for several minutes, listening suspiciously.

“Sounds okay,” said Ivi.

“Maybe they just went to get more alcohol,” my wife Liina suggested.

There were three other cars in the parking lot, but there was no gate attendant, not even a barrier. Only a grinning Koržets cautioning us not to burn the place down.

We unloaded our gear slowly, sure that any minute we’d be driven back to our car by gang of Lasnamäe youth wearing leather and gold and throwing lit sticks of dynamite in their wake. But things remained quiet. We passed a campsite occupied by a young family who was listening to soft classical music, a small Russian flag flew from a guy-line on their tent. They smiled and nodded. Another young couple with an infant waved and said zdrastvuitye.

We found a spot nearest the lake and pitched our tents. We made dinner (Norwegian salmon we’d brought from Tallinn) and settled in for the night, bracing for the inevitable party.

Around eleven p.m., when I was half asleep, Liina was met at our tent door by a young Russian. “Do you have any firewood?” he asked in Estonian slightly better than mine. “We forgot firewood. I’d be happy to pay for it.” Liina told him we’d burned what little we had and that she was sorry she couldn’t help. “Are you all alone?” he asked. “Because you could join us around the campfire if you want.”

Liina thanked him and told him she was with her boring husband, who grunted inside the tent in protest to the characterization. The young man laughed and said I was welcome, too.

This was all too civilized, and I wondered how Juss was feeling about it. This was relatively private camping, free of caravans and Germans. And it was almost completely silent: our Russian campers were making less noise than even Koržets.

“Hey, Juss!” I shouted. “Got any vodka?”

Juss told me to shut up. Normal people were trying to sleep.

***
Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

***
Vello in English from Amazon.com, Abebooks.com and Alibris.com. Purchase it here:


Inherit the Family: Marrying into Eastern Europe
by Vello Vikerkaar

Skinheads?

It's easy to spot an American in the crowd (white shoes and bluejeans). French and Spanish, too (fine fabrics in muted tones, those Burberry quilted jackets). Estonia has something close to a national look, if you count haircuts. I captured these two on a Tallinn-bound ferry.

Fresh Promises

The Centre Party is promising a new stoplight in Pirita. The Reform Party is offering “fresh energy” and they say they’ll make Haapsalu the Venice of the North. All those things are nice, but what I’d really like is for the national library to be open more than seven hours a day. After all, if it is, as its website claims, the “custodian of our national memory and heritage, the centre of Estonian literature...” and “the most valuable information provider for our legislative body and other constitutional institutions,” then can all that really be accomplished in a mere seven hours? If there are other research libraries in the world open so few hours a day, I’m not aware of them. Washington DC’s Library of Congress is open thirteen hours a day. The British Library is open at least ten. Even la Bibliothèque nationale de France is open nine to five. But the Estonian National Library opens later and closes earlier than even a Paris clothing boutique.

The national library may not be as popular as a stoplight in Pirita, but it’s at least as useful. If you arrive for the library’s opening at eleven, the music is inspiring. I’m no expert on music, but I can testify that the Rahvusraamatukogu Theme Song fills the building with hope and promise, as if every day might be witness to some young researcher emerging from deep in the stacks screaming “Eureka!”

Simply entering the library is a pleasure. The security guards are truly polite gentlemen. They have a memory for faces and offer a friendly welcome that makes me feel as if the national library were my very own office building, which, as a taxpayer, I suppose it is. These men are a reassuring presence in a building with hundreds of thousands of books, knowledge and tradition. From their shined shoes to their neatly combed hair, it’s clear that they, like everyone else in the building, value what they protect.

Architecturally speaking, the national library is one of the few Soviet-era buildings I’ve seen that the rain hasn’t almost completely washed away. It’s like the Linnahall, except for that the builders were sober the day they mixed the concrete.

I am not alone in my appreciation. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t spot an Estonian intellectual somewhere in the library complex. I’ve seen Andrus Kivirähk at least a half dozen times, and Andrei Hvostov is a regular in the library cafeteria (he orders porridge). I’ve also spotted Hardi Volmer, and I have one unconfirmed sighting of Jaan Kaplinski.

Perhaps these people, like me, come for the hope and optimism. Even on the darkest winter day, light can be found in the building. The view from the eighth floor (and the natural light on the reading tables) rivals anything you’ll find in the city’s expensive glass office towers with their Stockholm-level rents.

It’s said one benefit of modern Estonian office life is stylish coworkers, and if that’s why you like the office then the library won’t disappoint: there are babes aplenty in the sixth-floor law reading room. I’m not sure what this says about Estonia. In my country, female lawyers are to be strictly avoided. But the law reading room has advantages which attract everyone: It’s the one place in the library you can get up to take a phone call and still keep an eye on your laptop through the glass wall.

Not all is wonderful at the library, of course.

The café is a bit overpriced: Almost twenty kroons for what is possibly Northern Europe’s worst espresso in a venue that hasn’t been remodeled since Lenin’s day. And the café’s oldest employee (born in 1870, as was Lenin) has a habit of glaring at you if she thinks you haven’t returned with sufficient speed the newspapers you borrowed from the café’s counter. “That’s my private copy,” I’ve learned to tell her, which is sometimes true, but always sends her packing with a suspicious sniff.

The café is wonderful, however, as a place to watch conference participants decamp to the cafeteria. They’re often formally dressed and walk with a spring in their step, fresh energy (the real kind) from having learned something new, or at least from having cheated the bossman out of a day’s labor. And the coffee-klatching pensioners are priceless, tables full of chattering septuagenarians dressed to the nines.

What I most like about the national library is that it’s the haunt of normal people, and island of humanity in a city that sometimes seems inhuman. Tallinn, to me, suffers from an identity crisis, and the national library is one place you can count on for “normaalne.” It is one of the few places in the city you will never encounter a black luxury sedan parked on the sidewalk blocking the door.

But while it’s normaalne, it’s perhaps too normaalne for politicians, and therefore unlikely to become an object of anyone’s campaign. Although I’ve seen writers and composers and other cultural figures there, I have only once seen a politician: Jaak Aaviksoo (in the lobby) inspecting the poster for an exhibition of war photographs from the Middle East.

It might be unfair to conclude we don’t see politicians there because a library is the seat of learning and politicians are a breed who believe they already possess the answers. Perhaps there’s simply free coffee on Toompea? Or could it be politicians find nothing sexy about the library? But just because the librarians haven’t yet posed in Playboy (with reading glasses on the tip of the nose à la Rein Lang), it doesn’t mean that the library isn’t sexy. You’ve just got to spend some time in it to understand.

The coming elections are the first I’m allowed to vote in—I’ve finally fulfilled my five-year residency requirement—and to win my vote it’s going to take more than a new stoplight in Pirita or a cleaned-up Ninja on a poster with Tiit Terik. But “fresh energy” isn’t going to do it either, whatever that slogan is supposed to mean. How about a fresh new hour or two at the national library?

***
Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Baltish is Back...

...by popular demand.


Save the Whale. Save the Nature.
What's frustrating to me as a native English speaker (who's perhaps lived abroad too long) is that I know this is wrong, but I start to try to convince myself it might be right. It's said the one truly international language is Bad English. If that's the case, I more and more feel I'm approaching fluency.


Of course given the context, most of us can figure out why we should push the button (the sign's above a toilet), but there's still something that irks me about this. Say you're from a country where both violence rules and flush toilets are illegal (like Iran or Belarus), would you then think this is a nuclear button? In all cases, we could do with a better sign.

Childproof

When I was a child what I wanted most in life was a pet monkey. My mother said no, not because it was probably illegal or because we already had three dogs and two cats, but because “monkeys swing on the drapes,” she said, “and I’m not about to have one destroy my house.” At the time, I really didn’t understand, but mom did most of the housework and was hostess and homeowner, so I respected her wishes and so did not independently purchase a pet monkey. Not that I would have known where to buy one.

Just last week my American friend Patricia showed up for a visit with her two children, and before I knew it the eldest had used a ballpoint pen to add to Liina’s favorite Paul Allik painting. The second child, a bit younger and therefore lighter, had actually climbed the drapes halfway up the wall. I spotted him just before the curtain rod gave way and he tumbled a meter to the floor bawling. In that split second before he hit ground, I thought back to my childhood desire for a monkey and empathized with my mother.

“Oh, geez,” said Patricia, grabbing her screeching child and pulling him to her breast. “You should really childproof your house.”

Why? I wanted to ask but didn’t, since I was engaged trying to imagine what items I could leave in the house that could not be destroyed by her simian primates. I couldn’t think of a single one. Childproofing would literally require the house to be gutted, removing drapes, paintings, books, hiding our toothbrushes. I tried to imagine what Patricia’s home looked like. Perhaps it was nothing more than a padded-wall cell. Maybe the adults had surrendered and moved out.

Seeing her drapes destroyed, Liina clearly wanted to take my 12-gauge off the wall and blast Patricia’s kids in the ass with a load of rock salt. Liina was aghast at the implication that we should childproof our home, as if Patricia had no obligation whatsoever to restrain her children. “This is what you get with kids” was what Patricia’s resigned face communicated. Liina’s face resembled that of a passenger on a jet airliner just before it crashes into the ocean at over a six hundred miles an hour.

As I’ve been led to believe, many parents today don’t punish their children by physically striking them. This may be a good idea, even though my parents certainly trotted out the hickory switch in instances of Major Child Crimes. Today, American parents punish their children with something called a “time out,” which means the kids are supposed to sit still in a corner until they’ve calmed down. But why can’t the kids be calm all the time? Or at least when they’re at my house?

Sure, within reason, my mom allowed us to run wild in the Vikerkaar household, but we were strictly forbidden from doing it in someone else’s home. And when there were adult guests present at our house, my brother Villu and I were required to follow simple rules about interacting with them: Don’t interrupt a conversation; Say “yes sir” and “no sir,” or “ma’am” as the case may be; All intelligent questions are welcome, even encouraged, but no gaga babytalk was allowed under any circumstances. Villu and I ate at the same table with the adults, used knives and forks with our elbows held in, and we chewed with our mouths firmly closed. And we, never, ever, climbed on the drapes. Destruction of the home was beyond consideration.

I’d like to think Patricia’s case is an isolated example of child mismanagement, but it hasn’t proved to be.

Not so long ago, I loaned a friend a signed copy of Raise High the Roof Beam by J.D. Salinger. (The reclusive writer had visited Tallinn, had drinks at our house, and so I asked him to sign his book.) It was the only copy I had, and my friend wanted to read it. It was a first edition, and I suppose that fact, combined with the signature makes it worth good money on eBay, though I’ve never cared too much about that when it comes to books. Until, that is, my friend emailed to ask: “Do you want it back in good condition?” I replied to ask if she was using it for archery practice. “No, but it’s hard to keep it away from my toddler.” Just how is that? I wondered. The toddler is exactly how tall? And a signed first-edition cannot be put out of a child’s reach? Particularly a borrowed, signed first-edition?

Yes, I rant to Liina, the world has indeed gone to hell. The modern “vaba kasvatus” has backfired, and the peasants are in full revolt. There’s only one way to quash it, and that’s with blood on the square. Liina agrees with me, though she says she’d stop short of guillotining children.

“Oh, but you’ll both feel differently when you have kids,” people tell us. But, no, we won’t. I can guarantee you that my child will never swing from your curtains like a rhesus macaque. He will not add his signature to artwork in your home. He will not mine boogers from his little nose and deposit them in your salad. And should he, by some wild chance, say, drag a dead, bloody deer across your new white carpet, then I will return to clean it spotless, dear host, after I take him outside and spank the living daylights out of him. Our kids will behave because it’s the right thing to do. And because we don’t believe behaving well is too much to ask of a human being, regardless of his age.

After we cleaned up the collapsed curtains and the potted plants the child destroyed on the way down, Liina took Patricia’s child in her arms. She told him that accidents happen to everyone and that she wasn’t angry. “Would you like me to read you a story?” Liina asked the child. “Oh, yes,” cooed the little one. “A story!”

Liina reached behind her and took a book off the shelf. She opened the cover and read Jonathan Swift’s first sentence: “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country...” And onward she read to what turned out to be a very attentive little person.

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.

Me and My M

Back in the 1990s, I did a favor that enabled an Estonian businessman to earn some money. The man had heard me muse about crossing America by motorcycle, and as a gesture of thanks, he offered to ship my bike—a Russian M—to any place I named. I chose Kansas, because that’s where my Uncle Feliks lived, and because I knew how big America was: half of it was plenty for me. I would ride West to California and, as Hunter S. Thompson had done, “smoke weed in biker bars,” “feel burning oil on my legs” and ride with the “rain in my eyes and my jaw clamped together in fear.”

But anyone who has ridden an M knows that you don’t ride it: you wrestle it. And so I spent much of the time behind the handlebars speculating about what the “M” in the bike’s name might stand for. It certainly didn’t mean Mõnus, though there was a decent chance it was Mure. If the “M” had been English, it would have stood for Mess or Mistake. But since it was a Russian bike, in all its foul-smelling, cloud-farting splendor, I searched my primitive Russian vocabulary. I assigned the “M” to Mучитель, or, since it was almost always broken, Mертвый.

What I had imagined as a romantic ride, cresting flowered hilltops, breathing purer oxygen, a busty blonde hitchhiker next to me in the mother-in-law killer, bore no relation to reality. Most days, I stood around in service stations in one-horse towns while American mechanics and their greasemonkey friends circled the M and peered into its workings. “How could we have been afraid of a nation that built this motorcycle?” scoffed a twenty-something mechanic near Russell, Kansas. “You ought to junk this thing and get a Jap bike.”

“Actually,” said a know-it-all sitting on a stack of old tires tipping back a frosty Coca-Cola, “that’s a German bike. The russkies got ‘em from the krauts as war reparations. Disassembled the factories, put ‘em on railcars, and took ‘em to Russia.”

“Maybe so,” replied the mechanic, “but it’s still a piece of shit.”

But it was my piece of shit, and I liked it. And the advantage of it was that it was primitively simple. Even though I couldn’t fix it, most any farm boy could, and when a part fell off you could always find some local MacGyver who could fashion a new one out of something he found in his yard with grass growing up around it. I replaced so much of it that by two weeks into my journey, you could have said the bike wasn’t Russian anymore. Sure, I still had to wrestle it, but it ran.

I crossed the plains of Kansas, stopping to visit all the state's superlatives: the world's tallest prairie dog, the world's largest hand-dug well, the world's biggest ball of twine, the world's biggest easel, and the world's biggest pallasite meteorite. All these places hoped to snare a passing motorist with a car full of bored kids. But my M trumped them all. I was a superstar. “Look, it’s the Red Baron!” little kids would cry, even though the bike was black and didn’t fly. Since I wasn’t hairy, had no beard or visible prison tats, tourists did not fear me. They offered me cold beers to allow them to sit in the sidecar and have their pictures made.

More than two-thousand miles later, when I finally gazed at the ocean, I didn’t feel the elation Thompson had described. I was dog tired. My body was caked with dirt. The ocean of northern California was far too cold to swim in. I forgot Thompson and thought of Kerouac whose goal was to piss into the Seine at dawn. The Pacific wasn’t the Seine but the sentiment felt right. After zipping up my trousers I turned and walked away, leaving my M on the side of the road. Thieves and buzzards would be too smart to touch it, but a rider with a soul like mine might happen by. And it would surely call his name.

***

Read it in Estonian in Eesti Ekspress.

The Estonian Rovaniemi

Forget the Estonian Nokia. What we ought to be searching for is the Estonian Rovaniemi. I bow deeply to any town in the world which can convince tourists to visit by advertising cold and darkness.

I first heard about Rovaniemi in 1992. A Canadian family living in Tartu decided to spend their Christmas there, and so they drove northward to show their eight-year-old child, Charlie, the home of Santa Claus. Upon their return, they invited me over for dinner and for what has long been prohibited by the United Nations Convention Against Torture: the amateur vacation video.

For the two-hour duration of the footage, the screen remained pitch black except for the occasional trace of a street lamp or car lights. Sledding on Santa’s mountain? Pitch black. Walking through downtown Rovaniemi? Pitch black. Visiting Santa’s village and little Charlie taking a seat on the Big Man’s lap? Pitch black.

While I went for frequent refills from the wine bottle in the kitchen, they remained glued to the screen. “Remember that, honey?” the wife shrieked. “Oh, yes, dear,” the husband echoed. “That’s Charlie coming down the mountain now!”

I was baffled. Had this family been drugged by the Finns? There was nothing interesting at all about Rovaniemi—or their video—but they were as hooked as heroin addicts.

Even now, having finally visited Rovaniemi myself, I don’t understand the phenomenon. But I do understand that, if only for the sake of our economy, Estonia should have one, too. We’ve got dark. We’ve got cold and wet. What’s stopping us from having our very own Rovaniemi?

My first thought was that we should simply steal the town. Estonia could hire a public relations firm to circulate the rumor that Santa has decided to relocate to Valga or Otepää. After some thought I realized this would be too easily exposed as Eastern European treachery. Better to kidnap the man, blame it on the Latvians, and arrange it so Santa is liberated by Estonians somewhere near Otepää. Having seen both towns, I’m willing to bet that, all other things equal, Santa will by far prefer Otepää over Rovaniemi. If not, we could line Santa’s pockets with unspent EU developmental funds to ensure he sticks around. Then it’s only a matter of buying some reindeer and letting them roam the streets as thick as rats in an Old Town sewer. Our own little Santa Claus village would be complete.

But my conscience got to bothering me. What I like to think separates Estonia from Eastern Europe is its dignity. Estonians walk taller, talk straighter, and, in my estimation, live in a higher orbit than the rest of the region. Estonia doesn’t need a dirty trick. We don’t need to scare the crap out of the world’s children by kidnapping Santa. Forget the kids: let’s scare the crap out of the adults.

He may not recall it, but some years ago Mart Laar, while taking part in a panel discussion hosted by a now-defunct English-language magazine, came up with the idea that Estonia should have its very own Soviet Horror Park. Laar has always been a man ahead of his time in his vision for Estonia.

Personally, I see twenty hectares of horror.

Once my prototypical Canadian family has bought their tickets from the gate attendant, they’ll be stopped ten meters inside the park by an unshaven miilits wearing an untucked shirt and on his head a forashka as big as a serving tray. “Sure you bought tickets,” he’ll tell the still-smiling Canadians, “but you didn’t get them from me.” So Karl Kanada will dig in his pocket for a few bills to ensure his family gets to see the attractions. In some cases, the family’s car will be searched, the father’s porn magazines and children’s walkie-talkies confiscated. Alcohol will be removed (to be later resold in the gift shop or consumed by park employees) and a further fine levied on family members who neglected to purchase the park’s special health insurance which was recommended to them at the gate, the policy which guarantees foreigners the “same fine quality of medical care available to citizens of the Soviet Union.” (Incidentally, the park will house a small hospital where the only forms of accepted payment will be Levi’s jeans and live chickens.)

By this time, Karl Kanada and his family will be extremely thirsty and will descend on the park’s canteen, marked by a sign reading ресторан, at least half of the neon letters burned out. Karl will bribe the doorman, and once inside the family will spend hours deciphering the menu, finally realizing the restaurant has nothing on hand but pelmeni—and only fried pelmeni at that.

Exhausted, his hard currency nearly gone, Karl Kanada will take his family to the Intourist Hotel, where he’ll be charged the foreigners’ rate for a spartan room with no hot water and sheets a half meter too short for the bed. His key will be attached to a boat anchor and tended to by a dezhurnaya, who he will also need to bribe if he wants the family’s sweaty clothes returned by the hotel’s laundry service.

Sometime during the middle of the night, a knock will come at the door, and the family will be given ten minutes to pack and whisked down a back staircase into a waiting UAZ truck, then off to the park’s train station where a cattle car awaits. “Wait, there must be some mistake!” Karl will wail. But the guard will turn a deaf ear until Karl removes his Rolex, his leather shoes, his wife’s western brassiere, and anything else of value the family is carrying. Early in the morning, the family will return to their hotel on foot, to find their car stolen. “You only bought health insurance,” the desk clerk will inform them. “You should have bought the auto insurance.”

The deportation, being in such obvious bad taste, might be replaced by guests being rousted from their beds to be lightly beaten, then forced to sign a confession and inform on a neighbor—or, in cases of leniency, simply forced to write a postcard to their neighbors about the wonderful time they’re having.

To me, it’s a natural idea. It may not be exactly what Mr. Laar had in mind (I never had a chance to ask him), but it would certainly be one hell of a park. Educational for sure. Real family entertainment. The natural successor to reality television.

Vello, some will cry, you’ve stooped to a new low! How dare you make light such a serious subject? I answer this way: Estonia can continue the frustrating search for its Nokia—or seksikat produkti, as Mr. Ansip was quoted calling them in Äripäev—which it possibly won’t find while anybody reading this is still alive. Or, it can take advantage of that which is right under its very nose. It isn’t pretty, but it would be authentic. And thanks to Hollywood, with the West thinking that the Soviet Union was all about Bond and “Goldeneye grotesque,” Estonia might be doing the world a service by setting things straight.

But there’s Solzhenitsyn, Edward Lucas, and Anne Applebaum! a reader will protest. People know the crimes of the Soviet Union! No, dear reader, they don’t. The masses don’t read books and never have. Bad television and theme parks are the communication tools of our time. If we want to change the popular conception of history, then we’ve got to do it with Disney. Or rather our own sick interpretation thereof.

***

Read it in Estonian in Postimees.