Estonian President Addresses Kennedy School

President of Estonia Toomas H. Ilves discussed the relationships between the EU and NATO, and between Estonia and the Soviet Union yesterday at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Widely acclaimed for the political freedom and economic development made possible in Estonia under his leadership, Ilves drew a large Estonian audience, including an Estonian woman who was over ninety-years old and too weak to climb to the fourth floor of Littauer Building, and who waited downstairs for the President until the seminar ended.

The lecture segment of the event focused on the relationship between NATO and the EU.

The real problem, according to Ilyes, is that NATO and the EU do not talk to each other, and if the lack of formal and legal communication continues, Europe will see little progress in the near future.

In comparing NATO and the EU to the left and right sides of the brain, respectively, Ilves said that the two must communicate with each other in order to function normally.

In addition, Ilves discussed the tensions between Russia and Estonia.

In response to a question about why history textbooks in Estonia portray the relationship with the Soviet Union in a negative light, Ilves said he doesn’t “think there’s anything wrong with hating the Soviet Union.”

He then drew a distinction between the Soviet Union and Russia by paralleling the differences between the two nations to the differences between Nazi Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany.

But according to Marshall I. Goldman, Senior Scholar in the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the present history textbooks in Estonia may cause animosity against the Soviet Union amongst the younger generation.

Another audience member presented an alternative viewpoint.

“When I was in school we still had Soviet textbooks...which taught that Estonians were all being liberated,” said Andres Sevtsuk, an Estoniain MIT graduate student at the seminar, but “I do think that history should be taught factually, and I don’t think there ought to be a deliberate distortion.”