Remembering Guides Us Forward” – Imbi Paju

“Remembering guides us forward” – Imbi Paju Remembering guides us forward Speech by Imbi Paju at the ceremony for the Heli and Arnold Susi Mission Award for the Courage to Speak Out on 4 January 2019. Esteemed Minister of Justice Urmas Reinsalu, honourable Heli Susi, representatives of the Memorial Union for the Estonian Fight for Liberation and Resistance Movement [Eesti Vabadusvõitluse ja Vastupanuliikumise Mälestusliit] and Estonian Memento Association, organisers of the event, dear guests. Firstly, I am grateful for the exceptional honour of being the first to receive the Heli and Arnold Susi Mission Award for the Courage to Speak Out. Behind the actions of every person is a story which is, on closer examination, related to our collective sub-consciousness, the life, life-stories, achievements and contradictions of society. In order to see this all more clearly and to perceive the impact that certain people have on us and our actions, we must keep these stories constantly in our minds, especially now that the world is wavering again. The examples that these people and their stories set, creates and reinforces the identity and understanding of oneself – on a country level as well – keeping our heads clear and helping us to stay on the democratic path at a time when populism, ideological stigmas, fake news and other noise cause uneasiness, to the point of people talking about a post-truth era. We need a compass right now. When preparing this speech, I talked to many people who have a deep interest in the actions and stories of Arnold Susi, Sworn Advocate, Minister of Education during the government of Otto Tief, and Arnold’s daughter Heli. I will start with examples from our neighbours. Finnish non-fiction author and historian Erkki Vettenniem has just published a book, which has also been translated into Estonian, Solženitsyn. Elämä ja eetos [Solzhenitsyn. Life and Ethos], revealing the part that Arnold Susi, Heli Susi and other Estonians played in the creation of Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. The book revealed the Soviet Union’s crimes against humanity and gave human suffering a face and a voice. 1 “Remembering guides us forward” – Imbi Paju Heli Susi, as an involved party, has said that the book remains a bit superficial. The writer admits this but explains that Estonians themselves have not made this story important to the world. One could only hope that some Estonian museum of occupation would make the story permanently visible on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Solzhenitsyn; that it would be visible in the Estonian anniversary year’s cultural project focusing on foreign countries; that this is the time when the state of Estonia reacts and moulds this into a large narrative. I mention this fact because the name of Arnold Susi, thanks to whom this masterpiece was created, is referred to as a key figure of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in large international periodicals and newspapers such as The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent and others. The name of Arnold Susi was also internationally mentioned in the eulogies written for the writer Jaan Kross in 2007 because this national writer when a young lawyer stood for the independence of Estonia and was a member of the National Committee of the Republic of Estonia where Arnold Susi was one of the key figures. But even so, Arnold Susi is internationally still too little known. He wrote a thousand pages of memoirs, without really believing that they would be published, and yet they were published and his book Võõrsil vastu tahtmist [Unwillingly Abroad] would definitely raise interest outside Estonia as well. Last year, which was the 90th year of activity of the Estonian Centre of PEN International, I found in my mailbox a letter from the novelist, poet and translator Kätlin Kaldmaa, the President and Foreign Secretary of the Estonian Centre of PEN International; she proposed in this letter that we should choose Heli Susi to be an Honorary Member of PEN – precisely because she risked her freedom and life when helping Solzhenitsyn when he wrote The Gulag Archipelago. The idea seemed wonderful, and being inspired by the PEN decision, I organised a small discussion on the topic during the Võtikvere Book Village literary festival in August of last year. Unfortunately, Heli Susi was unable to participate in that small forum but the topic was introduced by Ivar Tröner, a cultural historian who studies Russian literature. He was joined by journalist and thinker Jüri Estam, a close acquaintance of Heli Susi. 2 “Remembering guides us forward” – Imbi Paju Ivar Tröner reminded us that no other world writer nor Nobel laureate has written about Estonians as respectfully and warmly as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Jüri Estam recalled that when Arnold Susi was imprisoned in the Lubyanka, he met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was then a Marxist, and organised a “night university” for him in the prison, changing thoroughly Solzhenitsyn’s notions of democracy and a state based on the rule of law. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in the first part of The Gulag Archipelago: “Thanks to his horn-rimmed glasses and the straight lines above the eyes, his face became severe, perspicacious, exactly the face of an educated man of our century as we might picture it to ourselves. Back before the Revolution he had studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Petrograd, and throughout his twenty years in independent Estonia he had preserved intact the purest Russian speech, which he spoke like a native. Later, in Tartu, he studied law. In addition to Estonian, he spoke English and German, and through all these years he continued to read the London Economist and the German scientific "Berichte" summaries. He had studied the constitutions and the codes of law of various countries – and in our cell he represented Europe worthily and with restraint.” I wrote a story on that topic for the cultural portal of the Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR) and mentioned in particular that perhaps we should memorialise the names of Heli and Arnold Susi in the form of a human rights and democracy day. Incidentally, I believe that the archive of the Estonian Public Broadcasting as well as the articles and interviews with Heli Susi that have been published in our magazines are a great achievement of memory work, containing as they do a lot of cultural historical material. Journalist Martin Viirand, whose father also participated in the National Committee of the Republic of Estonia, adopted, with the help of Heli Susi, a mission to memorialise the actions of Arnold Susi and the National Committee during the restoration of the independence of Estonia in 1944. The actions of the National Committee were extremely important in the sense of the continued existence of the state of Estonia. The actions of Arnold Susi, Heli Susi and others in helping Solzhenitsyn to write The Gulag Archipelago were also memorialised by the late Mati Talvik in a TV 3 “Remembering guides us forward” – Imbi Paju programme Ajavaod [Wrinkles in Time] with a subheading “Mees, kes usaldas eestlasi” [“The Man Who Trusted Estonians”]. The Soviet regime was determined that people should not trust each other. It began with joint apartments which promoted tale-telling. Privacy was taken from people. People were collectively controlled. Curricula lacked the psychology of individuality. A lot was done during the Soviet regime to discourage close relationships. Solzhenitsyn came to Estonia and found here privacy and altruism. Friends even had to warn him that the KGB operated in Estonia as well. I am glad that Minister of Justice Urmas Reinsalu decided to emphasise the courage to speak out and the mission when he established the Heli and Arnold Susi Award. As we know, the current minister has worked as an adviser and undersecretary to President Lennart Meri, where he was undoubtedly schooled in preserving memories. Lennart Meri in turn had worked with Enn Sarv, a jurist who worked on the National Committee in 1944 and who was repressed by the Nazi as well as the Soviet authorities. Enn Sarv was one of the advisers for my film Memories Denied. In the film, I tried to find answers about the nature of the malice and treachery of the regime that transported my under-aged mother to a Gulag in 1948. Enn Sarv became my good friend as well as an interpreter of history and eras. I was able to share with him the mind-set that we must constantly define the things that make a good and caring life, the things we strive for. This new good thing can be learning new things, learning to notice life and make acknowledgment, being merciful and forgiving, in order to be the best you. According to the classic representative of psychology Carl Gustav Jung, every person represents in principle the entirety of humankind and its history. That which is possible in the history of humankind in a larger sense is possible on a small scale for every person. I returned to this wisdom when reading the memoirs of Arnold Susi. Last year I met students from Seattle University via Skype who had watched my film Memories Denied and read the opinion piece in which I posed the question whether culture can save the world. And therefore they asked me whether it can. I did not 4 “Remembering guides us forward” – Imbi Paju know how to answer because every day I look for the answer myself. I know that my mother survived in the Gulag because she was reminded of a poem by Marie Under, or perhaps she forgot herself and sang a Schubert serenade and imagined herself in another time, a free time; when she finished, the people around her cried.

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