Estonian Study of Religion: a Historical Outline of the 20Th Century Developments

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Estonian Study of Religion: A Historical Outline of the 20th Century Developments

Ülo Valk and Tarmo Kulmar

1 Introduction: Notes on the History of Estonia

The large-scale Christianisation of Estonia and Livonia started at the beginning of the 13th century as a result of German and Danish conquest. During the Middle Ages, the traditional rural culture was maintained by the ethnically Estonian peasantry, whereas the towns were multi-ethnic and open to innova- tions from abroad. These new developments of European culture also spread among the rural nobility: the German landlords and owners of manors, whose lifestyle was luxurious compared to the oppressed peasantry. The revolutionary ideas of the protestant Reformation reached Estonia early, and had a consider- able impact in towns, leading to the publication of the first book in Estonian in 1525. Russia started the devastating Livonian war in 1558, while church reform was carried out systematically much later, during the 17th century, when Estonia became a part of the Swedish empire. In 1632 the Swedish King, Gustav II Adolf, established in the town of Tartu [German: Dorpat/Russian: Derpt, Yuryev] the Academia Gustaviana, today known as the University of Tartu. The Swedish period in Estonia ended in 1721, when Russia and Sweden signed the peace treaty of Nystad after the Great Northern War. However, even though Estonia became part of the Russian Empire, the Baltic-German nobility retained their privileges, and Low German remained the language of the cultural and political elites. During the 18th century the Pietist awakening movement of the Herrnhut brethren spread among the Estonian peasants, generally outside the control of the Lutheran church and sometimes even challenging its authority. In 1739 the Bible was published in Estonian. The University in Dorpat, which had been closed during the Great Northern War, was re-opened in 1802 under the name Kaiserliche Universität zu Dorpat, with German as the teaching language. Tsar Alexander I supported the Enlightenment ideology, and introduced political reforms such as the abolition of serfdom in 1816 among the peasants of Estonia, and in 1819 in Livonia (i.e. the southern region of present-day Estonia and northern Latvia). Parallel to similar movements elsewhere in Europe, ideas of national awakening spread among the Estonians during the second half of the 19th century, in association with progress in education, changes in legisla- tion, economic improvements, and the emergence of a new social stratum of

Estonian farmers who had bought land from their former German masters. By the end of the 19th century, the Estonian people had ceased to be a margin- alised and suppressed rural folk. Instead, they had become a socially more and more organised nation with ambitions for economic growth, the development of a professional culture and claims for administrative and political power. This historical outline is necessary to understand the developments of Religious Studies in 20th-century Estonia as a country often haunted by the shadows of the past—those of foreign invasions, military conflicts, political terror and the domination of ethnic ‘others’. World War I led to the collapse of imperial Russia and prepared the way for the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At the beginning of 1918, Estonia declared itself an independent democratic republic, which also symbolically ended the political and cultural domination of the Baltic-German aristocracy. The War of Independence against Soviet Russia (1918–1920) ended with a peace treaty, signed in Tartu, in which Russia claimed that it would “recognise the independence of Estonia and will give up forever every sovereign right Russia has ever had on the Estonian land and people . . .”.1 However, as a contested territory Estonia remained in the sphere of interests of the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The secret protocol of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, signed in 1939 in Moscow, prepared the way for the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states,2 while World War II destroyed independent Estonia, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union under the name of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. After 50 years of Communist rule—years of Stalinist terror, armed struggle against the new power, the minimal liberalisation of the “golden” 1960s, systematic Russification in the 1980s, and persistent passive resistance of Estonians to the Soviet system—the independent Republic of Estonia was re-established in 1991. In 2004 it became a member state of NATO, and in the same year joined the European Union. The grand events of the 20th century, the political turns and the ideologies of the ruling regimes, have to a great extent shaped the development of the sciences and scholarship in general and of the humanities and Religious Studies in particular as an ideologically sensitive field. The history of Religious Studies as an academic discipline in Estonia has developed over time in three main directions, each primed by specific ideo- logical factors and sometimes also political needs. First, the long tradition of Christianity, starting from the Catholic conversion, leading to the Protestant Reformation and the Pietist movement among the Estonian peasants, gave rise

1 Mati Laur, Tõnis Lukas, Ain Mäesalu, Ago Pajur, and Tõnu Tannberg, History of Estonia (Tallinn: Avita, 2000) 220. 2 Ibid., 259.