Estonians Back Down in Dispute With Kremlin

The Estonian Parliament backed down in a dispute with the Kremlin on Thursday, suspending clauses in a local election law that deprived thousands of Russian immigrants of the vote.

Estonian radio said 172 of the 243 deputies accepted a proposal by the republic’s president, Arnold Ruutel, to suspend provisions of the law that allowed only people who had lived in the republic for at least two years to vote.

The law provoked a rash of strikes by local ethnic Russian workers after it was passed by the Estonian Parliament in August.

“It was decided to modify the law in view of the current political situation and, in particular, because of the threat of more strikes,” a journalist at Estonian television told Reuters news agency.

The compromise, which will allow all residents to take part in local elections Dec. 10, appears to be part of an attempt by Estonia’s reformist leadership to steer away from conflict with Moscow over the issue.

The move was attacked by Estonian nationalists who are pressing for a return to the independence enjoyed by the republic until 1940.

“We never expect much from this puppet Parliament anyway,” said Trivimi Velliste, president of the nationalist Estonian Heritage Foundation. “But how can the Parliament vote one way in August and another way now?”

Estonian journalists said deputies agreed to Ruutel’s appeal to suspend the clause apparently in an attempt to rectify what had appeared to have been a political miscalculation.

Estimates of how many of the republic’s 1.5 million people were disenfranchised by the law varied between 10,000 and 100,000.

They are among hundreds of thousands of Russians and other non-Estonians who moved to the republic since 1940 as part of a policy of “Russification.”

The residence requirement brought the republic’s leadership into conflict with members of the Russian minority, who said the law made them second-class citizens.

It was condemned by the Kremlin, which declared that it was incompatible with provisions of the Soviet constitution, which guarantee the vote to every citizen.

The controversy also appeared to play a large part in provoking a denunciation by the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee of nationalism and separatism in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Estonian deputies pledged Thursday to continue discussion of even more controversial plans to introduce a separate Estonian citizenship alongside the Soviet one, to which the right to vote would be tied in the future.

The Kremlin faced another nationalist headache this weekend in the Baltic region, where the radical Latvian Popular Front is expected to approve a program calling for progress toward the republic’s secession from the Soviet Union, a spokesman said.