The Art of Estonian Activism: An Architect Designs New Democracy

Ignar Fjuk, the tall, blond Thomas Jefferson of Estonia, managed to slip in and out of Los Angeles last week virtually without notice. No surprise. Despite the tumultuous protests that have surged through the Baltic republics in the past few months, Estonia still has the ring of a musical-comedy country for most Americans, while Fjuk, the architect and Popular Front activist who was the main author of the nation’s “Declaration of Sovereignty” last year, is only a name lurking in the shadow cast by Mikhail S. Gorbachev or even the shadow of the increasingly heretical Boris Yeltsin, who is roughly Fjuk’s equivalent in Moscow.

To date, most U.S. media have presented a simple-minded picture of the democratic reforms now sweeping through the Soviet Union, with a narrow cast of stars. Fjuk contradicts this vision not only in his person but in his rich and complex view of glasnost , a view shared by many of his countrymen and their neighbors, the Latvians and Lithuanians, as well as reform-minded Russians.

I began to sense this richness on my first trip to the post- glasnost Soviet Union last year. Invited by the Ministry of Culture in Moscow to create and plan a collaborative Soviet-American video art satellite telecast in 1990, I spent (then and now) most of my time there with artists, architects, and writers, precisely the class often ignored by our press. But those people in the Soviet cultural intelligentsia act at the center of political life and reform (as so many American artists do not)--and nowhere more than in Tallin, the capital of Estonia, a place visited entirely by chance.

When I first began telling students at ArtCenter about Tallin, they were incredulous: “Where is Estonia?” asked one of them, “and why should I care?” And then we all witnessed on our television screens on Aug. 23 a massive and moving event that bordered on performance art.

Now known as the Human Chain, it linked nearly 2 million Baltic citizens who joined hands from Tallin, in the north to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania in the south. The chain protested the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact signed precisely 50 years earlier, leading to the occupation of the three tiny Baltic nations (and permitting the joint invasion of Poland).

No one who saw the chain can forget it. At once peaceful and resolute, monolithic yet anarchic--in its earthy variety, every face, gait, shirt and dress different--it was a visual tour de force. For communal scale, consider these figures: nearly half the citizens of Estonia stood in the line. Were Americans moved to such unity, we would easily stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The chain is what attracted an intense audience of students and faculty at ArtCenter, for Fjuk’s Toyota-sponsored lecture. He displayed in slide form the achievements of his nation in architecture and design. Sited on the northeastern shore of the Baltic, closely linked to Finland, the Estonians have long considered themselves as the direct heirs of Scandinavian modernism, evident in the clean-limbed snap and dash of their clothes, computers and automobiles. Even in the worst decades of Stalinist repression, Estonian artists and designers, left alone by local authorities, enjoyed comparative freedom. “We never had a dissident art community,” Estonians constantly say, “because everything has always been permitted here.”

A crucial point, and it explains why Russian intellectuals love to work and vacation in Estonia--as well as Latvia and Lithuania--and why Gorbachev wisely made one of his first major perestroika speeches in Riga, the capital of Latvia. In the East, the Baltic republics represent the West: the proper laboratory for new ideas, social experiment and joint ventures, commercial or cultural. “Anything can happen there,” one Russian artist said before my first visit. Two days after arrival, Estonian television committed itself to collaborating on my experimental video project; so did the Russians, later. On my second trip--last month--the two networks agreed to collaborate, with Tallin as the main producer. “Only the Estonians,” said a Russian TV director later, “can be avant-garde.”

From the day Gorbachev launched his initiatives, Estonians have pursued politics with the same flare as their art. Their Popular Front Party was welded together in huge democratic rallies numbering 300,000 at a time and on live, marathon television call-in programs. At every step of the way, Fjuk and his colleagues--known as the Cultural Council of Creative Unions of Estonia--have been at the center, giving voice, in effect, to the nation. “Who else can do it?” he told the ArtCenter audience. “Not professional politicians.” This winter, Fjuk ran for a seat at the Supreme Soviet, in the first free election held in the Soviet Union in more than 70 years. Though opposed by three candidates, one standing for the official Communist Party, he won 87% of the vote, roughly Yeltsin’s margin of success in Moscow.

Yet Fjuk is a distinctly different order of man--and intelligence--than Yeltsin. At the heart of one of the early Cultural Council manifestoes is this sentence: “We propose that the (19th Communist Party) Conference set the course toward a resolute elimination of secrecy in all spheres of life, first of all in party work and the activity of law-enforcement institutions.”

Intrigued by the reference to “all spheres of life,” I began to question Fjuk in Tallin; did he mean private and psychic life as well as public or political life? Fjuk said the political change must precede--and finally provoke--personal change. But many of his cohorts disagree; some contend that private “openness,” or truth-telling, comes first, as the prologue to democracy. The point is that Fjuk and all his colleagues are plainly committed to a deeper, more personal evolution of glasnost than either the party bureaucrats in Moscow or the hard-liners in Washington--who interpret the reform movement as a simple capitulation of socialism to capitalism--allow.

When I arrived in Tallin in late summer, not long after the Chain dissolved and the Central Committee in Moscow warned against “nationalist hysteria” in the Baltics, Fjuk met me at the boat from Helsinki with a smile. “No Russian soldiers yet,” he said.

The soldiers are still keeping their distance. Why? Everyone has his or her own explanation--or prediction for disaster. Let me offer a guess, to mix with all the others now in force. We live in an information age, when spoken and visual eloquence, even daring, is critical to survival. Perhaps it has always been critical, but we exist now, in terms of news and ideas, in a kind of fast-forward state. As the human chain is formed, it is seen everywhere.

Certainly “the communications revolution” is a deadly cliche, often describing a means of pacifying, entertaining or drugging viewers and readers all over the world. Worse, the cliche version of a deadly reality leaves out a vital ingredient--missing from our last presidential campaign--known as “content.” Without it, no message is going to break through the dense communications fog and plant itself in our minds.

Virtually alone among the reform-minded forces in the Soviet Union, the Estonians seem to know how to articulate content. They represent more than protest, which is, as in Georgia and Armenia, easy to quell. Time and again they act on basic values, as opposed to mere strategy, or mechanics, in visual as well as verbal form. Rather like the Quakers in the 17th Century they are organized, sophisticated, and relentless. They begin to direct light through the fog. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, but for now Estonians seem beyond reach of bullets. Standing for content, for a set of ideas, the Estonians are at once easy to see and hear, but difficult to touch, or kill.