Freed of Moscow, Balts Return to the Sea : Economy: Their fishing occupations withered under Soviet domination. Now the Baltics’ maritime industry must be rebuilt.

The rocky harbor at one end of this tiny community is showing signs of life. Men walk their children carefully over the stone jetty, fishing rods and plastic buckets slung over their shoulders.

The only reminders of its recent history are the cut ends of rusted barbed wire lying uselessly in the sand, where for more than 40 years they kept the residents from setting their boats in the sea.

“Fishing is a matter of luck,” said Karlju Veervald, who was born in this village in 1929 to a line of fishermen stretching back longer than anyone can remember.

His subject is the unpredictability of the catch, but it might as well be the political fortunes of Baltic seafarers. In the half-century that followed the arrival of the Soviets in 1940 as the region’s overlords, that luck was all bad.

Failing in eyesight, although his flyaway white mane and sharp beak give him the look of a glaring sea gull, Veervald is the last of his line. His 23-year-old son lives nearby and works on land, as a mechanic. He never put out to sea like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, because for most of his life the Soviet government forbade it.

After they won lasting control of this region in 1944, the Soviets proceeded to shut down the region’s domestic maritime industry, absorbing it into a vast monopoly directed from Moscow. Today, after nearly 50 years, its reconstruction is emerging as one of the Baltic states’ hidden burdens of independence from the Soviet Union.

Rebuilding the coastal trades will take hundreds of millions of dollars and require reintroducing a generation of young people to the opportunities of life on the sea that their forebears took for granted.

Confiscating the maritime zone was part of the Kremlin’s policy to subordinate local economies to the central government’s. The Soviets turned the Baltics’ cultivated fields into collective farms, strip-mined the woodland, erected ungainly refineries and unprofitable factories in the cities. But their closure of the sea may be the most important symbol of how they seized an entire region’s way of life.

Nowhere did that cut more deeply than in Estonia.

In 1940, the country’s merchant marine had 340 boats with a total capacity of nearly a quarter-million tons. There were 263 registered shipping companies operating out of 26 international ports. On a per-capita basis, Estonia was the third-largest commercial marine power on the Baltic Sea, just behind Denmark and Sweden but well ahead of Germany, the Soviet Union and Poland.

The Soviets appropriated almost anything that could be moved. Everything else on the coast--a sensitive border zone--came under their particular brand of paranoia.

Hundreds of fishing boats were nationalized and turned over to Soviet concerns. All but three international ports were closed, and millions of dollars held in maritime banks were seized.

Lighthouses and lightships were subjected to a Soviet administrative monopoly. Shipowners, captains and crewmen were deported to Siberia by the thousands. The Baltic Sea islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, once almost exclusively populated by seagoers, were cleared of people.

Estonian authorities calculate that more than $12 million in marine assets, calculated in 1940 dollars, was confiscated. “Estonia was a seagoing nation,” said Nathan Tonisson, general director of Estonia’s new National Maritime Board. “We lost a lot.”

What disappeared was more than just an industry.

“The length of the Estonian coast is 3,800 kilometers (2,400 miles), so you can imagine how big a portion of the population was deprived of its usual activities,” says Olav Traks, head of the recently re-established Estonian National Board of Fisheries. “This is not so much an industrial problem, but one of traditions and national culture.”

During the 50-year break, many nautical terms have fallen out of the Estonian language. The seized fleet has long since become unseaworthy because of age. The replacement of Estonians by Russians as port workers, sailors and marine technicians has given maritime life a bad reputation among young Estonians.

The sea became an alien place for a generation of Estonians. Veteran seamen such as Karlju Veervald consider that a fatal rift.

“I was 6 when my father first took me out to sea,” he said. “But under the Russians, you had to be an adult, and even then they would decide if you could go out.” Most fishermen or merchant crews had to be cleared for visas by the KGB, which was seldom inclined to allow Estonians off the land. “So you could never pass your traditions on to your children.”

He flipped the pages of an old photo album back to a picture of a timber lighthouse on Uhtjo Island, 10 miles offshore, during a community picnic. “When I was a child, all the children went out to the island. My son has never been able to go.”

Estonia faces a huge task in re-establishing the fishing industry and merchant marine, which the country is undertaking as a national policy.

The government will have to establish new curricula in its naval academies to replace the Soviets’ outmoded (and Russian-language) courses.

The Soviets did not make public any hydrographic charts of the Baltic coastline, except for narrow access channels to the major ports, so new surveys will be needed. Most of the harbors are in disrepair, and others were converted to naval bases. A new generation of Estonian harbor pilots will need training--a problem because Estonians have been largely excluded even from the crews of ships registered to the Estonian Shipping Co., a Soviet front.

Tonisson, the maritime board director, calculates that bringing Soviet facilities up to minimal international standards will cost Estonia $275 million over the next five years.

Even fishing rights will have to be renegotiated worldwide. Estonia last month took over ownership of 60 oceangoing fishing vessels that the Soviets had based in Tallinn, but if they fly the blue, black and white Estonian flag, they could be barred from many rich fishing grounds around the world.

“Somewhere in a Soviet ministry drawer are huge piles of treaties allowing them to fish in other countries’ waters,” said Traks. “Now we’re told, ‘You’re independent, so you have to find fishing territories for your own fleet.’ But it’s a very difficult task for a new independent country to get places and opportunities for fishing.”

The temporary solution: The former Soviet vessels will continue sailing under the Soviet flag.

The only bright spot is Tallinn New Port, the harbor built by the Soviets to accommodate their own vast fleet and regarded as the best commercial port in the Baltics. Estonian authorities plan to take over the ultra-modern facility, which has a potential annual capacity of 20 million tons of cargo. But they may first have to dicker with Moscow over the Soviets’ insistence on getting financial compensation for the port.

Meanwhile, on the Baltic shore the enduring impact of Soviet policies is still visible. The land approach to Eisma, about midway between the capital, Tallinn, and the Russian border at Narva, illustrates the scale of the Soviet stranglehold on coastal access. Straddling the only road to the Gulf of Finland is an abandoned sentry post.

A few miles farther on is a garrison where a detachment of Soviet border guards still lives. “They don’t come outside any more,” said a local resident.

Past the harbor, where two or three dinghies lie alongside a rotted wharf that once was home to 10 fishing launches, is Veervald’s tidy home. Before World War II he was one of more than 50 full-time fishermen in the village. He and four friends owned a launch; every night they would head out into the gulf, returning at dawn laden with sardines. Now he is the last one living in Eisma.

When the Soviets arrived, most of the fishermen took their boats to Sweden to escape. Others went on to North America. The remainder were drafted into the Soviet army unless, like Veervald, they had already been impressed into the German army, which had swept through Estonia in 1941.

Veervald was made to pay for his bad timing: In 1950 the Soviets arrested him for his wartime German service and sentenced him to the Siberian gulag, where he spent six years--until a post-Stalin amnesty--building factories and baking bricks by the suffocating heat of a furnace.

After the Soviet takeover he had been permitted to go on fishing, but only just. Under the new rules, he could no longer dock his boat in Eisma, but had to use a harbor 10 miles away.

And, of course, he could not sell his catch privately. The sardines he netted were turned over to the local fishermen’s collective, which paid him a salary only a fraction of what he had earned before the war.

As he reminisces, it is clear he feels that more has been lost during the years of Soviet control than just technical knowledge. What was taken away was a contentment with life on the water.

“When you’ve grown up with it, you don’t find it boring to be 10 hours at sea, walking from one end of your boat to the other, just looking at the water, watching the birds.

“Estonia’s an unhappy country because it’s in the middle of big interests,” he said. “In Sweden, people have lived in peace for centuries. The son inherited all the skills from the father. Here, your farm and everything could be taken away from you in an hour.”

Then, summing up his own life as a common mariner in a country overrun by two alien armies in the time since he was born:

“Sometimes when I think about it, it feels like a bad dream.”