Estonia

From the last pagans of Europe to a reborn Baltic republic that refused to be erased.

Estonia's history is the story of a small Finno-Ugric people who held the northeastern edge of Europe long before they held a state of their own. Conquered in the thirteenth century by German crusaders and Danes in the Northern Crusades, the land of the Estonians passed through Danish, Swedish and, after 1710-1721, Russian imperial hands, while a Baltic German nobility ruled over a peasant population for some seven centuries. A nineteenth-century national awakening, carried by newspapers and great song festivals, turned a peasantry into a nation. Independence was declared on 24 February 1918 and secured in the War of Independence, sealed by the Treaty of Tartu of 1920, in which Soviet Russia recognised Estonian independence forever. That first republic was extinguished in 1940 when the Soviet Union, acting on the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, occupied and annexed the country, an act the Western democracies never recognised as lawful. Through Soviet and Nazi occupations, mass deportations and forty-seven years of Soviet rule, Estonia's legal existence was kept alive abroad, and in the Singing Revolution the nation sang itself back to freedom, restoring its independence on 20 August 1991 as the very same state founded in 1918, and joining NATO and the European Union in 2004.