Tallinn in Technicolour

摘要

Estonia in the 1970s was a curious anomaly, a provincial border zone and a rapidly modernising country at the same time. Part of the USSR, yet on a longer leash than most Soviet Socialist Republics, its citizens could access uncensored information by tuning into Finnish radio or TV stations. They could eat in western-style cafes and restaurants, a number of which maintained both a customer base and an ambiance from the period of inter-war independence, while others were decorated in the modern Scandinavian style and served a broad variety of cakes and tarts, or 'whipped cream and strawberries', as Anne Gorsuch characterised them in All This is Your World, her study of post-Stalin Soviet tourism. If Estonians went to the theatre or an art gallery, they could enjoy shows that would rarely have seen the light of day in Moscow or Leningrad. The country's arts culture was never polarised into 'official' and 'unofficial' camps and - the ultimate index of quiet toleration on the part of the authorities - there was even a rock music scene, germinated in the university halls and student clubs of the capital, Tallinn.