Fear and anxiety spread into the world of children as well. During handicraft lessons, girls sewed gauze masks, attaching individual name-tags and placing them in a secure cupboard for storage. From time to time we would practise taking them out and fixing them over our mouths and noses. Just in case . . .
I remember one film about a girl in Hiroshima with leukaemia who was battling for her life. The Soviet Union exploited such stories about people trying to resume a normal existence after being irradiated in a nuclear attack. The message was that the Americans planned to repeat in Moscow and Leningrad what they had done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I can only vaguely remember the film about Hiroshima, but I think that it was produced jointly by the Soviet Union and Japan (it wasn’t the French film Hiroshima, mon amour). In any case, the film inspired tens of thousands of Soviet girls to make origami cranes.
The Japanese believe that origami cranes can make wishes come true, and so thousands of them had to be made to protect us against anaemia.
I know one Estonian woman who remembers being told about these magic charms from Hiroshima as a young girl. She followed the Japanese girls’ example and started making origami birds. Just as a precautionary measure. Her little heart would fill with fear as she watched the sky, looking out for the nuclear cloud that would supposedly resemble a grotesque oversized boletus mushroom. The approaching danger had to be spotted in time for her to act, which meant attaching the gauze mask to her face and hugging close all the origami birds that she had made.
Another girl suffered from an unhealthy obsession with nuclear bomb shelters. She lived in a small town in central Estonia, and knew exactly where the town’s shelter was located. And she always had a bundle of things ready to grab and take with her in the event of danger. Whenever she went somewhere new, visiting relatives or for some other reason, the first thing she would always ask was the location of the local nuclear shelter. She didn’t feel properly safe until she knew.
A third girl fashioned herself a suit from soap. She had heard it would protect against radiation. The soap suit was easy to make—you just had to take some normal clothes, like a tracksuit, make them wet, and soap them up; then you waited for them to dry a bit, before soaping them again. This procedure had to be repeated until the layers of soap formed a crust.
These are the kinds of things that women born in Estonia at the beginning of the seventies remember. I don’t know about the men. No men have ever told me about having any fears of that kind. It’s probably a male thing. Boys don’t cry, as they say.
*
But I personally didn’t have any such fears. For children born at the beginning of the sixties, childhood was still a happy time. Just as the Soviet government and the Communist Party promised it would be. Although you couldn’t ignore the niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
Once when I was in the second year at school the teacher took a long procession of us to Sillamäe’s School No. One after lessons, to have a look at its nuclear shelter. This visit was to be training as part of some civil defence assignment she had been given. I can no longer remember if we were ever given a stern command to scurry into the shelter and hide, ‘just in case.’ But at our fairly shoddy school—shoddy in terms of its preparedness for nuclear war—we had no such thing.
Just the thought of that bunker filled me with excitement. It would be deep underground, with incredibly thick walls, intricate equipment and mysterious machinery humming away in every room, and protective rubber suits and gas masks hanging up. There would be switches, buttons, and control panels. And a periscope to watch what was happening at ground level, so that when the danger had passed you could put on your protective gear and set off on a journey that would be full of adventure. Naturally, you would have to walk down a long underground passage, and exit through a well-camouflaged door, only to eventually find yourself somewhere completely different from where you expected. I was downright jealous of the kids at School No. One for having something so cool.
But I suffered a setback, right by the door of the school where the shelter I fantasised about was located. The teacher was the first to go in, followed by my classmates, and I was at the back of the line. At the very moment I was to enter, some older Russian boys from School No. One jumped out, slammed the door in my face, and refused to let me go any further. They behaved just as I would have expected pupils from that school to behave. Like thugs. Once I had finally got past the wretched obstacle and entered the foyer of the school, my teacher and classmates had disappeared without trace. They had descended into that mysterious and thrilling bunker without waiting for me.
I had tears in my eyes from the disappointment. Such bad luck! If I had known, I would have held on to my teacher’s dress and entered the lousy school with her.
I was left outside to face the raging nuclear war alone. The others were already somewhere in that mysterious underground world. They had probably switched on the air purifying filters and tried out the radio link with the satellites orbiting above. And the door made from incredibly tough steel and weighing many tons would be making a whooshing sound as they opened and closed it with just the push of a button. But I was left standing outside the school like an idiot, with no idea what to do next. Should I wait for the teacher and classmates who had betrayed me to return, and take the risk that the same boys who had meanly held me back on the other side of the door would come back? So that they could give me a bloody lip and chuck my bag into the muddy puddle in front of the school? If I just walked off I would be in danger of being accused of deliberately missing civil defence training, no doubt with some trouble-making motive in mind. Absent without leave. Skiving off, as they used to say back then. That’s just the sort of rebuke I could have expected from that teacher.
There was no ideal option. As per usual. I somehow managed to pull myself together and leave with my head held high, but I felt bitterly regretful about what I had missed, and worried about how to explain why I had stayed behind without permission.
But the next day no explanations were required. The teacher hadn’t noticed that her group had been one child short as they entered the shelter. After all, there were just so many of us in her class! A grand total of fourteen to be precise. (Looking back, I can’t resist a mischievous thought about what would have happened if things had really kicked off, and the teacher had taken us to the shelter not just for some excursion but because of a real nuclear war—would she have noticed that one child was missing?)
Fortunately, I learned from the other children’s accounts of the visit that the shelter at School No. One wasn’t up to much anyway. It had looked a bit like our cloakroom, which was also situated below ground, in the cellar. Just that it had an iron door.
*
A year later they took us from primary school to the Sillamäe cultural centre to watch an educational film about nuclear war.
This was during class time. This fact alone led us to believe that nuclear war might not be such a bad thing after all. The film only served to confirm that.
It showed how Soviet lathe operator Ivan Petrov and his family, consisting of his wife and daughter, responded when the imperialists decided to attack our beloved homeland. This time with an atomic bomb.
It’s a fine morning. Lathe operator Petrov is making his way to work. He is wearing a simple cloth cap and a pair of rubber boots which reach up to his knees. (Why? It’s not raining, because the director of the film decided it would be a fine morning.) The lathe operator gazes sentimentally at the flowerbeds in front of his house. Our Soviet homeland truly is beautiful! He politely greets the babushkas sitting in front of the building. Soviet lathe operators are always sober-mannered and polite, and our Petrov is no exception. He enters his cosy flat and greets his wife and daughter. The daughter, who is in the fifth year and is in the Pioneers, has a serious, intelligent-looking face. She wears her red Pioneers neckerchief at home as well. Petrov looks at his wife. His wife looks at her husband. They know that their duty is to over-fulfil the Five-Year Plan, and bring up their daughter to be another dedicated Builder of Communism. They are comrades. They even begot their daughter in a way befitting of good Soviet folk. In a comradely way.
Everything is fine in this family. Everything is just as it should be. No deviations from the norm to be found here.
Petrov turns the radio dial and tunes into the news. He furrows his brow. They’re talking about American imperialism. Petrov discusses the international situation with his wife. The situation is tense.
A new morning arrives. The radio announces that an enemy aircraft has set course for lathe operator Petrov’s beautiful hometown. The air raid siren sounds. The family begins packing their things, in quick and practised fashion. A lorry is hooting out in the street. It has come to evacuate lathe operator Petrov’s family. His daughter looks solemnly at her father and asks if she is allowed to take her most treasured book with the essential items. Petrov gently pats her on the head. He doesn’t object to his daughter’s wish. She takes her beloved book from the shelf and opens the title page, which depicts a Red Army soldier from the Russian Civil War. It’s Nikolay Ostrovsky’s novel, How the Steel Was Tempered. The calligraphic script on the first page shows that lathe operator Petrov’s daughter was presented with this book for being a model student.
Petrov’s daughter puts the book into her rucksack. The family members get into the back of the lorry and are evacuated. Similar lorries arrive from the other streets of the town. Other lathe operators, welders, locksmiths, and their families are sitting in them. The lorries are driving fast, but safely. There are no traffic jams. Not a single lorry has to stop with engine problems. The citizens arrive at the shelter. They go in. Calmly and with no jostling. The walls in the shelter are painted white, and there is plenty of air inside.
The huge steel door is shut. It was forged by metal workers from Magnitogorsk. It is strong and secure. Lathe operator Petrov and his family sit down on the bench.
They wait.
A dull thud is heard.
The screen in Sillamäe cultural centre lights up bright white. As the light fades a tumescent fireball appears in the centre of the screen, travelling at incredible speed, and rapidly reaching gigantic proportions. Then another fireball starts to grow inside this first one, and it swells and swells, until a freakish-looking mushroom-stem forms underneath it and sucks thousands of tonnes of earth, sand, and rock debris from the earth’s surface, up into it. The fireball then begins to unfurl, forming a mushroom cap which rises in a plume, higher and higher above the clouds, until in the end it tears itself free from the stem and sets off on a solo flight, over the hills and far away.
A matter-of-fact-sounding voiceover states: ‘termoyaderny vzryv.’
Lathe operator Petrov stands up. With a couple of deft movements of his hand he knocks the sand that has crumbled from the shelter ceiling off his hat. His family is also alive and well. Someone is sent out through the shelter’s emergency exit to scout around. He is wearing a gas mask, and has a dosimeter hanging round his neck. He goes out. He looks around. There is a single fallen tree, and a couple of bricks have come loose. The man checks the dosimeter reading and returns to the shelter. Everything is fine. No need to remain underground any longer.
They open the shelter door and exit. Recovery works begin.
I can no longer remember whether the face of international imperialism was revealed at the beginning or the end of the film. Those gallant adversaries who hurled bombs at our flowerbed-filled Soviet town. Damn, what brutes they were! My main memory of this scene was that their helmet straps weren’t fastened under their chins like the handsome, manly Soviet soldiers—the imperialist mercenaries’ helmet straps were held in place by their sharply protruding lower lips.
There were hoots and whistles in the cinema room. If we had been set an essay to write about what we had seen that day, then I would have been sure to conclude it with the stock phrase ‘we had a great time.’ In those days I would have written those words without the slightest hint of irony.
*
Another year passed. They started to organise civil defence classes for us at school. I don’t know whose initiative it was. Maybe our teacher at the time needed a tick in a box for something. Or maybe she was just treating all this stuff with the appropriate degree of seriousness, trying her best to make sure that as many as possible of us, her pupils, would survive in this cruel and wicked world.
These classes were just like proper lectures, and we were even addressed with the polite form of ‘you,’ just like adults. Fourth year children! And the lectures were in Estonian, read to us by one of our classmates’ fathers. He was the chief engineer from the Sirgala quarry, and our teacher must have buttered him up somehow. Though the chief engineer may have had some reason of his own for giving those lectures. He had relatives somewhere overseas, Denmark I think, and he needed the right kind of character reference to be able to go and see them. Something along the lines of him identifying with and adhering to the party line, being socially active, fulfilling and exceeding the Five-Year Plan, and on top of all that giving civil defence classes at the local school. But I may be doing him an injustice; maybe he just had the missionary zeal of a man with a technical education. Maybe he really thought it essential to explain to us exactly what would happen, and in what order, in the event of a nuclear explosion, because otherwise our childish imaginations would dream up all sorts of other stuff. I remember that for a long time I was convinced that a hydrogen bomb would be more or less like a huge balloon, but filled with water. It would function in much the same way as ordinary balloons do when they are filled up with water and thrown out of a second-floor window—it would burst with a splash. Only that a hydrogen bomb would be incomparably bigger and wouldn’t just make a splash: it would cause a real deluge.
Maybe the chief engineer had heard silly ideas like that from his son, and that was why he had decided that we needed a little educating?
Plenty of conjecture, but nothing certain. What exactly were the forces that moved adults in those days in any case? God knows!
I don’t remember much of the contents of the lecture. All that nuclear war stuff was a little too dry and complicated the way he explained it. He lacked the teaching experience required to evaluate his listeners’ knowledge and intellectual maturity. He treated us just like grown-ups. One time a particularly naughty boy started jumping about restlessly and poking the other children during the lecture. The chief engineer just said in a perfectly calm voice: ‘If you’re not interested in what I have to say, please leave the room.’
The troublemaker was so shocked that he was immediately as quiet as a mouse. He had been addressed with the polite form of ‘you’! That conveyed a previously unknown sense of threat.
So that was how my third encounter with nuclear war went.
In the course of time all this stuff accumulated, more and more posters appeared depicting the three phases of a nuclear explosion, there was more training, we were given gas masks to put on, and they railed tirelessly against international imperialism. Although during my childhood and adolescence the tone had not yet become hysterical.
I didn’t experience the climate of fear that is preserved in the memories of Estonians who are ten years younger than me.
*
I found out the reason I had been spared in 1984.
In the military, where else. An officer whom I got on with and trusted once told me about his time at military training school. He had been there at roughly the same time as I had been in the fourth year of school, listening to that chief engineer who talked to us as if we were adults.
In the first half of the 1970s, Soviet cadets were told that nuclear war wasn’t in itself such a bad thing. The main difference compared to normal war was the relative numbers of dead and wounded. Unfortunately I no longer remember for sure whether the Soviet strategists calculated that there would be more wounded in a nuclear war or less; I seem to recall that it was less. Maybe the ones who were irradiated weren’t included in the wounded category.
The colonels and majors tried to instil optimism in their trainees. If there were more dead and less wounded, that could only be a good thing—the medical services would not be so overloaded. And there would be less trouble burying the dead in a nuclear war—many of them would be incinerated without trace in the heat of the nuclear explosion. But otherwise war was war, the same as ever; someone wins and someone loses. Comrade cadet, no need to worry! Worrying is the work of the General Staff. Attention! On your guard! Voina khuinya, glavnoe manevry.
Of course that attitude carried over into civilian life as well. During my childhood we all imagined that we would follow lathe operator Petrov’s example and simply shake off the dust that had fallen from the bunker ceiling and come out onto ground level to begin the recovery work. After all, it wouldn’t have been the first time . . .
I suppose that some time at the end of the 1970s, or certainly no later than the start of the 1980s, the terrifying realisation dawned on Soviet strategists that in this new kind of war there could be no winners. Only losers.
This new knowledge scared them stiff. They became hysterical. Expenditure on armaments increased sharply. And in our schools little girls started sewing gauze masks and making origami cranes, wanting to believe that they could use them to ward off the nuclear clouds from above their heads.
Those poor children. But at least they did something. As far as I know they did more than the Soviet General Staff.
*
Notwithstanding my carefree childhood spent sheltering behind lathe operator Petrov’s broad back, I wasn’t entirely spared from the fear that the end of the world was nigh.
I spent my time in the Soviet army not in any old rocket division, but in the air defence forces—the real thing. In the event of war, my task would have been to perform a series of very simple movements. A couple of hundred simple movements to move a certain missile into firing position on a particular starting platform. At the arrival of moment X, I would have performed these couple of hundred movements in the required order maybe two or three times. And then for me the war would be over.
The requisite two hundred movements were to be done by a team of four men working in close cooperation. I was the leader of the team. We were trained until those movements became so automatic that we could do them even if most of our physical and mental capacities had shut down. Out of intense fear, for example. We had to be able to do them in winter and in summer, in daylight and darkness, dressed in a gas mask and a rubber suit.
And that was basically the only reason I was kept in the Soviet military for two years. I was a tiny cog in a gigantic machine.
Nevertheless, information reached me that I should never have known given my lowly position. That was because even in the military people still lived a more or less normal life. They talked with people of higher rank. They discussed the peculiarities of daily life with them. They ate the same ready-made shit. And all that brought them closer.
And so I will now share some information that probably very few people know.
Nineteen eighty-three was the year in which they shot down the South Korean passenger airplane in the Far East. It had been travelling along a route from Anchorage to Seoul. There was obviously some fault in the plane’s navigation equipment. In the cockpit they didn’t know that they had entered Soviet air space. The innocent airplane first crossed the southern part of the Kamchatka peninsula, then the Sea of Okhotsk, and then it arrived in the airspace above Sakhalin Island. That was where the Soviet fighter aircraft shot it down. All 246 passengers and twenty-three crew members perished. There was also a member of the American Congress among the passengers.
A terrible scandal ensued. Since I was in the military at the time, I don’t know how much ordinary Soviet people were told about the catastrophe, or how it was presented. But the Russian writer Vasily Aksyenov, who at the time was drinking from the bitter cup of émigré life in America, wrote in one of his novels that on the day of the accident there were violent attacks on people from the Soviet Union in countless bars across the West Coast of America. Many Soviet émigrés found that drinking buddies with whom they were used to having a relaxed tipple grabbed them by the lapels and yelled: ‘Damn Russians, damn shitheads, why do you do stuff like this? Why?!’
I don’t know how the shitheads in the Kremlin explained it to the rest of the world.
But I will explain the tragedy from the perspective of the Soviet air defence forces. This might not be the only true version, in fact it might not be true at all, but it was the way things looked from within the air defence forces, and should be treated as such.
The South Korean plane was a Boeing-747. It would have apparently left the same trace on the radar screen as an American RC-135 spy plane.
So when the hapless South Koreans entered Soviet air space the air defence in that area was more or less sure that they could see a spy plane. Not with the naked eye. On the radar screen.
They were unable to establish contact with the unknown aircraft. Or they did not try, I don’t know. Perhaps the command to shoot it down was given straight away. The supposed spy plane was flying above Kamchatka, which was then full of all sorts of secret military installations—and still is to this day.
There were nine rocket divisions on the plane’s route, or to be more precise air defence divisions, just like the one in which I was slogging out my military service. I wasn’t in the Far East; I was in southern Russia. But those divisions in the Far East had the same structure and armaments as the one in which I was serving.
They were given the command to shoot down the spy plane.
And not a single one of them was able to deliver that command.
In one of them the men were drunk, in the other the missile-loading equipment was faulty, in the third one the signal didn’t get from the control bunker to the starting platform, in the fourth one . . . well who knows, maybe a bear had rubbed its backside against the outside of the barracks, and the men were busy trying to prise open the weapon-room door so that they could scare off their furry guest.
Not one single damned rocket division managed to do what it had been put on this earth to do.
The possible spy plane flew undisturbed over Kamchatka, over the Sea of Okhotsk, and arrived above Sakhalin Island. By this time it was clear that the rocket divisions couldn’t be counted on. No one could be sure that the men on Sakhalin were sober, or that all the equipment was in proper working order. So the air force was dispatched. And it was they, our dear Red Eagles, who blasted the ill-fated passenger plane out of the sky. Incidentally, the trajectory of the Korean plane intersected with the ocean surface just one hundred metres inside the Soviet marine border. The airplane would have needed about one thousandth of a second more in order to be able to splash down in its own territorial waters.
Afterwards heads rolled and ranks were stripped in the Far East. A proper purge was carried out. But that wasn’t the only outcome of this story.
I got to know about the fruits of the Moscow generals’ analytical brainwork the same way as all the other cogs in the giant air defence machine.
The first conclusion: if the dolts in Kamchatka hadn’t managed to load the rocket onto the launch platform, then in future the rocket should be placed in fixed position there.
Yes, let’s put it there permanently. The missile had previously been housed in a special concrete bunker, but now it would be situated right there on the launch ramp. (Oh, what hassle we had trying to camouflage all that stuff!)
The second conclusion: if Kamchatka was full of idiots who had managed to load the rocket into the right place, but didn’t manage to fire it, then one could conclude that there was a high probability of there being similar idiots everywhere else. So from now on they would all have to undergo rigorous training.
What’s more, the Americans had now started to redeploy the Pershing II missile to West Germany. This was a first-strike weapon. So now the Soviet Union had to be even better prepared to strike, and beat America to it—like in a Western film where two cowboys are standing in the square in front of the bar, and the outcome of the standoff depends on who draws their revolver the quickest.
*
I should point out right away that my own rocket was a defensive weapon. Its code name was Vega, and it could take out an enemy plane from a distance of up to two hundred kilometres. If Vega had also been equipped with a tiny nuclear bomb, then a missile like that could have brought down a whole bevy of enemy planes. A whole squadron, since a nuclear explosion would apparently spread a long way through the sky. We certainly had a storage facility for nuclear weapons at our rocket base.
We started conducting endless emergency drills. Each lasting several days. During the day we were lying about somewhere near our rockets, hiding from the officers. Of course a real emergency would happen at night.
Those emergency drills lasted a whole damned eternity. Although I was half crazy from lack of sleep by the end, so I can’t say how long exactly. But months at least.
You would turn in at ten in the evening, hoping to sleep undisturbed until six o’clock as per your entitlement. But no. At midnight or one in the morning the alarm would go off. You would jump into your boots and scurry into position. There you would do what was required of you, or just wait until the men sitting in the control bunkers or by the radar got their stuff done. At two thirty at night you would be back in the sack. At six in the morning it was wake-up as usual. With the standard routine. Exercises, detail, damned rocket servicing, watch duty . . . everything as per usual. Each soldier made up for lost sleep on his own initiative, as best as he could, and as much as he needed. The men started to get moody. Tetchy. Irritable. After a while we started to have the feeling that there was some purpose to all this—although we hadn’t a clue what, exactly. Maybe it was preparation for a real-life scenario. War, in other words.
It didn’t help matters that back in the civilian world one Communist Party General Secretary after another died. During the time I was in the army three of them were buried in the traditional spot by the walls of the Kremlin. Every change of leader meant a new period of uncertainty. People started to wonder whether anyone was actually steering this ship of fools. And whether the Americans were asking the same question. It was a horrible, tense period.
Every night we were woken up some time between midnight and one.
And then suddenly . . .
The alarm. I fling the blanket to the edge of the bed with a practised movement. I jump into my trousers, put on my leg wrappings, boots, jacket, take my belt in my hand, and just have time to button up as I storm out of the barracks. And then my brain manages to process that it is light outside. What the hell . . . ? It had always been dark outside during the emergency drills, but now it is suddenly light. Early morning. Birds are warbling high in the blue sky. The steppe is in full bloom. And I am running to position, still marvelling at how light it is.
With every step that takes me closer to the rocket, foreboding grows inside me. It turns into certitude. And then fear.
This time it’s not a game, this time it’s not training. They mean it this time. ‘They’? Who are ‘they’? I don’t know. The Americans. Or the Russians. Someone. Damn them a thousand times whoever they are. Dear God. Help me God. I don’t want to see my rocket fire. Because when it fires that means that war has started.
God, I don’t want this to be happening.
Some very basic thoughts were pounding away in my head. Very basic. God. I don’t want this to happen.
Then came fear. I have felt fear many times in my life. Different types of fear. From the fear caused by childhood nightmares to fear of death. But the fear I felt there in the south Russian steppe that unnaturally beautiful morning was unique. It wasn’t just fear of death. What can be more important to us than our own selves? There’s been all sorts of clever philosophising on that question. Apparently, whenever someone dies a whole world dies with them. I am the centre of the world, nothing exists outside of me, so when I cease to be everything else ceases with me.
Rubbish, complete and utter rubbish.
As I ran towards that rocket, wrestling with the feeling of horror growing inside me, I understood that there was something infinitely more awful than my own death.
At that moment somewhere in the Tondi district of Tallinn, a ten-year-old girl was sleeping her deep child’s sleep. On the bottom bunk her four-year-old sister was snoring gently. The two of them were sleeping peacefully, maybe dreaming, maybe not. There were hundreds of origami birds piled up in their play area. When the girls woke, they would carry on making them. But there was still time before that. Before the worry and fear came. I don’t know what children’s fear would have looked like. Did a four-year-old feel fear at all? And what exactly was a ten-year-old afraid of? That when the ugly mushroom appeared in the sky they would cease to exist?
Meanwhile, I ran towards my rocket, sure that the world would soon cease to exist. It was no longer me running there on that day. I consisted of nothing but fear.
I have not experienced anything as horrific before or since.
But the world didn’t come to an end that day. Probably. I conclude that based on the fact that I am writing these lines, and because years later I met the same person who as a little girl had made those origami cranes, which she was later badly teased for, since in our materialistic world even ten-year-olds aren’t allowed to believe in miracles.
Although that still doesn’t prove anything in itself.
Of course there is still an abundance of predictions about the end of the world. In 2000 the computers were supposed to go haywire and cause the end of humanity. The Ancient Mayans planned to do the same in 2012. Meanwhile, giant meteorites have been spotted whizzing past us at great speed. And at some point bloodthirsty Nibiru was gnashing its teeth just the other side of Pluto.
It’s all the same to me. I have already survived my end of the world.
Or maybe it’s just that its final enactment has been postponed.
