Estonia

The smallest Baltic republic, and the one that turned a national grievance into a technology state. Estonians speak a Finno-Ugric language related to Finnish and unrelated to Latvian or Lithuanian, and were ruled successively by Danes, the Teutonic Order, Sweden and Russia, with a German-speaking nobility owning the land throughout - serfdom here was abolished in 1816, early, but without land. The national awakening of the nineteenth century organised itself around song festivals, which is why the independence movement of 1987 to 1991 is called the Singing Revolution: hundreds of thousands gathered to sing banned national songs. Independence won in 1918 after a war against both Soviet Russia and Baltic German forces lasted until 1940, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact assigned the country to the Soviet sphere and it was annexed. Deportations to Siberia in 1941 and 1949 removed a substantial fraction of the population, and Russian-speaking workers were settled in the industrial northeast. Independence was restored in August 1991 on the legal theory that the annexation had never been valid. The country digitised government aggressively, introducing online voting in 2005 and e-residency in 2014. It joined the EU and NATO in 2004. A 2007 cyberattack from Russia was among the first against a state. Tallinn is the capital and its medieval old town a World Heritage site. The country has about 1.3 million people. Skype was developed there. Estonia has more than two thousand islands and is largely forested. Its song festival grounds in Tallinn hold audiences of a hundred thousand, and the tradition is recognised by Unesco.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history