16-year-old Leo Kunnas sat on the train with determination. He planned to leave Soviet-occupied Estonia behind and join the French Foreign Legion. The year was 1984.
Kunnas had packed the necessary equipment in his backpack. Clothes, food and money for a train ticket. The money would not be enough to return.
The train crossed the Estonian border and went through Belarus to western Ukraine. In the city of Chernivtsi, near the Romanian border, Kunnas got off the train and continued his journey on foot.
It had been four days since he had left behind his childhood home in the village of Kliima in southern Estonia. The hiking went smoothly in clear autumn weather. Kunnas planned to walk to Romania and continue from there through Yugoslavia.
Then his luck turned. The Soviet state security police KGB found Kunnas.
The young man was arrested and taken back to Estonia for questioning. To the KGB investigator, Kunnas claimed that he had been going to fight on the side of the Nicaraguan communists, or Sandinistas.
– The researcher asked if I myself believed the story I was telling them. I said “of course, it’s absolutely true”, Kunnas, 54, recalls now almost 40 years later.
The KGB soon found out that Kunnas had hidden weapons near his home. He had received them from his older friend who had been drafted into the Soviet army.
The municipality was suspected of crossing the border and possessing weapons. He was transported to Patarei Soviet prison in Tallinn, known for its harsh conditions.
The place was also known as Pre-Investigation and Isolation Facility No. 1.
Violence and spoiled food
Now Leo Kunnas – an Estonian MP and national defense expert – is standing in the middle of a cramped, dusty cell.
The paint is peeling off the walls. The room still has a bunk bed welded from iron bars, where young Kunnas slept. The cell has the same small table attached to the floor, the same chairs.
There is a sign “128” on the door. Kunnas always remembers those numbers. Here he was a remand prisoner for seven months.
We have returned to the place with Kunnas when it is possible. Soon, some of Patarei’s cells will be converted into offices and apartments.
Unpleasant memories return to Kunnas’s mind. Life in Patari was survival from day to day.
Kunnas was in a cell alone with another minor inmate, but they didn’t always get along. In the small space, the situations escalated.
Violence was part of everyday life in prison. The guards beat Kunnas several times. He also had to see others being hit and kicked.
The food of the day was usually a bread ration of a few hundred grams, millet porridge and potato wedges. Fish was sometimes offered, but it was often spoiled.
– No one would eat that food these days. We ate because we were hungry and there was nothing else.
Kunnas thanks his faith in God – with the help of his faith, he got through that phase as a young man.
The light that never went out
Leo Kunnas was eventually sentenced to a total of two years and three months in prison for crossing the border, possessing weapons and attempting to escape.
After seven months in Patarei, he served the rest of his sentence in other Soviet prisons.
When he was released, Kunnas was a man in his twenties. A few years after his release from prison, he wrote a book about his time in Patarei. Kustumatu valguse Maailm (The World of Unextinguished Light) was published in 1990-1991.
There is still a light bulb in the border of Cell 128’s ceiling, to which the book’s title refers. It dazzled the prisoners day and night.
The book describes how some of the prison guards clearly enjoyed violence and subjugating the prisoners.
“The difference between hitting and hitting is that some go to jail, others get money and glory,” Kunnas writes.
According to him, the sin of about every tenth Estonian youth he met in prison was some act against the Soviet system, which was classified as hooliganism.
“The state is all-powerful. It defeats those who dare to be against it, no matter how the opposition manifests itself,” Kunnas describes his thoughts in the book.
The state did not overrule the municipality.
– In Patarei prison, I began to think that force can only be resisted with force.
Estonia must be ready to defend itself
After being released from prison, Kunnas applied to the Soviet army to do conscript service. In the Soviet Union, conscription lasted two years. According to Kunnas, the Soviet army has similarities with the current Russian army.
– In Ukraine, you can see that the problem in the Russian army is that there is not enough discipline. They cannot perform properly.
Later, he wanted to work to ensure that no one would have to experience the same as Estonian political prisoners in Soviet prisons again.
In 1990, Kunnas was involved in founding the Estonian Guardian Council. It is still part of the territorial defense of the Estonian National Defense.
He served in the Estonian army and in the Iraq war in the US forces. Kunnas also studied at the Finnish National Defense University several times. Nowadays he is a reserve lieutenant colonel.
Kunnas is currently the only Estonian who was a prisoner during the Soviet era in the Estonian parliament. He was elected as a Member of Parliament from the ranks of the conservative People’s Party (Ekre) in the 2019 elections.
As a Member of Parliament, Kunnas has emphasized the importance of a strong national defense. He is known in his home country as an expert on defense policy and warfare.
Kunnas has put forward the idea that Estonia must be ready for a possible war with Russia. Estonia has been developing its defense since the 1990s. Nevertheless, according to Kunnas, national defense is still at an insufficient level.
However, Estonia is investing large sums in its defense. During the beginning of the year, the country’s government decided to give the Estonian Defense Forces a total of 852 million euros in additional funding for the years 2022−2025.
This year, Estonia’s defense budget is 2.3 percent of gross domestic product. Next year, it will be increased to more than 2.5 percent.
– In about four to five years, we will get our defense to roughly the same level as it is in Finland relative to the population, if the government’s promises are kept, says Kunnas.
Finland’s NATO membership improves Estonia’s security
Estonia joined the military alliance NATO in 2004. The then foreign minister and later president of the country that became independent in 1991 Lennart Meri thought it was important to bind Estonia as closely as possible to the West.
Estonia’s support for Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership has been strong. Estonia was among the first to ratify the countries’ NATO memberships.
According to the municipality, the NATO membership of Finland and Sweden improves the security of Estonia and all the Baltic countries. He emphasizes that Estonia will defend itself if necessary, but the country benefits from NATO countries nearby.
– If war broke out, we could increase air support and Finland and Sweden could keep sea connections open. Sweden has a good navy.
Russia breaks all agreements
Kunnas has long talked about Russia’s danger to its neighboring countries.
In 2008 and 2014, Kunnas wrote a series of articles in which he discussed Russia’s attacks on Georgia and Chechnya and the annexation of Crimea. The message of the articles was that Russia has not changed at all since the time of the Soviet Union. That’s why Estonia should also be awake.
In 1994, Ukraine concluded a non-violence agreement with Russia, the United States and Great Britain and gave up nuclear weapons. In 2014, Russia violated the agreement by occupying the Crimean peninsula.
– Now Russia has gone the way of the Soviet Union in Ukraine and is breaking all agreements. Reasonable cooperation with Russia is impossible.
In 2016, Kunnas wrote the book Sõda 2023. In his book, Kunnas wrote that Russia would attack Ukraine and the Baltic countries at the same time and would also try to conquer Sweden’s Gotland and Finland’s Åland.
In his book, he estimates that Russia is attacking countries’ borders with traditional means of warfare. The assessment was based on how Russia had previously acted in Chechnya and Donbass in eastern Ukraine.
According to Kunnas, Russia’s attack on Ukraine has now shown that in today’s world, war is waged on a large scale and in a conventional way. Imaginations that such a war would not break out again have turned out to be delusions.
– However, Ukraine is too big a piece for Russia. Its population is just under a third of Russia’s. Russia cannot win Ukraine, Kunnas states.
Estonia should not have surrendered
Leo Kunnas has also written the script for the film 1944, which depicts World War II in Estonia. The message of the film, which premiered in 2015, was that Estonia should not have surrendered to the Soviet Union in World War II.
Since 1920, Estonia had the Tartu Peace Treaty with the Soviet Union, and since 1934, a non-aggression pact, and since 1939, an aid and base agreement.
Estonia sided with the Soviet Union in World War II. In 1939, the country allowed the Soviet Union to place bases on its soil.
– What did the Soviet Union do with a small ally? Occupied the Baltic countries.
In the end, 55,000 Estonians ended up in the Red Army and around 72,000 on the German side. The Estonians had to fight against each other. The losses were great.
– If you don’t fight for yourself, others will make you fight in their own army. I wanted my film to make it clear that such history should not be repeated.
Was it a dream or real?
The experiences in Patarei prison are now a distant memory for Kunnas. Her three children are now 14, 17 and 19 years old. They are roughly the same age as Kunnas himself was when he went to prison.
When the children want their father to talk about prison time, he tells them to read first Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Ivan Denisovich Day. Written in 1962, the work describes the day of one prisoner in a Soviet prison camp.
Only after this, Kunnas hopes that his children will read his father’s book about his time in prison. Although Soviet-era prisoners were treated very harshly in the 1980s, prison conditions in the 1940s and 1950s were even harsher.
According to Kunnas, the generation born after the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot even imagine what the Soviet era was like.
– Sometimes it’s hard to believe even yourself, whether it was a dream or real.
But it was true. The numbers 128 on Sell’s door tell about it.
What thoughts did the story evoke? You can discuss the topic until Thursday, September 1, at 11 p.m.
Modified on 31.8. at 8:11 am: Corrected Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s spelling and the Finnish title of the book Ivan Denisovich’s day.