Akadeemia
Eurozine
Akadeemia
2007-09-06
Abstracts for Akadeemia 9/2007
Ivo Juurvee
Did interwar Estonia possess a foreign intelligence service? (Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1920-1940). I
Nowadays it is common for every country to have at least three intelligence/counterintelligence services -- internal, foreign, and military service. Two of them were definitely present in the interwar Republic of Estonia. The Security Police was a traditional internal service dealing with counterintelligence and the Second Department of the General Staff dealt with traditional military intelligence. This article discusses whether the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could be considered a foreign intelligence service.
The Information Department was formed as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in April 1920; its first head was Eduard Laaman, a 32-year-old journalist. The department's two main objectives were public relations and information gathering abroad. The staff of the Information Department was limited, with only 2-4 persons in its central apparatus. The people were well educated; mostly they had studied law or economics at the University of Tartu or at the University of St Petersburg. Many of the employees had previously worked as journalists.
Tiiu Vadi
We were students in Tartu. II
From 25-29 March 1949, the Soviet occupation regime carried out its largest repression in Estonia's history. About 20 700 people were deported to West Siberia and North Kazakhstan in cattle cars -- 80 per cent of them women, children, and the elderly. The violence was aimed at breaking the resistance of forest brothers (anti-Soviet guerrillas) and destruction of the class of farm owners (or kulaks, as the Soviets called them). This measure contributed to the collectivization of agriculture and suppression of rural population under the Soviet rule.
Farmers' children as part of the intelligentsia were also under threat. The author depicts the fate of deported students. In the first part of the article, she describes after-war Tartu and the university, the night of deportation, the journey to Siberia, and life on the collective farms of the Cherlak district in the Omsk region where the students from Tartu were initially settled.
Madis Kõiv
Reminiscences from the Department of Physics at Tallinn Polytechnic Institute, 1953-1961. Excerpts
The author ponders why he remained at Tallinn Polytechnic Institute for eight years, not for three, which was the obligatory term of service for a university graduate. He speaks about colourful personalities among the staff, their mutual relations, about research and the social climate of Estonia after Stalin's death.
Anne Burghardt
How the all-night service reached the Russian Orthodox Church
The article discusses the development of the all-night divine service (Gr. agrypnia) and its adoption by the Russian Orthodox Church.
An essential aspect in the formation of the all-night service as well as of the hourly prayers or officium in the Eastern Church is the synthesis of the hourly prayers of the cathedral (or town) congregations that were mostly sung and the hourly prayers in convents that were based on recitation of psalms, or psalmody. A special role in the emergence of this synthesis as well as in the development of the all-night vigil of the Jerusalem typicon or St. Sabba's typicon in the first millennium belongs to the hourly prayers of the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Palestinian monasticism, where the tradition of St. Sabba's Monastery occupied a special place. Although Sabba cannot be personally regarded as the author of the typicon bearing his name, we can speak about the influence of the tradition of his monastery on the formation of this typicon. At the beginning of the second millennium, the Jerusalem typicon or the typicon of St. Sabba's Monastery was adopted nearly everywhere in the Orthodox East. It is unclear whether the all-night service as an inseparable part of this typicon was an old service re-discovered in the early second millennium or a new one, although influenced by the old tradition. The oldest manuscripts of the typicon mentioned, which also include the full order of the all-night divine service, date back to as late as the twelfth to thirteenth centuries.
After the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, the Jerusalem typicon or the typicon of St. Sabba's Monastery was also taken into use in the congregations of Constantinople. It was namely the Constantinople version of the all-night service that reached the Russian Orthodox Church in the late fourteenth century. Originally, the Russian agrypnia had several specific features, which disappeared after Patriarch Nikon's reforms in the second half of the seventeenth century. After that, the all-night service in the Russian Orthodox Church gradually began to shorten and finally reached its present-day length, which is a few hours.
Vladimir Sazonov
Early Sumerian kingship in the twenty-eighth to twenty-fourth centuries BCE
This paper deals with the complicated question of early Sumerian kingship (twenty-eighth to twenty-fourth centuries BCE). The first historical ruler in Southern Mesopotamia (Sumer) whose name is known was En-Mebaragesi. He took the title of lugal Kis (King of Kis) and ruled in the North Sumerian city-state Kis in approximately the twenty-eighth to twenty-seventh centuries BCE. Some inscriptions of En-Mebaragesi have been found, which were written in the Sumerian language. Those inscriptions designate the beginning of the historical period in Sumerian history. In Near Eastern archaeology, that is called the Early Dynastic Period. In ancient Sumer, all city-states had their own independent rulers. The most important independent city-states of the period were Kis, Uruk, Ur, Lagas, Adab, Umma, etc.
The rulers of the period, however, did not have an absolutist status in their states. We have to conclude that the Early Dynastic rulers were actually heads or rulers of the priesthood -- en, sanga, or ensi -- or military rulers, who took the title lugal (later translated as "king"). Lú means "man" in Sumerian and gal -- "great"; thus, lugal is "a great man", "a powerful man", "the lord", or rather "the prince". The term lugal can also be translated as the field commander of all the troops of his own city-state. Lugal, en, or ensi were the most important men in state hierarchy, but they were not "real kings". Their power was limited in many respects. In the social life of a city-state, different kinds of assemblies (unken, etc.) or public meetings might have also had an important role in decision-making, but considering the lack of trustworthy evidence, it is not possible to determine the functions of different assemblies.
Finally, we can conclude that the Sumerian royal ideology was never despotic, and the early Sumerian rulers (en, ensi, lugal) were never strong absolutist kings like the later Neo-Assyrian kings, such as Tiglatpilesar III, Sargon II, Sanherib, Essarhaddon (Assarhaddon), Assurbanipal, or Old Persian kings like Kyros, Darius I, Xerxes, Alexander of Macedonia, and Seleucids' kings.
During the whole history of Ancient Mesopotamia, the concept of the ruler, rulership, and the ruler's ideology changed dramatically. Late Mesopotamian kings (Babylonian, Assyrian, Old Persian, etc.) were not only priest-rulers over a single city, but "hegemons" over several small city-states. They became strong powerful kings or emperors who ruled over great empires (e.g. the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom or the Old Persian Empire, the Empire of Alexander of Macedonia, the Parthian Empire, the Sassanid Empire).
In the Early Dynastic Period, a Sumerian ruler had no chance to become an absolutist, despotic king (Akkadian sarru). The first strong kings in Mesopotamia were Akkadian kings (sarru) -- Sargon I, Rimis, Manistusu, and Naram-Su'en (twenty-fourth to twenty-third centuries BCE), who established the first strong centralized states in Mesopotamia and who called themselves "the King of the Universe", "the Mighty King of Akkad", and "the King of the Four Corners".
Elmar Kirotar
What will happen next?: Diary from 1931-1940. I
Elmar Kirotar entered the service of the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1919. From 1920 to 1923 he worked at the Estonian embassy in Helsinki and until 1926 at the London embassy. In November 1926 Kirotar was appointed first secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and acting head of its political bureau, in 1927 he became head of the bureau. In September 1930, he became head of the League of Nations bureau at the political department; from May 1933, he was counsellor at the Moscow embassy. From 1 September 1936, he was protocol chief of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from June 1939 to August 1940 director of its administrative and legal department. In July 1940, Kirotar did not return from a posting to Sweden. From 1941 to 1944 he was a liaison officer at the general staff of the Finnish army. In September 1944 he returned to Sweden and worked until 1969 as a translator and clerk at the US embassy in Stockholm. Elmar Kirotar's diary provides an insight into the functioning of the Republic of Estonia and the complicated international situation in the 1930s.