Forest brothers

A day of disjointed events, pointing eventually to camping in Soomaa – the marshland – where Estonian partisans hid from Soviet troops during WWII. After packing the tent among sheltering pines in a cold wind, the Toyota Yaris heads northeast, burning through the petrol. It’s supposed to be a hybrid; in reality, I am driving 300kg of half-dead battery around Estonia. A long drive on gravel roads through gloomy spruce forest alternating with light-filled Scotch pine towards a campsite dedicated to the memory of the forest brothers, the Metsavennad, and I am stopped in my tracks at a dead tree placed deliberately across the road. No sign of any campsite, despite a description, map and photos on the Estonian park service website.

A re-enactment of the forest brothers at the placing of a monument, in 2023

On the way back, a wagtail plays chicken ahead of my advancing at 30kmph, landing and then flying ahead and landing again. Maybe it is just being a wagtail. A blunt shape on a dead tree unfolds into a raven, two wingbeats and it vanishes silently into the spruce. Two grey cranes the size of ostriches graze in a field as I retrace my steps; a red squirrel scampers across the road, and atop a chimney tower of an abandoned brickworks, a stork pokes at an untidy nest of sticks and branches.

A 6pm arrival at a campsite by a lazy brown reed-lined river, and gratified to learn that the myriad insects reflected in the sunlight are mayflies. It’s been a dry spring, so few mosquitoes, and easy to brush off the half-hearted attempts at spearing me as I pitch the tent. No ticks yet, a welcome relief; at a 40% chance of contracting some horrible disease from a single bite, they are the most dangerous animal in Estonia, these days anyway.

At their peak, there were some 30,000 forest brothers hiding in the forests and boglands of Soomaa, eluding capture while carrying out sabotage, and living off the land as they could.

A 4.8km nature trail on boardwalks offers a crash course on identifying crowberries, cloud berries (in flower), bilberries, blueberries and cranberries, which all fruit at different times – but that would only feed you, and barely, for a few months of the year. The forest brothers also relied on the support of local people; even so, it was a miserable life, not being able to light a fire or cook food, enduring nights underground in damp earth, and over time their days were numbered.

The 2016 edition of Lonely Planet has a concise and chilling description of what happened to the partisans, around 15,000 killed by 1947. The Soviet secret police infiltrated their ranks and in 1949 rounded up some 20,000 supporters of the Metsavennad and deported them to Siberia. “It was only in 1980 that the final forest brother, Oskar Lillenurm, was found – shot dead in Lääne county.” He was an outlier; the movement had really come to an end by 1956, just as the Soviet Union was getting into its stride, putting down an uprising in Hungary that year, and anticipating the Prague Spring, that repeated this act of kindness in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The topic of Ukraine comes up repeatedly in conversations. Everyone talks about tension, although none of my friends or family look tense. The only tense one is me, struggling along in my basic Estonian, helped out by the English speakers as needed. Talking is now the easy part, but another matter to understand the clipped and chopped sounds of my hosts. The day before I had spoken more Estonian in one day than in my entire life to date – including lunch and dinner the day before - and camping in Soomaa is a truce. An English family touring Europe have lit a fire, which is now burning cheerily in a large steel chiminea as evening falls. Here, at least, there is peace.