Comments on the Role of Vaino Valjas
The Singing Revolution Educational Content • 31m
From 1978 until 1988, Estonian’s Communist Party was led by hard-liner Karl Vaino. In 1988, in order to calm down the Estonian hunger for independence, Gorbachev replaced him with native Estonian Vaino Valjas, a childhood friend of Gorbachev’s with a much softer approach than Karl Vaino. Valjas was a dedicated Communist who was not seeking Estonian independence, yet he tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, a great deal of Estonian independence aspirations. So was he a good guy or a bad guy? This clip starts with some Estonian perspectives on Valjas, but it predominantly consists of Vaino Valjas’s own words about what happened. You can judge for yourself. It is rare to have access to such “inside baseball”.
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