Estonia historical timeline

Estonia's history is that of a small Finnic people ruled for seven centuries by Danes, Germans, Swedes and Russians, who kept their language through all of it and made a state of it twice in one century. What a visitor sees -- the Hanseatic old town, the Baltic German manors, the Soviet apartment blocks and the glass of the digital state -- is the record of each ruler and of the people underneath.

Chronology

1. 1248 The king of Denmark grants Tallinn, then Reval, the town rights of Lübeck; in 1285 it becomes the northernmost member of the Hanseatic League, and the walled town that Old Tallinn still is takes shape.
2. 1559 After the Livonian order collapses, Estonia passes to the Kingdom of Sweden, whose public schools make it one of the most literate corners of the later Russian Empire.
3. 1710 Russia conquers the whole territory in the Great Northern War, and Estonia stays in the Russian Empire for two centuries. The Swedish century that ended here is the one Estonians remember well -- it is where the literacy came from -- and the Russian one that followed is where the manor houses, the Orthodox churches and the Baltic German landowning class come from.
4. 1869 The first all-Estonian song festival is held in Tartu, the flowering of the national awakening; from 1896 the festival moves to Tallinn.
5. 1918 Estonia declares itself an independent democratic republic in February, fights off the Bolshevik invasion, and in February 1920 wins Soviet Russia's recognition of its independence in perpetuity.
6. 1940 The Soviet Union invades and occupies the country in June and annexes it illegally; around 11,000 people are deported on 14 June 1941; Nazi Germany occupies Estonia later that year and the Soviet army returns in 1944. In March 1949, 20,722 people, 2.5 per cent of the population, are deported to Siberia.
7. 1944 Soviet air raids destroy both of the country's historic cities in the same week of March 1944. Narva, whose baroque old town had been renowned across Europe and had survived practically unchanged until February, was destroyed by the bombing of 6 and 7 March together with fires and explosions set by retreating German troops; the most extensive raid on Tallinn followed on 9 and 10 March, killing 757 people, of whom 586 were civilians. Military damage in Tallinn was minor. During the Soviet era Narva's original inhabitants were not permitted to return and workers were brought in from Russia instead. Narva today is a Russian-speaking city with almost nothing left of the baroque old town.
8. 1944 The Forest Brothers fight a guerrilla war against Soviet forces from 1944 to 1956 -- at least 50,000 partisans across the three Baltic states by some estimates, about 10,000 of them in Estonia, besides their supporters. It ended not in defeat in the field but through infiltration by Soviet secret agents. Twelve years of armed resistance inside living memory is why the occupation is presented in Estonian museums as something that was fought rather than something that happened.
9. 1988 The Singing Revolution: in September a record 300,000 people, more than a quarter of all Estonians, gather in Tallinn for a song festival, and in 1989 some two million people join hands in a 675-kilometre chain across the three Baltic states.
10. 1991 Full independence is restored on 20 August; the last Russian forces withdraw on 31 August 1994; Estonia joins NATO and the European Union in 2004 and adopts the euro on 1 January 2011.
11. 2007 The relocation of the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, sets off two nights of rioting in April -- the worst unrest in Estonia since the Soviet reoccupation of 1944, with one protester fatally stabbed -- and from 27 April a series of cyberattacks hits the websites of the parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters. The direct result was the creation of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, which is still based in the city.
12. 2014 Estonia becomes the first country to offer electronic residency to foreigners, the emblem of a digital state built from the ground up after 1991.

What survived, and how

The old town survived because Tallinn stopped growing inside it: its medieval and Hanseatic structure is wholly preserved, and UNESCO inscribed 113 hectares of it in 1997. The manors survived as schools and museums. The language survived because it was sung -- the song festival tradition carried the nation through the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union alike and finally sang the second out.

What did not survive were the people deported in 1941 and 1949 and the twenty years of the first republic; the memorials to both are in every town, and the de jure continuity of the state, kept alive by diplomats in exile for fifty years, is the legal thread that Estonians take most seriously.