Introduction

The perception of the Soviet Union as merely a Russian state has permeated both scholarship and public opinion in the English-speaking West to an appreciably greater degree than within the Soviet Union itself. Early specialists paid little attention to the union republics and to the significance they might have in the political, economic, cultural, and scientific life of the Soviet Union as a whole. A major impetus for change in American Soviet studies came with the cold war and the simultaneous influx of scholars who had fled from Soviet control in Eastern Europe. Many contemporary societal problems in Soviet Estonia probably reflect more the level of urbanization and industrialization than the fact of Soviet rule. Estonia retained from the pre-Soviet period an excellent scientific base, which has been further expanded during the postwar period. Most existing sources on Soviet Estonia are in Estonian, written either in the West or in Soviet Estonia.