ABSTRACT
Existence of underground publications in Estonia was reported in the 1970s, but the major semi regular one was started in 1978, six years after the Lithuanian Chronicle. In retrospect, the pace of history already had begun to quicken with the various forms of protest in 1980. In contravention of Soviet law pertaining to short prison terms, Jiiri Kukk was removed from Estonia, to Murmansk and then toward the Urals. The challenge potentially most serious to the Soviet regime, however, did not arise from the independence-oriented dissent or from the gradualist opposition but from a completely new underground movement that surfaced in summer 1981: the Democratic People's Front of the Soviet Union, the centre of which was in Estonia. Economic stagnation deepened, but native Estonian communists made their inroads into the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic top administration. The move seemed to be another reverse for home-grown communists.
