City of Cents

The following interview is an excerpt from Eesti Ekspress, originally conducted in English by foreign correspondent Jaak Reisik-Unt:

Good newspaper friends, after many cooperations with our cooperation partners, the looking up of the true identity of blog-writer Mingus allowed to be revealed a contact. This contact agreed to meet with myself in the restaurant Restoran Ö here in the Estonian capital Tallinn. While I am waiting, I am certain of this restaurant being for exclusive people indeed. Already during ten minutes I see President of the Estonian Republic Toomas Hendrik Ilves sitting at a neighbor table with former Environment Minister Villu Reiljan. Now they are standing and shaking one another’s hands. Mr. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves waits while Mr. Reiljan disembarks the doors of the restaurant Restoran Ö. And I have just received a friendly look from the Estonian President. He approaches to myself.


President Toomas Hendrik Ilves: Mr. Reisik-Unt, pleasure to meet you.

R-U: The pleasure is all to me, Mr. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. To what do I owe this pleasure?

Ilves: We had an appointment, didn’t we?

R-U: I have an appointment with a blog-writer who uses pen name Mingus.

Ilves: Shall we sit down then?

R-U: You are Mingus, Mr. Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves?

Ilves: I could not in good conscience allow myself to be considered otherwise.

R-U: This is certainly a shock and surprise! I am shocked and surprised. I was never having to guess it was you, Mr. President Ilves.

Ilves: I hid my true identity well then, it seems. Let’s sit down.

R-U: Yes, of course, certainly, sir. May I ask a question? Why you hide your real self?


Ilves: There were certain things that I believe needed desperately to be said, but you’ll understand that my position could prove quite precarious were I to openly speak of such things. And if I had been open about it, no one would have believed, for as Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, “Who would claim to be that who is not?”

R-U: Indeed. I have always been big fan of his poetry.

Ilves: He’s an actor, in a movie. James Bond?

R-U: Yes I know. He also is a poet.

Ilves: He is? I’ve never heard of that.

R-U: Well he is. And I am big fan. You haven’t read him?

Ilves: No, I can’t say I have.

R-U: That’s ok. You should read him. He’s very normal writer.

Ilves: If you say so.

R-U: Let us to start the interview then. What made you first want to write the blog Tartu – City of Good Thoughts? And why Tartu, not Tallinn? Do you hate Estonians? Why you so angry with my—sorry, “our”—small country Estonia?

Ilves: I think I can remember your questions, but remind me if I don’t. As I said, being a politician, especially the president, affords me little opportunity to speak openly of things that are not of a populist nature. And I like writing. But I was never very good at it. I guess that’s why I studied psychology and ended up working as a DJ for Radio Free Europe and then got into politics. So the two just sort of worked well together.

R-U: And Tartu? You live in Tallinn.

Ilves: That’s just my cover. If I said I lived in Kadriorg, people might suspect it was me. There aren’t many Americans living in Kadriorg.

R-U: But you have so much photographs from Tartu, and the place Karlova.

Ilves: Yeah a lot of them I just stole from the Internet if I didn’t have the right one in my computer. And no one checks piracy in Estonia. It’s safe here.

R-U: So the other photographs you took yourself? No one noticed you walking around?

Ilves: Yes, I took them myself. I used several costumes.

R-U: Really? What are some examples? What was your favorite? Did you dress up to look like Estonian sumo wrestler Baruto?

Ilves: Um, no. But I did wear contacts and regular pants and coat, and not my trademark bowtie and national clothes from Viljandi. Surprisingly, that was enough to go unnoticed.

R-U: I see. And your writing style. You are sometimes much funnier than I thought an Estonian president could be. But sometimes your style seem to fall. I want to say, sometimes your jokes are not funny. Any comment?

Ilves: Thanks for the compliment. But I think that my jokes are funny. If it’s not funny, then it wasn’t a joke. You see, I’m a novice writer. I’m trying to find my voice. I look at the first posts and they’re very different from the last posts. We’ve seen a lot of development, and if it continues at this rate I believe that every man, woman and child in Estonia will be able to understand my humor and what I’m trying to say. I must tread carefully and with caution, however. But if we work together, there is no reason I wouldn’t become the greatest writer ever.

R-U: But Mr. President, it’s just a blog. Do you—

Ilves: That’s Estonia’s problem. We limit ourselves too much with realism. We can’t dream. A lot of people dream of leaving, but these same people are the ones who give up, thinking “What’s the use of cleaning the streets if no one else will do it?” They’d just as easily prefer to live in Finland, where other people do clean the streets.

R-U: Is that Estonia’s problem then?

Ilves: Like every country, and especially small countries, we have a limit to our mentality. A big country, like the US, can have multiple views but they still have a common national character. Our country, as you know, is very small. We don’t have access to that kind of range of different views, so while we do have a national character, ours is from a smaller fundamental base.

R-U: I don’t understand…


Ilves: Most people here tend to think the same way because we’ve all had the same history. Not me, but my people. You don’t have to change the minds of hundreds of millions to make them agree with you. You just have to influence a few. Luckily for Estonian politicians, Estonians are more or less like-minded in their political beliefs simply because there are so few of us. We may not be able to agree on how to arrange voting precincts in our cities, but we all want to stay politically independent of our Eastern Neighbor. Speaking of that, why do we always say “Eastern Neighbor?” It’s pretty obvious we mean Russia. “Eastern Neighbor” sounds like something your poet Sean Connery would say.

R-U: Who?

Ilves: Um, right.

R-U: So you’re saying that due to our size we’re easy to control, to influence?

Ilves: To some extent yes, of course. But my point would be that while we all have common goals—we as in Estonians—there aren’t many of us, and we also have this nasty history of being occupied by all sorts of neighbors. This has created a certain mindset that we still suffer from today.

R-U: Suffer? I would think that we’re a young people and are just now starting to grow—

Ilves: No we are an ancient, proud people. We are a small part of the few who remain from a people once so numerous and widespread that we covered the majority of Europe and what is now modern Russia. We have had the unfortunate fate of occupying a wonderfully important piece of land.

R-U: Wonderful? It’s mostly swamp, and no real resources.

Ilves: That’s not true. We may not have mountains, gold or oil, but we have forests, a renewable resource so long as we take care of it properly. But our greatest resource is our people. The people need taking care of as well. If you don’t care for the forest, the trees will often be unusable. Diseased, too close together (meaning they can never reach full size and potential), and forests need to be diverse. If there are many species of tree and one species is diseased, the forest will still survive.

R-U: So this is to mean that you want immigrants here? Like Germany and Turkish peoples?

Ilves: No, no that’s not what I meant. We have diversification. All the peoples from the former Soviet Union are represented here, and a quarter of the population is non-Estonian. I mean Estonians themselves have to be diverse. Right now, we basically have people in the countryside, and city people. The city people are in turn divided into workers and upper class, the elite. There’s no real middle class. People either scrape by in life—even professors in universities—or they’re fantastically rich. Those who were smart enough and fortunate enough to be able to requisition state assets after reindependence in the early nineties. But these people are not true Estonians. Not my ideal of Estonians, I should say at least.

R-U: What this mean?

Ilves: They took what they could, putting it to good use, too. But they turned their backs on their fellow countrymen. Standard capitalism, but my ideal Estonian is one who pushes forward and pulls others along with him. These people just step on heads.

R-U: But these people—you mean wealthy businessmen—financed your political ascension.

Ilves: That’s just politics. Let’s not talk about that.

R-U: Heh-heh, okay. So what you propose doing to control this?

Ilves: I don’t know. I really don’t know. There are few lessons from history to instruct us here. But to continue with what I was saying, we’ve always been occupied by someone, never allowed to decide for ourselves. This is Russia’s problem too. We’re not so different really. Had we had Russia’s size, and the contemporary history, we would have invaded the rest of the world, too. And Russia has always had a strong central leader, for better or for worse. They’re not used to thinking for themselves politically. Those who do are repressed. It’s not quite the same here of course, but we don’t like being told what to do by people who just a few years ago were the exact same as everyone else. We’ve traditionally been a peasant, agrarian people. One peasant doesn’t like another telling him what to do. The way I see it is stubbornness is a tool. The only way you can really fight an oppressive, occupying power is to drag your feet, refuse to learn the new ways of the master. It is now time for our people to retire this tool. This stubbornness.

R-U: We Estonians are stubborn?

Ilves: Yes. That’s one thing I learned from growing up in the US. People listen to each other.

R-U: They didn’t communicate under Bush. Country was most divided in decades.

Ilves: True. But the Americans can often admit when they are wrong. Estonians cannot. They save that little embarrassment, the kind that everyone in the world has to endure from time to time. They hold on to it, letting it poison them, until the day comes when they can no longer work together. Little things, like not knowing who an actor is. To lose face in front of someone in Estonia is to also lose respect for that person. You’re embarrassed, so now you hate me. And fear of this happening causes a silence, an inability to communicate.

R-U: …

Ilves: Do you have a response?

R-U: I think you’re wrong.

Ilves: That’s all?

R-U: Yes. So in one sentence, how would you describe Estonians?


Ilves: Let me think for a moment. I guess—I guess I’d have to say that we are a people who are strong in resisting the ideals of others—and this is both wonderful and horrible—but I think the Estonian man’s greatest enemy is not the Russian man, it is the Estonian man. We fear one another, we have low self-esteems (this is very important in psychology, I think) and this is a root of a whole host of problems without which we would be one of the strongest nations in the world. Kennedy said it best when he said something about fearing fear.

R-U: Roosevelt you mean?

Ilves: Which one?

R-U: Franklin.

Ilves: No, it was Kennedy.

R-U: I see. And after a year of writing your blog—it is one year, correct?

Ilves: Yes, one year today in fact.

R-U: After one year, have you seen changes in anything you’ve written about?

Ilves: Actually yes, a few areas. More parts of the city use granite for the winter ice on roads instead of that kitty litter stuff. And a lot of businesses are more polite. Probably just due to greater competition with the current economic climate and young people especially being exposed to more of the rest of the world. But still—it’s progress.

R-U: So what your plans are now that you have come out of so-called writer’s closet?

Ilves: Funny way of saying it, and funny that you asked. May I use this interview as my next post?

R-U: Yes.

Ilves: Then this interview is my one hundredth and final post. One hundred posts, one year. Twelve months. Or as we say in Estonian, kaksteist kuud. It’s time to retire Tartu – City of Good Thoughts.

R-U: You’re ending your blog?

Ilves: [Laughing hysterically] Yes.

R-U: What is funny? Please tell me. I want to laugh too.

Ilves: Nothing.

R-U: Do you have any future plans?

Ilves: I’m the President of the Republic of Estonia.

R-U: What you mean?

Ilves: No.

R-U: Um, I meant with writing.

Ilves: Oh that. Yes—restaurant reviews!

R-U: Restaurant reviews?

Ilves: Yep. Every time you dine out is an experience. Food, drink, people. The reviews will really be short stories. True stories, and there will be honest reviews, but it will be a reality-based collection of short stories.

R-U: Can you as President eat out in public and not draw too much attention? Can you afford it?

Ilves: I have disguises, you forget. And I can afford it because I’m a politician.

R-U: Well, Mr. President of the Estonian Republic Toomas Hendrik Ilves, I thank you very much for your time. You are very normal person.

Ilves: Yes, thank you too. And to my readers: See you very soon in a restaurant near you. Thank you for your support! [Whispering] Hey Jaak, can I bum a smoke?

R-U: Yes, of course.

Ilves: Thanks man.

R-U: But you can’t smoke in here. You must to go out.

Ilves: Sure I can. I’m the President.