Estonian Protest Fizzles, Paper Says
MOSCOW — A Soviet Estonian newspaper said protesters had defied a ban on demonstrations on the anniversary of an independence declaration in the Baltic republic but failed to attract a large crowd.
Sovietskaya Estonia said protesters gathered on Feb. 24 at a monument to Estonian writer A. X. Tammsaare in the capital of Tallinn despite a local ban on demonstrations.
It said the protest disintegrated when Tallinn’s mayor and other local officials came to the scene and offered the group a nearby public conference hall to air their grievances.
The protesters refused and moved to other parts of the city but “failed to gain mass participation,” the paper said.
The paper, in its Feb. 26 edition which reached Moscow on Sunday, did not mention any arrests, nor did it say how many people were involved in the incident.
The three Baltic Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--for two centuries part of the Russian czarist empire--were all independent nation-states between 1918 and 1940, when they were absorbed into the Soviet Union.
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