Enn Tarto

Enn Tarto (born 25 September 1938 in Tartu) is an Estonian politician who was a leading dissident during the Soviet occupation of Estonia. He was imprisoned from 1956 to 1960, 1962 to 1967, and again from 1983 to 1988 for anti-Soviet activity.

Tarto was involved in nationalist activities since his youth. On November 4, 1956 Enn Tarto and other members of the Estonian Youth Brigade (Eesti Noorte Malev) distributed leaflets in support of Hungarian Revolution, 1956. The message reached the West and via Western broadcasts, the students of Moscow State University. Some of these students plus lecturers were expelled for approving the Hungarians. Later, Tarto met some of these in a prison in Mordovia. For his action, Enn Tarto has been awarded of the Officer Cross of the Merit Order of the Hungarian Republic. After being imprisoned twice, Enn Tarto studied from 1969 to 1971 in Tartu University Estonian philology. As Tarto was accepted to the university, a KGB man dealing with Tarto told him: 'We've already used stick, let's try now carrot as well'. Tarto was exmatriculated in 1971 in connection with his patriotic thinking and actions.

During the late 1970s, when Yuriy Andropov's anti-dissident campaign was at its peak, the dissidents of the three occupied Baltic republics decided to send a joint memorandum to the UN and the major powers. The petition, known as the Baltic Appeal, was directed to the governments of the two German states, the USSR, signatories of the Atlantic Charter and the Secretary General of the UN (Kurt Waldheim). The petition called for the elimination of the consequences of the pact and for self-determination and independence for the Baltic nations. The petition was signed by 37 Lithuanians, 4 Estonians and 4 Latvians. It was handed over to Western representatives in Moscow, August 1979. On August 23, 1979 Baltic Appeal was approved by well-known Moscow dissidents academic Andrei Sakharov, Viktor Nekipelov, Tatyana Velikanova, Malva Landa and Arina Ginzburg. Provided with these names, the document reached West, thus signed by fifty people. A reaction by the international community was the Resolution of the European Parliament, January 13, 1983.

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