DANGER IN TOMORROWLAND

DANGER IN TOMORROWLAND

A nation driven by technological genius, shaken by a monument scandal and vulnerable to Russian meddling. We're talking about Estonia, of course

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STEVE FRIESS

This is the kind of place where World War III could start.

A frigid river about half a mile wide snakes between Estonia’s third-largest city, Narva, and the Russian outpost of Ivangorod, known for a massive waterfront fortress built in the 15th century to intimidate Hanseatic wouldbe aggressors. That fortress faces a less

imposing but even older structure across the river:

Narva Castle, erected by

the Danes in the 1200s to

mark their dominance of the region. The two structures are now the only tourist attractions on either side of the water in this largely obscure corner of northeastern Europe—a pair of forts where Middle Ages enthusiasts can imagine rows of archers and cannon gunners facing off.

But the quiet majesty of those two opposing bluffs belies what the river between them has represented since the last decade of the 20th century: one of the most populous border crossings between Russia and its five neighboring North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries. More ethnic Russians live in Narva than in Ivangorod. Given a choice between the Putin regime and one of the most United States-friendly and technologically advanced countries in the world, they have opted to live like perpetual foreigners rather than as natives in the land of their ancestors.

With a population of about 1.3 million— roughly even with New Hampshire’s—Estonia is among Putin’s greatest humiliations. Upon attaining independence in 1991, the country pivoted from abject poverty and a widespread lack of indoor plumbing and phone service to a prosperous culture of venture-capitalized start-ups where voting, banking and almost every government function is conducted via the internet.

This, of course, stands in sharp contrast to the economic and geopolitical malaise and isolationism emanating from Moscow. Until 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea—on the rationale that the area was historically Russian and populated mostly by ethnic Russians yearning to be repatriated—few thought seriously about Putin’s designs on places like Narva or even Estonia as a whole. Estonia is a member of both the European Union and NATO; a military action by Russia would, in theory, be met as a declaration of war against the West. In normal times, Article 5 of the NATO charter would kick in and the collective force of the West’s most powerful militaries would be obligated to defend their fellow member nation.

These are not, however, normal times. The United States has elected a president who questions the NATO alliance’s viability and who is quicker to condemn Arnold Schwarzenegger’s TV ratings than anything Putin says or does. Russian cybertricksters, having succeeded at ginning up anti-Ukrainian sentiment among ethnic Russians living in Crimea with a steady diet of fake news, are actively pumping the same kind of noxious ephemera across the Narva River via radio, TV and social media. The short-term game is to undermine ethnic Russians’ confidence and sense of security in Estonia. As for the long term, the scenario laid out to me independently by several Eastern European experts is alarming. “Say an Estonian is supposedly heard shouting, ‘You bloody Russians, get out of our country,’ and they get into a fight and the Estonian kills a Russian,” posits political scientist Kristina Kallas, director of Narva College, a campus of Estonia’s University of Tartu. “The local Russians would definitely start protesting in the street, the Estonians would send in riot police, and then Russia would use this.” To do

what? Kenneth Geers, a cybersecurity expert who helped set up NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, offers this outcome: “The Russians in Narva will put up a flag on the town hall, and the Russian government might send support, saying they need to protect the Russians.

And what that does is challenge the integrity of NATO, the credibility and legitimacy of NATO.”

The what-ifs only

get uglier from there. Does NATO engage Russia on behalf of tiny Estonia? Does President Trump feel compelled to send young Americans into battle in yet another foreign land? Or does NATO condemn the intrusion, as it did Putin’s Crimea annexation, but fall short of militarily enforcing the existing boundaries out of fear of sparking an even wider conflagration?

If all that sounds far-fetched, consider the fact that this spring a NATO battalion of 1,000 troops relocated to an Estonian military base about 90 miles west of Narva.

Russia responded by conducting airborne military drills involving some 2,500 soldiers and 40 aircraft near its borders with Estonia and fellow Baltic state Latvia. Two weeks before I arrived in Estonia in late August, the Maryland Army National Guard had sent 10 A-10 Warthog attack planes to Estonia for joint training with Estonian and NATO troops. About a month after my visit, Russia conducted a war-games exercise known as Zapad with upward of 10,000 troops in its Baltic-bordering ally Belarus.

But perhaps the most visceral sign of those tensions came the day I arrived. It was Taasiseseisvumispaev, or Day of Restoration of Independence, a public holiday commemorating Estonia’s official separation after 51 years of occupation by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, then the Soviet Union again. On my flight from Munich to Tallinn, passengers had enjoyed champagne and sardine snacks with miniature Estonian flags toothpicked onto them. In Tallinn that night there were fireworks and a rock concert, where the city’s mayor touted how much the country

had advanced in the past 26 years.

Yet in Narva, where more than 80 percent of residents are ethnically Russian, there were no commemorations. No fireworks. No concerts. As the Russian translator I hired for my visit there told me, “That’s a holiday for Estonians. It’s just another day here. We are different here.”

“Our national agenda,” an effusive, wildhaired man named Marten Kaevats tells me, “is to be the model country for testing out

new technology. That’s what it’s all about.” We are riding through central Tallinn on the world’s first fully self-driving, street-legal bus available for public use. The ride itself— a six-seat electric vehicle chugging along at a speed equivalent to that of most golf carts— is far less exciting than it sounds, but it is a triumph nonetheless for Kaevats, who at the age of 32 serves as the Estonian government’s

national digital advisor. “It’s not about the technology; it’s about the mind-set,” he says. “It’s about open-mindedness. It’s about trying new things. This is something we are good at. Our society accepts it.”

This is the story about Estonia that the people of Tallinn, who live 120 miles and a world away from Narva, want to tell—and it’s certainly a good and true one. It’s the tale of a penniless, suppressed country that, upon retaking its sovereignty, decided to go full-on capitalist, pro-Western and modern in away no other former republic of the Soviet Union did. In fact, Tallinn today may just be the most American-friendly foreign city I have ever visited. The gift shops in its ancient Old Town section, where thousands of tourists flock for day trips during Scandinavian fjordviewing cruises, sell nesting dolls and refrigerator magnets adorned with Donald Trump’s

face. (Playing geopolitics decidedly down the middle, some shops sell the same items with Putin’s image on them.)

No other former Soviet state pivoted away from Moscow quite as quickly and definitively as Estonia. Estonian voters swept out anyone even remotely connected to the gloomy past, ushering in as its first elected prime minister the then 32-year-old Ronald Reagan fanboy Mart Laar. His defense minister was 27. “Anybody who was older than about 35 was suspect because they had been embedded in the Soviet system and so maybe they were KGB agents,” says Ahti Heinla, 45, who was a chief technical architect for Skype, the now-ubiquitous app and Estonia’s proudest export. “The people who went into government were idealists, innovators. If you don’t have any idea what you’re doing and nobody around you has any idea what you’re doing, there’s nobody to tell you what you can’t do.”

Laar, a disciple of the American free-market economics icon Milton Friedman, instituted a flat income tax, abolished trade tariffs, privatized state-run industries, balanced the federal budget and established new money whose value was pegged to the deutsche mark. Throughout the 1990s the country took a blank slate and populated it with an online land registry, a stateof-the-art telecommunications infrastructure and a school system that provided internet access to everyone. Today, virtually every government function takes place online, and Estonian citizens carry chip-enhanced ID cards that allow them to review health records, cast votes and conduct banking. In that environment, young tech entrepreneurs felt emboldened. A group of innovators that included Heinla developed the peer-to-peer file-sharing app Kazaa, and by 2003, Heinla and his partners had helped launch Skype. In 2004, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined the European Union and NATO—the first and still only former Soviet republics to do so.

Such an all-encompassing online life, with so much intimate digital interaction with the government, would probably be a nonstarter in the United States, where individual privacy rights and antigovernment hostility are ideological cornerstones. But Estonians, out of necessity and despite an otherwise per-

vasive pro-American sensibility, have embraced the trade-offs that allow the system they have. “As a country, we didn’t have any alternative,” says Priit Alamae, founder and GEO of Nortal, aTallinn-based firm that provides the Estonian government with much of its technology infrastructure. “We don’t have oil; we don’t have any natural resources. We have our brains. Being a small independent country is a real luxury. The only way for us to run that country and make sure we can afford it is to trust technology.” There’s also the sense that as pervasive as the government is, it’s still manageable. As Kaevats puts it, “We don’t have Big Brother here. We have only a small brother, and small brothers are easier, because when they’re bad you can just kick the shit out of them.”

Tallinn’s shiny facade suggests a country bustling with start-ups and all the youth and vigor that typically represents. I meet a few Estonians at a restaurant in a gentrified section of the city that is widely referenced, without irony or intentional insult, as “the hipster area.” I order pumpkin-andchickpea falafel with a quinoa salad and cashew cream. My dining companions include 23-year-old Markus Villig, GEO of the European ride-sharing app Taxify, and 30-year-old Siim Saat, whose start-up sells an eco-friendly additive for toilet paper to replace pipe-clogging wet wipes. Saat gushes about Estonia’s regulatory environment: “It takes you $100 and five minutes online to register a business. Most of my friends who are under 20 already have their first companies. They’re offering design services; they’re programming. It’s so easy.”

The Estonian technology success story is so famous by now that it’s almost a cliche. When President Barack Obama visited Tallinn in 2014, fresh off the disastrous Obamacare rollout, he quipped, “I should have called the Estonians when we were setting up our health care website.”

Tallinnites certainly have just cause for their pride and optimism. But as I would soon learn, they also live in a bubble that favors upwardly mobile city dwellers fed on pumpkinand-chickpea falafel. Even in tiny Estonia, not everyone shares equally in the bounty, and not all of the much-touted technology works as advertised.

More than a decade after Estonia gained independence, its public spaces remained adorned with tributes to Soviet glory. Most notable was a monument showcasing a sixand-a-half-foot-tall bronze statue of a generic

Red Army soldier overlooking several Soviet military graves, all in honor of the 1944 “liberation” of the country from Nazi rule. To native Estonians, 1944 was merely the year their oppressors changed faces, and it unnerved the powers that be in Tallinn that the site had become, in the first years of the new century, aplace for ethnic Russians to gather. Thus, in early 2007, the Estonian government decided to relocate the statue and the graves to an allpurpose military cemetery about a mile away. But as the United States realized this summer in Charlottesville, Virginia, moving historical monuments—even ones that represent murder and hatred to many—can be a surprisingly fraught exercise. It can also be a convenient excuse for sowing instability.

On April 26, 2007, when the Estonian government cordoned off the area surrounding the statue in preparation for the move, two nights of protest ensued—some of it violent. Thousands in Tallinn and in ethnic Russian strongholds such as Narva clashed with police in what is known as Pronksioo, or the Bronze Night riots. Amid all this chaos came something the world had never seen before: a vicious, unprecedented cyberattack that shut down Estonian banking, media and governmental operations. It remains unclear whether the Kremlin itself orchestrated or authorized any of it, but investigators say the denial-of-service attacks—in which malicious bots besiege systems with so much spam and so many automated service requests that they overload and crash—came almost exclusively from Russia-based IP addresses. Security experts unanimously agree this was the first time a country had suffered a politically motivated cyberattack. And to this day most of them blame the entire affair on Russian propaganda that first inflated the importance of the statue, then exploited its removal to assert the notion that ethnic Russians are unwelcome in Estonia.

The year 2007 would unfold as a watershed for global cybersecurity jitters. Whatever the intent, the attack made Estonia in general and Tallinn in particular an international epicenter of cybersecurity. Later that same year, researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory revealed for the first time that a cyberattack on an electrical grid could cause real-world destruction. Those events shook the West out of its reverie, and it began to address cybersecurity as a matter of national defense. By the end of 2008, NATO had opened the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn. It has since grown into the world’s foremost

center for cybersecurity training and applied research—a 17-nation institution housed in a heavily guarded military compound built, oddly enough, in the 1880s by the then occupying Russian Imperial Army.

That all this sits in Estonia is no accident. Sven Sakkov, who stepped down in August after a two-year tenure as director of the center, says attempted cyberattacks from Russia are constant, with Estonia in many ways a convenient test target. “If you are a very backward nation, you’re not really impacted by a cyberattack, but Estonia is one of the most digitally advanced countries,” he says. “Estonia has been under hybrid attack for the past 25 years, and I think we have been doing very well. Our systems have been very resilient.”

Indeed, Estonian leaders look on the West’s alarm over Russian meddling in its elections with a knowing sense that they have been contending with these tactics for decades. Fake news has been rampant since “even before independence, so there’s a certain degree of schadenfreude,” former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik lives tells me from his office at Stanford University, where he now teaches. “When others say, ‘Oh my God, the Russians are lying about us’—well, the Russians have been lying about us for 25 years.”

What is most striking is that, given the events of 2007, the Estonian public chose to double down on technology rather than rein it in. Indeed, away from the cybersecurity experts and the NATO think tanks in Tallinn, the entire discussion of an imminent Russian threat— either online or in real life—is treated with varying degrees of derision and defensiveness. At my dinner in the hipster area, I bring up the increased NATO and Russian troop activities at the border and a 2016 New York Times report about Estonia’s volunteer defense force learning to build improvised explosive devices in case it must someday mount an insurgency against Russian occupiers. My dinner companions bristle. “When you write, ‘Oh, this small nation that prepared for war,’ everybody wants to read it because of course Russia is bad,” Saat

groans. Martin Ruubel, president of the Estonia branch of the security-software firm Guardtime, insisted the day before, “It’s like earthquakes in California. It’s a thing, but you don’t obsess over it every day.”

As confident as Estonians are in their technology dependence—“We are quite sure our system is unhackable,” Kaevats tells me about the country’s electronic-voting program— there is evidence it’s not nearly as secure as proclaimed. In 2013 the government invited an international group of experts in electiontechnology security to see its setup. That attempt to show off backfired when the group issued a scathing report in 2014, in which it concluded, “Operational security is lax and inconsistent, transparency measures are insufficient to prove an honest count and the software design is highly vulnerable to attack from foreign powers.” The government shrugged off these claims, insisting the conditions under which the researchers say they could undermine the system were unrealistic. Nonetheless, Estonian scientists went to work patching up the system. They subsequently published a paper, laying out complex mathematical fixes to shore up security while also acknowledging the 2014 critique by

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sniffing, “Such measures can always be questioned.” And yet, just one week after my Tallinn visit, a different international group of researchers informed the Estonian government of a security risk in the chips embedded in some 750,000 ID cards issued over the past three years.

Some do sound the alarms. Jaan Priisalu, a former general director of the Estonian government’s Information System Authority and

co-founder of Tallinn’s Department of the Estonian Defence League’s Cyber Unit, points to active cyberthreats emanating from Russia as a harbinger of increasing aggression by the Kremlin. “This type of conflict happens in cyberspace long before it actually breaks out into the real world,” he says.

To the extent that Tallinn is upbeat and shiny, Narva is bleak and downtrodden. Its main train depot is desolate—no vending machines, no cab stand, a bathroom too foul to use—and most thoroughfares are bereft of people and cars on an ordinary Thursday afternoon. Even its most picturesque point, the castle that faces the fort across the Narva River, exudes the stillness of a place where consequential events once happened but don’t anymore.

Narva is predominantly Russian because most of the ethnic Estonians who lived there before World War II either died at the hands of Nazis or were forced to leave in mass deportations under Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in r949. Moscow then sent Russians to inhabit Estonia, and when it declared its independence from the USSR, Russian resi-

dents throughout the country had the choice of staying and becoming Estonian citizens or moving back to the motherland. (A third option allowed them to remain in a form of stateless limbo known as holding a “gray passport.”) In the 1990s, about 100,000 ethnic Russians reportedly did go back to Russia,

but today about 330,000 live in Estonia by choice. In one two-year span earlier this decade, just 37 ethnic Russians relocated from Estonia, according to the business-oriented digital media outlet Quartz. No doubt that stings a nationalist like Putin. “A NATO country is right on your border showing that

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there is this alternative to how your people can live,” Priisalu says.

Although I didn’t find cells of Russian separatists in Narva awaiting word from Moscow, I did find a streak of disaffection. While Tallinn booms and gleams, federal money for infrastructure, schools and new industries and jobs is slow to arrive here. Just as Midwesterners believe Americans who live on the

coasts don’t understand or care about them, so too do ethnic Russians in Narva radiate a sense of grievance at being ignored, slighted and left behind. As Kallas of Narva College says when she urges me to visit the city, “I’m worried that the Estonian government is so focused on technology that they are missing the deep part of the social conflict that is still happening and they are not dealing with.”

Theories abound as to why Putin might find a place like Narva of interest. The 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia are seen as an exploration

of the West’s digital vulnerabilities, and the 2014 seizure of Crimea was a clear test of whether an expansionist Russia would encounter anything more than an appalled, sanctions-imposing NATO. Likewise, an incursion into Narva would force the United States and its allies to reckon with the basic

tenets of their alliance. And if NATO’s foundational commitments, already shaky in the Trump era, can be cracked, Russia may be able to exploit a vacuum and regain influence. It would also bolster the image of a globally ascendant Russia that Putin relies on to maintain public support within his own bor-

ders. “We are part of the world that they are attacking; this is clear,” Priisalu says. “The existence of Estonia weakens the story the Russian government is trying to push.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that this sense of subjugation and alienation among ethnic Russians in places like Narva is precisely the message being hurled at them by propagandists via Russian-language radio and TV programs, as well as by an army of internet trolls lurking in the comments sections of many Estonian news sites. Even Saat, the toilet-paper entrepreneur irritated by my questions about Russia, admits that he combats that sort of misinformation. “I had a business partner from Moscow who came here and asked me, ‘Gan I speak Russian publicly here? I hear that if you speak Russian in Estonia, people throw stones at you.’ I said, ‘No, no, no stones!’ ”

In Tallinn, some superficial efforts are being made to lower the tensions between Estonians and ethnic Russians, in part because Tallinn benefits greatly from Russian tourists arriving on cruise ships. And a new political correctness seems to be taking hold in places you would least expect it. The Tondi Lasketiir shooting range, housed in the basement of an old Soviet munitions factory in central Tallinn, bills itself online as “the biggest indoor shooting range in the Baltics.” I went because its website advertised the opportunity to shoot Russian-made firearms at a tableau of Red Square. Much to my disappointment, the owner explained that he had removed the tableau earlier in the summer because he “didn’t want to offend Russian people who come here.”

Visitors are, however, welcome to shoot at depictions of an American cowboy about to draw his pistol.