Kertu Saks: 35 years after restoration of independence – no fear, only quiet resolve

Reflecting on Estonia's re-independence 35 years ago, Kertu Saks argues that the country's greatest resilience came from a quiet resolve to make calm, decisive choices together amid uncertainty.

She recounts conversations with young people curious about August 1991, when Moscow coup plotters sent paratroopers and armored columns to Estonia, and the Baltic Military District commander claimed supreme authority. Their main question: "Weren't you afraid?"

Saks, then a newly married University of Tartu student staying at her parents' home in Tallinn, remembers the sound of the armored column. Her mother, a deputy minister, was in Denmark for a conference; her sister was in Sweden. She didn't know when they would return.

On August 20 afternoon, she and her father listened to the radio. Her father calmly said that if the situation didn't improve by morning, they would head to their family farm on Saaremaa. Saks recalls not fear, but her father's quiet calm. That is her most vivid memory.

That evening, Estonia's Supreme Council decided to restore independence and called for defense of Toompea, the TV tower, and broadcasting buildings. Her husband, a history student, and classmates from Tartu boarded a bus to Tallinn to defend the radio building, making Molotov cocktails en route. No fighting occurred; the coup collapsed on August 21.

Today, amid the war in Ukraine, Saks notes that several generations have grown up with freedom as natural. Young people genuinely seek stories of independence, and we must tell them. Crisis preparedness, she says, involves not just supplies and defense, but mutual trust and calm decisions made together. This resilience is rooted in culture and cannot be taught from textbooks; it must be passed down through shared experiences.