War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival by Mart Laar (1992; Compass. ISBN:0-929590-09-0)
Laar has the credentials to write a thorough and insightful history of Estonia’s struggle for freedom from 1918 through the “Singing Revolution” in 1991, when, without bloodshed or violence, this tiny Baltic nation of barely more than one million souls freed itself from years of Stalinist dominion. Laar was there, as a recently-graduated historian and political activist, for the ultimate showdown between the Bear and the clever mouse. As we all know, the mouse won and Laar, in no small measure, had something to do with that success. If you are looking for a book that chronicles the partisan bravery of the Forest Brothers (Estonian guerrilla fighters who lived in bunkers from 1945 until 1978, when the last known survivor was killed in a Soviet ambush) and also weaves a solid, vibrant, hard-hitting and well-written narrative throughout the facts, this isn’t the book for you.
While Laar does an admirable job of giving you a sense of the scale of the Forest Brothers resistance and the measures the partisans used to bring notice to their cause (hoping the West would confront Stalin reagarding his human rights abuses and, if need be, go to war over those abuses) this work is rather dry. There are moments, like the scene where a young Finn sails a homemade boat across the Gulf of Finland to rescue his Estonian lover under cover of darkness that show how vibrant and alive this book could have been in the hands of a writer capable of merging history and language. I doubt that the translator is to blame here. The problem is more that a scholar and academic, who may possess a fine ability to write technically, has cobbled together a well documented segment of history with clean precision but little passion.
While there are glimpses of such intuitive depth throughout the book, only in the final chapter, “The Resistance Lived On”, does Laar (who twice served as Estonia’s Prime Minister) rescue the story from dull, fact-driven narrative for more than a page or two. A valid exercise of historical research but not a book for the casual reader. 2 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
