Word: estonians
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When underground electric cables had to be laid in the Estonian capital of Tallinn this summer, a call went out for community help. Working mostly with shovels, some 5,000 volunteers dug a trench more than a mile long in one night. A Soviet television reporter asked a ruddy-faced young Estonian why he had come. "I want to help so that perestroika doesn't begin just up there," the volunteer explained with a wave of the arm, "but with me here, with this shovel...
Those must have been gratifying words for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who has repeatedly pushed for less talk and more work. But they were double- edged. The shovel brigade was not organized by the Communist Party but by a new, pro-perestroika grass-roots movement called the Estonian Popular Front. Since the group first emerged last April in the most northerly of the Soviet Union's three Baltic republics, similar movements have taken root and flourished in neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers. What unites them is the common goal of promoting greater regional autonomy...
...Estonian capital of Tallinn last week, more than 3,000 ethnic activists tested the outer limits of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost. A congress of the nationalist organization, Estonia's Popular Front in Support of Perestroika, called for more regional autonomy, political democratization, economic freedom, a new currency and adoption of Estonian as the sole national language. But in its push for political changes, the Front stopped short of demands for secession...
...jokes that his appeal for Russian viewers can be explained by the fact that "I'm not one of them and I'm not foreign." He belongs, instead, to the Estonian school of TV and radio reporters, sharpened by competition with Western broadcasting from nearby Finland. Ott believes the art of interviewing was lost during the Brezhnev years, when prepared answers to prepared questions became the norm. With Television Acquaintance he has set about reviving the genre and giving it a personal spin. As he bluntly puts it, "An interview is not a speech...
...himself, he would reply that he is a bachelor who shares an apartment with relatives in Tallinn, the Baltic port city that serves as Estonia's capital. "If I were a Russian, the only type of life for me would be in Moscow," he says. "But I am an Estonian, and the surroundings in Tallinn suit me." As for his salary, he is paid the equivalent of $320 for each broadcast. Ott considers playing tennis a "sacred activity." Not that he has much free time these days. A celebrity in his own right, he frequently travels around the country...