Word: tartu
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Estonia -- or the Soviet Union, for that matter -- has not been the same since that night of April 13, 1988. Certainly, life changed dramatically for Marju Lauristin, 48, a journalism professor who had watched the show at home in the university city of Tartu. Inviting other activists to her apartment, she helped write the founding declaration of the Estonian Popular Front. Less than three weeks later, local party officials gave the group guarded approval to organize...
...upside down. The movement promotes no rigid political platform, except a general commitment to democracy and pluralism, and welcomes everyone into its ranks. Its central steering committee is an umbrella organization for dozens of local chapters that open their doors to any citizens' groups with a worthy cause. In Tartu the Popular Front joined with the environmentalist Greens and the local branch of a monument- preservation society to stage an evening of "public accounting," during which municipal leaders ran a gauntlet of tough questioning. Says Lauristin: "We are seeking a way to make the transition from totalitarianism to democracy...
Killu Tyugu, 21, a thoughtful Soviet college student, remembers when the rector of Tartu State University in Estonia asked if anyone wanted to go to America. "Everyone laughed and said, 'He is a humorous man.' We didn't believe him," says Tyugu, a molecular-biology major. "But when he went on to ask, 'Who would like to apply for an exchange program?' I thought, Why not take a risk?" This autumn Tyugu is enrolled at Ohio's Oberlin College, while 55 of her Soviet peers are at 25 other liberal-arts colleges in eight states. The arrangement is part...
...Karl Linnas is guilty, this is what he did. In the early 1940s, during the German occupation of his native Estonia, he was chief of a Nazi concentration camp in a place called Tartu. Twelve thousand East Europeans were executed there, including 2,000 Jews. Linnas ordered half-naked men, women and children transported to a ditch and gunned down. Some of them he finished off himself...
...provides a smooth connection between Brahms' parody of German schoolboys' drinking songs and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, which, its composer wrote, captures the Russian alcoholic soul. Tubin, born in Kallaste, Estonia in 1905, moved to Sweden in 1944, after studying with Kodaly in Budapest and Heino Eller in Tartu. The symphony is in one big movement, and the melodies are folksy, recalling Bartok in rhythm and structure. Syncopation and dotted notes, along with the rolling figures in the strings, give the piece a gypsy personality. Just as enticing, however, was the underlying pit-a-pat of the timpani...