Seattle on the Baltic
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

TALLINN — From outside, the offices of Skype don’t look very different from the other Soviet and post-Soviet buildings which make up the nondescript suburbs of the Estonian capital. But inside, the aesthetic influence of northern California is undeniable.
The high-tech, open-plan offices; the “playroom,” complete with pool table and sauna; the young, bearded employees; the Dadaesque plastic crocodile hanging from the ceiling; the blue-jeaned spokesman who has been “too busy” to contemplate the fact that eBay, which bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 — Skype being a provider of free internet telephone service, for those who don’t follow these things — has recently admitted that it paid too much.
This tiny slice of Seattle-on-the-Baltic — Skype’s main center for research and development — is in Tallinn because Skype’s original computer programmers were Estonians, and because Skype’s Scandinavian founders were savvy enough to know that Estonia is a country so eager to join the 21st century that even its gas stations have wifi: Fill up your tank, download your email, drive on.
Yet despite their eagerness to join the future, the home of Skype can also seem, to outsiders, paradoxically hung up on the past. Indeed, this is a problem Estonia shares with some of the other nations of Central Europe. Everywhere you turn, historical arguments now dominate the region’s politics.
History certainly influences Estonia’s relationship with Russia, for example: The two neighbors have a standing disagreement about whether the Red Army’s invasion in 1945 “liberated” Estonia from the Nazis, as the Russians would have it, or launched a bloody Soviet occupation — during which 10% of the country’s population were deported to concentration camps and exile — as most Estonians remember it. No mere theoretical dispute, this argument has led to riots in Tallinn and Moscow, as well as a wave of cyber-attacks on Estonian government and economic institutions last spring.
But the Estonians are not alone. Last year, the Hungarians nearly came to blows about the causes and current significance of their anti-communist revolution in 1956: At one point during 50th anniversary celebrations, police used tear gas against protesters riding a Soviet-era tank down through the center of Budapest, making for some eerily familiar photographs.
Ukrainian arguments over whether the Ukrainian famine between 1931 and 1932 was “genocide” have taken a political turn too, with different viewpoints offered by different political parties. Poles have lately flocked to a new film depicting the 1941 Soviet massacre of 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest; it too made the newspapers when the director, Andrzej Wajda, accused politicians of using the Katyn story for electoral advantage. Across the region, non-fiction best-sellers have similar themes: the war, the communist occupation, the resistance. In Russia, stacks of such books are available too — except that in Russia, these books have titles like “Stalin, Author of the Great Victory.”
From the safe standpoint of Washington or London, it’s easy to dismiss this historical discussion as retrograde, paranoid, even a drag on economic development. And it’s true that discussing history with the Russians probably hasn’t been good for Russian-Estonian trade. Nor has debating Katyn fixed Poland’s crumbling roads. One Estonian politician told me a German colleague had instructed him to forget about history and move on.”You’re wasting your time,” he told him.
But nobody ever asks the Germans to forget about history and move on, do they? Walk through the Skype headquarters in Tallinn, look through the big picture windows at the crumbling concrete buildings outside and it becomes clear that the phenomenon of economic progress and historical contemplation are actually closely connected.
The central European economies are no longer basket cases, and the central Europeans are no longer desperately poor neighbors. As the Hungarians, Poles, and Balts become more successful and more self-confident, it’s natural that they want their stories told, their issues discussed. The Germans only properly came to terms with their own history in the 1960s, 20 years after World War II ended. Almost the same amount of time has now elapsed since 1989.
There may be other forces at work too. Without question, the economic success stories of the region, particularly in the former Soviet republics, pose an ideological challenge to the current government of Russia. Estonia and its neighbors have joined Western institutions, expanded Western trade.
Russia has chosen a different path: confrontation with the West, an economic model based on oil rather than genuine capitalism. The regional sparring over history is also an argument over whose definition of the past, whose ideology and whose economic rules will prevail: those of the big Russian gas concerns, or those of Skype.
Myself, I’m rooting for Skype, or at least for its bearded, multi-lingual employees. Even if their company really wasn’t worth all those billions after all.
Ms. Applebaum is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.