Russian-speakers, most of whom could not vote, got the message, or thought they did. But Laar, who at 32 must be the youngest governmental head in Europe, insists the trash that needed sweeping out was not Russians, but Communists.
"Since I wrote the history of Soviet war crimes in Estonia", he told The Moscow Times in somewhat fractured English, "I have always said our Estonian Communists committed most of them. Our aim is to build a normal European society, not fight against any people".
Laar's conciliatory tone in an interview two weeks after he took office runs counter to his reputation as an extreme nationalist. By profession the prime minister is an historian from the university city of Tartu, which traditionally nurtured and preserved the Estonian national idea more fiercely than the Swedish-Russian capital of Tallinn.
His early political work was done in "citizens unions", which pressed Estonia's first two independent governments to take a more nationalist line. He also wrote for the journal Rainbow, which Russians consider beyond the pale of reasonable discussion. "They translate Rainbow into Russian", says Tallinn journalist Ella Agranovskaya. "But we still can't understand a word of it".
Laar thinks national antagonisms have reached their current high level largely because, "We haven't talked enough with Russians". He aims to start correcting this deficiency by making his first official visit to Narva, the severely-depressed industrial city on the Russian border with virtually no Estonian residents.
Many Russians suspect the Estonian government is not averse to the collapse of heavy industry oriented to the ex-Soviet market, because Russian workers unemployed as a result might decide to leave Estonia. Laar strongly denies this.
"We are not interested in having a social breakdown", he says. "Not at all interested".
The prime minister charges that a large investment a Swedish firm planned in Narva was undermined when, "Mr. Churkin of the Russian government went on Swedish television and promised blood in the streets".
Laar also blames Narva's economic paralysis on "former KGB men and Communists who have kept power and keep expecting something from the state".
A stocky figure whose bushy, blonde whiskers make him look older than he is, Laar frames the citizenship issue as a matter of the non-Estonian's choice. "We have the most liberal citizenship law in Europe", he asserts. "Anybody can take a language test within seven months, and have citizenship within a year".
Many Russians who speak Estonian claim they have failed language tests anyway for petty reasons. "When they saw that a friend of mine spoke fluently", reports Alexander Smirnov, a Tallinn-born journalist, "They started asking her which species of birds migrate to Estonia in the spring".
Laar declared this sort of behavior, "a shame for Estonia", and promised to fire the bureaucrats responsible.
But most Russian-speakers in Estonia are far from trusting any of the prime minister's promises. "They've made me nobody in my own country", says Gleb Netivolodov, a young graphic artist in Tartu. "I don't see anything good happening here".
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