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The Estonian collections relate to that country’s first period of independence and its foreign relations during the interwar years. Among these, the Pusta Papers are especially important, as they concern the Soviet annexation of Estonia and efforts to keep the cause of Baltic independence alive during the Cold War. Other collections document political repression in the Soviet period and the renewal of Estonian sovereignty in 1991.
Estonian branch of the Soviet secret police organization Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (KGB)
US poet and writer; visitor to Estonia
Estonian Foreign Office representative
Estonian diplomat; foreign minister of Estonia, 1924-25
Miscellaneous materials
Digital Collections: Estonian Language Service sound recordings
Images of Andrus Ansip, Prime Minister of Estonia, and his visit to Hoover
Duignan, Peter, ed. The Library of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1985.
Dwyer, Joseph D., ed. Russia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: A Survey of Holdings at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980
Jacobs, David. Baltic States Collections in the Hoover Institution Archives, ca. 2003.
Palm, Charles, and Dale Reed. Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980.
Fourteen thousand pages have been added to the Estonian KGB digital collection at Hoover representing sixty-one folders of documents of the KGB Intelligence Service pertaining to Estonian refugees.
This collection contains digitized copies of thousands of pages of Estonian KGB files relating to secret police and intelligence activities, dissident and anti-Soviet activities, and repatriation and nationalism issues in Estonia.
On October 15, 2012, Estonian TV news reporter Neeme Raud visited the Hoover Institution Archives to learn more about the Estonian collections in the archives. A group of local and visiting Estonians accompanied him. They were given a presentation by archival specialist David Jacobs that highlighted some of the HIA's important documents pertaining to Estonian history, including photographs of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 that led to the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States one year later.
Stanford historian Amir Weiner recently examined the newly accessible KGB files housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. Weiner found that “a system of checks and balances in today's Western-style democracies prevents agencies like the FBI from engaging in domestic surveillance at the same invasive scale as the KGB” (Stanford Report). The collection is composed of tens of thousands of documents, including informants' reports, interrogation minutes, and official internal correspondence. Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB archives are the largest accessible holdings (Russian and Ukrainian holdings are, for all practical purposes, closed) of the Soviet political police, which were left almost intact in Vilnius, Lithuania, after the Soviet Union disintegrated.
On Thursday, April 19, 2012, a five-member delegation from the Estonian Parliament, including Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; Sven Mikser, chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Estonia; Kadri Simson; Imre Sooäär; and Birgit Leppik, secretary, visited the Hoover Institution Library and Archives to examine materials from the Baltics, mainly Estonia. All are members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which oversees Estonia’s relations with other states and international organizations and maintains contacts with foreign affairs committees of the parliaments of other countries. Andrus Viirg, director of Enterprise Estonia Silicon Valley, joined members of the delegation on their visit.
The Hoover Institution and the National Archives of Estonia have signed an agreement of cooperation for digitizing and sharing records pertaining to Estonia. The first project will be Hoover Archives’ acquiring copies of selected groups of records of the NKVD and of its successor, the KGB of the former Estonian SSSR.
Before delivering a policy address at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on January 20, 2006, His Excellency Arnold Rüütel, president of Estonia, visited the Hoover Institution.
The prime minister of Estonia, Andrus Ansip, was a featured speaker at the Hoover Institution retreat November 29 and 30. In his talk, “How a Former Soviet Satellite Became One of the World’s Most Free Economies,” Ansip said that “freedom means something very special to Estonians. Freedom for us means the right to decide our own future; the right to run our own affairs, in both the political and economic sense; we know what it’s like to live without freedom; and we know that freedom is not free.”
Estonian president Toomas Ilves visited the Hoover Institution Library and Archives on Thursday, June 11. During a presentation in the archives, he was shown materials from the Estonian collections...
