My Estonia. White Man’s Dark Paradise

What happens when you move to a place that doesn't protect you?

This week, I bring you a story that has taken years to publish. This one involves myself.

Exactly three years ago, I took a punt and moved Estonia, in northeast Europe. Lured in by the promise of clean air, quiet and a chance to continue freelance journalism, I was (admittedly) coaxed in by a curated ‘progressive, Nordic’ image.

The truth was much, much darker. This is the story of how I found myself living in one of Europe’s last remaining countries without proper hate speech laws, encountering racism and White Supremacists in broad daylight. To keep commissions coming in, I stayed quiet.

But the story you’re about to read isn’t really about me. It’s about the narratives countries tell themselves and what they hide, connecting the dots between systems and silence. Of how limited legal imagination goes hand in hand with cultural fears. I found a region and a culture that finishes high in societal ‘trust’ rankings globally, yet has little trust in outsiders.

This is also the story about memory and what it does to us collectively. In the Baltics, I found a place with its own occupation history, yet has buried that past in favour of Whiteness and proximity to power, silent about the genocide of people that do not look like them. A painful past can make us turn inwards, or spur us on to look beyond our own mental borders.

This is also a story about hope; of how my own family migration history accelerated solidarities and coalitions with others, as well as finding a muscle for dissent. Today, a new generation of northeast Europeans have also begun to understand the idea of coalitions, and how they, of their own volition, are breaking free from cultural forms of censorship, shame, fear and guilt.

Below is the English version of my story, published in Müürileht, an Estonian language newspaper. Publishing with independent media, as opposed to corporate media, is a deliberate choice. They are an oasis of radical vision in a land of cultural conservatism. I am thankful for their trust, open mind and delicate care. It’s a wonderfully strange feeling to see my writing in another language (translated by a skilled human being, not Ai!) .

The power of coalition is alive and kicking.

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My Estonia; White Man’s Dark Paradise

Illustration by Vahram Muradyan – (Instagram @VahramMuradyan)

Holding my British passport, the Estonian consulate official in London looked confused — to the point of incredulous — as to why I was choosing to move to Estonia.

“It’s dark and cold for most of the year,” she said, with no hint of irony. Was she alluding to something deeper? I wish she had. It would have prepared me for Estonia’s hidden side.

I moved to Estonia from the UK in 2023 on a digital nomad visa. It was a chance to leave behind the exhaustion of working in fast paced newsrooms, living in a city of 10 million people during the Covid pandemic and the toxicity of Brexit.

Admittedly, I was swept away by Estonia’s self declared ‘Nordic’ status. Yet behind the smokescreen of sauna, startups and digital nomad visas, a darker side is brushed under the carpet, away from the gaze of journalists who shuttle in and out, impressed by Estonia’s shiny tech toys.

From day one, I was courted by civil servants and CEOs to portray the country as a progressive nation in perfect orbit with its northerly neighbours. I “drank the Kool Aid”, as the Americans say. The illusion appeared in my own reporting for the Guardian about same-sex marriage being legalised. Subconsciously, I was covering up the painful violence Estonia had unleashed on me.

Parallel to this, I experienced more racism in one year, compared to the previous 32 years of my life in the UK and western Europe.

At its peak, a White Supremacist targeted me in broad daylight with ‘great replacement’ conspiracies; the white race was on the cusp of extinction, white women and non-white men could not mix (racist beliefs originating from American slavery), and that mixed heritage children were born with ‘mental and physical deformities’.

Living in Estonia felt like witnessing a car crash. Except, no one cared to see or hear its explosive force. Many will say this is an isolated incident as an excuse to shy away from the unbearable.

As it stands today, Estonia does not belong to the modern, multicultural world. It is too embedded in a rigid, monocultural lens of both itself and the wider world, with a deep aversion to pluralism. It fears multiple belongings, diversity and ways of thinking that veer from conformity. Tech conferences cannot fill a void that, ultimately, reveals a fragile rigidity deep in the Estonian psyche.

Fragments of this appear everywhere. It shows up in policy, with a concerning lack of understanding about hate speech. The constitution has conditional protection against hate speech. A person’s life or property must be under threat for it to be taken seriously.

In practice, Estonia is one of the last European countries without adequate hate speech laws. The European Commission has long threatened legal action for failing to implement a law that is, by EU standards, mandatory. With [former prime minister] Kaja Kallas now EU foreign policy chief, those proceedings are far from likely to happen anytime soon.

Estonia’s flimsy laws means that the man who targeted me continues to walk the streets. I endured his taunts multiple times, while grocery shopping or going for a walk. (In fact, he is well known; Estonia’s national broadcaster published a story about him standing with a megaphone in Tallinn making openly racist remarks).

Other incidents occurred with alarming regularity; men (almost always men) physically obstructing me on the street, shouting expletives. Others made clear their desire to see me leave, down to low-level hostile stares on public transport, enough to have me finding the exit. Random police checks at a not-so-random rate. Subliminal, drip fed racism hits harder than overtly violent forms of discrimination. Racists, it seems, have impunity in Estonia. They’re not just protected by the law, but by the instinct to explain it away as humour, cultural norms or oversensitivity.

Freedom of speech comes with responsibility. Estonia’s reluctance is, quite simply, immaturity. It has yet to grasp the idea that pluralism requires protections to flourish. Estonia frames free speech as a reaction to its Soviet-era past, rather than asking which ingredients are required for a vibrant future. What might have felt freeing in the 1990s no longer serves a democracy that apparently yearns to be ‘Nordic’.

Cute, calm and quiet. Estonia’s self styled ‘Nordic’ image brushes away a darker reality from the outside world.

Exclusion does not appear in a vacuum. Through legislation, we see the limits of Estonia’s ability to imagine a society that holds multiplicity and plurality. Fifty miles separate Tallinn from Helsinki. In truth, they are thousand miles and several light years apart.

Estonia’s inability to hold multiple identities appears in its removal of voting rights from non-EU citizens—effectively erasing the civic rights of its Russian-speaking minority. As a British Muslim who came of age in the 9/11 era, I recognise attempts to marginalise and exclude through suspicion. It is a fear-based decision that will harm Estonia’s democracy in the long run. As the Democratic Erosion Consortium says, “the carrot of democratic participation is a far stronger defence than a stick of civil alienation”. Estonia still bears the hallmark of a culture uneasy with its own contradictions.

Colonialism & Coalitions

I write this back in London, a city with a population ten times the size of Estonia. A city where information exchanges happen rapidly. Ideas emerge at lightning speed. Over 300 languages are spoken, with 140 in my local neighbourhood alone. There is a tolerance for conflict in ways Estonians are averse to.

I am a child of Empire. Born far from my ancestral homelands, forced by the dominoes of colonialism.

I’m the product of a ripple effect of experiences; of my ancestors surviving the Bengal famine, instigated by former British prime minister Winston Churchill who described Bengalis as “breeding like rabbits”. Colonial policies of starvation twisted our bodies, altering our DNA.

Of my grandfather’s arrival to the United Kingdom after World War Two from ‘British India’, unable to find halal meat and striking a friendship with the Ashkenazi Jewish community in London, themselves migrants from Eastern Europe, to source substitutes.

Of my mother, arriving aged seven in the 1970s, spat at and targeted by neo-Nazi gangs known as “skinheads”. Discriminatory “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” signs were commonplace outside pubs and bars.

And, by 1991, my own birth (the same age as modern, independent Estonia) into the heady cocktail of British multiculturalism, where war children and second generation kids shared classrooms. Somalis, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Afghans, Nigerians, Ghanians, Albanians, Kosovans, Bosnians mingled with Portuguese, Colombians, Irish and English kids. Polish, Hungarians and Lithuanians arrived soon after their accession to the EU. Through weaving different parts of ourselves, we created a new type of Britishness, fluid and ever-expanding.

It was like the golden era of medieval Spain, when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in “convivencia”, translated as “tolerance”. It is better described as “coexistence” or “living, and loving, together”. The three co-religionists weaved a new identity—through literature, science, art, architecture, medicine and interfaith relationships—to create a unique culture that gave rise to technological advances Europe would eventually inherit, and then forget, thanks to Christian Spain’s fanatic attempts to expunge Islamic influence and impose an ethno-state with borders.

Convivencia in modern Britain reshaped the idea of ‘Britishness’ as a blank canvas. Our interwoven lives was proof that a culture could thrive by holding two, and often many more, conflicting ideas at the same time. We belonged to one another because of our differences, not in spite of them. We cultivated a new way of both seeing and living, in the realisation that contradictions—within oneself, as well as within a wider society—could be positive and life-affirming.

My own multicultural upbringing taught me to connect with anyone with a shared history of occupation. I thought I would find this in the Baltics. Instead, I found apathy and disinterest towards forging emotional, intellectual and historic bonds with the Global South, driven by a deep desire to be as White European as possible.

Whiteness is deeply pervasive. It is a particular lens in which to view the world and appears through coloniality, a present type of colonialism that lives on long after a country has won independence. It appears in power dynamics, quietly entrenching nativist sentiment.

Estonians will feel uncomfortable at any association with colonialism. They may dismiss whiteness as belonging only to American or Western European post-colonial contexts. But that is the catch of Nordic ideas of equality (if we are to hold Estonia to this ideal), which is rooted in the idea of sameness, as opposed to a true equality that understands the value of difference and dissent.

Whiteness and Coloniality connect Estonia’s stunted hate speech laws with its silence over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Along with Finland, Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia remains one of the last countries on earth yet to recognise the state of Palestine. Whiteness and Coloniality drive Estonian cognitive dissonance; it remembers the Forest Brothers (armed resistance fighters who regularly hid in underground bunkers while fighting the Soviets in the 20th century), yet calls Palestinian resistance “terrorism”. Through trade deals, weapons policies and tech partnerships, Estonia suppresses its historic connection with “dark-skinned” people in favour of extraction, profit and illusionary power. Estonia won independence, but is yet to decolonise.

By Julius Jääskeläinen (via Wikimedia commons) - Estonian Forest Brothers, a resistance force known to hide in bunkers, clean their guns in Estonia, 1953.

In the late 1980s, Baltic independence movements accused the European community of “double standards” for turning a blind eye to the “last colonies of the Hitler–Stalin era”. Now firmly in the corridors of Europe, Estonian silence is part of the machinery of erasure. The borders of Estonian empathy fall short.

Shame and the fear of social exclusion also runs deep. As an Irish person living in Tallinn told me, Estonia is reminiscent of 1950s Ireland. The coloniser is gone, but cultural censorship remains strong. The fear of standing out holds Estonians back from openly criticising their country to outsiders, as I had experienced as a foreign journalist. Estonia (and neighbouring Nordic countries) often score high in rankings that measure public trust. Yet such metrics hide the ingrained distrust of outsiders, handed down generationally. That shadow holds back new exchanges and ideas. There’s even cold, hard cash at stake for skeptics. Diversity of thought can only boost Estonia’s stuttering economy.

Subconscious silencing has, consequently, stunted dissent. Estonia built institutional democracy, but forgot to nurture a spirit and energy. As Inge Melchior, a lecturer on Eastern European identity at Maastricht University says, a sense of “national insecurity – of the need to stick together – is at the heart of why Estonians do not have a well-developed protest culture”¹.

Meanwhile, others lead the way. Bangladeshi students deposed a nepotistic prime minister in the first Gen-Z revolution. Nepal, Morocco, Indonesia, Peru, Kenya and Bulgaria have all followed. Next door, Latvians mobilised en masse following the country’s withdrawal from a treaty protecting women and girls from violence. Even Lithuanians, angered by the state’s increasing control over the national broadcaster, took to the streets in ways not seen in decades. Dissent requires practice and fearlessness. Is the long overdue Baltic-Global South kinship emerging?

Bangladeshis in London celebrate in 2025, on the day university students overthrew the Bangladesh government in the first ever Gen-Z revolution.

Instead of inertia, Estonians must embrace coalitions. It’s a school of thought that stretches from US intellectual Angela Davis to contemporary Irish author Emma Dabiri. It requires an understanding that our shared experiences act as points of unity for mass movements.

Estonia’s youth have understood this. Whether it is NoortePalestiina (Youth for Palestine) building a structured protest movement or Fridays For Future taking climate lawsuits, a new generation is chipping away at passivity and shame. Social media is today what television signals from Finland were in the 1980s; a window to the world beyond. This time, it’s not just for entertainment².

Coalitions require collective work from the ground up all the way to lawmakers. It will require translators, writers, artists, cultural workers and storytellers. Through exchange, behaviours may change; small talk and spontaneous conversation with strangers might appear. Groupthink and heavy conformity may dissolve. Gender-based violence, men’s responsibility to family life or reconsidering capitalism itself may no longer be considered taboo topics. Publicly ventilating an array of emotions may become common. The Estonian language might change. None of this should be considered as a loss or erosion.

A new generation carries the seeds of hope. On a plane to London from Tallinn, in a rare moment of an Estonian starting conversation, a 16-year-old student turns and asks about the book in my hand. It is Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War On Palestine, detailing Britain’s role in carving up Palestine. He had never heard such history; both school and the media had taught him very little about the world beyond Estonia.

“I want to see their mosques, eat their food and meet them,” he says, catching me by surprise. The boy confides that he wants to eventually study in the UK or Asia. His eyes light up when I tell him about the languages I grew up with.

These are glimpses of a new, open Estonia, embodied by the teenagers. We all, regardless of age, carry a responsibility to embody the future society that we want to see. As the British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak says in her book, How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division:

Multiple belongings are nurtured by cultural encounters but they are not only the preserve of people who travel. It is an attitude, a way of thinking, rather than the number of stamps on your passport. It is about thinking of yourself, and your fellow human being, in more fluid terms than solid categories.

New worlds are not simply imagined; they are built through attention, collaboration, conflict and care.

Pain can be a catalyst for something different.

But first, fear, shame and resentment must be washed away.

A louder, bolder, fluid and no less Estonian way is possible.

1. ‘Estonia’s Patriotism in Crisis’ by Inge Melchior. Full paper: https://pubpub.maastrichtuniversitypress.nl/pub/estonias-patriotisms-in-crisis/release/1

2. Between the 1970s and 1990s, signals from Finland’s television masts made their way beyond the sea into the fringes of the ‘Iron Curtain’. People in northern Estonia found themselves able to tune into Finnish television broadcasts and, as a result, had a window to the west. American show ‘Dallas’, aired by Finland’s national broadcaster Yle, became a regular national event in Estonian living rooms, despite Soviet attempts at jamming foreign TV signals.