In April, 1941 the Nazi army invaded Estonia. Alfred Rosenberg, the Reichminister for the Baltic states planned to ‘Germanize’ suitable Estonians, deport half of the Estonian population, and replace them with German colonists. Thousands of Estonians died in work camps or in the holocaust. Three years later the Red Army pushed the Nazis out of Estonia after a bloody six month battle along the Narva river. The Soviet Union memorialized this victory in 1947 with the ‘Monument to the Liberators of Talinn’ in 1947. The Bronze Soldier, as the monument is informally known, portrays a Soviet soldier with his helmet in his hands. He gazes down at the grave site of the comrades he lost in the liberation of Talinn, his head forever bowed in solemn appreciation for their sacrifice. Many Estonians, however, did not share the Bronze Soldier’s sentiments about the Red Army. Estonia was an independent nation after all until the Soviet Union invaded them in 1940. To many Estonians, the Bronze Soldier is an unwelcome reminder of almost five decades of Soviet occupation and brutal oppression.[i]
Estonia rededicated the Bronze Soldier monument to all their World War II fallen after their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 but many Estonians viewed the statue as a scar of the Soviet occupation. This spurred the Estonian Government to move the memorial from its central location in its capital city to a military cemetery in 2007. President Putin publicly denounced the Estonian government for this action and initiated a covert retaliation plan. Russian intelligence operatives coordinated with Russian sympathizers in Estonia to incite violent riots, arson, and looting near the Bronze Soldier on the evening of April 26th, 2007. The next day Russian launched massive cyber attacks against the Estonian government, financial sector, and telecommunications industry between late April and mid May 2007. These attacks crippled the Estonian financial sector and several banks had to completely shut down online operations.[ii] Malicious cyber actors used distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to bring down Estonia’s internet for almost three weeks. This is the first time that a nation state executed this level of cyber attack against another country. [iii]
Russia, of course, denied responsibility for both the riots and the cyber attacks.[iv] Most of this DDOS attacks originated outside of Russian territory but physical location isn’t always tied to origin in cyberspace. Hackers can exploit computers in other countries to perform tasks on their behalf. These are frequently referred to as ‘botnets’ or zombie computers that are mindlessly working on behalf of these malicious cyber actors. DDOS attack overwhelms the target with pings and other forms of network traffic. This suppresses the target system and eventually prevents them from performing their assigned functions. In this case, the targets were government websites, the financial sector, and their communications industry. Sites that normally logged around a thousand visits a day were suddenly subject to thousands of hits per second. This was impossible to respond to in the short term and these sites all shut down. This included the parliamentary email system.[v]
These attacks devastated Estonia. Their government recently transitioned almost of their services online and they were particularly vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. Estonians couldn’t access their bank accounts, use their credit cards to buy groceries, or access other essential services. Meanwhile, President Putin deployed intelligence forces to organize violent riots in the Estonian capital with Russian sympathizers and destabilize the country. These tactics are very similar to ones that Russia used to foment strife in post World War II Europe and influence governments to their advantage.[vi]
The history of Russian influence operations during the Cold War can help us better understand what drove their operations in Estonia. The Russians emerged from World War II surrounded by enemies that they could not defeat in open warfare. They turned to influence operations, which they defined as political warfare at the time, to help them achieve their objectives. The Russians generally executed these operations in three phases. First, they established networks of communists or pro-Russian sympathizers in their target countries. Next, they used covert action to manufacture a crisis. This could be riots, terrorist activity, work stoppages or anything else to destabilize their target. This chaos would help the communist or pro-Russian forces to gain power and accelerate their agendas.[vii]
The Czechoslovakian decent into communism is an excellent case study of this phenomenon. The Soviet Union fostered the development of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ) since its creation in 1921. The KSC grew over the years but never had enough popular support to turn Czechoslovakia communist. This changed during World War II when the Red Army pushed the Germans out of Czechoslovakia in October, 1944. Soviet Commissars and NKVD secret police helped grow the KSC and their membership swelled from 27,000 in 1945 to over a million a year later. The KSC won key government positions in the 1946 elections and filled the ministries of finance, trade, and interior with Russian sympathizers. The Soviets also planted communists in trade unions, the media, the police, and the military. They continued to deepen their control of Czechoslovakia’s institutions until 1948 when they decided to take power.[viii]
The non-communist members of President Edvard Benes protested the communist takeover of their government and demanded early elections. 12 cabinet members threatened to resign if Benes would not take action. The KSC responded by initiating massive pro-communist riots across the country. Armed communist sympathizers seized Prague and shut down government ministries. The Czechoslovakian government struggled to regain control and the Soviet Union offered to deploy their army into Czechoslovakia to restore order. Shortly afterwards, Benes accepted the resignation of the non-communist ministers, and the Prime Minister replaced them with members of the KSC. This new government changed the Czechoslovakian constitution a few months later and the communists seized total power. The KSC dominated Czechoslovakian politics with Soviet support for fifty years until they were finally deposed in 1989 during the Velvet Revolution.[ix]
2007 was a dark time for Estonia. Two months of cyber attacks sparked fear in the hearts of the Estonian people and caused around 1 million dollars in damages. At the end of the day thought, they didn’t have any lasting effects or achieve any strategic objectives for Russia. Estonian internet providers were able to isolate the origin of these DDOS attacks and neutralize them. This makes it unlikely that President Putin initiated these cyber attacks purely in response to the movement of a war memorial. A crisis in Estonia could have enabled pro-Russian factions in Estonia to increase their influence in the country. The largest pro-Russian party in Estonia is the Center Party. President Putin entered a pact with the leader of the Center Party, Edgar Savisaar, in 2004 to support his Estonian Center Party. This was the same year Estonia joined NATO. The Century Party did not win the national elections but Russia’s support helped them increase their foothold in the government.[x] This fits the pattern that the Soviet Union established in the Cold War and indicates that Russia isn’t done destabilizing Estonia.
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[i] Juurvee, I. and Matiisen, A. (August, 2020) The Bronze Soldier Crisis of 2007: Revisiting an Early Case of Hybrid Conflict. International Centre for Defense and Security. https://icds.ee/en/the-bronze-soldier-crisis-of-2007/
[ii] Herzog, S. (Summer, 2011) Revisiting the Estonian Cyber Attacks: Digital Threats and Multinational Responses Journal of Strategic Security. Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 49-60 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26463926
[iii] Connel and Vogler. (2016, September). Russia’s approach to Cyber Warfare . Center for Naval Analysis. Retrieved April 18, 2022, from https://www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/DOP-2016-U-014231-1Rev.pdf
[iv] Herzog, S. 2011
[vi] Blank, S. (2017) Cyber War and Information War à la Russe from ‘Understanding Cyber Conflict: Fourteen Analogies’, ed Perkovitch, G. and Levite, A. E. Georgetown University Press. https://carnegieendowment.org/files/GUP_Perkovich_Levite_UnderstandingCyberConflict_Ch5.pdf
[vii] Dickey, J., Everett, T., Galvach, Z., Mesko, M., and Soltis, A. (June, 2015) Russian Political Warfare: Origin, Evolution, and Application. Naval Postgraduate School Calhoun Journal. https://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/45838/15Jun_Dickey_Everett_Galvach_Mesko_Soltis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
[viii] U.S. National Archives. (1963) Czechoslovakia From Liberation to Communist State, 1945-63. U.S. State Department. https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/archives-unbound/primary-sources_archives-unbound_czechoslovakia-from-liberation-to-communist-state_1945-1963_records-of-the-us-state-department-classified-files.pdf
[ix] Dickey, J., Everett, T., Galvach, Z., Mesko, M., and Soltis, A. (June, 2015)
[x] Makarychev, A. (October, 2019) Estonia’s Russophones Tumble Between Two Populisms. Ponar Eurasia. https://www.ponarseurasia.org/estonia-s-russophones-tumble-between-two-populisms/
