By September 1944 the Germans had been thrown out of Estonia by the Red Army and the country once more became part of the USSR. The second Soviet occupation was even harsher than the first: hard-line activists were brought in to run the country and a second wave of deportations in March 1949 removed 20,000 Estonians (2.5% of the population) to camps in the East.

Thousands of Estonians joined the partisan movement known as the Forest Brothers, believing that the Western powers were bound to declare war on the USSR sooner or later. The KGB infiltrated the partisans and destroyed the movement from the inside.

The Soviet regime concentrated on developing heavy industry and imported a largely Russian-speaking population to work in the factories, changing the demographic profile of the country.

Open expressions of Estonian patriotism were discouraged, and many Estonians found refuge in folklore, poetry or environmentalism as a way of preserving their intellectual independence. Writers and artists walked a fine line between free expression and the displeasure of state censors.

Hugely popular Estonian-language publications like interior design magazine Kunst ja Kodu (”Art and Home”) and fashion quarterly Siluett succeeded in nurturing a distinctively Estonian sense of style.

When reformist communist Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin in 1985, launching the policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Reconstruction) in an attempt to save the USSR from decay, long-suppressed yearnings for change were released. Impossible things suddenly became possible: by 1987 a punk band like Tallinn‘s J.M.K.E could appear on national TV singing wry hit Tere Perestroika! (”Hello Perestroika!”). A new era of serious subversion had begun.