If you read the posting on Latvian history, this will sound familiar. Tallinn's fortress towers were no match for the crusading Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order, who forcibly Christianized the Estonians. German traders settled Tallinn and it became a port city in the Hanseatic League in the 13th-15th centuries. As a result, the nobility and commercial people were primarily ethnic Germans and the Estonians remained peasants. Estonian lands passed from the Danes to the Swedes to the Russians over the centuries. While Estonia was part of the Russian empire, Peter the Great built a summer palace in Tallinn.
Estonia too gained independence with the collapse of the Russian empire in World War I. But that independence was lost 20 years later when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia just prior to World War II. The Nazis occupied Estonia from 1941-1944, when the Soviets returned and stayed for the next 45 years. Estonia's Green Movement was one of the first independent organizations to form under Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika and glasnost and laid the foundation for the popular fronts that became the Baltic independence movements.
The Estonian language is closely related to Finnish --not at all like Lithuanian and Latvian or the Slavic languages such as Russian.
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