BIRTHDAYS AND REVOLUTION

Today the 8th May is the birthday of actor Ian Price a great friend and very talented man. Herewith is a very short clip from a Poirot episode, The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, something we all want. Heaps of salutations to Ian.

How indeed does one get out of that one?

It was also on the 8th of May in the year that Ian was born, that Estonian school girls Aili Jõrgi and Ageeda Paavel blow up the Soviet memorial which stood in front of the Bronze Soldier in Tallin. Aili Jõgi an Estonian nationalist on the night of 8 May, together with her school friend Ageeda Paavel, blew up a Soviet War reburial monument (a wooden memorial topped with a star): the preceding monument to the Bronze Soldier in Tallin.

After the liberation of Estonia in 1944, the Soviet authorities began systematically destroying the war memorials to the fallen in the Estonian War of Independence, which had survived the war. On 15 April 1945 a monument by Amandus Adamson, erected to 87 persons who had fallen in the Estonian War of Independence, was blown up in Pärnu with explosives. Also between 1944 to 1946 the gravestones of the Tallinn Military Cemetary were destroyed by the Soviet authorities and the Estonian graveyard was reused by Red Army.

Aili Jõrgi

Aili Jõgi has described why the two schoolgirls blew up a monument they considered a symbol of occupation and repression:

"How long should we watch this red star, a memorial for Russian looters. At the time when all our statues are being destroyed. We just couldn't get our heads around it. We decided that if such robbers are raging in Estonia, they should see how one of their memorials gets blown up. We could have just doused the wooden thing with gasoline and set fire to it, but we wanted it to go with a bang!"


That is just how Ian's birthday should be celebrated, with a big bang.

HAPPY 

BIRTHDAY

IAN