Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia (Estonian: Eesti or Eesti Vabariik), is a country in Northern Europe. Estonia has land borders to the south with fellow Baltic state Latvia (339 km) and Russia (229 km) to the east. It is separated from Finland in the north by the narrow Gulf of Finland and from Sweden in the west by the Baltic Sea. Estonia has been a member of the European Union since May 1, 2004 and of the NATO since March 29, 2004.-----------Human settlement in Estonia became possible 11,000–13,000 years ago, when the ice from the last glacial era melted away. The oldest known settlement in Estonia is the Pulli settlement, which was located on the banks of the river Pärnu, near the town of Sindi, in southern Estonia. According to radiocarbon dating, it was settled around 11,000 years ago, at the beginning of the 9th millennium BC. Evidence has been found of hunting and fishing communities existing around 6500 BC near the town of Kunda in northern Estonia. Bone and stone artifacts similar to those found at Kunda have been discovered elsewhere in Estonia, as well as in Latvia, northern Lithuania and in southern Finland. The Kunda culture belongs to the middle stone age, or mesolithic period. ------------------------------------------ The end of the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age were marked by great cultural changes. The most significant was the transition to farming, which has remained at the core of Estonian economy and culture. From approximately the 1st to 5th centuries AD, resident farming was widely established, the population grew, and settlement expanded. Cultural influences from the Roman Empire reached Estonia, and this era is therefore also known as the Roman Iron Age. ---------------------------------- A more troubled and war-ridden middle Iron Age followed with external dangers coming both from the Baltic tribes, who attacked across the southern land border, and from overseas. Several Scandinavian sagas refer to campaigns against Estonia. Estonian pirates conducted similar raids in the Viking age and sacked and burned the Scandinavian capital of Sigtuna in 1187.-----------------Estonia was occupied by Soviet troops in June 1940, as a consequence of the secret amendment to the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Estonia was formally annexed into the Soviet Union in August 1940 as the Estonian SSR. Many of the country's political and intellectual leaders were killed or deported to remote areas of Russia and other parts of the USSR by the Soviet authorities during 1940 to 1941. The repressions also included thousands of ordinary people. When German operation Barbarossa started against the Soviet Union thousands of young men were also forcibly drafted into the Red Army. Hundreds of political prisoners whom the retreating Soviets had no time to move, were massacred. The country was occupied by the Third Reich from 1941 to 1944, when Soviet forces reconquered it after fierce battles in the northeast of the country on the Narva river and on the Tannenberg Line (Sinimäed). Such was the fear and disgust of the general population against the Soviet oppressors that in the face of imminent re-occupation by the Red Army, tens of thousands of people chose to either flee the country to Finland or Sweden or retreat together with the Germans. In 1949, in response to slow progress in forming collective farms (as prescribed by the Soviet ideology), tens of thousands of people were forcibly deported in a few days either to labor camps or Siberia where half of them perished and the other half was not allowed to return until early 1960s (several years after Stalin's death). That and previous repressions in 1940-1941 sparked a guerilla war against the Soviet authorities in Estonia which was waged into the early 1950s by the so called "forest brothers" (metsavennad) consisting mostly of Estonian veterans of both the German and Finnish armies as well as some civilians. Western bank of Osmussaar Enlarge Western bank of Osmussaar ----------------------------------------- The Soviet era in Estonia which lasted from 1944 to 1991 was in general detrimental to the country as a whole. In addition to the usual Soviet-style forced collectivization of the agriculture, Estonia was also forced to go through with industrialization which was inefficient, and sometimes very destructive environmentally.