Tallinn Trip – Soviet Statue Graveyard (Helene Kullman Statue)
Another displaced statue and another contested Soviet claim, they certainly don’t make things clear-cut in their propaganda. Anyway, Helene Kullman, also known as ‘Leen’ was an Estonian woman who became a Soviet intelligence agent during World War II. Born in Tartu in 1920, she was trained in espionage and sent to gather information on German troop movements in occupied Estonia. Posing as a refugee, she successfully infiltrated German-held territory and relayed valuable intelligence to the Soviet Baltic Fleet. However, her mission was cut short when she was arrested by the Gestapo in Tallinn in 1943. Despite enduring torture, Kullman refused to betray her comrades or reveal sensitive information. Well, that’s the story, but it’s controversial and might not have happened. There is credible evidence that she survived the war and so she remains something of a complex enigma with the further complexity that there’s a suggestion that she might have been a double agent.
The memorial to her was designed by Elmar Rebane and unveiled in front of the Helene Kullman vocational school on 23 December 1972. The unveiling was attended by her twin sister and a room at the school was used as a museum to the agent. The monument was removed in the early 1990s and brought to the museum in 2006. When walking around these memorials, it didn’t occur to me just how controversial the facts behind them were. Like with much else, to most Russians she would be a hero, to most Estonians it’s fair to speculate that the matter is rather less clear cut.
As an interesting comparison between different Wikipedia pages depending on the country, the Estonian Wikipedia page has two death dates for her depending on which account is believed and it has a lot of content about the controversial subject of whether she was actually even on the side of the Soviets. The Russian Wikipedia page doesn’t have both dates and has a section titled “Estonian press claims about Leen Kuhlman’s double life” which it rejects as Russophobic nonsense and doesn’t much concern itself with the controversy at all.
