The Estonian Language Law, passed by the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet on 18 January 1989, was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. It helped launch a wave of similar legislation in other union republics and symbolized a new level of assertion of republican rights against Moscow and the tradition of centralized control. It is no coincidence that the Language Law was drafted and became available for public discussion at virtually the same time as Estonia's declaration on sovereignty (16 November 1988), also a first in Gorbachev's USSR. Indeed in late 1988 and early 1989 Estonia was leading the way in the movement for decentralization in the Soviet empire as the major political goal began to shift from autonomy to independence. This article will assess the origins and nature of the law itself as well as its implementation and impact over a nearly five-year period to late 1993.

Historical studies of the Russian empire in upheaval in the first two decades of the twentieth century have tended to be animated by a narrow centralist bias or an equally narrow regional one. Although it is clear that the primary impulse for revolutionary situations in 1905 and 1917 resulted from events in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, a Russocentric approach to a society that was less than 50 percent Russian is surely inadequate. At the same time, studies of individual minority nationalities, however thorough, tend to view these groups in isolation. A comparative perspective, which could identify broader uniformities as well as local peculiarities, is usually lacking. In this article I shall present a synthesizing and comparative overview of the Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland. Although these areas constituted only 2 percent of the land area of the Russian empire and had less than 4 percent of its population in 1905,2 they were among the most modernized in the country, and their ethnic diversity and differing histories provide abundant material for a comparative case study.