There is still much about Estonia that is unfamiliar to the world at large. The Russian attempt to subdue the country and its people, and to weaken or even destroy Estonian national identity, was never successful, but Russian attempts to pretend to the outside world that it was did have some success.
For a long time there prevailed a general impression that Estonia had irreversibly become some kind of province or 'Bezirk' of the Soviet Empire, in which Russian had replaced the native language as the means of everyday discourse. An example of such misunderstanding may be seen in the novel Smiley's People by John le Carre, in which Estonian emigres are described conversing together in Russian -- in spite of the plot, an improbable state of affairs.
