Avo Savikas backgrounder (1997 profile by writer Andres Kahar)

First published:

The Baltic Times (Riga, Lettland)
30 January, 1997

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HISTORY RECONSIDERED

By ANDRES KAHAR

"Thomas Wolfe was correct. You certainly can't go home again," wrote
Avo Savikas in a diary entry dated February 24 last year. "In my case,
that means more than one home."

The Estonian-American, a self-styled "scientist of socialist progress
and mind expansion," has never been forgiven by the pillars of the
Estonian émigré communities.

Savikas' has held unique views on a range of issues, from the Soviet
Union's future and nationalism to animal science and LSD, so he was
dismissed by fellow émigrés as little more than a pinko, drug-crazed
traitor. Savikas' hagiographic Internet homepage, however, paints a
different picture – that of a visionary traduced by a vicious
generation of hawks.

Savikas' life story is about as lacking in clarity as his many
holistic philosophies. Born in Estonia in 1930, young Savikas and his
father, a former associate of Estonia's pre-independence Bolshevik
activist Viktor Kingisepp, fled Estonia in 1944, bouncing from Germany
to Venezuela, and eventually to post-revolutionary Cuba. Little is
known of Savikas' activities during these years.

It was in 1961 that the exiled Estonian, by this point a known
left-wing activist, made his way to Miami by raft. Savikas went on to
take a PhD in 1968 at – as footnoted in his 1995 autobiography I Did
It For the People – "some university in the American mid-west." There
he wrote a thesis entitled "Animal Husbandry and Revolutionary
Socialism."

Being a workaholic, he laboured away concurrently on a master's degree
in Soviet studies and Russian language. In the autobiography, Savikas
is equally vague about this school's whereabouts, describing it as "an
ivy-covered institution," situating it "east of my other school."

These academic credentials, however, were enough to land the freshly
naturalized Savikas a research post at a small pharmaceutical
institute in upstate New York upon "graduation."

Savikas became marginally active in the Estonian community in New
York, but it did not take long for him to ruffle feathers. A speech
delivered by Savikas at one Estonian function in autumn 1969, entitled
"Estonia and the Gogol syndrome," called for Estonians abroad to
"engage" the Kremlin and win "satellite status" for the Estonian SSR.
Not less than 15 times did Savikas draw the audience's attention to
the similarity between the word for "bread" in Estonian and Russian –
leib in the former and khleb in latter.
The self-described Russophile's well-meaning rhetoric was too much for
the émigré community to bear. Savikas' name was soon dropped from
invitation lists and scratched off membership rosters.

At the same time, Savikas was finding professional existence at the
pharmaceutical institute stifling. Things changed drastically in the
summer of 1970: at a weekend pool party in San Francisco, he sampled
LSD for the first time, later describing the experience in his book as
"a wild, super-sensory trip, like the parting of Lake Peipsi, or
something."

Determined to pursue "mind-blowing, transcendental drug research,"
Savikas drew the ire of greyheads at the Institute and was forced to
resign less than a month after the fateful party. He then bid a bitter
farewell to the Estonians of New York and beat a hasty retreat to
Churchill, Manitoba, the base where he channelled his energies to
Soviet research studies – and tripping. In November 1970, he founded
the Institute of Soviet Strategic Studies and Consciousness Research.

The 1970s and early 80s were rough times for Savikas and his small
institute, where he worked on a shoestring budget and with a research
staff of four (one of which was his Inuit wife, who ran a local garden
supply centre). This did not stop Savikas from becoming a minor voice
in academic debate in numerous subject areas, contributing a number of
papers on ethnonationalism and Marxist-Leninist economics.

Between research in the realm of international relations and lectures
on the virtues of psychedelic exploration, Savikas managed to return
to his homeland on five occasions in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Mysterious meetings in Tallinn and Stockholm under cover of darkness
during this period with one "Mr. Ulo," rumoured to be the head of a
Soviet cultural exchange organization, provided Savikas with primary
resource material other Western academics could only dream about. Then
came the Awakening.

Savikas was among the first Western researchers on the ground in the
Soviet Union when glasnost opened archives and minds alike. Making
common cause with the rump of the former Estonian Communist Party,
Savikas launched his pro-Gorbachov mission to see the USSR reformed
according to Lenin's original vision.

"It is wonderful here," Savikas wrote in his diary on March 30, 1990.
"People who believe in the faith, people who listen. And the personal
secretaries! However, the drug culture leaves something to be
desired."

The Churchill-based Estonian spent increasingly more time in Estonia,
becoming a regular second choice pundit for smaller television
stations and newspapers across North America. When in Tallinn, he
could often be spotted on weekday afternoons and Sundays, dressed in a
blue-black-and-white track suit, jogging around the Old Town Square
distributing literature.

In the long run, however, Savikas was on the losing side. After 1991,
the émigré Estonian's wistful recollections of "the Gorbachov vision
thing" quickly saw him dubbed as something of an anachronist. His boys
in Tallinn were out of the picture, having either "hightailed it to
Moscow" or "bedecked themselves with primordial garb."

In February 1992, after an embarrassing attempt to buy himself a seat
on Tallinn City Council ("the scene of many glorious battles in
history," a diary excerpt has it), Savikas returned to Churchill.
Bereft of his glasnost era inflations, he closed his beloved Institute
two months later.

Still, the venerable left-wing thinker remained active. Always one
step ahead of his fellow academics, Savikas metamorphosed into
"Cyber-Savikas" last year, putting up the "Get high, Get Unchained and
Get the Man" homepage. Critics lampooned the project. They
rhetorically asked how features such as Dogberry the Virtually Real
Dog's guides to citizenship policy and electoral reform could be taken
seriously.

To this, Savikas always returned with a brusque reply: "If you had any
political sensibility, you would ask yourself where ITAR-TASS is
getting its information these days!"

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Date of Issue: Ceturtdiena, 1997. gada 30. janvâris.
Theme : News (page 1) 
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