The Brief Life of the Soviet Republic of Sailors and Fortress-Builders
Russian sailors created the republic on a small Baltic Sea island
Naissaar, part of modern Estonia, has quite the history for a sparsely populated island of barely seven square miles. The name means “women’s island” in Estonian. It reportedly comes from an 11th-century legend about beautiful Baltic Sea Amazons on an island where the men are slaves.
Nine centuries later, only men inhabited the island. Amid the chaos of war and revolution, they declared it an independent republic.
The legend of the Amazons stems from Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church, written by German chronicler Adam of Bremen between 1073 and 1076. In it, he reports that the son of Swedish King Emund the Old, who ruled from 1050 to 1060, landed at “Woman Land (patriam feminarum), whom we consider to be Amazons.” The women killed the king’s son and his army.
Apparently, any female warriors were gone by the 14th century, as the island was inhabited mainly by Swedes. It became part of the Swedish Empire in the 16th century. Sitting in the Gulf of Finland and only about a dozen miles from the Estonian capital, Tallinn, Baltic states considered the island a strategic defensive stronghold.
