Estonian War Museum awarded a prize for a book about Laidoner and an article on Estonian-German military cooperation
The Estonian War Museum – General Laidoner Museum presented the Hendrik Sepa Awards to the best Estonian military history writers of the past year at a seminar in Tartu on Friday, 9 May. The book prize went to Aarne Ermus and Urmas Salo’s work on General Johan Laidoner, while the article prize went to Igor Kopõtin’s German-language article on military cooperation between Estonia and Germany in the 1930s.
The jury, which consisted of Dr. Peeter Kaasik (Estonian Institute of Memory) and Dr. Kristo Nurmis (Tallinn University), and last year’s winners Dr. Arto Oll (Estonian Maritime Museum), Lieutenant Commander Taavi Urb (Baltic Defence College) and Merike Jürjo, selected four books and three articles for the prize.
Dr. Mari-Leen Tammela, Senior Research Fellow at the Estonian War Museum and Chairwoman of the jury, said that the winner of the book prize, Aarne Ermus and Urmas Salo’s “Laidoner. Ohvitser ja juht” (Laidoner. Officer and Leader) stood out for its original approach. “Colonel Ermus’s look at General Laidoner opens up a view of the activities of another military practitioner, and in this way themes come to the spotlight that might be overlooked in a purely historical approach,” Tammela commented. Urmas Salo’s part of the work is an analysis of Laidoner’s speeches in the second half of the 1930s.
The article prize was claimed by Igor Kopõtin for his article „Eine auf Deutschland orientierte bewaffnete Neutralität. Die militärpolitische Zusammenarbeit Estlands mit dem Deutschen Reich in den 1930er Jahren“ (An armed neutrality oriented towards Germany: Estonia’s military cooperation with the German Reich in the 1930s) in Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 2024, 83 (2). This is the first foreign-language paper to receive the Sepp Prize. According to Mari-Leen Tammela, the article, with its high level of generalisation and rich source base, deals with a topic that has not received much attention in Estonian historical literature so far.
The prize winners were announced at the Estonian War Museum’s annual spring seminar on the Estonian war history research field, this time entitled “Perspectives on War History V: How to Write Good History?”. Presentations were given by Dr. Juhan Kreem, authors Tiit Aleksejev and Lilli Luuk, and journalist Erkki Bahovski.
Since 2013, the Estonian War Museum – General Laidoner Museum and the Ministry of Defence have been awarding the Hendrik Sepp Prize to the authors of the best monograph and article on Estonian military history of the past year. With a prize fund of €4,500, the aim of the prize is to value, recognise and encourage in-depth research into Estonian military history.
Hendrik Sepp (1888-1943) was a professor of Estonian and Nordic history at the University of Tartu, an academic, the author of more than 300 historical writings. His main fields of research were the period of the wars following the Livonian War and the Northern War, but he also wrote extensively on economic, cultural and social history. Sepp’s most influential research work was his dissertation for a doctorate, The Siege and Battle of Narva in 1700.
