Remains of Estonian statesman to be exhumed despite local opposition
Remains of Estonian statesman Jüri Vilms (1889–1918) will be exhumed this week by the authorities, despite opposition, over doubts about whether the remains are really his, regional daily Sakala reported.
A heritage protection society and the Estonian War Museum want to carry out the work at a cemetery in Pilistvere, Viljandi County on Thursday.
Leader of the heritage protection society Madis Morel said there is some doubt whether any remains in the marked grave are Vilms' and modern technology can help to confirm this.
Vilms' relatives want the work exhumation to go ahead, he said.
Vilms was, according to the widely accepted version of events, executed in April 1918 in Helsinki. The circumstances around his death, and even whether a body brought back from Finland to Estonia was his, remain unclear.
DNA analysis of the remains exhumed from Pilistvere will be carried out in a lab in Austria, while bone studies will be conducted at Tallinn University.
Carl Heinrich Pruun, church congregation leader of the Pilistvere Andrease Kirik, said the congregation does not find the exhumation to be reasonable, but it will not physically oppose the work going ahead.
In the early spring of 1918, Vilms, together with fellow freedom fighters Arnold Jürgens, Johannes Peistik, and Aleksei Rünk, secretly left Estonia to seek support, primarily from Sweden, at a time when much of Estonia was still under Baltic German occupation.
Civil war was also raging in Finland at the time, historian Ott Sandrak noted, telling "Aktuaalne kaamera" a year ago that Vilms and his companions fell into the hands of German troops. All four men were shot in the yard of a factory in Helsinki on April 13, he said.
Other, more recent research has found Vilms may have been executed by a unit of the Swedish Brigade in Hauho, near Tampere.
Historian Mati Mandel also quoted Finnish historian Seppo Zetterberg, who noted near the end of his book "The Death of Jüri Vilms," that if I previously doubted whether the right bodies were brought [back] at all, now I doubt it even more. Mandel is a distant relative of Jürgens, one of the four executed in Helsinki, though he himself says he has no doubts that the bodies brought back to Estonia were of Vilms and his companions.
A descendant of Jüri Vilms' brother has also stated an interest in setting the matter straight.
Vilms was a member of the Estonian Salvation Committee, which issued the Estonian Declaration of Independence in February 1918, and the first Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Estonia.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Mirjam Mäekivi
