With hindsight, the best was made of a bad situation, he and other leaders from the time recalled.

The events on Tõnismägi, just across from the National Library, can now be seen as a teachable moment – for instance the decision to confine the response to civilian agencies like the police and not to deploy the military seems to have been the right one.

It is also clearer now how much of a watershed event it was, as that point in time where all those resident in Estonia, and outside of it, could come to realize that it was a wholly sovereign state, not required to bend to the whims of outside powers.

Those involved say the 2007 April riots stemmed from years of indecision, yet continuing this stance and leaving the Bronze Soldier untouched could have led to even graver consequences for Estonian society.

The "Bronze Soldier", nicknamed "Alyosha," stood on Tõnismägi in central Tallinn from September 1947, initially until the restoration of Estonia's independence, and then with just as much momentum into free Estonia. It was in this free Estonia however that Alyosha began to develop into a potential flashpoint, mostly between Soviet war veterans and simply pro-Russian people on the one side and so-called Estonian nationalists on the other. Things started to get most heated around May 9, which the eastern neighbor still celebrates as the victory in the Great Patriotic War.

Over the years, however, the statue and the day became something more than simply a flower parade for old Russian-speaking servicepeople. The final straw came in 2006. Attendees at the Bronze Soldier on May 9 that year threatened to get violent when two elderly Estonians arrived carrying the blue, black and white flag, along with a placard declaring their opposition to the Bronze Soldier as an installation.

To head off any scuffle, police decided to remove the two men who had staged the picket. More than 10 drunken revelers were then taken to the police station to have misdemeanor reports drawn up; more than 20 were given a verbal warning. Acts of apparent vandalism were also carried out, but the event was a watershed in that the implication had been that taking the Estonian flag to an area inside the Republic of Estonia at any time had been seen as a reprehensible act by some.

"The Bronze Soldier was actually doused with paint, after which a patrol schedule was put in place there specifically to prevent further acts against the statue. When Jüri Böhm came with the blue, black and white flag and the crowd wanted to attack him, and the police patrol then took him away, that was the last straw, because surely there is not a place in the Estonian capital where you cannot go with the Estonian flag, or where it is not safe," recalled Erik Heldna, who was then director of the criminal department at the police's Northern Prefecture and was also in the Vikerraadio studio.

"I think this event was a definitive red line, from which there was no turning back," he added. Andrus Ansip, prime minister at the time, also today identifies May 9, 2006, as the final wake-up call.

"It was already clear in 2006 that the Bronze Soldier could not stay there. We immediately began consultations with various interest groups, people from the Rifle Corps, religious organizations; we talked to a lot of people. There was no consensus, of course. Next, the legal questions had to be resolved. The Ministry of Justice proposed a bill on prohibited structures, which in fact would not have resolved any issue and which the president ultimately also refused to promulgate," Ansip recounted.

"I asked the Varul law firm to draft the relevant bill, so they developed the War Graves Protection Act based on a bill that had previously been under consideration. The bill was so strong that even several Center Party members eventually voted for it too, though they did not realize this was precisely the legal basis on which the Bronze Soldier would be taken away from Tõnismägi," Ansip added.

Time marches ever onward; the Riigikogu elections held in March 2007 ended up being a triumph for the Reform Party, who then formed a tripartie coalition with Pro Patria and Res Publica Union (the forerunner to today's Isamaa) and the Social Democrats. This coalition took office on April 5, only a little over a month before May 9. Jaak Aaviksoo, also taking part in the Vikerraadio broadcast, unexpectedly found himself in the post of defense minister.

"This was not an area which I had systematically prepared for in any way. But it was clear that the Ministry of Defense was responsible for organizing the excavations. It was clear that we had to avoid the possibility of this becoming a hotspot for provocations on May 9, which meant that everything had to take place ahead of May 9," Aaviksoo said.

"Everything" here included the fencing off of the statue, to render it inaccessible to the public. What followed was, among other things, an early example of the role social media can play in mass unrest – unrest on a scale which had not been forecast according to Aaviksoo.

"The most key principled decision, which can be judged one way or another in hindsight, was to fence off the monument and begin the excavations there covertly. By morning, the fence was up, and until that point there had actually been no major conflict. It caught them by surprise, but it nevertheless allowed them to mobilize so many people via social media and other channels that by evening there was a crowd there that could be stirred up and incited to vandalize. We were not actually prepared for a development like that. How many of those present were local people and how many were their advisers from the east is probably still unknown," Aaviksoo recalled, taking us back to April 26, 2007.

Toomas Malva was working in Tallinn as the commander of the riot squad during those April days. Protestors were organized too – notably around the Nochnoy Dozor ("Night Watch") organization of Russian speakers in Estonia.

"Our task was also to secure the excavations. The opposing side, which was the Night Watch, set up its own guard there and expressed that they would not allow the excavation and would not allow themselves to be disturbed at all, so that they could still commemorate their memories. We can assume that this was influenced from somewhere, that someone financed it, but it could also have been a grassroots initiative. Later they provocatively jumped onto the fence while the foreign press, mainly the Russian media, was filming them," Malva recalled.

Whether or not it was solely behind the disturbances, a peaceful solution to the situation involving the Kremlin was also sought, though according to Ansip, preparations were nevertheless made for a conflict, though with hindsight, things snowballed too much before the decision was made for the authorities to act.

"No one knew exactly what was going to happen. We knew that the whole process was still being directed from the Kremlin; later I established that two officers specializing in mass riots from another country were present. In the evening, people began gathering in front of the National Library, and of course the intervention should have come earlier, but that did not succeed," he said.

The prime minister convened the crisis committee and, under his leadership, and an operational headquarters was established at the police command center. The decision was made then and there to remove the Bronze Soldier and to coordinate the activities of the security forces. The situation was handled mainly by the police and other civilian agencies subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior; the military Defense Forces remained on standby, however, mainly to protect their facilities. The riots which followed were largely contained through the night.

In hindsight, Heldna praises the politicians' decision not to bring the Estonian Defense Forces onto the streets, even though the police took what he called a severe beating that night. "As it began to get dark, the crowd got more aggressive, the first objects started flying; they had become verbally aggressive much earlier. I remember one of the first cars being overturned. I remember that feeling; I thought: now it's getting out of hand. The crowd suddenly realized that there was no point fighting around the Bronze Soldier any more, but that there was an opportunity to 'liberate the city' of its expensive clothes or alcohol," he recalled.

By now, work was under way to remove the Bronze Soldier altogether, relocating it to the military cemetery across town, where it remains to this day. Ansip said the swift removal was needed in order that the state could retain the initiative and the trust of the public.

After getting the backing of government members, the removal operation was carried out overnight, while the riots were ongoing elsewhere, with the necessary equipment obtained from a nearby scheduled demolition site. With the dawn, it seemed that this had been the right course of action, given the circumstances, Ansip went on.

"I am sure that standing up to the rebellion united a great deal of the Estonian people and also made it clear to many people living here that Estonia is, at the end of the day, a wholly independent state. It is not the case that orders concerning the way we conduct our lives still come from the Kremlin."

While the national broadcaster – ERR was formed just a few weeks after the riots following the merger of the formerly separate Estonian Television and Estonian Radio – was key to conveying what was going on to the national populace and beyond, the private sector media also played its part. The most immediate picture was actually provided by Kanal 2, whose news magazine "Reporter" had by that decade redefined the microcosm of Estonian television news and was at the absolute peak of its popularity.

Directed by Ivar Vigla, reporter Steiv Silm and cameraman Veiko Taluste were on the spot for Kanal 2 as a second night of riots took place, bringing a western-style coverage of the events.

"That was perhaps an example of this kind of modern news production. In the U.S. and the West, it was relatively common to have the constant readiness to go live. By that point, the tech also made that viable; it was not yet as easy as it is now, but it already permitted it. In the end, it was Vigla's decision - he said that it had to be done, that we should monitor things and do it," Silm recalled.

"I was also a young guy then, full of enthusiasm to do things. That was the mentality that prevailed there too: Full throttle, no one really stood in your way, no one was afraid of anything. We knew that we had always managed to swim our way out of everything," Silm added.

Some of the work brought safety concerns too. "The task was that I did not actually have to conduct interviews there. Taluste was the one filming and, if necessary, I would have asked the questions from the side as a reporter. But the main consideration was still that a radio listener cannot see things," said Silm, who essentially became Taluste's bodyguard. "I'm not the shortest man, nearly two meters tall. I was told, go help Taluste, help him get through all these things. Then when darkness fell, we went out on to the streets, to monitor exactly what was happening there."

The risk of Estonians engaging in reprisals by attacking Russian-speakers was also a clear and present threat, with mobile communications again a factor by this time. This made heading off further escalation vital. "That risk was there, and [Estonian] people also gathered. This was particularly on the afternoon of the second day, when there had been calls for it. But this confirmed the enormous importance of strategic communications, 19 years ago; specifically those messages that started coming to people's mobile phones saying, do not fall for the provocation, please do not come. I think that preventing this scenario from materializing was also a major success story, as our eastern neighbor was certainly expecting this to be drawn into a very classic national conflict," Heldna said.

Ansip noted out that, in hindsight, the situation was resolved in the only way possible. "If we had allowed the conflict to continue, if we had taken a more lenient approach, then surely it would have been even harder for us to resolve in the future. Then who became the enemy of the press in 2007? I did, because I allegedly did not encourage discourse in society but rather suffocated that discussion. There had been enough discussion; action was needed," Ansip went on.

Aaviksoo compared the issue of the Bronze Soldier to the current debate on and process of transition to Estonian-language education only, arguing that the decision on both issues was postponed for years, out of a desire to be democratic and tolerant and to avoid tensions involving national minorities. '

"At times, we may have been too naive and may have learned too little from the experience of the wider world. In setting up a sovereign state of our own, there have been certain issues that needed to be resolved unambiguously. Ambiguity leads to uncertainty, while conflict is encouraged through uncertainty, then these conflicts can spiral out of control. As an independent state, we have been learning gradually from the experience of the world, and there is still plenty to learn about today."

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