Historian Toomas Karjahärm dies at 82

Prominent historian and history textbook co-author Toomas Karjahärm died on Monday in Tallinn at the age of 82, ERR reported. He was born in Tallinn on March 23, 1944.

Karjahärm worked as a junior researcher at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR from 1970 to 1975. From 1972 to 1990, he taught at the institute and became a professor in 1984.

From 1990, he was a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of History, later the Institute of History at Tallinn University. He led research and grant projects as well as doctoral studies, and later worked at Tallinn University’s Centre for History, Archaeology and Art History after the institute was abolished.

Karjahärm was a lecturer and a tenured and adjunct professor at universities in Estonia and abroad. He furthered his studies at universities in St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, Toronto and Jyväskylä.

His main research areas were the political and intellectual history of the modern era, including Estonia, Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as social history, culture, intellectual elites, Estonia’s relations with the outside world, modernisation, mass movements, historical research methodology and historiography.

With Väino Sirg, Karjahärm wrote a trilogy on the history of Estonia’s intelligentsia from 1850 to 1987. With Helle-Mai Luts, he co-authored a monograph on the persecution of artists and musicians from 1940 to 1953. He also wrote three monographs on Estonian and Baltic relations with Russia and two monographs on the 1905 Revolution in Estonia.

Karjahärm contributed to general histories, encyclopaedias, secondary-school and higher-education history textbooks and teaching materials. He published collections of documents and materials in Estonian and Russian, including volumes in the History of Estonian Thought series with Hando Runnel. He also published historical photographs and founded the series Old Cities and Counties: Buildings and People, which produced 14 albums between 2006 and 2013.

His work was published in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, Germany, France and Russia. He served as a member, expert and chair of several academic councils and state commissions.

Karjahärm took part in the restoration of Estonia’s independence, explaining the process at public meetings, in the media and at foreign universities. Together with colleagues, he launched an international conference on Estonia’s modern history in Tallinn in 1989. In 1997, he founded the Centre for Russian Studies at Tallinn Pedagogical University.

Karjahärm received the national science prize in 1999.