In Northern Estonia, the Soviet authorities didn't have a recipe on how to fight against the popularity of Finnish TV. Audiences didn't want to watch hardcore Soviet propaganda.

Working under the Soviet system made you very paranoid - people were afraid of everything - and this paranoia is still in people's minds.

In the mid-1980s, however, the Estonian TV programmers came up with a clever idea: they asked Moscow for millions of rubles to make propaganda in Estonia to fight the Finnish programs' popularity. They got millions from the government, but what they made was not propaganda at all! They simply made good, entertaining programs - no one in Estonia recognized them as propaganda, only Russia thought it was, so they got away with it. Of course, Russia provided their own propaganda programs, but Estonians knew to avoid them.

My childhood in the Soviet Union was not terrible, it was very joyful.

In Northern Estonia, the Soviet authorities didn't have a recipe on how to fight against the popularity of Finnish TV. Audiences didn't want to watch hardcore Soviet propaganda.

It was life under the Soviet system - we were struggling with every big problem. Publicly, my parents had to queue up to buy food, but were able to live secret lives in their private rooms. With the TV set in the living room, we were able to see Western pop culture -a different reality from what we were living. For me, it was like two different universes existed at the same time, and we got used to being in these parallel universes.

Life under the Soviet system was often funny, absurd really, especially for children.