Russian's bridge to Estonia: (Violetta Sokolenko, a rector in Estonia).

One of the most important things in life is to know which bridges to cross and which to burn, says Violetta Sokolenko, Rector of the Tallinn Commercial College in Estonia. `Every day I try to burn the bridge which leads to fear.'

When the small Baltic state emerged from under the shadow of the Soviet empire in 1990, many of the Russian minority left to return to their homeland. Sokolenko, then a researcher at Tallinn's Institute of Pedagogy, asserts she was not tempted to do the same. Rather, she `burnt the bridge of any hesitation' and stayed in Estonia.

She set up a private college for 250 Russian students intending to go into business and industry in Estonia, with the aim of building bridges between the communities.

`We started, from the very beginning, to pay a great deal of attention to the Estonian language.' The Russian students have to pass exams in citizenship as well as studying Estonia's culture, literature and constitution. And Estonian businessmen are invited to give lectures.

Another bridge, says Sokolenko, has been to the West. Lecturers come from Notre Dame University in America for a month each year and the Russian students spend three weeks there. There are other exchange programmes with Finnish and German institutes, particularly on Total Quality Management.

So successful has the college been that most of its 200 graduates so far have landed good jobs with Estonian firms or have gone on to study for their masters degrees, says Sokolenko.

She is keen to instil in the students a sense of ethical and moral values, as a foundation for democracy. `There are many problems among the young because people confuse freedom and democracy with a sort of anarchy. They think they can do anything they want.' Before, they were held together by ideology, `but now they unite on a materialistic basis and the only question is how to make lots of money. They want to be rich immediately after leaving the college.' So they make terrible mistakes, including joining badly run companies. `We try to persuade them that business is not done in this way.'

Sokolenko likes to quote her eight-year-old granddaughter who once asked her, `Why in our world is money more important than love?' And while Dostoevsky once wrote that `beauty will save the world', Sokolenko believes that `love will save the world'.