I will focus on Estonia, as that’s where I grew up, but I assume this topic is also very relevant to the other Baltic nations.
For my whole life, I have heard horrible stories about Soviet occupiers. I have yet to meet a single person in real life who actually believed in communism or socialism, despite being raised in Soviet times and spending a lot of their childhood learning about Lenin, Stalin, etc.
I always knew that there are people out there (especially in other ex-soviet countries) who remember the USSR fondly, but I always assumed that this was more about nationalism than anything else, like “oh man it sure was great when we had a powerful military and a strong presence on the world stage”. It has been a serious culture shock to discover that the leaders of the Soviet union actually seem to have believed in the project, and that elsewhere in the union, the people seem to have believed in it as well! It really gives me a new perspective on Soviet nostalgia.
Meanwhile in the Baltic countries, and especially in Estonia, all age groups, including the very elderly, treat our Soviet past as an extremely dark time in our history. Just take a look at Estonia here compared to other nations: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/06/29/in-russia-nostalgia-for-soviet-union-and-positive-feelings-about-stalin/
When discussing this with older people, or when I hear Soviet times discussed in general, I always hear statements like:
- Almost everybody had family members or friends deported or killed (a part of the Estonian population was deported early in the occupation under the guise of being kulaks and nationalists, except the vast majority were women and children)
- People lost their ancestral homes and were forced into tiny apartments shared with other families
- There were constant shortages of food - you had to know somebody in the party or somebody working in a shop to get any actual variety in your meals
- In general, everything was super corrupt, being “well-connected” meant you had a much easier life
- Our culture was being deleted, we were not allowed to sing our songs, discuss a lot of our history, etc
- People felt that they had lost their dignity and were not treated in a humane way
Conversely, I have not really heard many (or really any that I can remember) positive statements.
So this is something I have been thinking about for the past few days, and it’s not a topic that I can generally find a lot previous unbiased discussions on online (I guess because at the end of the day, the Baltic nations are absolutely tiny).
So: what actually went wrong? Why did communist ideology not manage to take root within the minds of the Baltic people? Maybe others here have some interesting perspectives.
One thought I have had myself:
Estonia was never a colonial power, we were in fact serfs, with other nations like Sweden, Denmark and Russia taking turns at ruling us. So when the Soviet union marched in with their army, the Estonian people only saw it as another exploitative ruler, with no interest in hearing anything about socialism. Nevertheless, this doesn’t really explain why several generations growing up in the Soviet union never learned to appreciate socialism.
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Were doing pretty well in Soviet times and had the experience of cutting themselves out before Russia tanked. A perception that they did things right and Russia held them back.
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Were not subjected to nearly as vicious of economic violence in post-Soviet times.
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Were offered up NATO membership on a silver platter.
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Had a lot of Nazi sympathetic history and despite the memes, the Soviets let the vast majority of them live and have children and harbor antisemitic views.
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Western ahistorical narratives easily took root due to the above.
Compare to post-Soviet countries that were more thoroughly stripped for parts, saw dramatic losses in quality of life, never fully recovered, and/or lacked such a strong Nazi sympathetic history that was whitewashed into cultural heritage. Most of those countries (European side) had and have all of these elements and properties, it’s a matter of degree and whether one thoroughly won out in the aftermath.
Russia would probably be the same if it hadn’t been subjectes to shock therapy.
Yeah, that’s basically 1:1 Poland’s situation, except without the pro-Nazi stuff. (instead it’s nationalist narratives of having been held back and targeted by everyone - which is the only thing preventing from Poland becoming a great power.)
Pro-Socialist narratives are also censored, criminalized, denounced and the accusation of communism is flung around by libs and right wingers against each other - odds are, people who remember socialism fondly often have a blurred understanding of what it actually is, while those who actually do understand it and are supportive hold their tongue out of fear of backlash/resignation/lesser evilism.
I really do think it’s the cultural rift. The Baltics are culturally much more closer to Germanic/Scandinavian cultures than Slavic ones, so the Russians were much more so outsiders to them than many other countries that gained independence in the post-Soviet era. And so anything Russian coming in felt like an attack on their culture. Probably also due to them being brought into the Soviet fold in the post-revolution period which made it feel more like a realpolitik move. It was more about the strategic advantage of having Baltic Sea ports, so it created a feeling of being used.
the baltics were colonized by the germans, it was not a natural affinity of cultures
Yes they were conquered by Germanic nations multiple times, but that’s also going back many centuries. At some point the conquering culture gets assimilated into the native culture.
The Baltic Germans have almost completely left to become settlers in Poland after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had the USSR annex Estonia and Latvia, and then fled from the Red Army into West Germany.
Similarly, East Prussia was (as any self-respecting settler colony - even though the genocide of the Prussian Balts was completed by 1710) a far-right stronghold. In the March 1932 elections, the NSDAP and the monarchist DNVP got 56% combined there (compared to 12% for the KPD)
I think it’s so interesting how particularly true this is- it’s seen everywhere that colonialism spreads culture so thoroughly that even the colonized see themselves as the conquerors. I think Alexander the Great is a huge perpetuator of this in the common understanding of history, but basically every superpower has done it to some degree.
I think most of it can be attributed to the change in economic fortune. The countries that have more nostalgia for the USSR are the ones with more across-the-board economic hardships.
As somebody from Hexbear, I feel obligated to, uh, say something mean about Estonia? I don’t know why, but I’m told by other instances that we’re a pro-Estonian genocide instance.
Anyway. ur mom gay. HA GOTTEM!
(I literally have not heard anything about Estonia since Pauly Shore made it a gag in Encino Man.)
Estonia is automatically the coolest baltic state just solely based on Disco Elysium
yeah i mean, doesnt that kinda prove the op wrong a bit that the disco elysium devs are probably the only game developers from estonia of note and theyre communists? it could be that a lot of the pro communist sentiment is buried on purpose
In my experience, it’s extremely fringe and basically completely taboo to be pro-communism in Estonia. Disco Elysium is definitely a point of pride for many Estonian video game enjoyers, but even so, when discussing the authors, Estonians get super awkward about their communism. The general vibe I’ve seen is something like “ZA/UM can be forgiven for having a few screws loose, they’re artists after all” etc.
The first prime minister of Estonia post-independence was a Milton Friedman stan in his early 30s, and as a result the country is super neoliberal with all the problems that entails, like really high poverty rates by EU country standards and really low wages which means a lot of people are exploited by having to work construction in Finland or working in outsourced call centers for Finnish companies. Estonia fucking sucks.
I think in general your description of poverty rates and low wages is a perfect description of Estonia ~10 years ago, but nowadays I think it’s actually a bit different. Poverty rates have seriously decreased, wages have gone up quite quickly every year, and construction workers are making quite good money within Estonia, etc. (To be fair though, the inflation from the past year has hurt people a lot)
Are you Estonian by any chance?
Shock treatmemt would makse sense in the way Estonian workers did become the Others with the Baltic and how Finland was and still is exploiting their workers, because they probably had to seek a living wage outside the country after the Soviet fell.
Interestingly there is never any analysis of this whatsoever in Finnish media, a county that had it’s own shock therapy lite with the depression and a Chicago school dude as a prime minister.
Construction sites here see a lot of Eastern Europeans nowadays, but Estonian workers were the first to my understanding.
