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.
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.
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.
For what it’s worth, here’s a struggle session with a lib about this topic: https://lemm.ee/comment/3344414
Not a fan of how this discussion went tbh. GoodEye8 brought up the very same poll about The Baltic states sentiments about the Soviet period that OP is talking about here, and the comrades in the thread switched to “well yeah the Baltics are Nazis” which seems immensely shitty to me. I’m not saying there isn’t a Nazi sympathy problem in Baltics, the prevalence of double genocide Definity means there is. But surely there’s a reason why such sentiments are common in the Baltics besides “well the people of the Baltic countries are just naturally Nazi inclined” or some shit. I think the comrades there could have done a better job of adressing GoodEye8 when they brought up the poll showing that pro-Soviet period sentiments are uncommon in the Baltics.
I completely agree with you, especially regarding the “Baltics are Nazis” thing - I think it’s completely messed up. At least in Estonia, there are three very distinct kinds of people that regularly get called Nazis by foreigners (mostly by Russian media):
- Actual Nazi sympathisers - they surely exist (as they probably do in all countries globally), but in my experience, this is an extreme fringe minority of people, because the general sentiment is that Nazis occupied and did absolutely horrible things in Estonia in WW2.
- Conservative nationalists - a much bigger group, but still a minority, these are people who are hardcore against anything progressive, they generally even oppose the EU (often calling it a new version of the USSR, as an insult).
- People who condemn the Soviet Union - this is the vast majority of the population.
Basically all Estonians belong to the third group (as discussed elsewhere in this thread), so it’s actually scary when Russian media lumps these people in with literal Nazi sympathisers. I don’t think Estonia can do anything to effectively combat this propaganda either - Russian media is fucking powerful.
I think the reason why 3 happens, besides Russia’s national agenda of course, is that in the Baltics (and Finland) resistance to the USSR often came hand in hand with collaboration with the Nazis. I also mention the Double Genocide Theory, which is recognized as being basically Holocaust denial and from what Ive heard is basically government policy in the baltic nations (correct me if I’m wrong about that). There was unfortunately a fair amount of Baltic Nazi collaborators back in the WWII era. But it is good to hear you say that general sentiment is that Nazi occupation was bad. I just worry about any perception that the USSR was actually the worse evil and that collaborating with the Nazis to resist the USSR was acceptable being common there.
But yeah, generalizing the entire nation as Nazis is wrong of course. Especially since even according to the polling, roughly 15% of the Estonian population DO think the fall of the USSR was bad, which is still a lot of people. So it may not be common sentiment or maybe not something you say in polite company there, but it does exist.
Smaller countries so easier for anticommunism to diffuse
