hatchet

Yeah, good point. I’ve also heard claims that Estonia was on par with Finland in terms of GDP per capita before Soviet times, so many people blame socialism for the current weakness compared to Finland.

I think this thread highlights the general sentiment among the Estonian population perfectly.

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?

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):

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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.