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.