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.

  • hatchetOPEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Lots of interesting comments here already. I am now trying to find more information from another perspective - how did the Estonian people feel about the Soviets leading up to the occupation.

    During the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Estonia was still a part of the Russian Empire. There was also a revolutionary government in Estonia at that time, but at the same time, a democratically elected (capitalist) government emerged, resulting in a dual power situation in Estonia.

    There was a war of independence during 1918-1920. In Estonian schools, it’s taught like this: on one side was the capitalist government with a mostly volunteer military (and with heavy financial and military aid from Britain and Finland) - these were the “good guys”. They were fighting the “bad guys” - Germans in the south, and Bolsheviks in the East. Bolsheviks also included the aforementioned revolutionary government, which was in fact fully comprised of ethnic Estonians, but they are mostly handwaved away as traitors to the Estonian people, and actually they are kind of treated as Russian puppets who were just executing the will of the “Soviet empire”. I remember being very confused in school when learning about these guys, I never understood how the Russians managed to convince some Estonians to betray our people, I think the common understanding most people leave school with is that they were basically just fundamentally evil people (yes, really).

    Ultimately the October revolution failed in Estonia, because the capitalist government managed to somehow win against both Germans and the Red Army with a much smaller army (how this happened is actually really hard for me to understand), and so the first independent capitalist Estonia was born (which lasted until the Soviet occupation in 1939).

    Based on the above, I am making some assumptions:

    1. I can definitely see the war of independence creating a “Bolsheviks are the enemy” understanding in the general populace, so when the Soviets came at the start of WW2, people were already only seeing them as the enemy. I think this is the perfect environment to prevent the spread of communism as an ideology: a population who feel they’ve had their independent future stolen from them by the Soviets, their historic enemies. I can definitely see parents in such an environment priming their children to not trust Soviet teachings from a young age - I know from first hand experience that such priming was being done to children when I was very young, so this very well could be something that has been passed down through the generations from when the occupation first started.
    2. Very likely the war of independence resulted in the loss of most Estonian communists, so by the time of the occupation, there were probably very few Estonian people spreading communist ideology “on the inside”.
    3. This is pure speculation, but the fact that the Estonian people had effectively resisted the October revolution may have caused some built-in anger and disdain from the side of the Soviets, and this may very well explain the initial violence and frankly unjustifiable deportations of what I consider mostly innocent people.

    I want to try and find some more sources about the revolutionary government and the war of independence, and how the people in Estonia felt about communism during the October revolution, but I think I will need to go to a library for this, as I am not finding much online (certainly not finding much that is unbiased).

    One interesting note: the revolutionary government went into exile in Russia after the war of independence, and eventually most of them were executed during the Great Purge. I am having a hard time finding out what crimes they were accused of.

    • NoLeftLeftWhereILive [none/use name, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for this question and these thoughts. This and a sort of similar history here in Finland has me confused as well because a lot of the framing seems the same. It was just today that we were talking with a friend on how it would be very good to hear even one Soviet positive comment from someone who lived during that time in Estonia. There really seems to be none.

      The history seems blurry at best. I know that here in Finland the capitalists had a lot of support from Germany and also Sweden even before the October revolution and it was them who were actually originally against independence. The nation building story of one nation came a lot later. But, they had to give into the independence which was then flipped on its head later as a project led by them (they actually wanted to install a monarchy here).

      All the Finnish owner families tend to have feudal ties and this goes back a lot further than the last century, but I believe they always saw Finland as their little playground where the people really didn’t have much of a voice until the Soviet started to form, this threat gave us a civil war that in hindsight the capitalists won. The support for them in my understanding came from their ties to feudalists. This also gave birth to the weldare state as the Reds had to be appeased with something, up until this we were still happily trading poors as slaves.

      Framing of these things in school, things like the Terijoki parliament are muddy and odd, the people deemed as bolsheviks are basically called traitors, but nobody says what or who was betrayed and how exactly. All I know is that the Reds here were treated badly even during WW2 and to this day “finlandization” will bring forward great outrage from the capitalis class.

      Our nations story has very much been constructed for and by these people in power, on a large part those in power remain to be the same today. I wonder if this alone has been enough to effectively disappear the voice and history of communism here and demonize it so fully that today you cannot find a balanced voice on this anymore and those few who do see the era of Soviet collaboration as prosperous have been fully discredited.