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.
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.)
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?
Nope, Finnish. Honestly I'm shocked I was even slightly contemporary with my tangential knowledge of Estonian politics.
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.
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
Tbf half of that game are the devs lamenting how much their country sucks
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.
also, should be noted that the baltics are out of the norm in that they were one of the ex-soviet areas that received a lot of foreign funding and are now doing better, at least gdp wise, than they did under the soviets. but it took 20ish years for this to happen. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/GDP_per_capita_Baltics.svg/1280px-GDP_per_capita_Baltics.svg.png. from what i can tell, PPP has remained stagnant in estonia since the soviet collapse.
this could be fueling reactionary opinions in society, but it should also be noted that the west has a keen interest in getting the baltics under their heel, it allows them to put more pressure on russia from the north. its unlikely that the baltics would be stable economically without this significant investment from the west. but if you take a look at the graph i linked, you can clearly plot the trend out, under the soviets the gdp would be higher in these areas.
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.
Yeah no clue tbh. I could give you a czech communist opinion of the Soviet Union but it should be noted that we're one of the only places to not ban the communist party (despite many attempts) and there are still a good number of communists in the country, though that has unfortunately been waning in recent years. I'm not aware of any Estonian communists in hexbear to give you that perspective. Tbh maybe you should email the communists on zaum and ask them why lol
I do know what Lithuania was up to during ww2 and they did some nasty shit along with the poles so I could discuss that
I mean it's fringe and taboo in the west as well
Oh shoot, you're right! I take back everything, Estonia fucking cranks.