So I was reading through @sunaurus@lemm.ee 's comment about Estonian demographic history and felt intrigued by some of the claims, so I did a teeny tiny bit of digging to see what I could find. So here goes:
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The Estonian population expanded rapidly during the industrial revolution right up to the 1910s.
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World War 1 and the Great Depression manage to suppress population growth for the next decade.
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Nazi occupation of Estonia (marked RKO) coincides with WW2. The vast majority of ethnic Jews flee to the USSR, and those whl stayed behind were exterminated. The nazis and their Estonian collaborators built concentration camps. This coincides with a dip in the graph.
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After WW2, Estonia is back under the USSR. The first Estonian SSR was established in 1940-1941 when nazi occupation started. After some lag, the population begins climbing on the same curve it did before. The population of the country peaks in 1989.
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20000 people were deported to Russia very early in the existence of the SSR
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The nazis aimed to remove 50% of the population on paper but only had 4yrs to do so. This means using concentration camps on ethnic Estonians for germans to take their homes/land as in palestine today.
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20k is not the same as sunaurus's 20% claim, not even close. 20% does however match the proportion of modern estonians who are russian. The obvious conclusion one can gather from this comparison is that this is not dissimilar to Great Replacement propaganda. The assumption here is that ethnic Russians are taking up Estonian space, because the evidence points to massive population growth under the ussr rather than a contraction like the one that occurred with German occupation.
Immigration was highest during that huge growth period, so I'm curious where all those excess deaths and gulags occurred to have not slowed or stopped said growth. It sounds to me like this person is just intimidated by people they consider foreign.
Another important facet of this: Communism doesn't have any malthusian elements in its ideology. There is no marxist theory which purports states are more efficient when they commit genocide.
Naziism very boldly and forwardly posits ethnic cleansing as one of its aims. Genocide is attractive to fascists because it frees up resources and capital for those considered deserving of them. In fascism, death balances the budget and every prominent fascist writer was not shy about saying so.
Capitalism is not addressing the tragedy of the commons, fascism is addressing it by stealing the resources from others, communism is a transgender polycule having an orgy behind the dumpster at dennys after a 3am rave party.
There is no tragedy of the commons. The coiner of the phrase as well as the concept of "lifeboat ethics", Garrett Hardin, was a fascist and white supremacist who used environmentalism as a tool to smuggle and propagate anti-immigrant and eugenicist ideologies.
Much like barter, the Tragedy of the Commons is an extrapolation based on modern economic orthodoxy, yet either did not exist or was solved out of existence from the dawn of human society.
The commons were communally managed for centuries by the people. The tragedy was the enclosures that destroyed communal village economies.
yeah they are purely theoretically possible but with literally no actual evidence from history because guess what, people are not mindless psychopaths unable to engage in social reasoning and compromise. Like bourgeois economists keep on assuming that in a prisoner's dilemma situation that you would always have the participants behave selfishly instead of showing a more enlightend social reason.
The actual tragedy is that capitalism, which ideologically uses the argument from the Tragedy of the Commons to justify itself, in fact makes such social breakdowns as described by the Tragedy of the Commons more likely due to the fact capitalism destroys healthy, organic social relations and community.
Of course this doesn't change that there is nothing stopping us from refuting it again. It's a classic example of capitalism recreating the world in its own satanic image.
Comrade that 3rd article is unironically supportive of trophy hunting. Also ecofascists don’t own the concept of “tragedy of the commons”. We don’t disagree with malthusians that resources are limited, we disagree on how to allocate resources.
I heard 40 billion was the theoretical carrying capacity for earth, if human consumption was minimized. As communists we don’t really want to stop technological or population growth, we want people to stop eating meat and driving cars and living in single family houses and yes we want people to choose to have less kids but we generally don’t agree with forced population control measures. We believe that we can allocate the finite resources of earth in a manner conductive towards human existence.
Malthusians and ecofascists want to stop technological and:or population growth so that western levels of consumption can be maintained. A malthusian would rather have a world with half a billion people not asking how it gets down that low, meanwhile a communist wants more people, they want humanity to flourish and grow, maybe not exponentially, maybe they want humanity to reach an equilibrium where births and deaths are equal.
What I’m saying is, resources are limited and there’s a regressive and progressive approach to the issue, and the malthusian approach is the regressive one. And communism is naturally the antithesis to malthusian. And off in the corner wearing a dunce cap drooling is capitalism which does not believe we will run out of fossil fuels.
What does any of this mean, idk fuck Ted Kaczynski.
So does liberal capitalism. Literally read anything by Peter Singer and he will wax on for pages and pages about how we should be donating to famine relief before at the very end (and it is in every single one of his works and literally on his website) saying that actually population control will have a higher marginal utility than famine relief so really we should be making sure the poors don't breed. Just disgusting stuff.
Malthus's argument as an analytical hypothesis has applied in many instances in history (in China, for instance).
However, Malthus also saw a normative and political dimension to in in that he believed it was right and good, inescapable, and the only way of restoring the 'natural order'. He was not able to foresee different economic conditions, technological innovations or different social systems which would obviate the problem.
Communism is also premised on a rejection of not only the Malthusian political idea which Fascism embraces as an active participant, but emphasizes that the predicament is not necessary and that it can be overcome.
Communism is the only ideology genuinely hopeful, and the only hope, for the future.
Taking any advice or insight on accuracy. I typed this up really fast so it's a bit of a mess. Any supporting evidence helps.
I don't have anything to add but the Baltikkks are notorious around here for just making up bizarre pseudo-history to justify their obsessive hatred of the USSR. I think they're mostly mad because the local equivalent of Naziism had near universal support and they weren't allowed to do Nazi shit for forty years, but that is admittedly very much prejudice.
Every single baltic person I have met without fail will say something along the lines of "i lived under communism" and they're like 30. Like they were only just born when the USSR collapsed they lived under none communism. Yet they'll use this to justify the most reactionary thinking...
It's would be like me saying I lived under apartheid. No I didn't, I'm a born free South African. I have no idea what apartheid was like.
I've seen that from a bunch of eastern europeans and it's just like... you are not 60, whatever communism you lived under was a handful of years where you weren't a child at the very end of the eastern bloc at the height of cold war stupidity. I really seems like most of them think the horrors of the shock doctrine were "communism".
A friend of mine works with a lithuanian lady who is either doing a phd or already completed it (I'm bringing this up because I want to show that her brainworms go extremely deep and also that formal education on europe is dogshit), and she keeps complaining about seeing young people being "into" communism and making the nazi equivalence. I told said friend that anyone who talks about how nice the Germans were and how mean the soviets were, probably should be questioned about what exactly their family did that made the Germans so amendable.
Fuck Timothy Snyder. Fuck Anne Applebaum. Those two Nazi apologists need to be transported back in time to Eastern Europe in 1941 and live their fucking hot takes out.
Really good post. Cuts through the bullshit and presents it as it is.
Honestly if Sun shows up here and recognises how wrong they are I'll be surprised, but I do hope it happens. They genuinely have the ability to learn, the question is whether they'll close themselves off due to cognitive dissonance or not. I don't even want them to like the soviet union just realise that they've filled their brain with trash about it and maybe taking a more solidly open-minded stance is a good idea.
I denounce Randy Orton for his heinous crimes against the Estonian people!
This is great stuff. Shows how full of shit that sunaurus person is. Nice work!
Thanks for the ping, OP. I don't expect much good to come out of commenting here - I assume if you guys see "only" 20k people being repressed as not evil, then there's not much I can do to defend myself here. Nevertheless, I can try.
First of all, the 20k number is certainly downplaying reality a lot (which is quite typically done in Russian sources). The amount of real victims is certainly higher. Also remember that Estonia is a very small country - even if the soviets "only" deported, imprisoned and/or executed a five digit number of Estonians, then that is still something between one in every hundred to one in every ten Estonians being directly repressed (not to mention the families and close ones of victims, who were of course also indirectly affected).
As for the 20% population replacement - on the very graph you posted, you can see that the size of the Estonian population was quite similar during the 30s and the 50s (around 1.1mil). According to a 1934 census, the population was ~90% of Estonian descent. Another census in 1959 showed that demographics had changed significantly - the population was ~75% of Estonian descent. I assure you that ~165 000 people did not magically change their descent in that period of time - this change was the direct result of deportations, executions, forced drafts into dictator-led armies, etc. The occupiers straight up had an official policy of "russification" - the goal to replace Estonian people and culture with a soviet people.
Finally, let me be clear that I don't really care what the percentage of repressed people is. It might as well be just 1% - I would still consider the soviet union evil. In fact, they took away the freedom of 100% of my nation, so arguing over percentages seems completely useless.
It's honestly one of the weirdest experiences on Lemmy so far to have to defend my condemnation of invaders and occupiers. I have received several DMs and comments trying to tell me that in fact my sovereign country having it's independence taken away was not such a bad thing, and really the occupation was all the west's fault anyway. It's the same kind of rhetoric I see used against Ukraine today. It's messed up to see a full post about how crimes against humanity are not actually that bad, but here we are.
Another census in 1959 showed that demographics had changed significantly - the population was ~75% of Estonian descent. I assure you that ~165 000 people did not magically change their descent in that period of time - this change was the direct result of deportations, executions, forced drafts into dictator-led armies, etc.
Assuming that the migration of every single person to and from Estonia was forced and done in deliberate pursuit of russification is a pretty major flaw in this argument. Economic migration in the rest of the USSR was common. Why do you rule that out completely for Estonia?
I don't make the assumption that every single person was forced. As I said, I think it serves no purpose to argue over what percentage was forced (even though it's pretty clear that the majority of that number was indeed repressed).
By the way, there has been significant research and investigation done into the exact extent of losses and repression during the occupation (both by nazis and soviets). If you're interested, have a look at this report. Quoting from the foreword:
In 1992, the Riigikogu of the Republic of Estonia established the Estonian State Commission on Examination of the Policies of Repression (ESCEPR) and set it „the final goal to publish a scientific investigation into all the losses and damages suffered by the Estonian nation during the occupation regimes”.
Only now, after twelve years of investigation work, the ESCEPR is able to publish a survey, which sums up the present state of our knowledge, in the form of eight original papers dedicated to the following fields: population, cultural life, environment and economy.
Also, if you read the report, please read it with the awareness that Estonia was a neutral country before being invaded by the soviets.
As I said, I think it serves no purpose to argue over what percentage was forced
Sure, but omitting nuance by default allows for painting a black-and-white picture of history, which helps fabricate a justification for nationalism. We hopefully all understand what that leads to and who benefits from it.
I will read it, although honestly I am not really confident about the reliability of the report so far, judging by the following (mutually unrelated) excerpts with the most interesting parts highlighted:
- THE CHARACTER OF REPRESSIVE ACTS COMMITTED IN ESTONIA BY THE SOVIET OCCUPATION
Because of their extent and severity, the repressive measures of this period can be compared to the Jewish holocaust, which is found to have caused long-term physical and/or mental disorders to nearly all the survivors.
Abortion, which had been forbidden in the Republic of Estonia and also initially in the Soviet Union, was legalised in 1955 and grew to be a serious problem, achieving its peak in the 1970s (in 1970 there were 188.7 terminations of pregnancy per 100 live births). This problem, too, has been carried over to the independent Estonia.
But the closed character of the Soviet system hindered development. In a normal and free society, the progress would have been more rapid. ... The industrious work and skills of Estonian doctors had to compensate for the technical backwardness.
Besides the damage to physical environment caused by the occupation authorities, the psychological pollution of environment should also be noted. This was caused by several measures deriving from the repressive policy:
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• polarising and splitting the nation under the false slogan of class struggle, persecuting patriotically-minded people, especially intelligentsia, establishing a totalitarian system of persecution and denunciation;
• forcing materialism and atheism, restricting church life, prohibiting and destroying religious books, physical and moral repression of the clergy and the believers;
• abolishing of all real convictions and principles, creating of a nation- less, godless and impersonal „herd human”. As a melancholy humoristic exaggeration one might say that a new subspecies of Homo sapiens developed, a Homo sovieticus.
The frequency of self-destructive behaviour, suicides and alcohol poisonings decreased (H. Noor, 1993), religious life livened up and birth rates increased sporadically. The crises of the transitional period that followed, did not bring along such positive changes any more.
Violation and plunder of the nation’s genetic fund — by destruction, forced deportation and banishment of the healthier part of the nation, — should also be considered as a far-reaching effect of Soviet repressive policy that had lasted for decades.
All in all, it reads more like fascist-leaning propaganda than a scientific report.
Our culture is perfect and any attempt at progress will be seen as discrimination! 😤
I guess it's more interesting for you to focus on the religious bits rather than the numbers of people destroyed and deported?
I can provide some additional context if you like:
There certainly is (even today in 2023) a religious minority in Estonia (less than ~30% of the population has declared a religion). Some of these people, especially older folks, have for sure very bad takes on things like abortion, or the necessity of church, etc. Believe it or not, this is actually cause for a lot of debate even today in Estonian society, the context being our declining population, with the religious minority being the loudest voice advocating for all kinds of methods to improve population growth (even going as far as abolishing abortion).
I believe the author of that particular paper was part of this religious minority and clearly wanted to include some of their religious beliefs in their conclusions. Maybe it was more intended for foreign readers, who were though to be more religious? I'm not sure, but in any case, religion is not common among Estonians.
As for the non-abortion related things you've quoted, I honestly don't see what is so controversial about them.
Because of their extent and severity, the repressive measures of this period can be compared to the Jewish holocaust, which is found to have caused long-term physical and/or mental disorders to nearly all the survivors.
I'm not into comparing suffering like this, I think it doesn't add any particular value, but I assume this statement is included for foreign readers who maybe don't have any frame of reference for what the psychological long-term effects of soviet concentration camps were.
polarising and splitting the nation under the false slogan of class struggle, persecuting patriotically-minded people, especially intelligentsia, establishing a totalitarian system of persecution and denunciation;
Does this statement surprise you? It's pretty much taken as common knowledge that "communism" was used as a catch-all reason to imprison, execute or deport pretty much anybody that the regime did not like. I have no idea why you highlighted this part as something interesting, unless this is actually a controversial statement for you?
forcing materialism and atheism, restricting church life, prohibiting and destroying religious books, physical and moral repression of the clergy and the believers;
The person is religious, I guess it makes sense that this is a major takeaway for them, it's not particularly interesting for myself
• abolishing of all real convictions and principles, creating of a nation- less, godless and impersonal „herd human”. As a melancholy humoristic exaggeration one might say that a new subspecies of Homo sapiens developed, a Homo sovieticus.
This was the whole purpose of russification, do you not see why this is bad?
Violation and plunder of the nation’s genetic fund — by destruction, forced deportation and banishment of the healthier part of the nation, — should also be considered as a far-reaching effect of Soviet repressive policy that had lasted for decades.
It's pretty obvious to me that WW2 had this effect on Estonia (as it did on many other nations). Not just through deportations, but also through conscription of young men into occupant armies.
@trot@hexbear.net has covered the issues with that report in more detail (abortion is repression? really begs the question of repression of what, against who), but I'll add that it was commissioned after the newly-independent Estonia repressed (declared illegal) the Communist Party of Estonia.
I should have probably made it more clear that all the excerpts come from unrelated parts of the text. The one on abortion is from a section on health problems "resulting" from Soviet occupation, not from the section of the above excerpt. Nevertheless, considering the content of the rest of the report, it's most likely implying that the act of abortion is itself a problem.
According to a 1934 census, the population was ~90% of Estonian descent. Another census in 1959 showed that demographics had changed significantly - the population was ~75% of Estonian descent
hmmm, I wonder what happened between 1934 and 1959, it's almost like you ignore the actual occupiers and genociders and just baseline wartime migration in favor of constructing a myth of a Russian ethnic cleansing of Estonians
This is ultranationalist drivel
You are so close. Just one more step - which two nations invaded and occupied Estonia between 1934 and 1959?
I keep running into this same wall in various threads. For some reason, the idea that two separate nations committed crimes against humanity in Estonia does not fit into your head. It's also exactly the type of thing you hear on Russian tv channels nowadays - if the topic of nazi and soviet occupants in Estonia ever comes up, one of the most common talking points is "if you didn't like the soviet occupation, then you must have loved the nazi occupation and must be a nazi!".
The idea that "maybe neither of the two dictators in Europe should have been allowed to occupy and repress any sovereign people" simply doesn't compute for you, or what?
I don't consider the punishment of nazi collaborators to be crimes, sorry if that rustles your nationalist jimmies
The idea that "maybe neither of the two dictators in Europe should have been allowed to occupy and repress any sovereign people" simply doesn't compute for you, or what?
And the idea that there is no equivalence between the nazi regime and the Soviet Union doesn't seem to compute for you, but I get it bro you grew up in an era of nazi-adjacent denialism and the heroism of the Soviet partisans in Estonia is probably a foreign concept to you
You keep ignoring that there was significant domestic support for the Estonian SSR.
Ever wonder why genuinely popular guerilla wars routinely defeat foreign powers, but Estonian partisan resistance to the USSR was minor and never went anywhere, despite support from the CIA and MI6? It's because they were not popular. That second link also mentions how they accepted "German POWs" into their ranks, which is a polite way of saying Nazis.
Finally, let me be clear that I don't really care what the percentage of repressed people is. It might as well be just 1% - I would still consider the soviet union evil.
"I don't care what the facts are, I've made up my mind."
they took away the freedom of 100% of my nation
There was a native communist party which eventually split over the question of independence from the USSR. Did all those people who supported the Estonian SSR somehow have their freedoms taken away? At worst Estonia had a Cold War government that had some popular support, but not the support of a wide majority, which is hardly unique to Estonia.
defend my condemnation of invaders and occupiers
Maybe people would take you more seriously on this if you (1) cited your claims and (2) applied the same standard to other "invaders and occupiers." For instance, I'm sure you don't deny the genocide of American Indians or the fact that the U.S. stole their land and occupied it. But somehow that's different and you don't take down American flag emojis (or comments praising America) on sight.
“I don’t care what the facts are, I’ve made up my mind.”
How do you get from what I said to this, I have no idea.
Finally, let me be clear that I don't really care what the percentage of repressed people is. It might as well be just 1% - I would still consider the soviet union evil.
You said you don't care how many people were repressed. From another comment in this thread, you also don't care how "repression" is defined ("repressed" in the report your other comment provided included "legalized abortion").
If you are committed to characterizing the USSR as evil regardless of what they actually did, you don't care about the facts, you've already made up your mind.
You are taking statements out of context and trying to create a narrative where you focus on small details in order to ignore the obvious elephant in the room - the thousands (tens of thousands) of victims of soviet deportation, execution, imprisonment.
For any external readers - this constant changing of the narrative and trying to redirect away from soviet atrocities is extremely common in Kremlin talking points. Anybody who has watched Russian television knows exactly what I'm talking about. I will stop responding to this user, as they are clearly posting in bad faith - I very much hope they are just trolling, and nothing more nefarious than that.
Because the whole point of me bringing up the 20% =/= 20k was to point out that your research was spotty or biased at best or that you're an unreliable narrator at worst. That particular statement wasn't a value judgement about the ethics of the USSR.
It's funny though that you moved the goalposts as soon as you got caught being racist to an ethnic group in your own country. Is the Russian population a problem?
What do you call someone who believes people who lie to them all the time? I'd call them naive, gullible, uncurious, or maybe willfully ignorant.
- Mainstream published estimates (PDF link) of the total numbers of "victims of repression" in the 1930s have ranged from [3.5 million to 20 million]. The bases for these assessments are unclear in most cases and seem to have come from guesses, rumors, or extrapolation from isolated local observations... [From research into Soviet archives,] the documentable numbers of victims are much smaller.
- The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities [in the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations]... Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred... A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the center of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel... When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.
- Moreover, three of [The Black Book of Communism's] main contributors (Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Nicolas Werth) publicly disassociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship", faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries, and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism.
Anti-communist propaganda is full of mistakes, guesses, rumors, and outright lies. This is a fact even harsh critics of communist governments readily admit. You can't take any of this junk at face value, even if there are grains of truth.
You also have to place the bad things communist countries have done in context. Say someone is arrested for working with a foreign government to overthrow the existing government -- nearly every country on the planet arrests people for that, but it's supposed to be some damning indictment when a communist country does it? Or compare FDR rounding up Japanese Americans (with little-to-no evidence of sabatoge) and putting them in concentration camps to Stalin deporting "unreliable" groups (some of whom actually were violently opposed to the USSR) to Siberia from the Eastern Front. Why is FDR portrayed as a great man, and his concentration camps are simply a tragic blemish, but Stalin is portrayed as a genocidal maniac, where the vast good he did (no individual was more responsible for defeating fascism) is irrelevant compared to his wrongs?
Yea, yea, I have seen the talking points before. I'm sure you just have plenty of legitimate questions about how many were killed and since the historic records arent very complete it can't be that many, right. And even if they were killed then it was justified. I have gone through this song and dance before and it's the same tune every time and it's not interesting anymore.
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