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.
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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.
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.
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:
Also, if you read the report, please read it with the awareness that Estonia was a neutral country before being invaded by the soviets.
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:
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.
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.
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?
The person is religious, I guess it makes sense that this is a major takeaway for them, it’s not particularly interesting for myself
This was the whole purpose of russification, do you not see why this is bad?
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.
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 don’t care what the facts are, I’ve made up my mind.”
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.
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.
How do you get from what I said to this, I have no idea.
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?