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.
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?