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Tag: Estonia

  • Estonia Has a Russian Problem

    No. I am not talking about their eastern neighbor, though the relationship between the two countries is currently even more strained than normal.

    I am talking about their Russian speaking stateless minority that is about 17% of their population (when Russian speaking citizens are included, the percentage climbs to 27.4%). I think that when Soviet Union collapsed and Estonia regained its independence, the native Estonians wanted to kick out the Russians and other Soviet nationals that had been imported or migrated into their country since the WWII, refusing to give citizenship to anyone who did not assimilate enough to pass the Estonian language test, but I thought that the sentiment had faded during the over three decades since, or at least something had been done to resolve the issue of large fraction of population being stateless. If I correctly remember, the newly re-emerged Russia had not wanted to take the Russians and other Russian speakers from Estonia, and I suspect many of the Russian speakers had been born in the country. Without Russian or Estonian passport, these people became stateless. To me, having about 17% of your population as a stateless minority, especially when preparing for war against their supposed native country seems very dangerous.

    An opinion poll comparing Estonian speaking, Russian speaking and bilingual households shows a clear rift in the opinions and attitudes of the ethnic groups. As far as I have seen, the Western media, of course, only publishes the Estonian speakers predominant opinion. The Russian speakers, anyways tend to follow their own media landscape. The pollsters comfort the readers (or themselves) telling that the Russian speakers are not a monolithic group and there is a diversity of opinions among them. This is true, but aside from the commonly differing prevalences of opinions between the linguistic groupings, the other two messages I got from reading this poll were 1) the difference in opinion about Ukrainian war between the region containing Tallinn (more pro-NATO and hawkish) and the rest of the country, and 2) the clear agreement between all groups that ethnic conflict within Estonia is possible, with Estonian speaking majority believing in it more .