Russians and their distorted view of eSStonia

Read Russian internet and you would think that Estonia is a hellhole ruled by Nazi sympathisers who organise a grotesque form of apartheid, hypocritically endorsed by the European Union.

Both ‘Nazi’ and ‘apartheid’ are strong words that should be used sparingly and precisely out of their original context - and probably not at all. (A good rule in most discussions is that the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument.)

So it may be worth listing a few of the more grotesque unfairnesses and inaccuracies of the charge. Apartheid was the legally enforced separation of the peoples of South Africa, based on race (or more accurately, skin colour). Mingling of the races, from intermarriage to mixed swimming, was forbidden. Pass laws meant that blacks could not live in white areas. Apartheid was backed up by a ruthless secret police that on occasion murdered people, and had no hesitation in enforcing house arrest and exile.

Nazi sympathisers idolise Adolf Hitler, think that Jews invented the Holocaust (or, sometimes, that they deserved what they got), and believe that national socialism was a glorious ideology destroyed by Judaeo-Bolshevism.

Absolutely none of that applies to Estonia. Not only do the authorities not prohibit contact between Estonians and Russians, they encourage it. Russians and Estonians mix freely everywhere. Some of Estonia’s top politicians, including the president and the leader of one of the main political parties have Russian family ties.

Estonians look back on the Nazi occupation with loathing. Their country was caught between the hammer and the anvil in 1939 and whatever they did only suffering and destruction awaited them.

What really annoys the Kremlin and its supporters is that Estonians (like many others in eastern Europe) do not regard the arrival of the Red Army in 1944-45 as a liberation, but as the exchange of one ghastly occupation for another. That flatly contradicts the Kremlin’s revived Stalinist version of history, which puts Soviet wartime heroism and sacrifice at centre-stage, while assiduously obscuring all the historical context. Given the way the Soviet Union treated Estonia in 1939-41, it is hardly surprising that those who fought the occupiers when they returned are regarded as heroes. But they were not Nazis and neither are those that admire them.

Secondly, Estonians (like Latvians and Lithuanians) do not accept that their pre-war statehood was ever extinguished. Russia may like to think that the Soviet Union magnanimously granted independence to the three ‘Soviet Baltic Republics’. But the Balts themselves see it differently. They argue that they regained independence. In that stance they are supported, more or less enthusiastically, by most Western countries, which never recognised the Soviet annexation of 1940, and in some cases continued to accredit Baltic diplomats in dusty and deserted embassies.

From that point of view, the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who moved to the Baltic from the 1950s onwards were migrants who settled illegally in occupied territories. Lithuania granted them all citizenship automatically. But Estonia and Latvia, where the demographic position was more precarious, insisted that they apply for citizenship if they wanted, and pass a simple test in language and history. This was not about ethnicity: Russians who lived in Estonia before the occupation (then around 10% of the population) and their descendants regained citizenship automatically.

That has worked rather well. Nearly 150,000 people have gained Estonian citizenship; only 8.5% remain stateless.

Fifteen years on, the policy may now be too tough, or just right, or even too lax (compared to most European countries’ citizenship laws, it is quite generous). But calling it ‘apartheid’ is nonsensical and stupidly insulting, to a country that has responded with intelligence and restraint to devastating historical injury.

• The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

Read Russian internet and you would think that Estonia is a hellhole ruled by Nazi sympathisers who organise a grotesque form of apartheid, hypocritically endorsed by the European Union.