So I was reading through @[email protected] '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.
Removed by mod
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
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.