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.
Every single baltic person I have met without fail will say something along the lines of “i lived under communism” and they’re like 30. Like they were only just born when the USSR collapsed they lived under none communism. Yet they’ll use this to justify the most reactionary thinking…
It’s would be like me saying I lived under apartheid. No I didn’t, I’m a born free South African. I have no idea what apartheid was like.
I’ve seen that from a bunch of eastern europeans and it’s just like… you are not 60, whatever communism you lived under was a handful of years where you weren’t a child at the very end of the eastern bloc at the height of cold war stupidity. I really seems like most of them think the horrors of the shock doctrine were “communism”.
A friend of mine works with a lithuanian lady who is either doing a phd or already completed it (I’m bringing this up because I want to show that her brainworms go extremely deep and also that formal education on europe is dogshit), and she keeps complaining about seeing young people being “into” communism and making the nazi equivalence. I told said friend that anyone who talks about how nice the Germans were and how mean the soviets were, probably should be questioned about what exactly their family did that made the Germans so amendable.