Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Two Estonian Villages Declare Independence, Ask for Russia’s Recognition

I just received this story from our Israeli correspondent Abu Elvis. He found an article in Russian, and says, “Here is a machine translation (sorry, I don’t know Russian; I saw it on a forum).”

This is the raw translation. I have no further information:

Two Estonian farms Soviet republic declared themselves

Two farms in north-eastern Estonia, near the Russian border, declared themselves the Estonian Soviet Socialist republic, and we intend to ask Russia to recognize their independence. This is stated on the site regional organization “Communists Petersburg and Lenoblasti” (KPLO), whose members went to Baltic republics to support their comrades.

As the radio station Echo of Moscow, residents of farms has already formed his government, people’s militia and put border posts on the border with the rest of Estonia.
- - - - - - - - -
In a communication site says that the decision to withdraw from the bourgeois Estonia and restore Soviet republic adopted a simple peasant Estonian Andres Tamm, whose farm is located in north-eastern Estonia, near the border with Russia. He joined hostess and an adjacent farm Ain Saar.

“No longer want to live in a bourgeois Estonia, where there is no cause for anyone to man, cut forests, rampant unemployment and corruption, where everyone decides to NATO and the Americans, honors fascist rabble. My grandfather was in the anti-fascist underground, fought forest brothers, and I I can not accept the place, “- site quoted the words A. Tamm.

… Reactions to the expressed will of the Estonian authorities have not followed hutoryan.

12 comments:

X said...

I doubt they'll jump for it... :) if he wants a "nice" socialist government he should be talking to the EU, not Russia.

Protestant said...

This must be a joke. There is NO ethnic Estonian who would seriously say something like this and fly a hammer-and-sickle flag, any more than a Jew would fly a swastika flag.

But, this is a joke over a very serious issue. Narva in northeastern Estonia is 95% Russian, and could easily play the role of 'Baltic South Ossetia', if Russia smuggled in some agitators to start trouble and provoke a response [the Estonian response being immediately declared by the KGB-overlords in Moscow to be "Estonian aggression against Russians(tm)"], faked some Estonian 'crimes', etc.

And if they were in a stronger geopolitical position, Russia could intervene and simply take over all of Latvia and Estonia today, ostensibly to protect the "rights of the millions of Russians in the Baltic". Estonia's capital and only major metropolis, Tallinn, is only barely 55% Estonian, the rest being the remnants of Russian colonists 1950-1990. Latvia is even worse, with its three largest cities all being majority-Russian.

The Russians before 1950 killed or caused the deaths [e.g. in the gulags] of something like 15% of Estonian and Latvian people, including murdering outright their entire governments in 1940. Post-1950, the deportations and political murders dropped off, and the Russians began to introduce a "flood them with foreigners and debase their culture" policy to crush those nations. [Does that remind anyone of what has happened to Western Europe in the same period?!?]. First, large numbers of Russians and other Soviet peoples were resettled in the Baltic, while Moscow tried culturally 'russify' the Balts themselves (In the 1950s-1980s, the Russians promoted the idea that "the Estonian language is dying", and you will not find an Estonian born before 1970 who is not fluent in Russian...For post-1975-born Estonians it is all English, of course...). Eventually, the Russians reasoned, by means of the cultural russification and the presence of such huge numbers of Russians, the Estonian and Latvian nations would simply die, and the rich lands and coasts thereof would become as Russian as the Moscow region.

Latvia and Estonia in 1991 were faced with a problem FAR worse than any of the Western-European countries today, as regards the 'National Question'. They were looking at nominal independence, but populations which were 40%+ Russian-speaking Orthodox. After independence, they stripped citizenship from all these post-1950 colonists, and some have moved back. But both states still have a huge domestic problem of their now-30%+ Russophone populations, which have high levels of criminality, alcoholism, drug-addiction, unemployment, prostitution; and are angry and nationalistic. The Russian media sticks up for their coethnics, and spews hatred against Latvia and Estonia the likes of which is hardly believable. "How dare they resist the death of their nations! How dare they resist full russification!".

The long story short: The Baltic states are in real danger. But more importantly, to understand the Baltic situation is to understand how Russia really feels about western nationalists (the Balts having always been westward-looking, are non-Slavic, and are Lutherans...they are on par with the Finns).

laine said...

To understand the full magnitude of what transpired under Soviet occupation is nearly impossible in nations that have always been free.

But imagine first, 15% of your population killed outright or transported to slow death in Arctic gulags. For the USA, that would be roughly 50 million victims, including all the intelligentsia or anyone who might lead a rebellion against the new overlords, including church officials, police constables, public school teachers, even scout and guide leaders.

Next imagine a police state for the survivors with a vast spy network to suss out any disloyalty to the state, penetrating even into one's own family at times, so no one can trust any individual. Imagine no freedom of movement from city to city without proper papers, forced streaming into certain university studies and/or jobs needed by the invading state, and finally, massive movement of their people onto your territory where they are privileged with better housing, schooling etc. (This part should be easier for Americans to imagine).

Also imagine being forced to learn and speak Russian instead of English in all public venues and with your culture ruthlessly suppressed. Imagine hiding the stars and stripes under floor boards where if discovered, the penalty is imprisonment. How do you keep hope of renewed freedom alive for decades while the world forgets you?

Imagine it if you can.

X said...

Ok, this little tidbit means nothing but, last time I was in Kalmar, I saw a lot of russian yachts and boats docked in the harbour there. My father in law was impressed at how many flags I could recognise. :D

Ok that aside, the problems in Estonia are very real. The Russians were already making noises a few years ago when the Estonians deided they wanted to take down a russian war monument dedicated to the russian soldiers who died during the transfer of the country from the germans to the russians. The russians say it was m erely a monument to the soldiers who died to "liberate" Estonia, but the Estonians saw it as a symbol of the next 40 years of occupation - and of course the previous occupation of Estonia by Imperial Russia. The Russians made a big fuss about it and there were rather large riots.

At the time Russia was still in the process of re-organising itself and wasn't as flush with cash as it is now thanks to the high price of oil. It was not in a position to do much except provoke the local Russian population into belligerence.

But... as I recall, the Russian population in South Ossetia were provoked into similar belligerence a few years prior to the first Russian occupation, when they sent in their "peace keepers" to "restore order", who remained right up to the point when Georgia attempted to take its territory back. People tend to forget about that one. It'd be, if we're making comparisons, the equivalent of NATO stationing troops in the balkans a decade before the start of the war there and then handing out US passports to the local population.

Afonso Henriques said...

I doubt it to be truth. It probabily is some kind of joke.

But I am astonished how so many people here cannot distinguish between Nazis/Communists Germans/Russians, as if the Russians, for instance had not suffered under Communism or as if other "ethnicities" did not support nazism as badly as the Germans themselves.

But the "numbers" provided by Protestant are nonetheless worrying. I wonder if he can give us some links or a confirmation of that. That would mean big trouble in the Baltics after Russia's annexation of Belarus. Trouble... that's what you get when you conceede independence to states that have almost never been independent, especially with bogus border. That's the main problem, legitimacy and fake borders. But, if problems arouse, who will help the Baltics? Sweden? Germany?? The European Union??? Or probabily an Obama-like figure...

Protestant, can you cofirm your numbers?

Unknown said...

Hi, im from Estonia. This is fake news, just ordinary Russian propaganda.

the sign on the image you can see, that they present with the news, isn't even correct estonian, the word "sotcialistlik" contains symbol "c" that isn't even used in estonian language, it supposed to be "s", but whoever wrote this has accidentaly wrote russian "s" or - "c".

kplo.ru/images/stories/2008/esr8.jpg (couldn't post as image for some reason)

and the word "Nookogude" should be "Nõukogude". You see, these are major mistakes, that no Estonian can make or even less, write them on a huge sign. People on the

picture are russians. I have no idea where they live, but they are not estonians.

Estonian government has confirmed, that there lives Aine Saar in that area, but is around 80 years old. (Not likely the one on pictures, huh? the middle one, with the blue jacket.)

(I'll say just in case, that "C" is a part of estonian alphabet, but is never ever used in a word.)

you can find original story, where it was leaked from here:
http://kplo.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612&Itemid=5
It's communist portal.

Henrik R Clausen said...

Thanks, weweryh :)

I think it's a joke the Estonias
would do well to take seriously, as in looking at ways to make their Russian-speaking minorities feel more Estonian.

One never knows what Russia might be up at some point in the future, under guise of some crisis. Better to be prepared.

Afonso Henriques said...

Yes, thank you weweryh.

Avery Bullard said...

Notice how 'Protestant' keeps talking about Latvia and Estonia but does not mention Lithuania? No doubt because the latter are not Protestant.

Incidentally we often hear about how Jews were the dominant force bringing communism to that part of the world. Most of it is true. However much of the documentation for that also shows Latvians were aols heavily overrepresented among early communists. Solzhenitsyn once expressed sympathy for Lithuanians and their plight under the Soviet Union but then made a point of contrasting their anti-communism with the pro-communism of Latvians during the Revolution.

Avery Bullard said...

alfonso,

I don't have links but the numbers sited of Balts who were killed and/or deported are accepted by most academics. They might even be underestimated. But in other parts of the USSR it was the Russians who suffered - depending on the time period. The Baltic states suffered under Russification but we shouldn't let that fact alone lead us to confuse the USSR with Russia as neocon commentators do at other sites. In the Ukraine for example the ethnic Russians have legitimate grievances as they forced to be a part of Ukraine by a non-Russian communist party boss.

Afonso Henriques said...

Bulard,

I was actually wondering about the current numer of Russians there. I made a quick resarch on Wikipedia and found out the numbers to be around 30% ethnic East Slavs (Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians) in Estonia and Latvia.

I still don't kmow if they "rule" the main cities or the border regions with East Slavic territories. I don't think the number is that high for some recently and not Historical independent states... Concerning Protestant and Lithuania, I checked it too and the number of Russians was a mere 5% out of 3 million people. But the Balts, by being part of NATO will not get in trouble with Russia. Their problem is an internal problem, a severe one. Thanks, though.

I will not get along with demonisation of European peoples, whether Russians, Germans or Latvians.

Anonymous said...

Globalism leads to tribalism.

Expansionism leads to feudalism.

The world is round and so is history.