Russia Is Preparing to Invade East Ukraine, Estonia Says

[LiberalEsto]

26. Your criticism is, in my view, unwarranted.

One doesn't have to have a "Cold War" outlook to fear the Russians who captured their country, shipped tens of thousands of them to Siberia, and moved vast numbers of Russians into Estonia and the other Baltic nations to "Russify" them.

During the Soviet regime, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were forced to use Russian as the "official" language. School was taught in Russian, but Estonian children were secretly taught the Estonian language, culture and history at home in order to keep their culture from disappearing. The Russians held all the good jobs, while Estonians were mainly required to do menial work. The Russians basically treated the Estonians like crap, and this was true in Latvia and Lithuania as well. (Now, of course, the big Russian population still living in Estonia bitches and moans about having to learn Estonian, the language of the nation in which they have lived for decades and lorded it over the natives.)

A little story from my own relatives can illustrate this. When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened, the Russians conscripted hundreds of men from the Baltics and other outlying Soviet Republics to go in there and deal with the situation. The Russians didn't want to sacrifice their own people, but people like Estonians were considered worthless enough to sacrifice.

As the Russian soldiers made their way through the town where my relatives lived, word got out about what they were doing. When the knock came at my relatives' door, my cousin Arno had already fled out the back door and stayed hidden in the woods for many days. Had he been dragged off to Chernobyl, he likely would have died of radiation poisoning. The Russians wanted what they considered "inferior" people to clean up the mess the Russians themselves made.