Talk:Estonia/Comments

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The article about Estonia contains controversial information and it is biased, reflecting the opinion of Estonian nationalists who are currently in power in this country. It distorts the events of the World War II and of the preceding/following period.

It claims that Estonia was occupied by USSR till 1991. But why period before 1918 is not called occupation? This way you need to call the entire history of this country an occupation.

There was no special difference between life in Estonia and life in any other part of Russia, or other country of Eastern Europe during this "occupation". There was no special treatment towards Estonians, or Russians, or any other ethnicity on the part of Soviet authorities.

The reason why the "occupation" term is brought up by Estonian nationalists is their attempt to extract some practical benefits from those claims, targeting modern Russia to that regard, and at the same time to cover up numerous human rights violations in Estonia itself where hundreds of thousands of residents are stripped of citizenship rights and status based exclusively on their ethnic origin.

It is bad that Wikipedia is used by English-speaking Estonian nationalists as a tool to promote their views and misinform the outside world.

Alexander0807 01:14, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Please let me counter some of the popular misconceptions presented in your text.

The occupation is called as such because in 1940, USSR illegally annexed an independent state, something that tsarist Russia hadn't done there.

I take it you didn't live in any of the occupied republics during the soviet period. The preference in power structures for russian languague and ethnic russians was easily discernible.

Estonian citizenship isn't based on ethnicity, but on, well, citizenship. People of russian ethnicity received citizenship automatically if they or their ancestors had had it before Soviet occupation, while ethnic estonians who hadn't had the citizenship before the war had to take the tests with all other immigrants.

Accusing the editors to be nationalists for merely presenting the history as it's seen by a consensus of historians everywhere apart from Russia and Belarus is dishonest.

213.35.244.155 (talk) 08:59, 25 February 2008 (UTC)