Sergei Metlev, Member of the Board of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory
It is becoming increasingly apparent that some Russian-speaking Estonians are offended and complaining. In general terms, it sounds like this: Ukrainian war refugees are given immediate and plentiful aid, but we who have lived here for a long time are not given aid and do not hear good words. This comparison is embarrassing, of course, but we will try to look into it anyway.
According to a survey published on March 22, 2022, 51% of non-Estonian speakers in Estonia support the reception of war refugees from Ukraine – this is an important statistic to keep in mind. There are also many Russian-speaking Estonian people among those volunteering for and donating to causes that are providing aid to Ukrainian refugees.
My argument about complaints from Russian-heritage Estonians is this: it is a psychological result of a syndrome of discrimination cultured for years and a lack of understanding the real scale of the war in Ukraine and the tragedies it is causing. This syndrome could limit natural human tendencies toward helpfulness, compassion, and conscience. This leads me to make these points:
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, some politician-speculators and the local Russian contact network have tried to create a way of thinking that the average Russian should not even try to achieve success in Estonia because everything supposedly comes down to the question of blood – they are pushed away and disadvantaged even if they are very good at what they do and speak the official language. Some are entrenched in the belief that they have been unjustly treated. Paradoxically, holding this obviously erroneous belief is precisely what prevents a person from developing and succeeding. Among other things, the product of such belief is the assignment of personal failure to nationality even if that claim is a lie and the lack of success can be attributed to the usual reasons of ineptitude or lack of qualifications, which can be overcome by educating and retraining oneself.
As Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking people come from Ukraine, many Estonian people who do not speak Estonian (or lack fluency) make this argument: “The new arrivals speak the same language that we do but have lived here only for a few weeks and are already surrounded by care and attention from the majority of Estonian society. Why are they not required to speak the national language?!” One might ask, how can that belief be held? How can a sensible person compare his/her problems as a long-term resident of Estonia with the suffering of a mother fleeing a bomb blast with two children in her arms? In such a situation, how can a war refugee be expected to immediately master the Estonian language?
The survey cited above says that 39 percent of non-Estonian speakers trust Estonian channels in covering the topic of the Russian war on Ukraine, while 27 percent trust Russian channels. Putting it another way, almost one third of this group is firmly in the grip of Russian state media. For this group there was no sweeping bombing of Mariupol, only a “special operation” going on in Ukraine. Ukraine has been “killing children in Donbass for eight years” and there are neo-Nazis who must be suppressed by force. This third, largely comprised of people aged 50+, has connections with groups that think much more soberly and humanely, like their children and grandchildren. There is also a percentage of people in the survey who question both western and Russian media.
If the alternative reality offered by Moscow is believed, it raises a question: what are the refugees doing here? Are these war refugees, or are they economic migrants and friends of those Ukrainian neo-Nazis? And we do not trust these Ukrainians very much either, because there are good Ukrainians who welcome Russia’s “special operation” and bad Ukrainians who do not welcome it. The tragedy of people thinking in this way is that they do not understand that, in addition to almost all non-Russian-heritage Ukrainians, millions of Russian-heritage Ukrainians hate the current Russia wholeheartedly. Their tragedy is also that they cannot believe that Russia can have murderous, criminal motives, or that Putin’s decisions have negatively changed the status of the Russian nation in the world.
If the three beliefs discussed here fill the mind of a person, then human compassion for children and women fleeing war is delayed or absent. It can be argued that Moscow’s propaganda regarding the situation in Ukraine has created a local anesthetic to the humanity of certain people, aided by complexes cultivated during the past 30 years.
It should be taken into account that a psychological state that has developed over a long period of time does not quickly subside. The psyche begins to defend itself – the abandonment of the ideological fluid that fills the personality with political content leads to an existential lack of fluid, which can manifest itself as both mental and physical collapse. Since the collapse of the present Russia is only a matter of time, the worldviews of these people will also collapse as will the longheld hope that one day they will be “respected” again.
Three main things will help (there are, of course, many other solutions): the creation of a social and legal environment where the justification or support of the war of aggression or public Putin-love are not tolerated. Those behaviors should be seen as in conflict with the true soul of Estonian society. We should persistently reveal the truth about the war in Ukraine and the criminality of the Putin regime via all windows, doors, and avenues. We should stubbornly direct misguided people to information that will cause them to question their beliefs. We should rescue young people from a linguistically segregated and stuffy school system, which means we need to reform Estonian school education and finally abolish a separate Russian school system.
Monument to the 1944 Great Flight Opened in Pärnu