Soviet Legacy Lingers as Estonia Defines Its People

[pampango]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/world/europe/16estonia.html

TALLINN, Estonia — Oleg Bessedin’s main travel document is called an “alien’s passport,” as if it were a gag item. But it is all that he has when he ventures abroad — a reminder of his conflicted relationship with this country, and of the explosive ethnic tensions that endure across the former Soviet Union, nearly two decades after Communism’s fall. Mr. Bessedin, 36, an ethnic Russian, was born and raised in Estonia, and lives here with his family. Legally, though, he is not Estonian, nor a citizen of anywhere else. He is among 100,000 people in Estonia, most of them ethnic Russians, who are stateless, as if they were refugees in their own homeland.

Whoever is at fault, deep friction is one legacy of Soviet ethnic and demographic policies that moved millions of people around — and shifted many borders — in order to cement Kremlin control over a vast patchwork of territories. The fallout endures, and the post-Soviet countries are constantly confronting it. Just scan recent headlines: Major rioting breaks out in areas of Kyrgyzstan that Stalin gave to the Kyrgyz, but are still populated by Uzbeks; a firefight erupts over an enclave disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan; Georgia asserts that Russia wants to go to war again in support of two separatist territories, as it did two years ago; Moldova demands that Russian troops leave its own breakaway region.

Before Estonia was seized by the Soviets in 1940, its population was largely ethnic Estonian; resentment was strong enough that many sided with the Germans when Hitler invaded in 1941. In subsequent decades, to assure future loyalty, the Soviet government settled many ethnic Russians and others here. Today nearly half of the people in Tallinn — not all of them ethnic Russians — speak Russian as their mother tongue. With independence in the early 1990s, the government has reversed Russification. It mandated the Estonian language in schools and government offices. And it adopted a policy that left people like Mr. Bessedin stateless: With few exceptions, Estonia granted citizenship only to people who had it before the Soviet takeover, as well as their descendants. Latvia is the only other former Soviet republic with a similar rule.

Non-Estonians can obtain citizenship by passing a language test, but that is difficult for many ethnic Russians, who felt no need to learn Estonian during Soviet times. (There is also a civics examination, in Estonian.) Estonian society, in other words, has undergone a turnabout, and ethnic Russians have lost their privileged status, just as the Soviet collapse has reordered ethnic relations across the Soviet space.