The ‘Russian World’: Weaponization of Language and Culture in the Former Soviet Space –

Essay

What does it mean to be a Russian outside of Russia since

Fig. 1. The Russian-majority district of Lasnamäe in Tallinn, Estonia. Image by user “Digger”, 28 September 2009, in
forum.ee, https://forum.ee/t57572/moi-snimki/page-54#entry2630463

March 2023
The parliamentary election held in Estonia on 5 March 2023 marked a rather significant shift in the
Baltic state’s political landscape. The Estonian Centre Party (EK), led by former Prime Minister Jüri
Ratas, suffered its worst electoral result in nearly 30 years, falling from 26 to 16 of the Riigikogu’s
101 seats, behind the country’s now second-largest party, the Conservative People’s Party (EKRE).
Observers partially attributed this result to a shift in the voting pattern of Estonia’s largest minority:
Russian speakers. A near half century of Soviet occupation left independent Estonia with a large
portion of ethnic Russians in its population, most recently standing at 23.6% 1. Though, as I will later
elaborate, a fair number of them lack Estonian citizenship and thus cannot vote in national elections,
they form a historically very strong voter base for the Centre Party. Recent years have seen some of
that support shift towards the EKRE despite the latter’s historical position as an Estonian nationalist
and anti-Russian party – this might be explained in part by the fact that it is also noted for being right-
wing populist, Eurosceptic and socially conservative, most notably being staunchly opposed to same-
sex registered partnerships and to “homosexual propaganda”.
This example goes to show the important role the Russian-speaking
community can play in Estonia. Their presence is nothing new – until 1918, Estonia had been a
governorate of the Russian Empire for two centuries – but their proportion of the population
immediately shot up following the country’s definitive occupation by the Soviet Union in 1944; the
late 1940s saw a considerable influx of Russian immigrants who mainly came to work in factories, and
this demographic shift continued to a lesser extent all throughout the Soviet period, to the point where
by 1989, the year Estonia declared its independence, ethnic Russians made up just over 30% of its
population2. Their presence in a modern, independent Estonia proud of its national identity and marked
by centuries of Russian domination is, in a way, postcolonial 3 – they migrated from an arguably
colonizer state to an arguably colonized state and established there, generating a population of what
are now second- and even third-generation Russian Estonians. Over the last 20 years, heavy emphasis
has been put on their integration into Estonian society, but a form of separation of two societies within
a single country persists; to this day, for example, the north-eastern city of Narva, on the Russian
border, comprises 95.7% of native Russian speakers in its population 4, public schools are to some
extent segregated by language, and many Russians are excluded from the Estonian language society.
This essay is an attempt at
understanding the reality faced by the Russian minority in Estonia today – I will cover questions of
language, culture, citizenship, education, relations to the Russian Federation, as well as take a look at
how the situation has evolved since the fall of the USSR, all while offering some points of comparison
to the situation in other post-Soviet countries.

1
Statistics Estonia, Population by ethnic nationality, sex and place of residence (December 31, 2021),
https://andmed.stat.ee/en/stat/rahvaloendus
2
Richard Mole, The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union (London: Routledge, 2013), 85.
3
Vetik and Helemäe, The Russian Second Generation in Tallinn and Kohtla-Järve, 14.
4
According to the 2011 Estonian National Census.
One of the most crucial themes in the relation between the Russian minority and the rest of Estonia is
language5; comparatively to Estonia, in Ukraine, for example, linguistic integration can represent for
most Russian speakers but a minor obstacle, as Ukrainian and Russian are both part of the East Slavic
language family and thus quite closely related. A good example of the ease of linguistic integration in
Ukraine is the fact that the 2022 invasion caused a remarkably swift shift in language use, with a large
number of native Russian speakers switching to the use of Ukrainian in their daily lives, including a
third of Kyivans6. Estonian, though, is not a Slavic language – it is not even part of the wider Indo-
European language family, and being furthemore known for its complex grammar, one can imagine
the difficulty of learning it as a second language. We can see that to this day, the form of asymmetric
bilingualism that was typical of the Soviet Union persists in Estonia – the prevalence of Russian
proficiency among Estonian speakers remains considerably higher than that of Estonian proficiency
among Russian speakers, with those figures being around 58 percent and 38 percent respectively as of
the mid-2000s7. For much of the Soviet period, the imposition of Russian in Estonia was quite limited
– the firm establishment of Estonian as a national language delayed effective Russification until the
late Brezhnev era, when it intensified; by 1981, the teaching of Russian was mandated from the first
grade on8, meaning that despite Russian and Estonian theoretically being on a legal equal footing as
co-official languages, focus was put on teaching Russian to native Estonians, not on teaching Estonian
to Russian immigrants or their children.
After independence in 1991, the new constitution made Estonian the sole state
language, with the status of Russian switching to that of a mere minority language. An “estonification”
of public life was kicked into motion to counter, or even arguably to take revenge for, the heavy-
handed russification of the previous decade and a half – to the inconvenience of Russian speakers,
“most of whom could not even count up to ten in Estonian” 9. A major part of this was tied to the
question of Estonian citizenship.

Essentially, in light of the concept of the Estonian state’s legal continuity during an illegal occupation
by the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1991, residents of post-Soviet Estonia were automatically
granted Estonian citizenship only if they could prove that they were, or descended from, Estonian
citizens before 1940 – others (that is to say, Russians) would need to acquire it through a
naturalization process. This initially left close to 40 percent of the population stateless, a situation
decried by Human Rights Watch 10. For comparison, Lithuania, which shares with Estonia a common

5
Crucial to the point where as a group, they are usually referred to as Russian speakers rather than ethnic Russians – as the
two concepts are nonetheless mostly convergent I will use both terms interchangeably.
6
Harding, Luke. “‘A generational shift’: war prompts Ukrainians to embrace their language” The Guardian. March 6, 2023.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/06/russia-ukrainians-embrace-language-war
7
Pavlenko, “Russian in post-Soviet countries,” 66.
8
Lenore Grenoble, Language Policy in the Soviet Union (Dordecht: Springer Netherlands, 2003), 99.
9
Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History, 180.
10
Human Rights Watch, “Submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child concerning Estonia”, 21 November 2016.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/21/human-rights-watch-submission-committee-rights-child-concerning-estonia
history of Soviet occupation, was much more lenient, granting automatic citizenship to all residents 11 -
this can likely be explained by the fact that Lithuania always had a considerably smaller Russian
population than its Baltic neighbours, peaking at 9.35 percent in 198912.
In the early independence period, in choosing between acquiring
Estonian or Russian citizenship, the latter option might have started to appear like the easier choice for
the suddenly stateless Russians – as the Russian Federation was considered the legal successor to the
USSR, until 2000, all former Soviet citizens were eligible for Russian citizenship through simple
request13. By that year, some 21 percent of Russians in Estonia held RF citizenship, while the
proportion of Russians without citizenship was still nearly double that figure 14. Acquiring Estonian
citizenship, meanwhile, represented a certain hurdle: the citizenship law established conditions that
included two years of residency, an oath of allegiance, and most crucially, a good enough command of
the Estonian language15. As I have developed previously, during the Soviet period, despite the official
ideological policy of equality between national languages and Russian, language teaching mostly went
one way, with many settled Russians learning little to no Estonian. Furthermore, rather than being
spread out evenly, the Russian population has for long been concentrated in certain parts of Tallinn
and in the north-east – two of the most striking examples are Tallinn’s largest district, Lasnamäe,
depicted on the cover page, known for its seemingly endless social housing landscape and whose
population as of 2021 was still 60 percent ethnically Russian 16 – and the one I mentioned previously,
Narva, which after being almost entirely destroyed by Soviet air raids in 1944 was repopulated almost
exclusively by Russians17. Thus, it can make sense why a Russian who was never properly taught
Estonian and who spent their entire life in a Russian-majority community would have difficulties with
the language and, consequently, with acquiring citizenship.
The level of difficulty established by the Estonian
state in the naturalization process, coupled with the certain lack of integration of much of the Russian
community, has even periodically attracted criticism from international organizations who perceive the
situation as a violation of minority rights. Most notably, a hurdle came in the process of Estonia’s
application to the European Union when the latter demanded of the former to facilitate the
naturalization and integration of Russian speakers as to comply with the EU’s agenda of minorities
protection – much to the discontent of Estonians, many of whom saw the demand as an attack on their
sovereignty and a potential threat18.

11
Pavlenko, “Russian in post-Soviet countries,” 65.
12
Mole, The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union , 85.
13
Sergei Gradirovsky et al, “The Policy of Immigration and Naturalization in Russia” (Moscow: Eurasia Heritage
Foundation, 2006), 9.
14
Nastja Sokolova, Migration Patterns, in Vetik and Helemäe, The Russian Second Generation in Tallinn and Kohtla-Järve,
34.
15
Vetik and Helemäe, The Russian Second Generation in Tallinn and Kohtla-Järve, 15.
16
Tallinn City Government. Statistical Yearbook of Tallinn 2021, p. 11.
17
Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 141.
18
Mole, The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union , 157-159.
A key component of Russian identity in Estonia is the functioning of the educational system. In Soviet
times, it was entirely segregated: two separate systems co-existed, one for Estonian speakers and one
for Russian speakers, helping to cement the separation between the two communities. Newly
independent Estonia established a single national public education system with compulsory schooling
from ages 7 to 1719, but the language division remained, with some schools teaching only in Russian,
and others offering bilingual education. Their number decreased with subsequent “estonification”
measures, with 13.7 percent of schools functioning in Russian as of 2003 20, and their status remains a
central part of the political debate in Estonia to this day: in June 2022, the country went through a
government crisis when the Centre Party, on which I developed in my introduction, left the coalition
led by the Reform Party mainly due to its opposition to a proposed primary education reform that
would have made Russian schools progressively switch to Estonian – under the subsequent coalition,
the Riigigoku passed a bill to gradually make that transition effective by 2024 for grades 1 to 4, until
2032 for grade 1221.
A point of noticeable inequality is seen in higher education. Independence brought
heavy reforms to its system, most notably a linguistic shift – under the Soviet period, instruction was
given in both Russian and Estonian, but after 1991 it shifted to being mainly in Estonian 22. Though
Russian-speaking secondary schools graduates have, in theory – since they go through the same
system – the same opportunity for further education as their Estonian peers, they effectively find
themselves at a disadvantage. We can observe the exact opposite of what was true in Soviet times –
back then, Russians typically attained a higher level of education than Estonians, but already as of
2000, there was a clear disparity in education the other way around, particularly in Tallinn: among
those aged 20 to 24, for example, 41 percent of Estonians were studying in higher education,
compared to just 24 percent of Russians23

Finally, having developed on the situation of Russians in Estonia, it feels most appropriate to ponder
on which direction they look towards – does the Russian minority feel closer to Estonia, the nation
they came into as foreigners and in which, for many of them, they still lack integration, or the Russian
Federation, the former homeland to which they are tied by blood and language, whose state now tries
to reach a hand to its “compatriots”?
Indeed, the policy of nurturing the “Russian world” that has been developed under Putin
might, in the case of Estonia, be reinforced by the latter’s particularity of, more so than most post-
Soviet states, draw a line between itself and a Russian “other” that lives within its border, mentally
19
Kristina Lindemann and Ellu Saar, Ethnic inequalities in education, in Vetik and Helemäe, The Russian Second
Generation in Tallinn and Kohtla-Järve, 60-61.
20
Pavlenko, “Russian in post-Soviet countries,” 66.
21
Riigikogu, “Bill on the transition to Estonian as the language of instruction passed the second reading in the Riigikogu”, 5
December 2022. https://www.riigikogu.ee/en/sitting-reviews/bill-on-the-transition-to-estonian-as-the-language-of-
instruction-passed-the-second-reading-in-the-riigikogu/
22
Lindemann and Saar, Ethnic inequalities in education, in Vetik and Helemäe, The Russian Second Generation in Tallinn
and Kohtla-Järve, 64.
23
Ibid, 65-66.
tying it to Russia itself and feeling wary of it 24. We can, for example, find that Russian Estonians can
share, to some extent, the glorification of triumphant Soviet war heroes that is part of the Kremlin’s
line of discourse – a proof of that is the fact that in 2007, the planned moving of the “Bronze Soldier”,
a Soviet war monument that had been erected in the centre of Tallinn in 1946, caused a violent two-
day riot among certain young Russians, whose view that the move was “fascist” and “insulting” had
the backing of the Kremlin, who also paid a mob to surround the Estonian embassy in Moscow 25.
The general reality, though, is that Estonian Russians are mostly stuck in the middle. A sense
of attachment to Russia exists and has been measured through surveys; a 2002 survey among Russian
Estonian students found they felt a closer connection to Russians from Russia than to Estonians, and
that they saw themselves much more as representatives of Russian culture than of Estonian culture 26.
Another found that a slight majority felt a strong or very strong connection to Estonia, but also found a
large majority had little to no Estonian friends, and many also felt a sense of identification to their
Russian-majority city, which they distinguished clearly from the rest of Estonia 27.

The situation of Russians in Estonia is unique and complicated to say the least. It was created, without
the formers’ intention, by an equally unique history – under the Soviet occupation of Estonia, with an
official ideology of equality of the peoples and an absence of borders, ethnic Russians came en masse
to the Baltic state, many of them settling there for generations to come. Upon Estonia’s independence,
they found themselves as a minority in a country that found their presence uncomfortable, as a kind of
living, breathing reminder of Soviet imperialism. New citizenship laws excluded them from most
aspects of public life by rendering them stateless, forcing them to either become a citizen of a
neighbouring country they might have never lived in, or to earn citizenship in their host country by
proving a level of integration which the vast majority of them lacked due to the legacy of Soviet
policies that had segregated them from Estonian society.
Today, the situation has evolved in a rather positive way. The proportion of stateless people in
Estonia has drastically reduced since the 1990s, standing at 5 percent as of 2022 28, as laws were
notably passed to automatically grant Estonian citizenship to children born to stateless parents 29. Past
and future reforms in education have meant a widening of Estonian teaching in Russian schools, thus
theoretically paving the way for a new generation of Russians with a better command of the language,
24
Cheskin and Kachuyevski, “The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Post-Soviet Space”, 11.
25
Taylor, Estonia: A Modern History, 197-198.
26
Laitin, “Three models of integration and the Estonian/Russian reality”, 218-219.
27
Gerli Nimmerfeldt, “Sense of belonging to Estonia”, in Vetik and Helemäe, The Russian Second Generation in Tallinn and
Kohtla-Järve, 208-219.

28
Statistic Estonia, “Population by Year, Place of residence and Citizenship”, 1 January 2022.
https://andmed.stat.ee/en/stat/rahvastik__rahvastikunaitajad-ja-koosseis__rahvaarv-ja-rahvastiku-koosseis/RV068/table/
tableViewLayout2
29
Human Rights Watch, “Submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child concerning Estonia”, 21 November 2016.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/21/human-rights-watch-submission-committee-rights-child-concerning-estonia
and thus better opportunities, than their parents.
The fact cannot be ignored, though, that Russians in Estonia remain quite separate from the
rest of the country they have lived in for upwards of four generations. Many still live in what are
essentially Russian “ghettoes”, like Lasnamäe and Narva, hurting their chances of interacting and
connecting with Estonians, who in turn, not having forgotten the past, look at them as a Russian
“other” unwilling to integrate. Russians still struggle to truly view themselves as Estonians, ending up
stuck between two worlds: they are not Estonians nor Russians, but rather a cultural-political
community of its own – Russians of Estonia. There remains a long way to go, and it is unclear whether
true integration or assimilation could ever be reached. The measures taken by the Estonian state to
deal with their situation have, in part due to international pressure, gotten more humane over time,
recognizing that Russians will be more likely to embrace Estonia as their homeland if they do not feel
their culture and heritage are threatened by state policy.
Being a Russian in Estonia might, thus, be a shifting identity. Yesterday, it might have meant
being a stranger in the country one was born in, not recognized as a citizen due to decisions that might
have been understandable when considering historical factors that were outside of their control.
Today, it might mean being in a middle, slowly better accepted and integrated, but still being partially
kept outside of Estonian society. Tomorrow, it might mean, with a hope for reconciliation, maintaining
one’s language and cultural heritage while also being able to speak Estonian and forming an integral
part of Estonian society.

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