Dividing Friend from Foe: Local Soviet Policy and the National Question in the Estonian Socialist Soviet Republic, 1944–53

After World War II, the Soviet leadership returned to the comparatively nationality-friendly rhetoric of the mid-1920s with regard to Estonia and the other Baltic Soviet republics. This rhetoric was taken at face value by many party workers in the republic, who believed that their national rights were supported by Moscow. In reality, however, if the Soviet leadership’s faith in the loyalty of non-Russian nationalities had been low throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s already, it was even lower with regard to the republics that had been forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. This is also true for Estonia. Estonians, especially those who had remained in the country during the German occupation, were distrusted from the beginning. Problems that resulted from Soviet policy were soon “nationalized” and interpreted by the new regime as a consequence of “bourgeois nationalism.” Also, resistance against the Soviet system supported a consolidation of Estonia’s national self-consciousness. Meanwhile, the regime offered a Soviet version of Estonian national identity that was diametrically opposed to the one promoted by the resistance. When the Soviet state crushed active and passive resistance by using mass terror to force the Estonian peasants onto kolkhozes in 1949, it not only presented techniques of mass terror as “class struggle in the countryside, it interpreted them as part of a conflict between bourgeois and Soviet understandings of nationality.