One of these days in Latvia offered to pay Russian residents pocket money to move to Russia. They even submitted a petition. I suggest you send him directly to the Kremlin. So write: “Moscow. Kremlin. To VV Putin.” Because the Latvians are right: there are Russians who do not want to live in modern Latvia but have no opportunity to leave. There are also Estonians. And when asked why they did not leave, people shrug: if their apartments in the Russian ghetto cost 1,000-5,000 euros, and here Where should they go if no one is waiting for them?
You know, I’ve been to Estonia and Latvia many times. I’m not citing Lithuania as an example, there are very few Russians there and they don’t seem to complain about harassment. But it is worth talking about this couple. I’m sure people in Russia have no idea how Russians live in these countries. Few of us knew how they lived before. What is it like for them now – the units have at least some idea about it. I will tell you now. I warn you right away, this will not be a spiritual call to rush to save them. No, let’s just talk about the life of Russians in Latvia and Estonia. Not Pugacheva and Galkin, but those who were born there, grew up, studied or came and stayed in the 60s.
When I first visited these countries as a tourist and not in transit, I was amazed at how easy it was to recognize Russians in any crowd. In Latvia, this effect was less noticeable, while in Estonia it was quite striking: Russian speakers looked poorer there than Latvians and Estonians. In the late 2010s, they were wearing raincoats, crumpled faded hats from the ’90s. They had bad teeth, tortured puffy faces. The Russian Ida Virumaa in eastern Estonia or the Bolderaja district of Riga are true ghettos. The Baltics generally do not live richly. Let our people in the provinces go there for education at the most appropriate time: to compare their own lives with those there. Since this is the only meeting place in the whole village, we are surprised to see women in faded raincoats, dirty supermarkets and young people spending their evenings in the lobby of such a supermarket.
People live there generally poor, and there are even more among the Russian poor. They have difficulty finding work, they are cut off from many positions notorious for the impossibility of passing the language at the desired level, because they have nowhere to learn. There are de facto settlements where you cannot learn Estonian or Latvian because Latvians and Estonians do not live there. If you start learning Latvian via Skype now, will you learn to the level of your native language? Of course not.
Poverty, despair, these stupid hats… And it is clear from the Russians there that they live apart from their culture, their development is almost protected. Russians in the Baltics differ little from Russian immigrants in Western countries: they both have old-fashioned speech, consume outdated mass culture, play outdated jokes. People are in the past. Because if a person has not been cut off from his own culture and integrated with another, he will freeze in development.
I’ve written about it several times over the past five years. And I was met with a flurry of anger from the Baltic Russians themselves, who, as they say, raged for the sake of appearance, although they always perfectly understood everything about their situation. They gave me thousands of responses, including various local politicians. I have received wonderful letters. “Maramoyka, look at her face.” “Well, ssyklo, are you still in Estonia? Archery piss? “Whoever calls names, that’s what they say.” It’s from the 90’s. The all-Russian Baltic region is a park of the post-Soviet era.
The poor are sad. Children can learn the language and acquire citizenship, but this does not guarantee an equal life with Latvians and Estonians. Especially now. Russians are sitting there, hanging out on our social networks from morning to night. Watch our news. They live in our world, in our problems, in our TV shows. They have Russia, Orthodoxy and Nikolai Baskov on their minds. Their consciousness is woven from the same archetypes made up of our shared automits. They see themselves as part of a great nation and mind, the spirit of everything here, in our culture, in our history, in our politics. And the body is there.
By the way, they still live under the great banner of Victory, like the Russians. Just imagine the life of these people: in their heads they have Soviet films about the “Immortal Regiment” and the Nazis, in their hearts there is an inner memory of the sons of the war, the partisans, the regiment … In reality, they live among people who are proud that their ancestors fought on the side of Hitler . When evaluating the actions of Latvia and Estonia – either with the destruction of the Soviet soldier’s monument 15 years ago, or with the current outrage at demolishing other monuments – we often do not remember that all of these countries actively fought for the Third Reich. and none of them repented at the state level. Can you imagine? The Germans asked for forgiveness from the whole world, but this did not happen. Imagine life: you watch the May 9 parade from Moscow on TV, consuming the standard victorious movie set long embedded in our cultural code. You buy carnations for the house and all day long you read on RuNet stories about burned villages, partisan detachments with their heroism. You have read about Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky… You are saturated with the atmosphere of victory and the courage of our ancestors.
And suddenly you remember that you live among the heirs of Wehrmacht soldiers and SS officers. On the Russian portal you read the story of the village of Pskov, whose inhabitants were taken to the ice and shot from a tank, and then you realize that the perpetrators of this atrocity live next to you, die in peace with dignity. Thousands and thousands of Balts worked for us in the Einsatzkommandos, in the gendarmerie field brigades, in the police and guarding the camps. There were especially many of them in the modern Novgorod, Pskov, Leningrad regions, since Hitler promised to transfer these lands to Latvia and Estonia – this is what they tried. Yes, there were Estonians fighting for the USSR. But today the Estonian state has not made them heroes.
An elderly woman from Narva-Jõesuu watches a documentary about how the Soviet prosecutor’s office searched for collaborative police across the country until the seventies, and her neighbor, not celebrating anything, stood before her on May 9, mournfully. A portrait of his grandparents on May 8 to mark another date since their loss. They’re with Hitler.
You want to combine it with a single national exclamation. Like “Christ is Risen”, repeat “June 22, exactly four …” with your people, but you do not even dare to shout from your balcony, because your neighbors remember how on this day their mother and father chopped the Russians with Lithuanians and regret that they did not cut them.
And nothing, people got used to it. And what to do? Out of anger they put them in jail. The real one. So they live: one leg is here, the other is there. In a sense, spiritual and cultural life do not intersect with physical life. Spiritually you are with Forty Days Without War. And physically – in a world where the announcer sadly announces the death of your country’s oldest SS veteran.
Your brothers from Russia do not get tired of being surprised: as they say, then a monument to a soldier, then a tank, and now three monuments to Soviet soldiers in Latvia were removed at once. They do not understand how this is possible in Russia, but you understand everything perfectly. From early childhood, you know that the people around you fought on the side of Hitler and were very upset that they did not win. This is the strongest experience: both from disharmony and from intimacy with evil, because in the minds of our people German fascism was an absolute evil. However, there are people in the world who live among this evil.
Add this year’s events to this life. Shut up, real landings for pro-Russian views, deprivation of visas of Russian relatives. Consider the case of a person who turns out to be stateless on the eve of his retirement, living alone in a country where their language is no longer taboo and where they want to live—after all, the children leave to earn money. ban by law. Living in poverty, dressed in a faded bolognese belt, and can’t count on a prestigious job. At the same time, they openly tell him that the Russians should be expelled from everywhere, the state allows his neighbors to loudly regret that he and Hitler could not defeat the Russians. The people are calling on their country to “destroy Russia indiscriminately”. They are expected to publicly renounce their historic homeland, denounce it, and reassure the local population that they are good Russians.
And that, and high unemployment, employment in grassroots jobs, and a feeling of a hostile environment – all make Russians in the Baltic a very special population that causes suffering.
And the emotion that evokes their current state can be called in a broad word – confused. They became poorer and weaker. Now their Russian friends and distant relatives will not be able to freely visit them. They don’t know how to pay for gas and electricity if the houses in their town have long been sold and cost less to maintain.
Hungry, cold, no hope and people shout that you are a demon and at the same time regret that they did not crush you once with Hitler. So they didn’t crush you with Hitler. Can you imagine how neurotic these people are now? What shock must they constantly experience from a new life?
And they are always told to leave from there. But where will they go? Maybe give them some money? Also, most Russians from Latvia and Estonia already hold Russian passports, especially stateless people. How much money do they need there for them to leave? Among the several hundred thousand depressed Russians from Latvia and Estonia, there are ten thousand who may decide to move to Russia. It’s not such a big expense. Our pockets will not be torn, but there will be hope for the living among the descendants of the SS men. Maybe they’ll never get together, but they’ll know they can. Man needs hope. And the position of the Russians in these countries, especially the elderly, seems hopeless today.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.