For all their bluster and rhetoric, the Soviets were amazingly naive and idealistic. Leon Trotsky during negotiation for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a good example. He proclaimed "No war, no peace," naively expecting the Germans to accept the border between the Bolsheviks and Germans after the Russia Revolution; before the ceasefire, the Germans were advancing with little difficulty. The Germans just restarted their advance, throwing the Bolsheviks into a panic and forcing them to accept harsh surrender terms. These new terms including the surrender of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Ukraine; when WWI ended shortly thereafter, these countries became independent.
Anyone who travels throughout Eastern Europe will see brothels. The vast majority of prostitutes in these establishments are Russian. Sometimes the woman will describe themselves as Estonian or another nationality, but when one probes further, one learns that they are ethnic Russians living in another country.
The Soviets played a curious game with the countries of Eastern Europe. They diligently attempted to get the citizens of each country to vote for the Communists. Every fraudulent and/or violent trick was used. Once the Soviets achieved their goal, the country was doomed to remain in the Soviet sphere. It was as if the Soviets had to convince themselves that the country honestly desired to be Communist, but once they did, the relationship was forever. Only two countries avoided this fate, Finland and Austria.
The Finns are independent people and determined to stay that way. The Soviets tried to get Finland to vote for the Communists in the 1930s, but they failed. The Soviets wanted to add a buffer zone to the west of Leningrad in case of Nazi attack, so they demanded that Finland cede large tracts of Finnish territory including Karelia. Then the Soviets decided they were going to annex Finland and invaded it in the Winter War. However, the Finns were no pushover and fought for all they were worth. The Soviets wisely decided that a military occupation would be too costly and so negotiated a peace, but not before confiscating 11% of Finnish territory.
Austria was partitioned from 1945 to 1955, with Vienna divided much like Berlin. Austria was the only country occupied by the Soviets that was allowed to leave the USSR before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It all boiled down to Austria's refusal to vote for a Communist government. After the Soviets realized that their quest was fruitless -- Stalin's death in 1953 also had something to do with it -- they allowed Austria to revert to an independent state.
The other Soviet republics were not so lucky. Once the Soviets could trumpet to the world that a country voted for the Communists, the die was cast. The republics would have to wait for Gorbachev to announce in 1989: "The social and political order in some countries changed in the past, and it can change in the future too, but this is entirely a matter for each people to decide. Any interference in the internal affairs, or any attempt to limit the sovereignty of another state, friend, ally, or another, would be inadmissible."
The situation in the Baltic States -- Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- was especially unfortunate. Stalin wanted to kill three birds with one stone: eliminate political opposition, regain tzarist territory, and gain border security. Border security for the USSR meant enslaving neighboring countries so they could be used as buffer zones in case of attack.
Stalin forcibly transferred some six million residents of the Soviet republics to prison camps or similar exiles, with around 25% dying along the way. 10% of the adult population of the Baltic States was deported and/or sent to labor camps during 1940-1953. To fill the void, and to ensure that the Baltic States would be permanently attached to Russia, millions of Russians were sent to live in the former republics.
Today Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have only 68%, 58%, and 83% ethnically-native residents, respectively. Most of the others are Russians too nationalistic to bother to learn the native language; they must be waiting for the rebirth of the Soviet Union.
The documentary The Soviet Story exemplifies the murders and resettlements of the Soviet Union during this time. The Eastern European people sent to Siberia were usually given only an hour or two to get ready to move. They were not allowed to bring more than one bag, if that. And it was not uncommon for Soviet officers to take over their home after their departure.
The Holocaust is rightfully revered as a shining example of man's inhumanity to man. The Soviet Story reminds us that the concentration camps in Soviet territory were immediately switched from housing Jews and other Nazi victims to housing victims of Soviet repression from the Baltic Countries, Poland, and other nearby countries. Stalin was merely following the lead of his predecessor, Lenin, the creator of the concentration camp.
Not surprisingly, The Soviet Story is hated in Russia with its illustrations of the Ukrainian Genocide, Katyn Massacre, and forced deportations. The documentary notes that a true partnership was established between the Nazi SS and Soviet NKVD during 1939-1941. To this day, many Russians refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the contract between the USSR and Nazi Germany that divided Eastern Europe at the start of WWII.
In April 2005 then Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his annual state of the nation address: "First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory."
As I wrote before in The Russians are leaving, the Russians are leaving, this is a current political strategy of Russia. Since the Soviet Union implanted millions of Russians in the former republics, Putin now uses the existence of these Russians to justify warmongering and jingoism. He used Nashi (Russian for "Ours"), his private nationalistic youth group, to harass and intimidate Estonia. Miriam Elder's article in GlobalPost, Kremlin youth group embraces North Korea, noted how Nashi admires North Korea so much that it published a series of gruesome, not to mention imaginary, North Korean posters depicting U.S. troops raping, pillaging, murdering, and torturing their way across Korea.
We should call Putin's bluff. We should tell him that he needs to protect the ethnic Russians living in the former republics by inviting them all back. He should issue them Russian passports -- with the former republics confiscating their current ones, but many of these people are citizenship orphans with no passport -- and transport them back to Russia in busses. The Russians should be treated better than the people of the Baltic States were, with all of their possessions transported back to Russia by truck. The former republics will be glad to get rid of people who hate their current surroundings and Russians can rejoice in the return of their former comrades, a genuine win-win.
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