Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic

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The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (abbreviated ESSR) was a union republic of the Soviet Union from the short twentieth century. It was succeeded by the modern state of Estonia.

History

Estonia had briefly formed a pro-Bolshevik republic during the Russian Civil War,[1] and the Bolsheviki were popular among the lower classes during the 1910s. For example, Baron Wrangel, the official historian of the Estonian German-Balt unit, recorded that during the Russian Civil War, 60–70% of Tallinn's population supported the Bolsheviki. Their popularity decreased almost entirely due to the decades of antisocialist indoctrination[2] During the short twentieth century Jerome Davis visited the Baltics and found that most, if not all of the workers and peasants there preferred being part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics[3] (whereas the middle and upper classes freely voiced their objections to him), and everybody that he met, even the upper classes, still preferred the Soviet Republics over the anticommunist reoccupation.[4] Nevertheless, a gang of antisocialist guerrillas known as the Forest Brothers fought against the Soviets from 1940 to 1956. They caused 18,562 fatalities throughout the Baltics.[5][6] The Estonian SSR also had the second highest anti-Russian sentiment out of all of the other Soviet republics, but antisocialism itself was rare.[7]

Culture

In the 1970s the percentage of books published in the titular language was 74%, and of newspapers 72%.[8]

References