• Were doing pretty well in Soviet times and had the experience of cutting themselves out before Russia tanked. A perception that they did things right and Russia held them back.

• Were not subjected to nearly as vicious of economic violence in post-Soviet times.

• Were offered up NATO membership on a silver platter.

• Had a lot of Nazi sympathetic history and despite the memes, the Soviets let the vast majority of them live and have children and harbor antisemitic views.

• Western ahistorical narratives easily took root due to the above.

Compare to post-Soviet countries that were more thoroughly stripped for parts, saw dramatic losses in quality of life, never fully recovered, and/or lacked such a strong Nazi sympathetic history that was whitewashed into cultural heritage. Most of those countries (European side) had and have all of these elements and properties, it's a matter of degree and whether one thoroughly won out in the aftermath.

Russia would probably be the same if it hadn't been subjectes to shock therapy.

I’m not familiar with the specific history and am excited to read the responses to this thread. However, the extent of the policy of Russification is a common critique of the USSR from a Marxist perspective, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the long and short of it.

I really do think it’s the cultural rift. The Baltics are culturally much more closer to Germanic/Scandinavian cultures than Slavic ones, so the Russians were much more so outsiders to them than many other countries that gained independence in the post-Soviet era. And so anything Russian coming in felt like an attack on their culture. Probably also due to them being brought into the Soviet fold in the post-revolution period which made it feel more like a realpolitik move. It was more about the strategic advantage of having Baltic Sea ports, so it created a feeling of being used.

As somebody from Hexbear, I feel obligated to, uh, say something mean about Estonia? I don't know why, but I'm told by other instances that we're a pro-Estonian genocide instance.

Anyway. ur mom gay. HA GOTTEM!

(I literally have not heard anything about Estonia since Pauly Shore made it a gag in Encino Man.)

I think most of it can be attributed to the change in economic fortune. The countries that have more nostalgia for the USSR are the ones with more across-the-board economic hardships.

For what it’s worth, here’s a struggle session with a lib about this topic: https://lemm.ee/comment/3344414

Smaller countries so easier for anticommunism to diffuse

Lots of interesting comments here already. I am now trying to find more information from another perspective - how did the Estonian people feel about the Soviets leading up to the occupation.

During the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Estonia was still a part of the Russian Empire. There was also a revolutionary government in Estonia at that time, but at the same time, a democratically elected (capitalist) government emerged, resulting in a dual power situation in Estonia.

There was a war of independence during 1918-1920. In Estonian schools, it's taught like this: on one side was the capitalist government with a mostly volunteer military (and with heavy financial and military aid from Britain and Finland) - these were the "good guys". They were fighting the "bad guys" - Germans in the south, and Bolsheviks in the East. Bolsheviks also included the aforementioned revolutionary government, which was in fact fully comprised of ethnic Estonians, but they are mostly handwaved away as traitors to the Estonian people, and actually they are kind of treated as Russian puppets who were just executing the will of the "Soviet empire". I remember being very confused in school when learning about these guys, I never understood how the Russians managed to convince some Estonians to betray our people, I think the common understanding most people leave school with is that they were basically just fundamentally evil people (yes, really).

Ultimately the October revolution failed in Estonia, because the capitalist government managed to somehow win against both Germans and the Red Army with a much smaller army (how this happened is actually really hard for me to understand), and so the first independent capitalist Estonia was born (which lasted until the Soviet occupation in 1939).

Based on the above, I am making some assumptions:

1. I can definitely see the war of independence creating a "Bolsheviks are the enemy" understanding in the general populace, so when the Soviets came at the start of WW2, people were already only seeing them as the enemy. I think this is the perfect environment to prevent the spread of communism as an ideology: a population who feel they've had their independent future stolen from them by the Soviets, their historic enemies. I can definitely see parents in such an environment priming their children to not trust Soviet teachings from a young age - I know from first hand experience that such priming was being done to children when I was very young, so this very well could be something that has been passed down through the generations from when the occupation first started.
2. Very likely the war of independence resulted in the loss of most Estonian communists, so by the time of the occupation, there were probably very few Estonian people spreading communist ideology "on the inside".
3. This is pure speculation, but the fact that the Estonian people had effectively resisted the October revolution may have caused some built-in anger and disdain from the side of the Soviets, and this may very well explain the initial violence and frankly unjustifiable deportations of what I consider mostly innocent people.

I want to try and find some more sources about the revolutionary government and the war of independence, and how the people in Estonia felt about communism during the October revolution, but I think I will need to go to a library for this, as I am not finding much online (certainly not finding much that is unbiased).

One interesting note: the revolutionary government went into exile in Russia after the war of independence, and eventually most of them were executed during the Great Purge. I am having a hard time finding out what crimes they were accused of.