Which possible POD could have formed the contemporary Baltic States as the multinational states?

But the transition to a new form of state should nullify injustice, and not manifest a specific form of revenge, shouldn’t it?

I have met no statements about multicultural society being oppressive. Multiculturalism is a good thing.

It is difficult to say, given that the living conditions in the Baltic republics were higher than in many places in the Soviet Union. Soviets were trying to show how the westernized republics can be incorporated into the state of socialism, actually making them an advertising exhibition (after the year 1955).

1. Again, I think you are not seeing that the system which was responsible for the Russian settler colonialism as well as the general Russification in the Baltics was completely unjust, not to mention unfair.

The policies created to counteract this were quite lenient and were meant to restore some semblance of fairness to the Baltic people. If you don’t understand this you simply can’t see how they felt about this. There is a saying about how losing your privileges feels like oppression to some people...

2. I addressed this in my previous post, see above.
 

iVC

Donor
I don't think I understand what you're asking. Do you want a united Baltic federation?

Baltic federation is the one of the possible options. A more global plan is to invoke a POD for independent states to be proclaimed as multinational states consisting of several nations and languages united by the idea of democracy and saying goodbye to the troubled past along with the mutual claims. Basically inverting the idea of the happy returns to the mono-Eesti, mono-Latvija states.
 
Post WWII PoD? I fear the closest would be fast tracking nationalization of all who renounce allegiance elsewhere and make good faith effort to learn (and instruct kids in) the national language.

I would contest this. The Soviet Union, in my estimation, was terrible for all of its people, and the Baltics suffered no more than the Russians or any other group of people, especially since they were spared of the worst parts of Stalin's terror.
Consider the reason they missed the interwar era mess was because they were independent nations at the time. The outright takeover left an even bigger anti-Russian grudge than the puppetization the Warsaw Pact endured.
 
Honestly I can't see this happening without a POD that avoids the Baltic states being annexed by the USSR. Had these countries been just (nominally) independent *Warsaw Pact nations with decisions about immigration and legislation about citizenship made locally (even if under influence from Moscow), I could see them retaining something like the liberal attitude towards minorities these countries had in the interwar era.*

After spending 50 years under Moscow's yoke, like the majority of the Baltic people saw it, and gaining a massive Russian minority in that time, without the local native majority being asked if they accept this huge influx of immigrants, I'd say it is very hard to avoid a counter-reaction after these nations gained new independence. This especially applies to Estonia and Latvia, as mentioned above, which saw an increase in the Slavic population from 8% to 35% and 10% to 42%, respectively, between the late 30s and 1989. This growth in the size of the Russian-speaking population was enough to make the native people in these SSRs fear for their future as ethnic and cultural groups, especially as at the same time the Russian language and culture was officially and practically in a much stronger position than the native language and culture.

I guess that from a Russian POV, it might be hard to understand the members of a small ethnic and language group fearing becoming a minority in their own country, or even being wiped entirely from the face of the earth in the foreseeable future. For the Baltic local ethnic majorities, though, being a part of the USSR was a heavy ordeal, all the way from the repression and forced transfers of tens to hundreds of thousands of people in the Stalinist period. It is very hard to see the post-1990 Baltic native majorities in toto turn into practical reincarnations of Jesus Christ in their ability to turn the other cheek and to forgive their treatment under the Soviet system, or to stop fearing that the large Russian minorities are used as Moscow's catspaws to keep influencing their nations' internal affairs. As much as I consider the Baltic citizenship policies during the new independence to be unfair, discriminatory and bordering on criminal, it is difficult to see how, with that past since 1940, these nations could have after 1990 become shiny, happy and harmonious multi-ethnic nations virtually overnight.


* Note that even the post-1990 citizenship laws are not based on ethnicity, as such, but jus sanguinis, having family roots in the countries in question. In Estonia, an ethnic Russian person who could prove that his/her direct ancestors lived in the country before 1940, during the first independence, would have received an automatic citizenship as much as an ethnic Estonian did. It was only those people that had arrived to the SSR during the Soviet era, or their offspring that were subject to the more difficult requirements - again irrespective of ethnicity.
 
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The Baltic States were relatively multinational during the interwar period. Lithuania's de-facto borders allowed it to function as a homogenous "national" state without large minority populations, but if it actually controlled Vilnius it would have a much larger community of Yiddish-speaking Jews, as well as Poles and Belarusians.

Latvia and Estonia had very large Baltic German communities as well. Riga began the 19th century as a mostly German-speaking city in a situation analogous to Prague. Latvia had large Russian and Jewish minority groups. The land reform broke the power the German landowners had before WW1, and by the early 20's Baltic Germans were either leaving for Germany or coming to terms with the new political order.

This raises a difficult issue that might be called the "imperial orphan question". Large German or Russian minorities are a geopolitically convenient excuse for both interwar German and modern Russia to howl about muh oppressed co-ethnics and pretend to care about multiculturalism/minority rights. While all the residents of a state deserve civic equality, a fear of great powers selectively overplaying this case in Sudeten-land style situations helped accelerate the decline of the League of Nations' minority treaties.
 
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