You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
Ahem. The Baltics got independence when the Soviet regime collapsed. With all due respect to the struggle of anyone who opposed this regime while it existed, attributing the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the resistance in the Baltics is a bit too much. It was mostly driven my processes internal to Russia itself.
Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Ah yes all the freedom fighters and culture preservationists had zero impact in securing Lithuania's freedom - what an incredibly dumb, disrespectful and frankly depressing take.
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.
also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
No your logic is fundamentally flawed because it assumes a job has to reach 100% completion to have an effect. What if soviet empire collapsed precisely because the resistance was too costly.
In Lithuania in particular sabotage was a constant reality of the country for bigger chunk of a century. People were breaking the empire not only via outside resistance and cultural identity preservation but also by sabotaging soviet operations in daily activities. The empire fundamentally became unsustainable and collapsed under it's own weight and no new glorious leader could have saved it.
So whether Lithuanians are free because of their own efforts or because it just so happens that soviet empire collapsed is a fundamentally flawed question as these two things are not only correlating but are causal as well.
You're are feeding into a myth of unbreakable ussr and belittling efforts of former member states.
In any colonizer's strategy, this tactic achieves following goals
1. Instills fear, and demotivates and fragments resistance
2. Internalizes inferiority into a colonized nation
I might've been too hasty assuming you are doing this on purpose. But otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government. Well, maybe not now, as his resources are strained.
Point is: Kazakhstan is far from independent, and Baltic states have done a lot to gain their true independence.
>otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich.
Kazakhstan is dependent on Russia and there is massive corruption, but for the most part it is independent. Just as independent as any other country with massive corruption.
Also, Russian speaking non native-Kazahk people are not treated so nicely there.
Young Kazakh people indeed started questioning the state of things. And I celebrate that.
At the same time, russia has huge influence over the country. Yes, corruption is exactly how russian influence is usually maintained.
That doesn't contradict my claim, however.
>saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government
at the time of the empire's collapse, Putin was essentially a nobody. Yeltsin and the oligarchs didn't really give a fuck about Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Baltics, and the rest. they were truly and unconditionally independent, and Russia, given its humiliating defeat in Chechnya, couldn't do shit about it even if it wanted to (which it didn't).
Oh, they gave a lot of fucks.
They ensured russian language has a special status in Ukrainian constitution, for example, despite freedom of speech and non-discrimination were already there.
They ensured the presidential candidate with strong nationalistic views, arguing for severing ties with russia, won't make it to elections.
They financed political parties pulling Ukraine back to russia.
There might've been a temporary loss of russian grip on Ukraine in those turbulent times, but that was just a tiny blip on the scale of whole timeline
I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.
