I find Johan B ckman absolutely revolting. Luckily he is living in St.
Petersburg, and the likelihood that I would bump into him in Helsinki is
rather small. (I dislike having to puke in public places.)

Somehow, it doesn't surprise me that he now lives in Petrograd.

Although I would never deny that Estonia was occupied like Backman does,
that version of the historical narrative is one of many possible
alternatives and not the only one. Was Finland occupied by Russia? By
Sweden? By people calling no calling themselves "Finns" but who really
reveal themselves to be the decendants  of invaders who colonized Saami
lands from Estonia, Ingermanland, and Roslagen? What about the American
state of Hawaii, 120 years ago the independent Kingdom of Hawaii?

Although I would never characterize Estonia as an apartheid state, as he
also does, I know from my experience there that being a member of the
Russian-speaking minority does put a person, even if an Estonian citizen
who speaks perfect Estonian, at a certain disadvantage see e.g.
http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/artikkeli/Ven%C3%A4l%C3%A4iset+heikoilla+Vi...),
which I will traslate and post here within the hour.

History, politics, and sociology are largely interpretations of complex
realities, and Backman is certainly entitiled to his version of the
narrative constructed from the evidence, all the more so if he can succeed
in justifying them. If nothing else, people who proffer versions of the
historical narrative profoundly different from the one we have become used
to accepting, make us think about things we normally take for granted,
never a bad thing.

On Saturday a controversial dissertation, *Salaiset aseveljet* ['Secret
Comrades-in-Arms'], by Oula Silvennoinen, will be defended at the
University of Helsinki (https://oa.doria.fi/handle/10024/41922). It
challenges the standard view held in Finland that Finland's relationship
with Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1944 was that of a cobelligerent, a
democracy immune to Nazi ideology that was marginally involved in the
Holocaust, arguing instead that Finland was a German ally, did little to
prevent Jews in Finland from being handed over to the Germans and executd,
sometimes on Finnish territory, and even had a hitherto unknown
*Einsatzkommando Finnland* under the command of Gustav vom Felde to rid
northern Finland and Finnish-occupied Soviet Karelia of ideological and
racial enemies, particularly active communists and Soviet POWs who also
happened to be of Jewish ethnicity.

This flies in the face of views Finns have cherished about their wartime
history for two generations, but it is based on honest archival research
and the inclusion of evidence previously unavailable to historians. Not
everyone is happy about this work or Silvennoinen's conclusions, but come
this Saturday we will see if his claims are sustainable. This is what
freedom of speech is all about.

Let's be reasonable. Backman's theses, however intuitively repulsive we
might find them, will be accepted or rejected on their own merits. To
argue otherwise is to make ourselves guilty of the same mindset that we
worked so hard to overcome during the Cold War.

Bäckman is going to sue the authors.

Although I would never deny that Estonia was occupied like Backman does,
that version of the historical narrative is one of many possible
alternatives and not the only one. Was Finland occupied by Russia? By
Sweden? By people calling themselves "Finns" but who really reveal
themselves to be the decendants  of invaders who colonized Saami lands
from Estonia, Ingermanland, and Roslagen? What about the American state of
Hawaii, 120 years ago the independent Kingdom of Hawaii?

Although I would never characterize Estonia as an apartheid state, as he
also does, I know from my experience there that being a member of the
Russian-speaking minority does put a person, even if an Estonian citizen
who speaks perfect Estonian, at a certain disadvantage see e.g.
http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/artikkeli/Ven%C3%A4l%C3%A4iset+heikoilla+Vi...),
which I will traslate and post here within the hour.

History, politics, and sociology are largely interpretations of complex
realities, and Backman is certainly entitiled to his version of the
narrative constructed from the evidence, all the more so if he can succeed
in justifying it against criticism. If nothing else, people who proffer
versions of the historical narrative profoundly different from the one we
have become used to accepting unquestioningly, make us think about things
we normally take for granted, never a bad thing.

On Saturday a controversial dissertation, *Salaiset aseveljet* ['Secret
Comrades-in-Arms'], by Oula Silvennoinen, will be defended at the
University of Helsinki (https://oa.doria.fi/handle/10024/41922). It
challenges the standard view held in Finland that Finland's relationship
with Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1944 was that of a cobelligerent, a
democracy immune to Nazi ideology that was marginally involved in the
Holocaust, arguing instead that Finland was a German ally, did little to
prevent Jews in Finland as refugees or POWs, as opposed to its own Jewish
citizens, which it protected but who also knew that German intelligence
services and their collaborators in Finnish police structures were keeping
an eye on them, from being handed over to the Germans, and executed,
sometimes on Finnish territory, and even had a hitherto unknown
*Einsatzkommando Finnland* under the command of Gustav vom Felde to rid
northern Finland and Finnish-occupied Soviet Karelia of ideological and
racial enemies, particularly active communists and Soviet POWs who also
happened to be of Jewish ethnicity.

This flies in the face of views Finns have cherished about their wartime
history for two generations, but it is based on honest archival research
and the inclusion of evidence previously unavailable to historians. Not
everyone is happy about this work or Silvennoinen's conclusions, but come
this Saturday we will see if his claims are sustainable. This is what
freedom of speech is all about.

Let's be reasonable. Backman's theses, however intuitively repulsive we
might find them, will be accepted or rejected on their own merits. To
argue otherwise is to make ourselves guilty of the same mindset that we
worked so hard to overcome during the Cold War.

Bäckman denies that the Baltic countries were Soviet-occupied. Such a claim
is purely propagandistic and cannot even be dealt with in academia. It's on
the same level as denying the holocaust. Or gravity.

: Bäckman is going to sue the authors.

It is getting better and better. Now Bäckman is accusing Estonia of
persecuting Neo-Nazis:

http://pronssisoturi.blogspot.com/2008/09/international-press-release...

I am not going to defend Backman, but I am going to assume the role of
devil's advocate as a means of trying to understand his thinking.

Nobody denies that the USSR ousted the legitimate governments of the
Baltic countries, or to use the modern term "effected regime change", in
June 1940, replacing the legitimate regimes with governments, now
generally regarded as bogus, that were, initially at least, accepted to
some degree by the three Baltic nations. The Latvian President appealed to
his wary nation to accept the new government, and in Estonia what seemed
to be a resolution of a threat to nationaal existence was intially greeted
with relief, even if President Päts was arrested and sent into Soviet
exile.

These new harmless-looking governments arranged sham elections and quickly
negotiated to have their respective countries "apply" to join the USSR.
The application and its acceptance resulted in the incorporation of the
three countries into the USSR, a move that was not welcomed by the
majority of their populations, but one that they had few instruments to
change. I honestly do not know if occupation is the proper legal term to
use for a situation like this. Going to the inexhaustable resource of 19th
century US history, something quite similar was done in the Kingdom of
Hawaii: the government was weakened and ousted, and political intrigues
between American businessmen and certain members of the Hawaiian elite
resulted in the islands being incorportaed into the United States as a
territory, much to the distress of a considerable portion of its citizenry
which, like the Balts, were victims of the imperialist ambitions of a far
larger country and had no instruments to resist. If you are going to say
that Baltics were occupied by the Soviets in 1940, you have to say that
the Kingdom of Hawaii was first subverted by the Americans with their
creation of the Republic of Hawaii on July 4(!), 1893, the arrest and
trial of ousted Queen Lili'uokalani for treason, and the eventual
annexation of this Republic of Hawaii at the request of its government by
the United States in 1898.

In any case, if the use of the term occupation with respect to the regime
change and subsequent Soviet annexation of the Baltic countries can be
questioned, then we have a case for disputing whether applying the term
"occupation" to the entire period between 1940 and 1991 is appropriate.
The Russian position, as we all know, was that the annexation, even if
deviously done, was the work of the government that was in charge. Thus,
the German invasion, occupation, and annextion as Ostland, was a genuine
occupation, because it was a military operation with no statesmanship
being involved, but the retaking of what Moscow regarded as Soviet
territory in 1944 was *not* an occupation, but rather a re-establishement
of the *status quo ante*, no matter how deviously that had come about in
the first place.

Between the fall of 1944 and Stalin's death in 1953 the Baltics were
administered as occupied territory, and nobody other than countries in the
communist bloc regarded the Soviet presence there as legal. After 1953,
though, things changed. With the opening up of the Baltic states in 1965,
the development of tourism, and the general acceptance of the status quo
by new generations of inhabitants, both natives and migrants, the case for
speaking of an *occupation* weakened. Sweden, the UK, and even Finland,
whose president urho Kekkonen sent mixed signals to the world when he, the
only Western statesman to visit the Baltics during the Soviet period,
visited Tartu in 1965, about how the situation in the Baltics sould be
regarded in the future. By the early 1980s even the Americans were getting
used to the idea of the Baltic countries being a legitimate art of the
USSR, an issue that came up in conunction with the trial and deportation
to the USSR of Karl Linnas, an Estonian who had been commandant of a
German concentration camp during the German occupation of Estonia.

By 1988, when the people of the Baltics united in their incredible
demonstration of peaceful protest against the continued presence of their
countries in the Soviet Union, there was little talk of occupation. Rather
there was more talk of a political system that theoretically allowed a
republic to secede from the union, but practically did not provide the
political instruments for even testing whether the population would be
interested in self-determination. Gorbachev was unhappy that the Baltics
were seriously considering this option, and he tried t squelch it by
visiting Lithuania and discussing the options for "divorce" with leading
political and other leaders. It was only later, in Vilnius in January 1991
and then a few weeks later, in Riga, that blood was spilt. Even then,
these instantiations of violence demonstrated themselves to be isolated
incidents rather than standard policy, nor did they involve soldiers of a
colonial occpupying army crushing native populations. The situation bore
more similarities to civil war. There was nothing in the Baltics in 1991
comparable to the struggle against French occupation in Algeria during the
1960s or the struggle against the French and then the American occupations
in Vietnam between the 1950s and 1970s.

So, not wanting to use the word occupation does not amount to a denial of
the historical facts. According to a reasonable interpretation of the
facts, the three Baltic republics were the victims of Soviet imperialism,
a German occupation, and a Soviet reconquest of territory it had
originally stolen "fair and square". Given that life was a normal as
possible under commnist rule, that Balts were involved in the
administration and defense of their own republics as well as of the USSR
as a whole, and that the general feeling was not that they wre living
under foreign occupation, but rather that their homelands had been sucked
into state structure that allowed them to participate in its
administration and day-to-day decision making, but did not allow them the
possibility of self-determination, I can see why some people prefer ot to
use the word "occupation" to characterize such a situation. Subverted and
co-opted might be a better term. Consideration of the case for an
alternative explanation of the historical facts might teach us something.

I had visited Estonia on June 15 of whatever year it was and was deeply
moved by the commemoration of the victims of the massive deportations that
had taken place on that day in 1941, precisely a week before the Nazis
attacked the USSR. The article had noted that the reality was more
complex. Despite the fact that people were forcibly removed from their
homes and sent off to locations unknown traveling in and winding up in
unspeakable conditions, for certain groups among them the tragedy was a
blesing in disguise. The Jews, political radicals, and any healthy males
between the ages of 14 and 30, the article argued, stood a far higher
chance of surviving until 1945 in Siberian exile than they would have in
an Estonia occupied by hostile foreign forces and a passageway for
advancing and retreating armies.

For presenting this viewpoint for consideration I was excoriated.
Nevertheless, I am certain that the actuarial tables support it. The three
Baltic countries were, after Poland and Germany, the worst places to be
during WW II, particularly if you were a Jew, a person with radical (=
leftist leaning) political beliefs, or a young man of draftable age.
Former Estonian President Lennart Meri expressed the view several times
that his famly had been fortunate, all things considered, to have sat out
the war in Siberian exile where they had a higher chance of surviving the
war than they would have had in Estonia.