I suspect it’s hereditary and connected to the traumas endured by my Estonia parents, and their parents and the nation that they belong to.
My parents were forced from their homes and homeland in 1944 – carried away in the arms of their parents, fleeing not by choice but to escape violent Russian Soviet era repression and colonization.
The previous Russian occupation of Estonia in 1941 had already delivered its verdict. My paternal grandfather was sent to the Gulag. Others in our family and their neighbours – arrested for the supposed crimes of being entrepreneurs, teachers, members of local councils, or for simply attending a church or synagogue. Stalin’s terror had a bureaucratic efficiency: if you had a mind of your own, you were marked for elimination.
What we’ve witnessed over the past three years, in Ukraine, Bucha and Mariupol – torture, rape, and the calculated destruction of entire communities – these are not new Russian innovations. They are macabre traditions. They are inherited tools of Russian neo-imperialist conquest, sharpened and passed down through generations.
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