Slop.

The urge to say I told you so is strong these days throughout the Baltics.

In 1968, the historian Robert Conquest published The Great Terror, at the time the most unsparing account of the state-directed megadeath supervised by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.

MEGADEATH

Also nothing bad happened in other countries during the 1930s no one died in America during the great depression. People dying is totally cool if it's market directed

After the book’s publication, some readers remained skeptical: Could the Soviet Union have been that bad? In fact, it was worse. But for years before his vindication, Conquest was accused of Russophobia. After glasnost, when he revised his old book, his publisher asked him to come up with a snappy new title. His friend Kingsley Amis suggested I Told You So You Fucking Fools. (The publisher eventually went with The Great Terror: A Reassessment.)

Jesus Christ was this written by the most insufferable person the ever exist?

Estonia maintains a state museum dedicated to the evils of the Soviets and their suppression of Estonian nationhood and identity. It equates Communism with Nazism and spends much more time on documenting the crimes of the former. During an intermission at the Tallinn opera, an older Estonian man caught me staring up at the sprawling, Soviet-era socialist realist ceiling mural, which depicts Communism triumphant. He pointed out a smudgy area where a Leninist slogan (“Art belongs to the people”) had recently been effaced in an ongoing effort to de-Russify.

Unsurprising. The US often funds right-wing propaganda in foreign countries in order both destabilize and Nazify them. They Nazified Russia when the Soviet Union ended and it became the capitalist shithole known today as the Russian Federation. Why do you think they're invading Ukraine? Communism? Lmao stop living in the 80s. This time they won't be bringing art for the people.

“We have been living here 7,000 years and have never witnessed any good things coming to Europe from the east,” Tsahkna told me.

Not Russophobic though

Edit: Wait, let's go back to that line about the mural for a second. The writer claims the only thing defaced on the mural was the line "Art belongs to the people." Why not remove the whole mural? The writer saw it when they attended an Opera, which is no doubt an expensive thing to do in Estonia these days. So what is really happening here are two wealthy people shitting on a time where art belonged to the people, and wasn't just a shitty club for rich folks. Defacing only the slogan is sending a message, "the people's art belongs to the rich now."

I have to wonder, if the Baltics didn't get bombarded with so much anti-communist, pro-Nazi propaganda from the rich ruling class, what would the average, non-wealthy Estonian think of communism?