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Xenophobe's Guide to the Estonians

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Lembit Öpik

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“For those countries not in Scandinavia or the Russian Federation, Estonia is perceived as part of Russia, or totally off the radar. Estonian soldiers who served in Iraq had a common complaint: no-one knew where they were from. Many of their American colleagues had never heard of Estonia or thought it was a mythical country. The Iraqis hadn't a clue either. One Estonian captain gave up - 'I told them I was from the moon,' he said.”

StoriesFunnyEstoniaEesti
Book:Xenophobe's Guide to the Estonians
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“Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.”

CommunismGenocideWorld War IiNazismEastern EuropeBloodlands
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power? Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food. p. 158”

IndustryEconomicsAgricultureWwiiModernitySecond World WarHitlerEmpireStalinBloodlands
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“She would be crowned empress this morning. She smiled, watching her reflection in the mirror, seeing a glimmer of the peasant bard in the crook of her grin, but the composure of a princess, too, and the stature of a queen, for however short a time she had been each. There was no looming shadow behind her, no waiting other self who might swoop out and consume her. Going forward, she knew she would be a balance of these pieces, somehow, some way. She could be many things all at once.”

Princess AuroraMultifacetedBriar RoseCrowned
Book:A Sword In Slumber
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