Lessons from a Year Abroad: “Estonians are changing their attitudes towards the Russian Language”

Edited by Anni Myllymäki.

As a Russian-language student in Tallinn last year, I became aware of often negative attitudes towards the Russian language, with Estonians often reluctant to use it in a public space. I became interested in how Estonians’ attitudes towards the Russian language have changed since becoming independent. To what extent can this be explained by attitudes towards Russia as a political aggressor, heightened by its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022? 

In 1991, Estonia gained its independence from the Soviet Union. In an effort to build a post-independence national identity Estonian was declared the sole official language of the state. However, Russian speakers have remained the country’s largest minority, comprising a quarter of the population in 2024.

For Estonians, the Russian language is a remanent and thus reminder of the brutality of their nation’s occupation by the Soviets, which lasted nearly half the 20^th century. While some look back with nostalgia, for many the period is marred by a legacy of deportations, repression and enforced collectivisation. 

 The Russian language itself was used as a tool of imperial control within this legacy, imposed as a compulsory school subject and playing a key role in cultural homogenisation. Authorities used the myth of the so-called ‘Russkiy Mir’ (‘Russian world’) to emphasise the value of the Russian language in its ability to forge a collective identity, unifying the multicultural tapestry of states within the Soviet Union by functioning as a common language of interethnic communication. 

 However, rather than producing cohesion, these language policies produced tension, fracturing communities, and souring the previously neutral attitudes toward the Russian language. Consequently, after Estonia’s independence, single-language policies were adopted, and, in contrast to other post-Soviet states, Russian lost its primacy. This is largely due to Estonia having spent comparatively less time as a Soviet state and remaining more orientated towards the West. Furthermore, the Estonian language was not banned during the occupation. Therefore, the country retained a greater sense of national consciousness and language loyalty. 

The 1989 ‘Law on Language’ reversed Soviet-era policies through promoting the teaching of Estonian and requiring employees to have a command of the language. However, this created socio-economic disadvantages among monolingual Russians, as well as the striking ethnic segregation evident to this day. 

Russian speakers tend to be concentrated in communities in Eastern towns such as Narva (bordering Russia) and Tallinn, the capital. Consequently, these communities are often segregated from Estonian-speaking communities, impacting attitudes towards each language. This separation results in greater monolingualism among Estonia’s population as there is a lack of motivation to learn another community’s language, further exacerbating the segregation in a vicious cycle.  

Studies have shown that bilingualism results in a more exclusive conception of collective identity. This explains Baltic authorities’ aim to improve knowledge of the state language (Estonian in this case) to allow for better integration of Russian-speaking communities. This is particularly important in Estonia, compared to other Baltic states, as its Russian-speaking population (besides the Old Believer Orthodox community) only arrived in the country in the Soviet period, causing a lack of integration into Estonian-speaking communities.  

Other factors that exacerbate ethnic segregation include the linguistic contrast between Russian and Estonian which makes maintaining Russian difficult. Compared to Ukrainian speakers, for example, learning Russian requires more effort from Estonian speakers. Furthermore, the 1995 Citizenship Act refused to grant Estonian citizenship to ethnic Russians who arrived in Estonia after 1940 and required the completion of Estonian language tests and cultural pledges. Therefore, it directly equated language with identity. This Act also led to the perception of Russian speakers as occupants, accentuating the cultural divide and thus segregation of communities.  

In the long term, rather than unifying Estonia to the Soviet Union more firmly, Soviet policies have resulted in ‘status reversal.’ This refers to Estonian speakers adopting more negative attitudes towards Russian speakers than vice versa. 

As a result, Estonian speakers are less likely to have tolerant attitudes and live in ethnically mixed environments (as evidenced by research on Ethnic and Language Relations between Estonian and Russian communities. In the study, 64% of Estonian speakers lived and worked in an ethnically homogeneous environment, compared to 29 % of Russian speakers. However, the study claims that the level of ‘command of the Estonian or Russian language’ corresponds to ‘mutual accommodation of the other ethnic group.’ Can this link necessarily be made? Is it possible that Russian speakers themselves also adopt a negative attitude towards their own language? 

This probes a key question within a broader linguistic debate: what is the relationship between language and identity politics? Is language an arbitrary means of communication, or can it be politically charged, impacting conceptions of identities? 

In this case language has a political dimension, since Russian speakers are perceived as occupants from the old political system. A study shows that Russian speakers in Estonia are more likely to feel hostile towards NATO while Estonian speakers more likely to feel hostile towards Russia, suggesting a connection between language and politics. On a more practical level, monolingual Russian speakers were seen to undermine the revival of the Estonian language post-independence and thus the re-establishment of national identity.  

On the other hand, language in this context can be viewed as arbitrary, not linked to conceptions of identity and politics. Many young Russian-speaking Estonians do not associate with Russian culture or identity despite their native language being Russian. Such attitudes are evident in research which showed that generally, Estonians prefer self-identifying as a ‘Russian speaker’ rather than a ‘Russian.’ It seems to be the case that there is a mismatch between actual linguistic diversity (including a high number of Russian speakers), and the official culture and policies which almost adopt a mechanism of repression with regards to the language.  

It has been suggested that national censuses in Estonia may have been impacted by participants not admitting their ability to speak Russian. Furthermore, a study on Multilingual Tallinn suggests that visual linguistic representation (for example, road signs in Estonian) does not correspond with the widespread use of Russian in day-to-day life. As such, most Russian speakers want Russian to become a second official language. Since this is not currently the case, it can be inferred that a negative attitude has been adopted towards Russian, perhaps considered something taboo. 

It would be a major oversight to discuss this topic without considering the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has shaped Estonian attitudes towards Russia and its language. Since war broke out in 2022, Estonia has been actively involved in defending and aiding Ukraine, donating 1% of its GDP to the cause. The pro-Ukrainian sentiment is tangible: I saw many Ukrainian flags displayed around Tallinn, including on Freedom Square where it is blended with the Estonian flag, a powerful symbol of their alliance. The invasion hits close to home for Estonians, who can sense their similarities with Ukraine in terms of being victim to Russian aggression. For many, the war against Ukraine suggests a possible repetition of Estonia’s past. This is both in the sense of a physical invasion as well as more epistemological violence and Russification if Russia continues its quasi-colonial project beyond Ukraine.  

Kaja Kallas, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, stressed the palpability of history repeating itself  in her country: ‘I would say that history rhymes. And if you look at 1930s and 1940s, the history of the world, then you can clearly see that America also tried to isolate itself from what was happening in Europe.’

Thus, the Estonian government has been investing in their own, as well as Ukraine’s, defence. An Estonian passer-by explained to me that the road works we were passing were not of the usual kind: raised blocks were being installed in the middle of the road to prevent the movement of Russian tanks in the case of invasion. The possibility of invasion has become increasingly plausible with the hybrid attacks on Estonia, with Russia as the suspected perpetrator. In 2023, the cars of an interior minister and a journalist were attacked and in 2024, an underwater cable between Estonia and Finland is thought to have been sabotaged by a vessel in Russia’s ‘Shadow Fleet’, one of many similar incidents in the Baltics.  

The invasion of Ukraine has probed cultural, as well as military questions: how can Estonia deal with the cohesion of its multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society? The war has brought out the echoes between the current situation in Ukraine and the past Soviet occupation of Estonia. What I have found particularly striking is Estonians’ desire to cling onto the freedom that they have only had glimpses of over the past century. The end of the exhibition in the KGB museum in Tallinn draws parallels between the deportations of Estonian children out of their home country during the occupation, and the deportations of children from Ukraine since 2018. Of course, this is one among many notable parallels.  

What has thus been amplified over the past three years is the need to assert a national identity in the face of imperial aggression. Language is considered an important aspect of this, resulting in the often-negative attitudes towards the Russian language. To no matter what extent language is arbitrary or tied intrinsically to identity politics, the segregation of communities in Estonia along linguistic and ethnic lines accentuates a sense of hostility and lack of mutual understanding. Of course, this phenomenon is not only evident in Estonia, but is relevant to all post-Soviet states, in the Baltics and beyond.