This brief essay was written shortly after 24 February 2022, Estonian Independence Day, and this year the day of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The author could not help thinking that the ‘good old Soviet times’ were better because at least in those times, there was no war. We all know the cruelties of Soviet power, e.g., deportations, arrests and detentions, occupation and tanks in Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, and Prague 1968. That is why it sounds perverted to wish back those times and speak of Soviet nostalgia. This is exactly the same perversion that Stephen Fry manages to create in his novel Making History (1996). In this novel, a certain kind of time travel is possible which enables people to ‘correct’ history. In this case, the protagonist goes back to the nineteenth century and poisons the drinking water of the Austrian town of Braunau with the result that all its residents become infertile. The logical consequence: a boy called Adolf Hitler is never born. However, in the novel, the world turns out to be much crazier and worse, so that when the reader finishes the book, the inevitable conclusion is that Hitler was the better alternative.

The Soviet power that the author of this essay became acquainted with in the late 1970s was rather ridiculous and in a wretched condition without really achieving anything. Of course, it was sometimes depressing and certainly dangerous now and then, but at least people had food to eat and a roof over their heads. In today’s Ukraine, this is not possible. Hence the Soviet nostalgia.

The difference between Soviet times and the present is that in principle, a ‘soviet’ was a body where people came together and talked. At least some people, perhaps only the Central Committee of the Party or the Politburo, but there was some kind of debate, discussion, and consultation. It was only in Stalin’s time that the dictator decided alone – and now we are back in that time where a dictator’s voice roars in Moscow.

There is one significant difference: according to Marxist ideology, Soviet power was by definition international (The Internationale was even the Soviet national anthem until 1943!). Yet now we are back in times that are the opposite of internationalism and that is nationalism, which according to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig is the worst poison for European culture. He wrote in 1942 in the preface of his memoirs: ‘All the livid steeds of the Apocalypse have stormed through my life – revolution and famine, inflation and terror, epidemics, and emigration. I have seen the great mass ideologies grow and spread before my eyes – Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia and, above all else that arch-plague, nationalism, which has poisoned the flower of our European culture.’[1]

Nota bene: nationalism is the final in his list of plagues. It is in his focus. And it is not merely a plague, it is the arch-plague for Zweig. Indeed, nationalism is the most poisoning ideology mankind has invented. There is killing, bombing, and destroying in the name of the nation. Nationalism cannot be all bad (see the emergence of nation-states like Estonia in 1918 and its restoration in 1991), but to put a nation above other nations has fatal consequences, as we can see today. That is why the author longs for the return of Soviet times…

[1] S. Zweig, The World of Yesterday. New York: Viking Press, 1943, p. vii.