hold on now I thought you said they should have citizenship once they learned Estonian? get your fascist arguments straight you xenophobe
And you better shut up, you're way off as almost always.
I can perfectly understand whya the Estonians and Latvians don't want to recognize Russian as an official language. It's pretty easy to grasp, once you stop being focused on your narrow point of view, look around and see the bigger picture.
I'll try to make it easy to understand for you. In general, big imperialist nationalist states use the most loyal population as their power base. When such a state occupies some small country with a population resisting its attempts to destroy its culture and independent mentality, it usually decides to move its own people there in order to "dilute" the local culture and use them as agents supporting gradual assimilation of the subjugated nation.
This is basically what was happening in the Czech lands during Hapsburg rule (or in Ireland during the English rule). The German-speaking minority was clearly the upper class. German culture was favoured, while the Czech language and heritage was being suppressed. The goal was to assimilate the Czech elites, make them speak German and adopt German culture and German "mindset" and then gradually assimilate the rest of the population. It was working until the 19th century, during which the Czech elites successfuly attempted to promote the Czech culture. "National revival" (as it is called here) happened and the German dreams of dominating the country were wrecked.
So they adopted a new strategy. They focused on the already "germanized" areas and tried to make them more compact, perhaps even spread them a little, and "contain" the Czechs inland and on the countryside (all major cities had large German populations). After WW1 and the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia granted the Germans all the rights you people now want from the Estonians and Latvians. German was recognized as the official language and German people had all the citizen rights like the other nationalities. But the Germans, just like the Russians in Estonia, refused to reconcile with the Czechs. While many Czechs learned German, they refused to learn the "inferior Slavic language" and try to get more familiar with the Czech culture. They looked to Germany for inspiration, they never accepted the independence of Czechoslovakia as a fact they had to accept.
Nazi Germany exploited the weakness. As absurd as it looks now, Hitler managed to convince the rest of the world that the Czechs were in fact oppressing the poor minority Germans (which was not true at all) and he gradually forced the Czech government to grant them more and more autonomy, which in turn only made them more rebellious and incooperative. In the end, as you surely know, he annexed the German regions and later the rest of Czechoslovakia.
It's not hard to understand why the Estonians and Latvians don't want to go down this road, and the recent conflict in Caucasus will only serve to strengthen this feeling.
The whole thing is of course not fully comparable to the Czech experience. Germans had been living in Bohemia and Moravia for many centuries. The Russian minority in Baltic countries is fairly new. Soviet Union (the red form of Russia) tried to crush the Baltic patriotic resistance to their rule by sending thousands of Estonians and Latvians to forced labour camps and importing ethnic Russians, who were expected to "dilute" the local culture. It would have worked, if it lasted for longer: Estonians and Latvians are small nations, much smaller than the Czechs, while Russia is overwhelmingly bigger and stronger.
Estonians and Latvians are afraid, that the more "rights" they'll give to the Russian minority, the harder it will get to make them accept the independence of these countries and the more likely it will become, that one day Russia will step in and exploit this minority as the 5th column to undermine and eventually occupy these countries again.
They decided that a gradual assimilation of the Russians in their countries is the safest option in the long term.
And I really doubt in possibility of any assimilation in real sense of the word. There is far too many of them and far too few of us. This is effort to survive ourselves, not to make them forget their origin.
Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians have a long and painful experience with Russian imperialism. For them, even a small possibility of renewed Russian aggression is enough to adopt measures to decrease their vulnerability.
