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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

A quick question - how can a person born in a Baltic state and living there their whole life end up without citizenship? How is that democratic? Don't you see any problem there? That doesn't happen even between Romanians and Hungarians that are often at each other's throat for similar historical reasons.

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> A quick question - how can a person born in a Baltic state and living there their whole life end up without citizenship?

The people in question are ethnic Russians who CHOOSE to not get a citizenship. They choose this, beccause people in Baltics without citizenship have the right to travel both within the EU and in Russia without a visa. Just to make it extra clear, let me draw you a table of a citizenship matrix in Estonia:

Estonian citizen - can travel within EU, needs visa for Russia

Russian citizen - needs visa for EU, can travel within Russia

No citizenship - can travel within EU, can travel within Russia

Thanks for giving me another perspective - so it's basically always a hack to go around limitations?

They can convert themselves to a Russian citizen at any time. They don't do it, because they don't want to actually live in Russia. They just want to be able to go there regularly for family and friends.

In the 1990s Estonian citizenship was given to any resident who asked for it, zero requirements. The people who remain stateless today rejected the proposal. Nowadays its more difficult to get Estonian citizenship, but still within reach for plenty of these people. They just don't want to do it, again, because they have friends and family in Russia - and Estonian citizens can't freely travel to Russia.

They can still vote for local elections and work. So there isn't really a strong incentive to care.

The best incentive for getting an actual citizenship is for those who want to travel beyond EU & Russia, because the global world doesn't give these stateless people special rights.

Thanks, I might have been misinformed then. I'll look into it in detail to set my perception straight when I have more time.

> A quick question - how can a person born in a Baltic state and living there their whole life end up without citizenship?

It should only be possible, if that person was born in Soviet Union (that is, before 1990), and doesn't speak the official language of the country he / she is living in.

I understand you are used to it, but it's really bad optics from the outside. How can there be people in their 30s without a citizenship? Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language which means it's extremely difficult to learn due to a completely alien structure of the language (compared to almost all European languages). Even Finland allows both Finnish and Swedish as official languages and doesn't discriminate Finnish Swedes that they don't speak Finnish. So you have some sort of "Eastern-European" flavor of democracy that allows a portion of population be marginalized based on their language.

> How can there be people in their 30s without a citizenship?

Because they've chosen not to pursue citizenship. There's a simplified path that anyone in this situation can utilize. I don't see how giving them the choice and allowing them to live and work in the country indefinitely even if they choose no is in any way "un-democratic".

And if you're suggesting that 30 years is not enough time to learn the absolute basics of a language, that is just utterly ridiculous. Not nearly as ridiculous as comparing this to the slave labor that built Dubai though.

Look, Baltic states have my sympathy for what you managed to achieve in 30 years. I understand you needed a few years to establish yourselves as independent nations, assert/reclaim your national character and show it to your big bad neighbor. However, 10-15 years would be sufficient for that. Having that same problem for 30 years is just bad and you can try to explain it away as much as you want.

> Having that same problem for 30 years is just bad and you can try to explain it away as much as you want.

I think as an outsider you are completely missing the point: if Estonians ever wanted to give the Estonian citizenship to the residents who are unwilling to learn the official language of the country, they would have already done that.

Because by giving somebody a citizenship, you give them the right to vote. And who would the Russian speakers vote for, if they don't speak any Estonian? Pro-Russian parties and politicians.

So your solution is to basically have them as "untouchable caste" that is supposed to pay taxes but can't vote, despite being born there and living there all their lives. Ideally if they just disappeared. And you don't see any issue with that. You are basically confirming all my arguments so far.

I believe that you totally lack understanding of the situation.

These people were never born in Estonia, they were born in the USSR.

These people never spoke Estonian, and never tried to speak.

Nobody ever asked them to stay in Estonia and to pay taxes in Estonia.

They are always welcome to leave, if they don't want to fully integrate into the Estonian society by learning the official language of the country.

Fundamentally, the ethnic Estonians don't owe anything to the descendants of their occupiers.

> I understand you are used to it, but it's really bad optics from the outside. How can there be people in their 30s without a citizenship?

Technically, Estonia is not the successor state of the USSR, Russia is. If a person was born in the USSR, and only speaks the official language of the successor state of the USSR, then that person should probably be a Russian citizen, not Estonian.

"Technically, Slovakia is not the successor state of Czechoslovakia, Czechia is. If a person was born in Czechoslovakia, and only speaks the official language of the successor state of Czechoslovakia, then that person should probably be a Czech citizen, not Slovak."

> Most varieties of Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, forming a dialect continuum (spanning the intermediate Moravian dialects) rather than being two clearly distinct languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech%E2%80%93Slovak_languages

> state and living there their whole life end up without citizenship

Not true for Lithuania. Educate yourself.

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