The Passport and the Person: Being Russian-Speaking in Estonia After 2022

I grew up here, a Russian-speaking kid in a Russian-speaking family, and in all that time no one in Estonia has made me feel the country would rather I left. I want to put that on the table first, because I'm about to spend a good while taking the opposite feeling seriously, and you should know where I'm standing before I do.

It would be easy to turn my sentence into a lesson. It's fine for me, so it should be fine for you. I don't believe that, and I haven't earned the right to say it. I speak Estonian well enough that it doesn't mark me out. I spent the hardest years, 2017 to 2025, out of the country altogether, in Britain, watching the war and everything after it on a screen the way many of you did. And I'm not a seventy-year-old in Narva being told to sit a language exam for a passport I've held, in all but name, my whole life. Remove any one of those and my easy sentence gets harder to say. So I don't offer my experience as proof of anything. I offer it as one data point, and then I want to go and find the others, because the feeling that this country has turned on its Russian-speakers is real, it is widely held, and it deserves better than a pat on the head.

The strange thing is that the closest I've come to that feeling, I felt in England. I was a migrant there through the Brexit years, living in a country that argued out loud, in its newspapers and at its ballot boxes, about whether it wanted people like me. I know that low background hum, the sense that your welcome is being renegotiated in rooms you're not in. I don't think it's the same as what's happening here. But it's close enough that I'm not going to wave yours away.

The night this all goes back to

To see why so many Russian-speakers flinched in 2022, you have to go back to two nights in the spring of 2007.

That April the government moved the Bronze Soldier, a Red Army monument, out of a small park in central Tallinn and off to a military cemetery. For most Estonians the statue marked half a century of Soviet occupation. For a lot of Russian-speakers it was something else entirely: their grandfathers' war, the one thing the Soviet century was supposed to have got right, and with it their own quiet claim to belong in this country. When it came down, Tallinn saw its worst rioting since 1944. Shops were smashed and looted over two nights. Around a thousand people were detained. A young Russian-speaking man named Dmitri Ganin was stabbed in the chaos and died, and his killing was never solved.

Historians still argue about how much of that night was raw grief and how much was stoked, by activists on both sides and by Moscow, which was only too glad of a martyr. All of that can be true. It doesn't change the mark it left. A generation of Russian-speakers took from 2007 a lesson that lodged in the body more than the head: that when it came to it, the state saw them as guests, and guests can be asked to move. Trust in Estonia among Russian-speakers fell after that spring and took years to climb back.

So when Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine in 2022, and Estonia began removing its remaining Soviet monuments again, including a T-34 in Narva that August, the old bruise got pressed. Whatever the state said it was doing, a lot of people felt 2007 coming back.

The reform that feels like a punishment

Here is the fear I hear most often, and the one worth the most care: that the switch to Estonian-language schooling was designed after 2022 to punish Russian-speakers, or to erase them. I understand why it lands that way. The law passed in December 2022, ten months into the war, while monuments were coming down around the country. Set out like that, it looks like cause and effect.

It isn't, and this is the piece I'd most like you to sit with, because unlike a feeling it can be checked. The plan to move Estonia's schools to Estonian is about thirty years old. A first target date of 2000 was pushed back, in 1997, to 2007. From 2007 a "60/40" rule began requiring Russian-language high schools to teach at least sixty percent of their lessons in Estonian. That reform half-stalled when Tallinn and Narva fought to keep teaching mostly in Russian and lost in court. The gap in results between Estonian and Russian-stream schools was measured and worried over for years before anyone had heard the phrase "special military operation." And in December 2021, three months before the invasion, the education ministry had already drawn up a plan to go fully Estonian by 2035.

What the war changed was not whether this would happen. It changed how fast, and it broke the politics that had held it back for a decade. The invasion snapped a long deadlock and pulled the finish line forward from 2035 to 2030. That acceleration is the real grievance hiding inside the false one. Being told that a thirty-year policy will now land in five, in your own child's classroom, is a fair thing to be angry about. "They invented this to hurt us" is not what happened. "They rushed something hard and handed us the bill for the rush" is much closer, and it's a complaint with teeth.

Because the rush shows. By Estonia's own account, not Moscow's, the first year was a mess. The National Audit Office and the public broadcaster documented schools and teachers drowning in the change with too little support, and a shortage of teachers who could actually deliver it, worst in Narva and the rest of Ida-Viru. Children who had been taught in Russian for years found themselves in Estonian-only classrooms and some of them sank. If you're furious about how this was done, you're in large and mostly Estonian-speaking company.

What the law actually says

But be angry at the real thing, not the invented one, because the two are different.

The reform changes the language lessons are taught in. It doesn't ban the Russian language. Russian stays on the timetable as a subject, and schools still have to offer mother-tongue and culture classes where enough families ask for them. The education minister, Kristina Kallas, actually adjusted the reform program to put Russian back in as a mother tongue, a couple of hours a week from the first grade, on the argument that you learn a second language better when your first one is solid. Russian-medium schools are being converted and, yes, renamed, which stings, but they aren't being shut. And the change is phased slowly: it began in 2024 with kindergartens and the first and fourth grades, and the oldest pupils won't complete the switch until the end of the decade. Tallinn is still letting about twenty schools keep some Russian classes while they catch up.

None of that makes it painless, and there's a serious case on the other side. Three UN special rapporteurs warned in 2023 that stripping out a minority's language as a medium of instruction may cross a line under human-rights law. They're independent experts, not a Kremlin broadcast, and that concern deserves to be named rather than sneered at. It's also true that the binding European court, ruling on Latvia's broadly similar reform, found it lawful and proportionate. Serious people disagree about where the line sits. That's a real argument, not a plot.

The part I won't soften

Now the place where I stop reassuring you, because you'd catch me if I tried.

In March 2025 the Riigikogu amended the constitution to take the local vote away from citizens of Russia and Belarus. Stateless "grey-passport" residents were allowed to vote one last time in the autumn 2025 elections, and then lose it too. This is a genuine, permanent loss of a political right that these people had held for more than thirty years, and I'm not going to dress it up.

The grey-passport case is the sharpest of all, and it's where the reassurance I'm about to offer is thinnest, so let me put it here rather than hide it. A stateless resident is not a citizen of Russia. Many of them were born here, or arrived in Soviet times and simply never took a passport. They're losing a vote on the basis of a citizenship they don't even hold. The measure only touches local elections, and this group never had a say in national or European ones anyway, and their right to live and work here is untouched. All true, and none of it makes the loss nothing. It drew criticism inside Estonia, and not only from the people losing the vote, over how far it reached. If this one leaves a bad taste in your mouth, good, because it leaves one in mine too.

What actually holds your place here

Now step back from those two hard measures, the rushed reform and the lost vote, and look at what actually decides a person's standing in this country. It's citizenship. And citizenship in Estonia is not an ethnic category.

An ethnic-Russian Estonian citizen has exactly the rights I have: the same vote, the same right to work anywhere in the European Union, the same passport. Nothing in any of this, not the school reform, not the monuments, not the local-vote change, touches that. Your language isn't what secures your place here. Your status is, and unlike your ethnicity, your status is something the law lets you change.

And statelessness here is a vanishing story, not a growing one. In 1992 nearly a third of everyone living in this country had no settled citizenship. Today it's about four percent, and still falling. Most of that fall came in the 1990s and 2000s, when well over a hundred thousand people naturalised. What lowers the count now is mostly something else: the people still holding a grey passport are largely elderly, their children have been Estonian citizens from birth since 2016, and that generation is slowly ageing away. Most of those who remain, asked directly, still say they'd like an Estonian passport, and the door stands open.

I won't be glib about that door, because it has a hard sill. Naturalising means passing a B1 language exam and a test on the constitution, and Estonian is a genuinely difficult language, hardest of all for someone who has spoken Russian for seventy years. The reason I cross this country without friction is not that it's warmer to me than to you. It's that I have the language, I was away for the worst of it, and I'm not the pensioner facing that exam. "Just naturalise" is true and nowhere near as easy as it sounds. But it's a door, not a wall, and it opens onto everything.

And what about the deeper fear, that people are being pushed out, driven away, made to leave? Here the evidence is worth reading with its gaps left in. There's no documented wave of violence against Russian-speakers, though I'll add the caveat the reassurers usually skip: Estonia barely collects hate-crime data, so quiet statistics aren't the same as proven calm. There's no exodus either. The number of Russian citizens here has dropped, but mostly because Estonia stopped issuing new permits and because people naturalised, not because families are fleeing. Surveys keep turning up the same stubborn fact: most Russian-speakers consider Estonia home and mean to stay, and identification with Estonia among them has risen over exactly these years. The gaps that remain are real. Unemployment among Russian-speakers still runs well above the Estonian rate, historically about double, wages sit lower, and a stubborn penalty lingers that fluent Estonian alone doesn't erase. I'm not filing those under "fine." But alienation is not the same as expulsion.

It matters because most Estonians, whatever the television tells you, separate the Kremlin from the neighbour. The deep and real split between Estonians and Russian-speakers is over foreign policy, over the war itself, not over whether the family down the hall has a right to be here. Most young Russian-speakers condemn the war. And when politicians have reached for the whole-community-as-suspects line, other Estonians, former security officials among them, have pushed back on it in public.

The harder version is one border south

If you want to see the sharper edition of everything I've described, look at Latvia.

Latvia built a permanent legal category of "non-citizens" that at its height covered close to a third of the country and still sits near nine percent. Estonia's grey-passport share is about half that and dropping faster. Latvia moved through its school switch faster and is now dropping Russian as a foreign language altogether. And Latvia passed a law requiring Russian citizens with permanent residence to pass a Latvian exam or lose the right to stay, aimed mostly at the elderly. In the end the number actually forced out was small, but the fear it put through a lot of old people's kitchens was not.

Estonia looked at that road and chose not to take it. It didn't revoke settled residents' permits. Its expulsions have been individual security cases, specific people with specific ties, not a category of human being. I'm not telling you to be grateful, because nobody should have to feel grateful for not being treated worse. I'm telling you that the shape of Estonia's choices is not the shape of a state trying to get rid of you.

Who profits from your fear

One last thing, and I'll say it slowly, because it's the easiest point to turn into an insult and I don't mean it as one.

A great deal of what reaches Russian-speakers about all of this arrives through Russian and pro-Kremlin media, whose actual job is to make you feel that Estonia hates you. A frightened, resentful Russian diaspora in the Baltics is useful to Moscow. A settled, enfranchised one is not. So the machine takes the real grievances, the rushed reform, the lost vote, the renamed school, and inflates them into a story of ethnic persecution and forced assimilation that the facts underneath won't carry. I'm not telling you your fear is manufactured. I've spent this whole piece agreeing that a good part of it is earned. I'm telling you that another part is being farmed, and it's worth knowing which supplier you're buying from.

Fewer people are buying, though it's worth being careful about why. Russian state television's role as an important news source among non-Estonians fell from about a third in early 2022 to roughly a tenth a year later. A large part of that is simply that Estonia and the EU took those channels off the cable that spring, and a channel you can't tune to can't be your main source, so the number is as much a ban as a change of heart. Watching was never outlawed, only retransmission was, and the satellite dish and the VPN still work. What a ban can't reach is what people believe, and there the shift is real: over the same year, trust that Russian channels were covering the war honestly fell from about forty percent to under twenty. The Russian-language channel Russian-speakers now most favour is Estonia's own public one, ETV+. But plenty of people didn't so much move to Estonia's information space as stop trusting anyone's, and they still trust Estonian media far less than their Estonian neighbours do. So the honest version isn't that everyone came home. It's that the Kremlin's grip on this audience is loosening, unevenly, and partly because it was pried loose.

What I'd ask

I don't have a clean ending for this, and I don't want to invent one, because the situation hasn't earned one yet. The reform will go on being hard. The lost vote isn't coming back soon, and it should sting when you remember it. The gaps will take a generation to close. None of that is cancelled by the thing I keep returning to, which is that the country in the worst version of the fear, the one that wants you gone, is not the country I came back to.

So if I can ask one thing, it's this: keep the two apart. Be angry about the specific, real losses, loudly, in Estonian and Russian both, to the people who actually made the decisions, because that anger is legitimate and it works better aimed than diffuse. And don't let anyone, least of all a broadcaster in a country currently at war, talk you out of a home. It isn't a flawless place to be a Russian-speaker. But it's mine, and I'm fairly sure it's still yours.