ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that the Great Depression was one of the most important—possibly even the primary—factors contributing to the decline of the young democracies in East-Central and Eastern Europe into totalitarianism. However, it is still not always evident how the connection works in detail. This article attempts to identify some connections between the decline in confidence in democratic processes and free markets, using Estonia as a case study. The economic crisis’s destructive power grew in tandem with another crisis: The collective fear that the project of establishing a state to represent Estonians was on the verge of failure. It was also a time to look back and compare the reality with the ideals Estonia had started its statehood some 20 years earlier. The historian Jaak Valge has formulated succinctly that in the early 1930s, many Estonians had an “is-this-the-Estonia-we-wanted?-feeling.” 1 This feeling was closely connected to the question of how independent Estonians had really managed to become. Karsten Brüggeman described in an article that in the early times of the Estonian Republic, the concepts of “foreign rule” and “own rule” were the subject of “semantic wars.” 2 By 1931, the Estonian national state was undeniable, but whether it was really the embodiment of the Estonians’ “own rule” was up for grabs.
