I'm not sure how you would measure diversity. But if you have a metric, I'd love to see it. I'm not disagreeing, Russia definitely has a problem, but their export is also more diverse then people think. So how do we compare?[
72% of export revenues from oil & gas vs no sector con
Iirc it was Latvia that lost 30% of their population in the last 20 years? So was it the USSR that screwed them, population-wise? Or the current immigration patterns? I think it's at least both of those things responsible.
22% in 22 years (census to census, 1989-2011), & it had grown 6.6% in the previous decade.
Note the difference between Latvians & inhabitants of Latvia. And consider differential migration patterns. The Russian (as in ethnic Russian & Russian citizen) share of the population has fallen sharply. It was increasing fast up to the 1989 census, & has fallen by 38.5% since then. That accounts for the bulk of the decline in population. Only 14% of the decline has been from the falling number of self-identified Latvians. Latvians were 75.5% of the population in the last pre-war census, & 52% (& declining) in 1989. How'd you like to be turned into a minority in your own country by a government you thought of as foreign? There were fewer of them than in 1935, & only 5% more than in 1897.
Much the same in Estonia. Three quarters of the fall in population is from emigration of Russians (mostly), Ukrainians & Belarussians.
Remember that very many of those Russians were born in Russia, & had no attachment to Latvia. They were also disproportionately employed in the industries which failed when their markets in the former USSR were cut off (partly because Russia switched to buying from factories in Russia whenever there was that option). Born in Russia, no job in Latvia, don't speak Latvian - why not go home? Some were not welcome, as I heard from the son of a Red Army general in Riga. Many senior officers had retired to Latvia, & generally returned to Russia ASAP. The son told me it was made clear to the family that everyone else was welcome to stay, & he preferred Latvia, because of the more open society, 'even before independence', he said. His father had just started talking to him again, after a few years.
The restoration of expropriated property also encouraged a lot of Russian officials to leave, as their state-provided housing suddenly became the property of the heirs of the former owners, from who it had been stolen by the USSR.
Also remember that the huge increase in Russian population was a deliberate state policy. Factories were built, & the work forces imported. Incentives were given to move to the Baltics. The locals might have preferred not to have so much of that sort of investment.
I don't know much about their pre-WWII economies. I do know that they would have ended up swallowed by Hitler or Stalin, and later put through the furnace of the Eastern Front. So I'm not sure the Soviets are exclusively to blame. That having been said, the Soviets certainly invested a lot into rebuilding the Baltics. Would Finland look as great today as it does, if it had been rolled over first by the Wehrmacht, and then by the Red Army?
I didn't say the USSR was exclusively to blame. But consider what it did, before the Wehrmacht rolled in: it tried to decapitate Baltic society. Tens of thousands were deported, of who many died, & thousands executed, for the crimes of being trade union organisers (of independent unions), journalists, members of political parties, having publicly criticised the USSR or Stalin, being in the army, etc. And their families. 5% of the population of Estonia, & almost 2% of the population of Latvia, was deported (mostly) or executed between Soviet occupation in 1940 & German invasion in 1941. Larger numbers followed after re-occupation in 1944.
The only reason Finland didn't suffer a similar fate was that it fought too well.
However you want to talk about macro-economics, this does not change the basic facts. Life in the Baltics today is far from great. Their infrastructure is aging. The Soviet-era factories are shut down. And how many people does the wireless equipment industry you mention actually employ? The population is still rapidly moving out of the country, and the entire younger generation is learning english, so they don't have to be stuck in their home countries. None of this is a good sign. And if you visit some of the smaller towns and cities, in Estonia at least, things get downright depressing.
See above for the population - & would it be any less depressing if they'd stayed with Russia? What are small Russian towns like these days? Collapsing populations, according to the censuses, & from what I've heard, decaying. I read complaints that Moscow gets everything, & the regional income statistics certainly support that, showing great increases in inequality.
They currently have a flood of EU money for transport - but funnily enough, it's not oriented towards Russia. Power generation, ports, telecoms, waste water treatment - lots of infrastructure investment. But mostly not visible to casual visitors.
The pre-war economies of Latvia & Estonia were export & western-oriented, & at a similar level of output per head to Finland. Exports were, as in Finland, largely primary products. As far back as the Empire, they had relatively high literacy rates. Lithuania was poorer & less developed.
BTW, one of the reasons for their rapid re-orientation westwards after independence is that Russia pretty much forced them into it, e.g. by imposing extra tariffs on them.
