중동부유럽

After obtaining the independence in 1991, Estonia and Latvia decided to give the citizenship only to the people who were the citizens of each countries in the very day of the 1940’s Soviet occupation and to their direct descendents. As a result, a considerable number of Russians, most of whom had moved to the Baltic region after the Soviet occupation, and who now occupies about twenty five percents of the total population in both countries, are in the status of statelessness. The legal and institutional situations related to the citizenship where Russians are in both countries sharply conflict with their historical, conventional and emotional sense of belonging, and it can be said that they are on the boundary between citizen and non-citizen. Such situations, coupled with a dramatic displacement of positions of Russians in both countries from ‘a ruling minority’ in the time of imperial and Soviet Russian rules to ‘a ruled minority’ in present time, result in the various controversies, including the interpretations of the past, or separatism discourses, etc. In this problematics this work examines the history and characteristics of Russian diaspora in Estonia and Latvia according to the four historical periods (period of imperial Russian rule(1721-1918), the first independent republic(1918-1940), the period of Soviet rule(1940-1991), the second independent republic(1991-present)), focusing on the correlation between the demographic dynamics and the change of socio-cultural status of Russian diaspora, and finally analyses its meaning in the general context of the comtemporary ‘crisis of citizenship’ and in the relation between citizenship and the universal human right.