Marcus Kolga: University of Toronto education project risks reinforcing Russian disinformation

Sigh. Historical amnesia:

…Titled “Post-Soviet Canadian Diaspora Youth and Their Families,” the project claims to explore the integration experiences of youth whose families came to Canada from countries colonized and oppressed by Soviet Russia. While its stated intent may indeed be to foster a deeper understanding of these communities, the project’s language and conceptual framing are historically inaccurate, politically insensitive, and risk reinforcing harmful Kremlin-aligned stereotypes about the very groups it aims to study.

By lumping together all nations once occupied by Soviet Russia into a single “post-Soviet” identity, the project risks distorting the unique histories, cultures and political experiences of Canadians who are of Baltic and Ukrainian heritage, as well as all nations that were violently subjected to Soviet cultural annihilation. Worse, this framing unintentionally echoes Russian propaganda efforts that seek to blur the line between occupier and occupied, casting doubt on the legitimacy of these nations.

The project defines the Soviet Union as “formerly the largest country in the world,” and a “multinational and multicultural country … experimenting (with) communist ideology.” This portrayal omits critical context about the violent and repressive nature of Soviet colonization. There is no mention of the mass deportations, forced famines or repression that defined millions of lives under Soviet Russian rule.

Particularly disturbing is the project’s inclusion of a map that depicts Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as part of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, most North American textbooks marked these nations differently to denote their illegal occupation. The map used by OISE more closely resembles those found in Soviet schoolbooks, presenting occupation as full annexation and thereby indirectly legitimizing Russia’s imperial conquest.

While this may seem like a simple and innocent error, it reflects a deeper failure to recognize that the Baltic nations didn’t just “transition to different, non-communist forms of statehood” in 1991, as the project claims. These were independent nations illegally invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, a pattern Russia repeated with its 2014 occupation of Crimea. Their reassertion of independence in 1991 was not the birth of new states, but the restoration of sovereign ones whose continuity Canada rightly recognized. Then-prime minister Brian Mulroney was the first G7 leader to formally re-establish diplomatic ties with the restored Baltic governments.

This key fact in Canadian foreign policy is ignored. As then-prime minister Justin Trudeau stated in 2016: “Canada never recognized the Soviet Union’s occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and always supported their struggle to restore independence during decades of Soviet occupation.”…

Source: Marcus Kolga: University of Toronto education project risks reinforcing Russian disinformation