Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
All this sounds practically like fascism to me. It sounds really primitive. Brussels needs to look at this and punish Estonia and Latvia if they don't quit this. It's outrageous. Citizenship should have nothing to do with what opinions you hold about certain historical events, or whether you speak the minority or majority languge. And at 40% the Russians are hardly a small minority in Latvia. Without them, the country would no doubt stop functioning.
It should be noted that even getting the citizenship does not always give you all rights. For example, to get elected to the parliament, at least until 2002 in Latvia a person had to know the language at the highest, 3rd grade, i.e. native level. One striking story happened with ethnic Russian candidate Podkolzina: despite she had a valid language certificate about knowledge of the language at 3rd grade, a language inspector visited her at work and examined her at the workplace. After that he concluded that she does not satisfy the 3rd level and she was banned from the elections.