Thanks for the ping, OP. I don’t expect much good to come out of commenting here - I assume if you guys see “only” 20k people being repressed as not evil, then there’s not much I can do to defend myself here. Nevertheless, I can try.
First of all, the 20k number is certainly downplaying reality a lot (which is quite typically done in Russian sources). The amount of real victims is certainly higher. Also remember that Estonia is a very small country - even if the soviets “only” deported, imprisoned and/or executed a five digit number of Estonians, then that is still something between one in every hundred to one in every ten Estonians being directly repressed (not to mention the families and close ones of victims, who were of course also indirectly affected).
As for the 20% population replacement - on the very graph you posted, you can see that the size of the Estonian population was quite similar during the 30s and the 50s (around 1.1mil). According to a 1934 census, the population was ~90% of Estonian descent. Another census in 1959 showed that demographics had changed significantly - the population was ~75% of Estonian descent. I assure you that ~165 000 people did not magically change their descent in that period of time - this change was the direct result of deportations, executions, forced drafts into dictator-led armies, etc. The occupiers straight up had an official policy of “russification” - the goal to replace Estonian people and culture with a soviet people.
Finally, let me be clear that I don’t really care what the percentage of repressed people is. It might as well be just 1% - I would still consider the soviet union evil. In fact, they took away the freedom of 100% of my nation, so arguing over percentages seems completely useless.
It’s honestly one of the weirdest experiences on Lemmy so far to have to defend my condemnation of invaders and occupiers. I have received several DMs and comments trying to tell me that in fact my sovereign country having it’s independence taken away was not such a bad thing, and really the occupation was all the west’s fault anyway. It’s the same kind of rhetoric I see used against Ukraine today. It’s messed up to see a full post about how crimes against humanity are not actually that bad, but here we are.