This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 8th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Estonia is a small country that was beset by many problems for a very long time, not the least of which was Soviet

rule for decades. Estonia is now prosperous and relatively free, and it may offer

some powerful lessons to countries recovering from authoritarianism.

Matthew Mitchell is co-author of the new book The Road to Freedom, Estonia's rise from Soviet

Vassal State to one of the freest nations on earth, we spoke last month.

So the Estonian people are some of the oldest ethnic communities in Europe.

It's a very ancient culture built around music, built around fishing and small farms,

but they are at this crossroads, literally at a crossroads,

a crossroads, ancient north-south, east-west trade routes.

And because of this crossroads,

they have this history of constantly being subject to either voluntary or involuntary exchange,

constantly invaded from east and west, north and south.

And so there are people really who, though they had this cultural identity, they hadn't started to think of themselves as a real country until quite recently.

So, you know, the way we put it in the book is they're an old people, an ancient people in a young country.

So it wasn't until 1920 that in the chaos of the Russian Revolution that the Estonians actually asserted their independence and gained their seat at the table of nations and were their own country.

As an independent country, it only lasted 19 years before the Soviets invaded.

And during this time they were a relatively prosperous people.

I say relatively because I don't want to oversell and I don't want to oversell that it was a beautiful democracy

towards the end under the President Pat's they were sort of creeping towards

authoritarianism but it was certainly a far significantly better than it had been under the czars and

...