the_dunk_tank

The collapse of the USSR created major economic shocks and hardships for the member countries. This obviously creates political turmoil.

With the collapse, many of the countries were faced with a choice:

A. Try to maintain socialism as a single country and face the full might of the west who is no longer focused on the USSR as a whole.

B. Privatize your national economy and sell off your social safety nets for dirt cheap. Accept foreign investment in order to get absorbed into the western sphere in hopes of alleviating the pain.

Most chose B.

If you have political turmoil, economic hardship, and wide scale rapid privatization, well... You get fascism.

While the book isn't exclusively about this phenomenon, Parenti covers it in Blackshirts and Reds.

Also, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise gives a very in depth look at the dissolution of the GDR and Germany's turn to liberalism.

A lot of it is also due to the fact that most of the anti USSR 'heroes' are just literal Nazis. Kinda proves that fascism is the opposite of socialism despite what braindead horseshoe theory believers think.

Because they needed a new national identity, opposed to the USSR. The first person they find as an anti-soviet hero tends to be someone called vladislav the jewslayer and then they built their entire national idea on "that guy was cool."

It's a real mystery.

I can speak a bit to the Baltics. First off, while they border Russia, culturally they were much closer to Germanic/Nordic cultures than Slavic cultures. Add to that them being folded into the USSR during WWII, after having been independent from Russia during the interwar, created a feeling of their occupation being an opportunistic one by Russia. That it was about their resources, namely the ports on the Baltic Sea, being exploited by an other.

However, there’s also the 800 lb gorilla in the room that during the latter interwar period, they were ruled by authoritarian, fascist or fascist aligned dictators, and then of course the Nazi occupation. Which, while the raw numbers weren’t as great as in other Nazi territories, had some of the most brutal oppression of Jews during the Nazi regime, some of which was perpetrated by the natives (including pogroms in Lithuania). So there’s both that sort of socio-political undercurrent, and when the Baltics got independence there was a nationalist rehabilitation of those leaders as victims of Russian expansion.

In Yugoslavia and Soviet Ukraine, the CIA had a long history of supporting fascists and riling up ethnic tensions.

Western Exiles were well positioned to gain influence in a post soviet situation.

A good modern historian of the Baltics shift towards fascism in particular is Dyukov, a few of his works are available in full here https://iriran.academia.edu/AlexanderDyukov

though many need google translate

I would particularly recommend this

As others have mentioned there are many internal reasons why the Baltics (and the rest of the Reddit belt) turned fascist after the counterrevolutions of the 1990's. I also suspect there were powerful external factors at play. American leaders as well as their European vassals were heavily invested in wrestling the Soviet republics or if the Russian sphere of influence andplacing the Soviet out them under American dominance. Doing so would not only give them access to new markets and a highly skilled low wage workforce, it would also contain Russia and fortify American rule over Europe.

I would not the the least surprised if an investigation of the funding behind media, political campaigns, culture and education in that period revealed heavy footprints from western imperialist forces.