Looking at Russia-Estonia bilateral relations and the political use of history, one cannot begin before examining the Soviet occupations in Estonia and how the two sides they see that history.Developments such as the end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the re-emergence of pre-communist and pre-Soviet conflicts, as demonstrated by Karlsson (n.d.), have certainly stimulated historical consciousness since the 1990s After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian population faced a global identity crisis (Bagger, 2007, p. 109) and, like Estonia, also began to search for its own identity and roots. In the public sphere, the crisis gave rise to a lively debate which largely revolved around the nation's past which according to Scherrer (quoted in Bagger, 2007) was a wave of nostalgia, called "nostalgia for history" and which existed he was actually talking about a “cult” of the past. Furthermore, Scherrer also found that Putin, more clearly than Yeltsin, later emphasized the tradition of the powerful state and that he had abandoned his predecessor's anti-communist position. The Soviet national anthem had been reintroduced with new lyrics and the army banner was red again. Instead of allowing the Soviet period to be a dead end leading away from the main road of Russian history, Putin had sought to place this period within a political-power continuum, focusing on its positive aspects – primarily the heroic achievements of “Great Patriotic War” (p. 115). It is well known that Estonia has a totally different view of the Soviet era and has difficulty finding anything positive in this period. While Estonia sees that the Soviet Union has occupied and forcibly annexed Estonia, ... middle of paper ... and therefore, despite signing the border treaty, Russia refuses to ratify it. One of the latest issues concerns the Russian-German gas pipeline project, which Estonian officials, together with their Lithuanian counterparts, criticized, and the Poles initially even called it a new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Latvian criticism in this case was muted (p 50). Furthermore, during the 20 years of regaining independence, there has been no clear change in the coalition and opposition parties in Estonia. Center-right parties have always been in power with the only exception in 1995. Likewise, the annual commemoration of Estonian soldiers who fought in the German army during the Second World War by Estonian nationalists, as well as the politics of citizenship and the recent school reform concerning Russia's minorities, continue to maintain tensions between Russia-Estonia relations.