Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Informants
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Persisting Pasts in the Margins of Europe
- Part 1 The Making of Estonian History
- Part 2 The Meaning of Closure
- Part 3 Closure and a Significant Other
- Conclusion: Guardians Of Living History
- List of Informants
- Full Reference List
- Index
1 - Making an Emotional ‘History of the People’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Informants
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Persisting Pasts in the Margins of Europe
- Part 1 The Making of Estonian History
- Part 2 The Meaning of Closure
- Part 3 Closure and a Significant Other
- Conclusion: Guardians Of Living History
- List of Informants
- Full Reference List
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 1 explores how historians, political elites, and cultural figures since the National Awakening have been involved in the writing of a ‘collective story of Estonians’. The chapter shows why ‘Estonia's story’ has become an emotional story of rupture. The independence activists of the Singing Revolution, being non-political actors, have mobilized a sense of collective responsibility among the masses for creating and preserving the nation. As ‘a people’ they wrote a new national history, literally based on Estonians’ personal stories. Since the late 1990s, the intellectual and cultural elite increasingly voice a more open, critical narrative, while remaining loyal to the former independence activists and their family's stories. In politics a fairly non-pluralist narrative of rupture prevails.
Keywords: Memory actors, national history writing, emotional history, Singing Revolution, collective responsibility, cultural preservation
It is 9 May 2011, the day that Russia celebrates its victory over Nazism, 66 years earlier. I go and pick up Kalev at his apartment, as I have convinced him to join me to the Raadi monument on the outskirts of Tartu. This monument was built by the ESSR state authorities in 1975 for ‘all the sons of the Soviet Union who were heroes in the Great Patriotic War’ (Koppel, 2011). On our way out, Kalev explains how he carefully chose his clothes that morning: he avoided any Estonian freedom fighters’ symbols, and put on his ‘soni’, a hat that apparently makes him look ‘like a Russian’. I have no idea what to expect, since the newspapers did not write anything about the event. Kalev also has no idea, because he has never attended a 9th-of-May celebration since Estonia regained independence: ‘I asked someone who has been in Raadi before, and he said it was peaceful. Not too much drinking.’
Once we manage to find the monument, which is hard to see from the road if you do not know the exact location, Kalev whispers to me that we should not speak to each other until we leave, since ‘they might be suspicious of any Estonian presence’. When one of the organizers approaches Kalev to ask why he is filming, he answers in fluent Russian that a friend in Moscow wants to see the celebration. The atmosphere feels unfamiliar to me.
- Type
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- Information
- Guardians of Living HistoryAn Ethnography of Post-Soviet Memory Making in Estonia, pp. 67 - 126Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020