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
3 - Personal Memories Becoming National History
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 3 explores the meaning of an emotional collective story of rupture for those who have been deported to Siberia. The chapter shows that the story's mobilization positively reframed their identities, it legally and symbolically repaired injustices, and assures a continuation of their personal stories within the community. The ethnographic approach, however, discovered the ‘paradox of the experienced’. Although this settled story of rupture has provided recognition for the deportees, it simultaneously makes them fear the loss of the authentic and real, because the postgeneration can never really understand. Due to this perceived ‘privilege of the experienced’ and ‘impossibility for representation’, the deportees avoid closure in order to keep the emotional connection with the past alive and safeguard the nation.
Keywords: Soviet deportees, autobiographical memories, collective memory, paradox of the experienced, impossibility for representation, symbolic reparation
It is 14 June 2011, the National Day of Mourning, when I find myself near an inscribed stone at the riverside in Tartu. I see Villem, Valve, Leena, and Johanna; active members of the Memento organization of the repressed. The memory activists Joosep, Kalev, and Vello are present to capture the commemoration on film. Alvar and Osvald are there, as they never miss a commemoration in Tartu. Most other attendees are people who have either been deported to Siberia in the 1940s, or have been born there. The speeches are very informal, and the organizers invite members of the public to share their stories. A woman named Valve steps up to the front to share her story. She says she fled with a friend from Siberia to Estonia when she was only eleven years old. Mart, another speaker, recalls how his father disappeared and never returned after the 1940s. Reet has brought a picture of her uncle, and asks whether anyone has seen him on his way to the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camps, as her family never got to know his fate. The circle in which these stories are being shared expands after the ceremony concludes and the procession moves towards the city centre. The march not only incorporates wider Tartu society by passing through the streets of the city.
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- Guardians of Living HistoryAn Ethnography of Post-Soviet Memory Making in Estonia, pp. 163 - 194Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020