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The Perception of Historical Identity and the Restoration of Estonian National Independence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rein Ruutsoo
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Extract

Attitude towards one's past, the farewell to the communist past, has become a vital matter on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The failure of the “building of communism” project has, besides a devastated environment, left behind it a spiritual “homelessness.” For Russians, for whom communism was the path to global power, the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant a collapse of their national identity. “Look back in anger” might be the most concise way of characterizing their attitude to their history of the past seventy years. The same might be said of the other peoples of the former USSR. Sovietologists who treated the Soviet Union as one entity and placed the Baltic nations into the same category as the other “fraternal” people created insurmountable problems for an understanding of Baltic developments, and Estonian, in particular.

Type
Part I: Estonia's Path to Identity and Independence
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 167 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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References

Notes

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