11.1 Introduction: From the West of the East, to the East of the West

On 12 June 1992, Edgar Savisaar, by then already the former head of Estonia’s 1990–1992 transitional government,Footnote ¹ gave a speech entitled Eesti – Euroopa – maailm: geopoliitiline etüüd [Estonia – Europe – The World: A Geopolitical étude].Footnote ² Savisaar opens his talk by posing Estonia’s integration to Europe as an ‘inescapable imperative’. ‘Our geopolitical situation over the last year has changed substantially’, explains Savisaar.

It is hardly surprising that economists and politicians of the ‘times of transition’ thought of Estonia’s new geopolitical position and Estonia’s aims and possibilities in relation to the recent past of the Soviet era. Savisaar’s juxtaposition between Soviet Estonia (‘a generator of ideas’) and the newly independent Estonia (which is ‘lagging behind’) is greatly simplifying,Footnote ⁴ yet it is hard to disagree with his basic observation of Estonia’s substantially changed geopolitical position – from the West of the Soviet Union to the East of Europe. Like many others before and since, Savisaar links ‘the East’ with passivity and ‘the West’ with leadership, as if this combination was a geopolitical inevitability rather than a cultural construct.

This chapter is interested in the ways that Estonia’s self-perception has changed in relation to Estonians’ European imaginaries. More specifically, the focus is on co-articulating the ‘Soviet question’ in relation to the ‘European question’: in what ways did the decades of Soviet rule impact the understanding of Europe and Europeanness in Estonian national imaginaries? In such an analysis, different factors have to be taken into account: the understanding of Europeanness before the Soviet era; the matter of the Soviet colonial matrix of power; changes within the USSR over the decades in question; the long-rooted orientalization of Eastern Europe in West-European imaginaries; and the role of Soviet state-promoted ideologies on local cultural imaginaries. The ‘Soviet question’, as this exploration will show, was never solely a question about the Soviet impact, but rather about how the intertwining of Soviet era sociopolitical realities with pre-Soviet value-systems produced complex and to some extent competing geographies of belonging.

In order to address this complex set of problems, it is useful to proceed from a multi-scalar understanding of social phenomena. From this perspective, Estonia’s geopolitical ‘relocation’ from the Soviet West to the European East, occasioned by the re-establishment of the Estonian republic, can be articulated as a shift in the geopolitical scale-system. In more general terms, attention to scale as a ‘tool for bounding space at different geographical resolutions’Footnote ⁵ enables us to perceive historical conditions as complexly multiscalar. A multiscalar approach reveals how meaning-making unfolds through interaction across different scales of sociopolitical realities and imaginaries, and how in the Soviet-era Estonian SSR, local, regional and global scales formed complex and dynamic systems of inter-dependency.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-establishment of the Estonian Republic brought about substantial changes at all levels of social and political existence. During the decades of the Estonian SSR, the general category of ‘the West’ (not ‘Europe’) had provided a cultural counterpoint to ‘Sovietness’, and the scale of Europeanness was significantly deactivated. At the same time, analysis does reveal the hazy category of a tacit, internalized Europeanness, something perceivable mostly in contrast with certain imaginaries of Russianness. This tacit Europeanness included class and cultural competency and knowledge of European cultural traditions, yet it was only weakly (if at all) connected to then-current cultural developments in Europe. It lacked a dialogical dimension. In the early post-Soviet years, the newly rescaled relationship to Europe relied on longstanding imaginaries, yet it also – as Edgar Savisaar’s 1992 speech attests – went through the shock of Estonia ‘becoming the East’. The new situation (re)activated the concept of Europe as an imperative category and a point of reference for both political and cultural frameworks.

This chapter will first articulate the theoretical framework of cultural imaginaries and multiscalar thinking and then proceed to analyse the scalar cultural logic of the Soviet era, with a focus on the ‘question of Europe’. The last section will summarize the consequences following from the re-establishment of Estonian independence. The complexities of the Soviet decades are, of course, considerable; the present essay will concentrate on the late Soviet period, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The chapter will focus on the Estonian-speaking cultural zone: while such a choice is necessitated by the scarcity of data concerning European imaginaries among other population groups in Soviet and early post-Soviet Estonia, it also conveys the logic of the present project. By the 2020s, Russophone populations have become to a significant extent integrated within Estonia’s political and cultural sphere, yet, during the early post-Soviet period, when Estonia’s policies of integration with Europe were formulated, Russophone populations participated in this process only marginally.

11.2 Theoretical Framework: Cultural Imaginaries and Their Role in Identity-Production

To understand sociocultural processes during periods of (semi-)authoritarian rule, the distinction between state policies and cultural imaginaries helps to avoid simplifying arguments about mass-level ‘ideological brain-washing’ or an organized state-production of certain kinds of personality-types, leading to uncritical categorizations such as homo sovieticus.Footnote ⁶ State ideology and state policies are one factor, but not the only factor, contributing to people’s views and behaviours – while this premise is taken for granted in analyses of democratic societies, it is too often overlooked in writings about the former Socialist bloc. Soviet rule was firmly established in the Baltics only at the end of the 1940sFootnote ⁷ and its heyday lasted barely forty years. During these decades, people’s thoughts and value-systems continued to include ideas, values and beliefs from the pre-Soviet era. These became mixed with state-imposed ideologies and were additionally impacted by a large variety of images and narratives from cultural zones beyond the Soviet sphere – existentialist writings by Albert Camus were widely read, popular North-American TV serials (Dallas, for example) were available in northern Estonia by way of Finnish broadcasting and Eastern religious thought and global environmental discussions made their mark. The notion of ‘cultural imaginaries’ is useful in keeping a distinction between the ideological networks of institutionalized power and the popular circulation of ideas. This distinction is, of course, partial, as both are hazy and shifting categories which necessarily also influence each other. Nevertheless, identifiable kernels remain: a canonical speech by Lenin and the textbook of the Communist Party share little in common with Beatles’ songs, Disney comics, nineteenth-century Estonian patriotic poetry and a grandmother’s stories about life in the times of an independent Estonia – but they all circulated and comingled together in the Estonian cultural space.

I use the term ‘cultural imaginaries’ to designate diverse, multiscalar, hazy, ever-changing sets of images, ideas, and values that are accepted by the general population in any given period and thus form a tacit self-knowledge of that society. In this field, communal identity is produced metonymically, foregrounding certain parts at the expense of others – not everyone’s voice is heard at every moment.Footnote ⁸ Us–them figurations function as important formal categories that condition cultural imaginaries – thus one of the questions in this investigation is whether and under what conditions Europe was considered as ‘us’. Imaginaries form thematic clusters, which occasionally get condensed into core images that attain symbolic value and start to function metaphorically. Such core images become kernels for the signification of national identity – in Estonia, these have included the pillars of Tartu University, the medieval towers of Tallinn, junipers on the island of Saaremaa, Haapsalu castle, imagery from nineteenth-century romantic poetry and much more. Notably, these core images have historic depth – they carry the sense of ‘having been there’ for centuries, if not for thousands of years. Presentist imaginaries about social existence in any given era are bound together with a pre-existing fabric of interconnected values, ideas and images.

The concept of cultural imaginaries is related to Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘social imaginary’, which Taylor articulated as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.Footnote ⁹ Cultural and social imaginaries are to a significant extent overlapping concepts and the ‘political imaginary’ – including ‘constitutional imaginary’ – belongs to the same set. For Taylor, ‘social imaginary’ describes the common ground of a particular moment in the existence of a society; as Jiří Přibáň notes, this concept puts an emphasis on ‘the symbolic system of images and normative self-descriptions of society as the moral and meaningful unit’.Footnote ¹⁰ My own use of ‘cultural imaginaries’ includes both the present-era social and political imaginaries in a given culture and an emphasis on cultural continuity; this term also allows scholars to take account of the role of cultural artefacts – in architecture, visual arts, literature, film – in shaping and preserving shared imaginaries. I have elsewhere articulated the threefold temporality of cultural imaginaries: ‘Cultural imaginaries consist of the shared images and narratives of the past, patterns of behavior for the present, and visions for the national future that together shape the self-conception of the community.’Footnote ¹¹ In historical terms, the logic of shared imaginaries reflects larger global processes of growing diversification: over the last decades, the role of nationally shared imaginaries has shrunk substantially yet in the Soviet era, and during the first post-Soviet decade, their role was considerable.

Accessing something that is not fixed and not even fully articulated in a given culture will, of course, pose a challenge for scholars. Cultural imaginaries can be traced in life stories, diaries, memoirs and through performing interviews – all of which raise questions about the unreliability of memory, selective remembering techniques and narrative strategies. The lack of ‘eventness’ of the shared cultural common ground poses additional problems: the common cultural elements might be taken for granted to such an extent that they are not thematized in life stories. Media, fiction and film thus become valuable gateways to era-specific imaginaries, partly due to the sheer volume of such sources, which makes it possible to detect repeating patterns. However, reliable research into era-specific imaginaries is perhaps best achieved through comparative methods which combine and compare the aforementioned sources.

Cultural imaginaries – like any other cultural phenomenon – can be analysed at different levels of generalization and focus. Imaginaries can be analysed across different scales – we might talk of imaginaries with a transnational spread or focus on national imaginaries, imaginaries that can typically be found within a nation-state. National imaginaries may well internalize transcultural ideas and practices – and reimagine them as specific to a given national culture.

In analysing the constitution of shared imaginaries, a pluriscalar approach allows us to observe the multiplicity of processes involved in meaning-making. Section 11.3 will offer a short introduction to scalar analysis and then delineate the basic outline of this threefold cultural logic, in order to then locate the European imaginaries within this network of constitutive power-relations.

11.3 Pluriscalarity in the Sociopolitical Context of the Soviet Union as the Ground for European Imaginaries

In principle, there are countless ways to scale reality: in world-systems theory, the global world functions as the dominant scale; in phenomenological approaches, the human body and its experience provides the primary access to the world. Political geographers have held debates about the ontological status of scales, asking if scale is ‘a material thing’ or else an arbitrary, socially produced ‘mental device which allows us to make sense of our existence’.Footnote ¹² Scale-systems have been envisioned in different ways, as forming nested systems, or concentric ones, or ladder-type hierarchies or, following Bruno Latour, as networks without clear structure and subordinations.Footnote ¹³ A ‘trilogy of geographical scales’ is often used: a three-scale analysis distinguishes between international or global, national or state-scale and intra-national scales.Footnote ¹⁴

In sociohistorical analyses, the nation-state or a particular region is often taken as the central focus, leading to classification of scales as ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ with respect to the nation-state.Footnote ¹⁵ For a nation-state, the state-level forms the ‘here and now’ of the world, with other layers forming hierarchical constellations and standing in relation to this primary ground. Edgar Savisaar’s 1992 speech, introduced at the start of this chapter, chose an international relations approach, in which three basic scales – Estonia, Europe and the world – were used to analyse smaller national and regional units, including different European countries, the Baltic states, Russia, China and more.

For the present purposes it is necessary to distinguish between cultural imaginaries and sociopolitical conditions. While scalar hierarchies tend to be dominated by sociopolitical facts (such as belonging to a union of states of being a part of an empire), cultural imaginaries question and complicate such sociopolitical realities and create alternative geographies of belonging. Our questions include: to what extent were European imaginaries in the Soviet era tied to pre-existing culture-specific imaginaries and to what extent did they reflect specific sociopolitical conditions? Which scales become foregrounded and which ones recede? How do scalar hierarchies organize the cultural distribution of meanings and values? Even when one limits the main focus to just a single scale – the nation-scale and its European imaginaries in the present case – this scale assumes its full meaning only in the context of the other scalar hierarchies of the era.

11.4 The Changing Location of Europe

In the all-Soviet scale of the post-war era, Europe as a relatively coherent entity disappeared; instead, Europe was split into the Soviet zone of influence and capitalist Western Europe. Eastern Europe, subject to guidance from Moscow, functioned as an extension of the Soviet sphere, while Western Europe became inaccessible to the general Soviet citizenry.

It is worth noting that the early Soviet Union had been significantly better connected to Europe: figures like Vladimir Mayakovsky could spend extended periods in Paris, Ilya Ehrenburg would actively contribute to Soviet press while living in Paris, Soviet scientists published in Western journals and interacted with Western colleagues. Germany, of course, was an important partner for the USSR in the interwar period, with many major German companies maintaining some presence there.Footnote ²¹ This sustained connectedness was partially due to weaknesses in the state of the USSR in its early history; it was only later on that scientific and military collaboration with the Germans and with the rest of the world came to be regarded with great suspicion by Stalin, inspiring trials and persecutions.

In the Khrushchev era, networks of interaction were developed anew – delegations of architects, for example, travelled to Scandinavia and to Western Europe, to learn about mass-scale urban planning in line with new factory-assembled construction methods.Footnote ²² Yet westward travel from the Socialist bloc remained open only for a limited number of political, cultural and scientific or economic elites and was a complex undertaking with onerous limitations.

11.5 The Location of Europe from the Estonian Perspective: Sociopolitical Realities

For Estonians, Soviet-era sociopolitical realities differed vastly from those in pre-Soviet times. The pre-war Estonian Republic had been situated in what retrospectively looked like a clearly defined system of nested sociopolitical scalarity: Estonia – Europe – the world. This system was interwoven by various political, economic and cultural networks.

The Soviet colonial matrix of power dismantled historical ties that had organized the Baltic sea region and had linked Estonia with other European countries. Colonial-style centre–periphery relations made it nearly impossible for the Soviet borderlands (including the Estonian SSR) to sustain or develop direct connections with institutions or businesses outside the USSR. Prior to the Soviet annexation, geographical and linguistic proximity with Finland had facilitated close, even intimate relations between Estonians and Finns – connections included business and politics, of course, but also ties of love and friendship.Footnote ²⁷ With the new era, political, economic and cultural interactions with the world outside the USSR had to be routed through Moscow; in such instances, republic-level interests were secondary and personal connections unsustainable. This was a particularly suggestive example of the colonial matrix of control exerted by the USSR, as regards the Estonian SSR: the disruption and rerouting of former economic and cultural ties that had formerly bound Estonia closely with Finland and other European countries.Footnote ²⁸ As a result, not only did Estonia cease to be a political and economic entity which could interact with the rest of the world in pursuit of its own interests, the whole sociocultural sphere was permeated with such limitations: only on rare occasions could Estonian musicians participate in major international competitions outside the Soviet UnionFootnote ²⁹ and foreign films reached Estonian audiences only after being selected, cut, censored and dubbed in Russia, with Estonian subtitles composed according to the Russian dubbing, and without access to the original.Footnote ³⁰ Cultural exchanges of the late Soviet years, such as Estonian theatre performances in Finland and Finnish theatre troupes’ visits to Estonia could not bypass Moscow.Footnote ³¹ Soviet tourist groups did occasionally include members of the Estonian Soviet elite, but the company as a whole would in such cases be identified as Soviet.Footnote ³² The ‘iron curtain’ hid the borderlands more profoundly than it hid the Soviet centre: for most of the rest of the world, the Soviet Union became equated with Russia.

Given the structural hindrance suffered by Estonian scientists and artists seeking contact with the outside world, it was, paradoxically, Leningrad and (to a lesser extent) Moscow that started to function as access points to Europe – these were the cities one could visit to gain access to information, knowledge and high art.Footnote ³³ In the Russian centres, a certain limited openness was restored after the period of Stalinist excess and research budgets were by far more generous than those disbursed in the borderlands. Leading Russian academic centres could order scientific journals published in the West and thus open up access to global knowledge production. Estonian scholars and intellectuals would visit libraries in Leningrad and Moscow to browse through Western scholarly and cultural journals that were indispensable for their work: the library at the Hermitage, for example, included exhibition catalogues and art journals that never reached Estonian libraries.Footnote ³⁴ International artists would more likely visit Moscow and Leningrad than Tallinn; similarly, the occasional exhibitions of Western art (such as the Picasso exhibition in 1956) were shown in Moscow and Leningrad and nowhere else.Footnote ³⁵ The Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow 1957, which included many Western participants, gave many visiting Estonians inspiring encounters with the contemporary Western cultural sphere.Footnote ³⁶ There were historical roots to this phenomenon: St Petersburg, historically Estonia’s closest major European city, had long functioned for Estonians as an access point to Europe. During the late Tsarist era, this city functioned for many cultural figures (Johann Köler, Miina Härma) as a place to acquire (typically German-style) education or to find fulfilling employment.Footnote ³⁷

The Europeanness of Russia more broadly, however, had also been repeatedly contested over different periods by Russian cultural elites themselves – most famously by Pyotr Chaadayev in his First Philosophical Letter (1829): the author argued that Russians had ‘bestowed not even a single idea upon the fund of human ideas, contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit’.Footnote ³⁸ Madina Tlostanova has used the notion of the ‘quasi-Western subaltern Russian Empire’ (Tlostanova)Footnote ³⁹ to describe Russia’s historical struggle with its subalternity or its feeling of secondariness with regard to other major European powers.Footnote ⁴⁰ For visiting Estonians, similarly, the experience of visiting Leningrad and Moscow often included a high degree of ambivalence.

11.6 The Aesthetics of Europeanness: Continuities in Cultural Imaginaries across Political Regime Changes

The double dispersal of Europe – its split into two and its subsumption within the larger category of the ‘West’ – could not erase Europe from Estonian cultural imaginaries. The slowness, inertia and multiplicity of cultural processes guarantees the preservation of traces of ‘what used to be’ throughout periods increasingly dominated by new sets of values and ideas. An annexation or a revolution can change the sociopolitical order of a state or a territory within a period of a few years, yet the process of changing collectively shared cultural understandings might well take decades and may only ever be partially successful. At a personal and regional level, continuity is also sustained by material culture and by natural environment: the same physical items, similar architectural structures and kindred topographical features support the sense of continuity or permanence.

After the Soviet takeover, the new regime contended against earlier cultural traditions and values and created new hybrid imaginaries, yet supposedly displaced images and values and tropes persisted. Key cultural works and events of various kind, notably those attached to school curricula, continued to function as resources for cultural continuity.Footnote ⁴¹ The Soviet state could not impose a wholesale rejection of major cultural developments before the Soviet era, so much of the pre-Soviet Estonian cultural canon was appropriated into the Soviet ideological framework and continued its cultural circulation. During the Soviet era, Estonian school curricula included nineteenth-century patriotic songs and poems, but also classic twentieth-century novels that had defined a pre-Soviet national consciousness.Footnote ⁴² For the imaginaries about Estonia’s situatedness vis-à-vis Europe, the early twentieth-century Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) movement played a special role.

The Noor-Eesti movement, founded in 1905, earned its place in the Estonian cultural canon for its Nietzschean programme of radical cultural innovation.Footnote ⁴³ Its young members decisively rejected the German and Russian influences that had been dominant in nineteenth-century Estonian culture, instead they valorised Scandinavian and Romance cultures.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such nuances became lost in popular imaginaries, however, and Noor-Eesti became synonymous with the aspiration towards Europeanness in general. In its 1905 manifesto Noorte püüded [The Strivings of Young People], the movement declared that its mission was ‘to seek those aims and forms, to which we are guided, from one direction, by the spirit of our nation and the natural capacities and requirements of our nation, and, from the other direction, by European culture’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The same text also supplied the slogan ‘Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!’ and the short catch-phrase ‘More culture! More European-style culture!’Footnote ⁴⁶ The formulaic structure of these proclamations made their dissemination all the easier.

The Noor-Eesti movement was treated critically during the period of high Stalinism,Footnote ⁴⁷ but the Khrushchev era re-established its cultural importance. Somewhat paradoxically, the Noor-Eesti slogan found its way into Soviet school curricula: it was helpful that Noor-Eesti leaders had been excited about the 1905 revolution, since this positioned them on the ‘right’ side of history.Footnote ⁴⁸ Voldemar Miller wrote in the weekly Sirp ja Vasar, in 1970: ‘The Noor-Eesti movement developed under the direct impact of the 1905–1906 revolution, their slogan was “Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!” The Noor-Eesti movement turned into an important landmark (verstapost) in the development of the aesthetic view of Estonians, in their Europeanization.’Footnote ⁴⁹ And Mai Levin, in 1979, stressed in the same weekly newspaper the role of Noor-Eesti in the context of its era, while pointing to the combination of the European and the national: ‘at this stage of the development of national culture, a deeper investment in European culture was both unavoidable and necessary, much as the demand for a national subject matter in art was objectively conditioned’.Footnote ⁵⁰

For Noor-Eesti, Europeanness was an aesthetic, not a political category – this was an important precondition for the adoption of their slogan in the Soviet era. In cultural circulation, the Noor-Eesti declaration acquired a life of its own, however, partly independent of its original historical context. A colourful example is provided in Herbert Vainu’s vulgar-Soviet lampoon of a typical member of Soviet Estonia’s economic elite:

Such an easy appropriation suggests that, by the late Soviet era, the Noor-Eesti dictum had become a commonplace in Estonia’s cultural self-identification. It had engraved itself as a cultural imaginary with historic depth, one of those core ideas with a special symbolic value that play a significant role in building and sustaining national identity. Notably, this imaginary figured the future of Estonian culture as securely bound together with that of Europe.

Yet, even as Noor-Eesti foregrounded the necessity of close relations with Scandinavian and Romance cultural spheres, its central statement is directed elsewhere: it is the acknowledgement of a lack. For Noor-Eesti, Estonian Europeanness was not a given, but rather an aim and a direction. Noor-Eesti’s leading voices coupled their European aspirations with criticism of the ‘overly Germanic’ Estonian culture of their era. In its original context, the slogan hardly offered an easy positive identification with Europe, yet, in the Soviet context, it nevertheless served to affirm Estonia’s imaginary affiliation with Europe – Noor-Eesti members had, after all, freely travelled all over Europe. The temporal distance from Noor-Eesti times was necessary for their call to crystallize into a symbolic gesture and the historic distance was further accentuated by the cultural rupture of the Soviet annexation. I have elsewhere described such a situation through the double dialectics of nostalgia and colonial rupture: ‘first, the colonial split initiated a discourse of national nostalgia; and second, the nostalgic lens further intensified the colonial conflict’.Footnote ⁵³ The mere fact of the Soviet annexation guaranteed the Noor-Eesti slogan a special place in national imaginaries.

11.7 Binarisms in Everyday Cultural Imaginaries: Europe and Russia

In addition to the persistence and deepening of various pre-Soviet cultural aspirations, era-specific factors – especially those linked to the Soviet-era colonial conflict – also contributed to the cultural imaginary of Estonia’s Europeanness. The ‘Soviet gaze’ classed the Pribaltika as the ‘Soviet West’ and thus supported local self-understandings as being more Western than the rest of the USSR. Examples abound: Elena Zubkova even opens her monograph Pribaltika i Kreml’ (The Baltics and the Kremlin) with a recollection of the Soviet Pribaltika enjoying a special significance for those living in the USSR.Footnote ⁵⁴ Art curator Alla Rosenfeld remembers: ‘I traveled to Tallinn to see art exhibitions, which seemed so Western-like and avant-garde for us in Leningrad, where it was almost impossible to exhibit openly what they were showing in Estonia’.Footnote ⁵⁵ While the common rhetoric labelled the Balts as ‘Western’, in this context, the semantic difference between ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ was irrelevant: Estonia as ‘Western’ could only signify Western in European terms.

Estonians, for their part, shored up their national pride together with their European difference by juxtaposing themselves against the new Soviet-era settlers, whom they homogenized into a coherent entity they referred to as ‘Russians’. Estonian manners and habits were deemed superior, starting from the everyday basics: eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells carelessly about was held in disdain, the use of low-quality, strongly smelling cooking oil (as compared to relatively odourless margarine) was considered an inferior cultural practice. ‘Tuck your shirt in, son – you are not some kind of a Russian’, a man interviewed in 1993 remembers his grandmother saying. ‘At home it was always important to behave like a proper Estonian and not to shame oneself with behaving like a Russian’, this informant added.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such everyday oppositions functioned as a decolonial reaction, a strategy for supporting communal self-respect.

Even during the era of Soviet censorship, oppositional motifs found their way into fiction, often through passing remarks or marginal characters. Characters such as Georgi Nikanorov in Teet Kallas’s Eiseni tänav (Eisen Street, 1979) or Bobrin in Mats Traat’s Rippsild (Suspension Bridge, 1980) are presented as simpletons compared to Estonians with their complex inner dilemmas. Bobrin gives a young Estonian couple an embarrassingly banal speech about the importance of making children: ‘Down with the pants and skirts, off with the bras and undershirts, out with the fake modesty – and then go at it!’Footnote ⁵⁷ Nikanorov, the father of five children, encourages his former colleague Rein to follow a similar path: to beget children in order to get a new apartment with all the modern comforts in a Soviet suburb. Both Bobrin and Nikanorov are loud, robust and simpleminded, not to be taken seriously. In Rippsild there is also a passing reference to an open conflict between different nationalities: when Kaida, a young Estonian woman, starts a relationship with a Russian-speaking man from Ukraine, Kaida’s mother refuses to acknowledge their marriage and takes her daughter’s child away to live with herself.

In Lilli Promet’s novel Primavera (1971), the Estonian–Russian juxtaposition is developed in considerable detail. The main character, Saskia, an actress, provides a lengthy description of her everyday circumstances:

Greasy food, onions, cabbage, noisy parties sliding into destructive behaviour, non-participation in cultural life, primitive modes of gender relations – one finds here a suggestive list of era-specific attributions externalized onto the image of the cultural Other: the unwanted, unwelcome new settler, whose growing presence was a continual marker of the colonial-style disregard for local interests.Footnote ⁵⁸

Promet’s Primavera offers a nearly perfect setting for considering the Europeanness of Estonians: the novel accompanies an Estonian actress on a Soviet tourist trip to Italy, where Saskia shares a hotel room with Fevronia, a woman from Russia.Footnote ⁵⁹ Slender Saskia enjoys the trip fully, orients herself easily in art museums, drinks wine in local cafes, attracts the interest of several male companions and is mistaken for a German. Full-figured Fevronia, in contrast to Saskia, is clearly out of place in Italy: she displays ignorance and chauvinistic attitudes and is demanding and pretentious. Like the Italians, Saskia relies on strong coffee for energy, whereas Fevronia is upset when tea is unavailable. While Saskia and her attentive male companions enjoy Italian street life until late in the night, Fevronia gets lost because she is unable to read the Latin alphabet. In short, the novel emphasizes the Europeanness of the Estonian woman through her contrast with her markedly ‘less cultured’ Russian roommate. The contrast between Saskia and Fevronia is so extreme that the Finnish reviewer Pekka Lilja had to cautiously admit, in his review of the Finnish translation in 1977, that Fevronia’s character is presented in a such a grotesque light that it could ‘almost be considered racist’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Pekka Lilja proposed that Promet’s novel escaped serious imputation of racism by introducing another Russian, Konstantin, an intelligent and knowledgeable Russian professor, a researcher of classical culture.Footnote ⁶¹ Saskia’s new Russian-speaking friends – a Jewish writer and the Russian professor – also accommodate themselves to the Italian setting with easy elegance and they share Saskia’s irritation with plump, ignorant Fevronia. In short, these two men, coming from Russia, are as European as Saskia is. Europeanness thus turns out to be correlated to categories of class and education: a Russian intellectual turns out to be no less European than his Estonian counterpart. The motif appears similarly in the novel Rippsild, where Dr Levin, whom an Estonian couple visits for treatment in Leningrad, is presented as both knowledgeable and desirable.

In a way, this corresponds to the Noor-Eesti mode of thinking: one becomes European by attuning oneself to European culture, through study and research, through choosing certain modes of creative self-expression. Europeanness is here understood as a category of aesthetics and knowledge. At the same time, the novel pokes fun of Fevronia’s diligent note-taking – the assumption is that the necessary knowledge should always already have been acquired and acquired somehow effortlessly and playfully. According to this formula, being European implies lightness, pleasure and enjoyment, instead of a wrong-spirited scribbling of a guide’s already oversimplified explanations – being European is characterized by a certain aesthetics of being, which the novel elaborates as an ontological positioning towards the surrounding world.

Promet’s novel Primavera follows characters in exceptional circumstances – only very few from Soviet Estonia could enjoy leisure trips to Italy. The actress Saskia, likewise, has an exceptional profile: how many in the Estonian SSR would have displayed similar ease in recognizing and appreciating classical works of art? Yet thousands read Promet’s novel, laughed at Fevronia and enjoyed the admiration that Saskia attracted on her fictional travels. The passive, non-dialogic Europeanness of a reader of fiction who faces not actual people in Italian streets and cafes, but instead follows words on the printed page and travels in an imaginary Europe from his or her cosy armchair – such armchair-Europeanness was secure from threats of Orientalization and excluded the least hint of cultural discomfort. The novel’s ambition, however, met with some indignities in its Finnish translation: the editor was obliged to correct many mistakes about Italy and its classical heritage.Footnote ⁶² But, since rumours of Finnish editorial corrections would hardly reach Soviet Estonian audiences, Saskia’s European success could be enjoyed domestically without critical disturbance.

In one of the 1976 issues of the cultural weekly Sirp ja Vasar, a group of Estonian elites shared their travel impressions after the trip to Canada and the United States. Among other general commentaries, the writer Enn Vetemaa observed casually: ‘For the European, Canada feels homier, both in terms of architecture and even in interpersonal relations. The United States feels inadvertently more foreign.’Footnote ⁶³ In the context of North America, Vetemaa easily identified with Europe. Even as the scale of Europe was in Soviet era significantly deactivated, the identification with Europe clearly survived in national imaginaries as embedded within the category of Estonianness.

11.8 From Soviet to Post-Soviet: Changes and Continuities

The armchair-Europeanness that had been part of the Estonian self-image in the Soviet era was shaken up in the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a rescaling of geopolitical realities and accompanying imaginaries. Transition-era political rhetoric foregrounded the vocabulary of a return: the emphasis was on the re-establishment of the independent state and re-connecting Estonia politically and economically with the rest of Europe and the world.Footnote ⁶⁴ The discourse of restoration also implied a return to the nested scalar system ‘Estonia – Europe – the world’ or, in the more detailed version, ‘Estonia – the Baltic sea region – Europe – the world’. Yet, in the 1990s, the dream of such safely nested belongingness could be realized only partially: the Soviet Union, albeit now dissolved, continued to loom over the new era with its continuing presence in global political imaginaries. What used to be the Soviet Union was now commonly referred to as ‘the former Soviet sphere’ and what used to be the Socialist bloc or the Soviet sphere of influence now became the so-called post-socialist countries.

From the late 1980s onward, Estonians and other non-Russian nationalities of the USSR had to struggle against the cultural erasure that had taken place during the past half century, when one geopolitical label – the Soviet Union – had obscured the great diversity within its imperial borders. Notes taken at the European Student Forum 1989 in Bologna are telling. Jüri Luik, who later made a name for himself as a distinguished politician, was then one of the two participating Estonian students and commented on how Estonians had to contend with the perspective of the students from the EEC countries:

As Luik observes, the renewal of actual, two-way encounters led to the realization that there was a clear and uncomfortable mismatch between the Estonians’ sense of Europeanness and the EEC-countries’ more exclusive vision of Europe. Such a mismatch continued to be produced by way of labels such as ‘post-Soviet’ or ‘post-socialist’ – both implying a significant difference from ‘real Europe’. The post-Soviet-era geographical imagination, like its Cold War predecessor, reinforced the historical orientalization of eastern Europe – the division of Europe into East and West – and judging the West as superior to the EastFootnote ⁶⁶ – but this was now newly strengthened by the dire need for Western investment in these societies undergoing transition.Footnote ⁶⁷ While the rarity of direct interaction with countries outside the state-socialist bloc had neutralized the relevance of orientalising visions during the Soviet Era, now new encounters with the orientalising gaze of the ‘West’ threatened Estonians’ internalized sense of Europeanness and created existential discomfort. The humiliating poverty of the years of transition exacerbated this unhappy situation.Footnote ⁶⁸

For Estonia and other ‘post-Soviet’ countries, the two simultaneous imaginary geographies – the aspirational ‘nested Europe’ and the orientalising binary judgement ‘post-Soviet East versus more advanced West’ – clashed and intermingled in disconcerting ways. The imaginary of Europe, now again very concretely tied to geopolitical realities, also became divided into different institutional entities – in political terms, it was generally not ‘Europe’, but NATO, the Schengen area, the EEC and later the EU that was the locus of Estonia’s aspirational belonging. In the Soviet era, Europeanness had survived as a cultural marker of imaginary belongingness – now, for Estonian political elites, Europeanness became understood in terms of economy, politics and, importantly, national security. Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm summarize the priorities set at the beginning of Estonian transition as ‘economic competitiveness coupled with national security’ – a combination that Lauristin and Vihalemm attested to be still in place in 2009, regardless of the deepening global economic crisis.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, the former Soviet empire continued its presence in political imaginaries as a reminder of military threat, lending special urgency to Estonia’s ambition to join European institutional and security frameworks.Footnote ⁷⁰

In cultural imaginaries of the transition period, regained independence raised new questions about belonging – exactly how European are we? Actual encounters with the world outside the former Eastern bloc diminished the role played by Russia and Estonia’s Russophone populations as cultural others – the role that formerly gave impetus to Estonians’ imaginary sense of Europeanness during the Soviet era. The Noor-Eesti slogan ‘Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!’ continued to be taught in schools, but, in a strongly future-oriented cultural era, its cultural relevance diminished. While in the Soviet-era the slogan had significant performative power, it now became part of national pedagogy, outside the active repertoire of cultural imagery.

The most widely discussed literary work of the 1990s period, the novel Piiririik (The Border State, 1993) by Emil Tode (a pen name for Tõnu Õnnepalu) was strongly marked by a sense of East-European Otherness. The main character of the novel, a gay man in Paris, feels both attraction and revulsion towards his new surroundings, with their Western consumer culture and sterile functionability. The main character’s sense of non-belonging in Paris and yet his unwillingness to return lead him to an indefinable, liminal, border-state existence and also to the realization that it is impossible to shake off one’s past: past moods, colours and landscapes continue to re-emerge in his thoughts regardless of geographic distance. While Piiririik was able to capture something important about its era, the 1990s cultural ferment escapes simple delineation – this era was characterized by great multiplicity, by a variety of hopes and aspirations, as a well as by bitter disappointments.

In Estonia, the economic crisis of the transition period was relatively short-lived: the national currency was successfully introduced in June 1992 and the economic situation started to improve in early 1993. By September 1993, the president of the Estonian Bank judged the crisis to be over.Footnote ⁷¹ In Lauristin’s and Vihalemm’s report, ‘[a]ccording to World Bank analysis, Estonia in 1994 belonged to a group of countries that had … reached high levels of political freedom and economic stabilization’.Footnote ⁷² Yet the restoration of national self-esteem and the feeling of collective agency vis-à-vis newly scaled geopolitical structures of the world required more time to develop. As with other former Eastern bloc countries, the judgemental, orientalising ‘Western gaze’ complicated this process.

In time, Estonia’s early 1990s crisis of collective agency developed into a story of collective success. By the 2010s, what had been an unstable post-colonial identity, defined by its struggle to come to terms with its Soviet heritage, had become overwritten by a new narrative gradually emerging: that of Estonia as the eco-digital nation,Footnote ⁷³ a country and culture that cherishes and cares for its well-preserved natural habitats, while also moving at the forefront in digital technology.Footnote ⁷⁴ Importantly, the ecodigital national narrative replaced the transition-era mismatch between the country’s self-image as European and the orientalising gaze of the old imperial centres of the European West: the new narrative promoted the local sense of being, in certain respects, among the most successful in Europe and being appreciated as such. The culminating point in the new national narrative might be considered the 2017 EU digital summit in Tallinn, when, according to the The New Yorker, a speech by the President of Estonia Kersti Kaljulaid earned praise from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel: ‘You’re so much further than we are’.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the 2010s, being European had become a basic condition of life, the normal paradigm for being an Estonian. The formula for achieving this had already been articulated by Jüri Luik in 1989: ‘In order to be equal, you have to be a little bit better’.

11.9 Conclusion

As we have seen, Europeanness is a relational category, its role and its function in Estonian imaginaries are dependent on other identificatory categories active at the same period. ‘Europe’ as an imaginary and as part of era-specific sociopolitical scalarity plays a different role in different eras: each era creates its own scalar logics, while activating certain geopolitical scales at the expense of others; in each era, cultural imaginaries rewrite geopolitical parameters through the lens of prior cultural experiences, thus forming competing imaginary geographies. These processes are accompanied by normative value-judgements which unavoidably enforce scalar hierarchies of higher and lower standings; secondary effects variously include feelings of superiority or otherness and processes of orientalization.

In the Soviet-era Estonia, the Soviet colonial matrix of power disabled nation-level political agency and severed economic agency. However, while the Soviet leadership was able, within a period of a few years, to reorganize Estonian governmental structures, economy and trade networks, the conservatism or inertia of processes of cultural identification made it impossible to switch the country into a full ‘Soviet’ mode of cultural self-identification. The pre-Soviet decades of cultural development, including the Noor-Eesti, call ‘Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!’ continued to support Estonians’ sense of Europeanness. The rather insubstantial imaginary construction of such a mental framework could, however, find support in the continuing and visible presence of pre-Soviet material culture, architecture, natural environments, specific forms of cultural self-expression and more. Continuing European standing on the cultural scale, however, gave some compensation for the enforced separation from Europe on the socioeconomic scale. Even as the Soviet colonial matrix of power worked to deactivate and downgrade the sociopolitical category of Europe, Europe continued its existence as an imagined, implicit quality Estonians could claim for themselves. The rarity of direct encounters neutralized the typically orientalising gaze of Western Europeans towards East-Europeans; instead, Estonia’s position as ‘the Soviet West’ within the USSR affirmed its imaginary belonging with Europe. As Savisaar’s speech suggested, the intense generation of new ideas in the perestroika era heightened the local sense of agency – and to such an extent that Estonians could during this period self-identify as the avant-garde of the USSR.

Estonia emerged from the USSR with a strong sense of national agency and with a determined commitment to Europe. This strong, unquestioned sense of belonging to Europe, together with the continuing threat that Russia posed to national security, inspired the political leadership of the 1990s to prioritize an agenda of joining ‘all possible clubs’:Footnote ⁷⁶ NATO, the Schengen area, the EEC and later the EU – an agenda that operated under the ‘logic of securitization’Footnote ⁷⁷ to proceed with radical reforms that led to growing levels of inequality within the state, but that indeed found success in providing both security guarantees and a flourishing economic climate. The imaginary of Europe itself had changed substantially during this process and changed from a predominantly aesthetic category to a predominantly geopolitical one.

In his 1992 speech Estonia – Europe – the World, Edgar Savisaar reflected on global future scenarios – among others, on the possibility of a Europe that has integrated Russia to become a global entity that stretched ‘from Gibraltar to the Urals’ – a scenario that in the early 1990s did not sound utterly implausible.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thirty years later, Russia’s new wave of imperial warfare has effaced such visions from Estonian imaginaries, and Estonia’s belongingness to Europe has emerged as an existential imperative, not simply one imaginary among others.