Literature Review

Despite the relative abundance of literature on Estonian post-soviet urbanism (Stanilov, 2007), memory (Jõesalu, 2017), and the emergent discourse at the intersections of the two (Tammaru, Baldwin, Hess), most accounts have limited themselves to official state narratives from the perspective of the new nations’ ethnic majority, previously suppressed under Soviet rule. While the newly marginalised minorities’ practices and experiences of post-Soviet domesticity have proven fertile ground for anthropologists and ethnographers (Shevchenko 2009; Morris 2016; Boym 1994), these topics are largely disregarded in architectural discourse, where post-socialist housing districts continue to be painted as anachronistic relics of an undesired past. This neglects their continued – if not heightened – relevance as sites of cultural production and memory work for the often-marginalised Russian-speaking minorities that inhabit them. The research at hand thus aims to draw on a range of disciplines from ethnography to urban planning, from memory studies to property reform, to inform a sensitive approach to minority domestic memory and spatial appropriation. Core texts from broader post-Soviet contexts establish underlying commonalities, while literature specific to the 21st century Estonian memoryscape and restitution process ground the research both temporally and geographically. These writings are bolstered by the anthropological literature on post-Soviet domesticity in Russia, exploring similar themes and methodologies, albeit in a cultural context notably different from that of Estonia.

POST-SOVIET URBANISM

‘The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism’ by Stanilov (ed) (2007) provides a technical overview of spatial transformations and strategic urban challenges arising from the socio-economic reforms of post-Soviet independence across Central and Eastern Europe. While this work is of limited use in addressing questions of identity and culture, it provides a rich contextual analysis of broader trends in realms of post-socialist urbanity and policy. The broad theoretical backbone of issues relating to mass housing districts and their evolving spatial and demographic condition of will be formed by Baldwin, Hess and Tammaru’s ‘Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries: The Legacy of Central Planning in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania’. Focusing on Baltic peculiarities within the broader context of Soviet central planning, the work offers insight into the evolution of socialist housing from Tallinn’s utopian forest suburbs to its dystopian Lasnamäe district, highlighting the architectural choices

that shape contemporary segregation and stigma. Despite the essays’ emphasis of ethnic segregation between Estonian- and Russian-speaking populations, Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries does not explore the role of these districts in the ethnic groups’ identity formation or memory politics, neglecting these factors’ pivotal role in wider sociocultural changes.

PROPERTY RESTITUTION

Feldman’s (1999) ‘Justice in Space? The restitution of property rights in Tallinn, Estonia’ lends an insight into the conflict-laden process of residential property restitution upon Estonian re-independence in 1991. Questioning whether the return of property to its owners prior to the Soviet occupation in 1940 is socially just, Feldman highlights how imposing abstract notions of private property onto lived space juxtaposes Estonian owners with migrant renters, predicting the ‘othering’ of Russian-speakers in the following three decades of independence. Experiences of deliberate dispossession of Estonian and minority populations are further explored in Õmblus’s (2009) ‘Kaotatud kodud’ [Lost homes], a collection of contemporaneous accounts gathered by members of the Tallinn Tenants Association. Both texts and would greatly benefit from being revisited in 2021, with a focus on the impact of these experiences on the memory and spatial practices of the original migrant community and successive generations.

FORMAL MEMORY POLITICS

Key developments in formal memory politics and identity construction are gleaned from Tamm’s chapter ‘In Search of Lost Time: Memory Politics in Estonia, 1991-2011’ in Diener and Hagen’s ‘From Socialist to Post-Socialist Cities’, as well as Petersoo and Tamm’s ‘Monumental conflict: Memory, politics and identity in contemporary Estonia’. The latter was published a year after the riots surrounding the Bronze Soldier in 2007 – a pivotal point in Russo-Estonian relations and memory politics – and curates a collection of essays tracking the history and changing perceptions formal memorials erected in Estonia under Nazi German, Soviet, and independent Estonian rule. The Russo-Estonian memory divide is explored at length by a range of authors from both sides of the ethnic divide. However, the scope of the essays is limited to formal memorials and little discourse exists around the subject of informal or inhabited processes of memory work and heritage-making.

POST-SOVIET DOMESTICITY

Accounts of post-Soviet domestic memory have thus far predominantly been studied by anthropologists. They are analysed from a predominantly Russian perspective, as many of the USSR’s former occupied states have attempted to jettison past socialist associations to develop and present discourses of independent statehood, and in so doing, writing out personal narratives of Soviet domesticity from official state histories and limiting the literature available. Attempts to centralise the marginal domestic realm are made by the ethnographic works of Shevchenko’s (2009) ‘Crisis and the everyday in postsocialist Moscow’ and Morris’s (2016) ‘Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins’. A personal account of the Soviet Union’s cultural practices around home, art and material objects is made by Boym (1994) in ‘Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia’, focussing on subject matter commonly dismissed as “poshlost”, or bad taste. Presenting accounts of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia, Shevchenko and Morris illuminate the ‘other life’ neglected by mainstream media and academic discourse, showing the agency, identity, and values of people inhabiting the liminal peripherality of panel housing districts. Rather than presenting these sites only as “bearable”, these writings show the unusual attractiveness of this life, bringing dignity to the sites and subjects of their research.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

It is thus hoped that architectural discourses of post-Soviet urbanism can be fused with writings on memory politics and domestic ethnographies, to revise the role of housing districts in cultural production and answer the following research questions:

1) How does ad-hoc spatial appropriation navigate Lasnamäe’s privately owned ‘public’ landscapes?

2) How do experiences of restitution colour Russian-speaking memory and selfidentification?

3) How do these patterns of memory and appropriation differ between the three generations of Russian-speakers Lasnamäe is home to?

Figure 3: Soviet statues awaiting their fate behind Maarjamäe Castle Museum