Restitution and Dispossession

3. RESTITUTION AND DISPOSSESSION

Various forms of property restitution took place in most former member states upon the fall of the USSR, often deliberately dispossessing marginalised groups in the process (Aleksahhina, 2006). In the Estonian context, the process of restitution was primarily framed as an abstract moral exercise of “turning back time” (Feldman, 1999) – a narrative of continuity with the first 1918-1940 period of independence central to the reborn state’s politically-minded memory work. On grounds that the Estonian state existed de jure throughout the illegal Soviet occupation, the 1991 ‘Law on the Fundamentals of Ownership Reform’ postulated the restoration of property ownership to the original owners in June 1940 or their descendants to “overcome the injustice done with violating ownership rights” (Kährik & Kõre, 2013). This strategically dispossessed property and stripped citizenship from many in the Russian-speaking communities, who emigrated after the 1940 threshold and was based on the assumption that the majority would return to their respective countries of origin upon fall of the USSR. This, however, was an erroneous assumption with great consequences, as only 25% of Soviet-era immigrants left Estonia in the 1990s, leaving a ‘stranded’ population predominantly concentrated in post-Soviet housing districts and Lasnamäe in particular (Anniste & Tammaru 2014).

Attempts to restitute these districts’ land to their ‘rightful owners’ proved uniquely contentious. As the vast quantity of socialist housing erected in the 1950s-1970s was restored to pre-1940 owners of what were then largely un-developed parcels of barren land far beyond Tallinn’s municipal borders, property became an abstraction equated with personhood and legitimacy as an Estonian citizen (Feldman, 1999). This set the scene for rising tensions between predominantly Estonian property owners and Russian minority renters, although official property delineations were often not articulated or abided by, due to the highly fractured and unintuitive pattern of land ownership that proved particularly problematic in housing districts. Ownership boundaries of many courtyard plots and ‘public’ land are often shared between 5 or more housing associations. While incentives to develop plots together remain low, these lines of ownership halt public spatial process in an effective gridlock and where formal development is rendered troublesome, if not outright impossible, informal appropriation has taken root, shaping conceptions of publicprivate delineations in the spatial imaginations of Lasnamäe three successive generations.

Figure 7: Stills from ‘Autumn Ball’ depicting Mustamäe, but filmed in Lasnamäe