CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Lember, Uku |
|---|---|
| Title | Domesticating the Soviet Regime: Autobiographic Experiences of the "Post-War" Generation in Estonia |
| Summary | It is a study of the autobiographical accounts of the Estonian “post-wa r”/ 1d;thaw” generation (born in 1940-1959), with a focus on the possible tension of the “ordinary” people between the simultaneous domestication and resistance of the Soviet regime. The study falls into the category of generational research, although it does not assume the presence of any “common generational experience” per se. Argumentation is based on fifty published and archival autobiographies collected by the Estonian Literary Museum and the Estonian National Museum. The author argues that the paradigms of “everyday resistance” and “double- mindedness 1d; do not reflect well their life experience of people during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era as reflected in their autobiographies written in the 1990s. The writers of life histories reflect much more of the “domestication” of the regime than any conscious “resistance” to it. Nevertheless, the author also argues that the attitude of the “ordinary” people towards the Communist regime and their personal ideological choices varied greatly and there seems to be no meaningful way for establishing a neither a causal generational relationship nor a class- or education-based generalisations about the people’s mentality during the Khrushchev’ and Brezhnev’s era. |
| Supervisor | Kochanowicz, Jacek |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/lember_uku.pdf |
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