CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Lember, Uku |
|---|---|
| Title | Silenced Ethnicity: Russian-Estonian Intermarriages in Soviet Estonia (Oral History) |
| Summary | Between 1945 and 1989, the number of Russian-speakers in Soviet Estonia grew from 4% to 35%. This dissertation touches upon the ethno-cultural cohabitation between Estonians and Russian-speakers in Estonia in that period of socialism. It is based on oral history interviews with spouses and children from inter-marriages between “newcomer Russians” and “local Estonians.” The author conducted 95 interviews from the spring of 2009 to the summer of 2011. The study is mainly focused on the inter-married spouses who were born from 1930s to 1950s and on their children who were born from 1950s to 1970s. The composition of the dissertation is based on two parallel modes of representation. On the one hand, it describes personal and family life-worlds throughout the chapters as different narrative episodes about the same families accumulate. On the other hand, the thematic structure of the chapters is based on topical clusters that emerged from a close reading of life-story transcripts. Two main arguments are developed in the dissertation. First, I argue that Soviet Estonian society can be understood as divided into two linguistically marked Russian and Estonian cultural worlds. Both worlds offered intermingled but distinct “reservoirs” of ethnic, political, historical and other meanings, personal identification patterns, and past-future horizons. These worlds maintained a balance and parity in Soviet Estonia by offering attractive and diverse ways for individual identification. The Russian world offered more diverse and ambiguous patterns as it was imbued with sometimes contradictory meanings (different registers of Russian culture, other ethnic cultures in the USSR, connections to the Soviet ideology). The Estonian world offered narrower patterns for individual identification and these were more tightly related to the local Estonian ethnic culture and heritage (however, some working class identifiers differ in that regard). I propose that both worlds should be primarily understood as cultural worlds rather than “ethnic” ones, because they contained varied identification elements. Second, I argue that the Estonian-Russian cultural divisions were scarcely discussed and debated within the inter-marriages themselves. People did not identify with the conflictual patterns of either cultural worlds in their everyday lives. On the one hand, the relevance of conflicts arising from the social cultural division was reduced in family life, and it was often a practical solution to de-emphasize controversies, as there were no publicly available tools for resolution. On the other hand, silence about the cultural conflicts in intermarriages also indicated the absence of such experiences. People point to the constructive ways of living together without identifying with the forces that pull the society apart. I also propose to distinguish between the performative and constative dimensions of culturally conflictual identifications in the everyday life by showing that even if people “performed” repetitive affirmations of ethno-cultural belonging they did not actually invest in the “constative” meanings that accompanied such repetitions. |
| Supervisor | Siefert, Marsha |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/lember_uku.pdf |
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