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DOCUMENTING MEMORIES OF SOVIET REPRESSIONS AT THE ESTONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM

Mgr. Terje Anepaio (Estonian National Museum, ) Dear guests,

Estonian National Museum as one of the central national memory institutions in Estonia has considered essential to record topic on Stalin’s repressions as a significant experience in the 20 th century history and collecting memory of Estonia. Our museum has been documenting this subject for quite various scope and in the current presentation I will introduce the work of the Estonian National Museum in this direction and I will more focus on audio-visual documents. We all know that nearly half a century the memory of Stalin’s repressions was silenced memory of our societies. Also in Estonia, before the re-awakening time, museums were very cautious about taking in materials concerned with repressions and therefore these were rather negligible in museum’s collections. For example from our collections, is a man ....., voluntary informant of the museum, who has been deported to Vasyugan River in in 1941 sent to our museum the reminiscences of his life in exile in 1969 and some additional material in the following decade, but these reminiscences were in a way hidden in our archive and they were filed with other materials on the title „Foreign nations“. In the course of past and memory liberation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, more writings/reminiscences from the repressees reached the museum, as well as the diaries kept about the deportees. So, for example, diaries of previous school teacher who was deported to Irkutsk oblast in 1949. It is stressed that particularly Estonian feature in this post-socialist past and memory liberation process was high level activity of Estonian people in response to public appeals while at the same time the oral history method predominated in our post-socialist countries. In other words, Estonians were active in writing down their past experiences. The considerable success of public appeal method in Estonia is related to similar traditions usually based back to the national re- awakening period and famous ..... appeal to record memories already in 1888. This way of collecting ..... texts is also characteristic to Scandinavian countries. So, for example, Estonian National Museum has collected data from correspondence. It is voluntary informants using appeals in the formal questionnaires for over 80 year now. So in the late 1980s and early 1990s people started to send their reminiscences to Estonian National Museum, but it was not yet very active process. The more intensive collection of repression memory was launched at the Estonian National Museum somewhat later, starting from the second half of the 1990s. The Museum started to collect people’s memories about the repressions through three thematic questionnaires which were compiled in 1998, one year before 50 th anniversary of March . So these two questionnaires concentrated on two major in Estonia: June deportation in 1941 and 1 ORAHIS

March deportation in 1949 and the life in exile. The third questionnaire focuses on life in soviet prisons and prison times. Questionnaires were brought forward and consisted of circa 90 questions and the subject of repressions has received quite wide response of hundreds of people, nearly three hundred, who have sent their reminiscences to the Estonian National Museum which more or less powerfully reflects their painful past experience. The length of these answers, these texts, varies from 5 to over a hundred pages. And here you can see this part of this collection stored in our archive. They are not digitalised yet, but they are available to researches in our museum’s library. These materials covered are often directly by the questionnaire, but occasionally the respondents are shaken off the frames of the questions and written about memories relevant to them in a way chosen by themselves. And this process is continuing each year until today when our museum has received some contributions on this subject, writings about repressions. Together with reminiscences about repressions, photos and items related to this subject started to find their way to Estonian National Museum. The photos reflect first and foremost life in the destinations of exile and deportation as well as pre- and post-repressions time in the homeland. Photos have been sent to the Estonian National Museum together with these reminiscences, but they have been also collected by the repressees themselves. For example, a woman deported as a school girl to Siberia in 1949 collected over 300 hundred photos from her destiny companions. Also the photos have been collected by the researches of Estonian National Museum during field work. Besides the memories of repression, the Estonian National Museum started to pay attention to the commemoration of repressions trying to follow to whom the past is important and how the past is commemorated. The museum collections have been supplemented by photos about commemoration events above all in re-awakening times in the years 1989 and 1991 as well as in the communities of expatriated Estonians in the West. And also our photographer has recorded the practical ceremony of the repressees. Estonia remembers 10 years ago in June 2001, when the President of Estonia visited every county in Estonia and handed out to the repressees the symbolic tokens of mourning. A major qualitative developmental impetus in documentation was given to the Estonian National Museum in 2005, when the museum obtained professional movie camera. The museum has set as an objective to launch a more continuous and extensive audio-visual documentation programme. Besides other thematics, the commemoration of repressions has also been recorded audio visually, various commemoration events have been filmed. And today I would like to introduce you, as an example, video material/video clip from the opening of the memorial complex of the Estonian home in South Estonia on the 65 anniversary of the June deportation in 2006. /Presentation/ So this was opening of memorial dedicated to the destroyed Estonian farms and houses and it was built on the cost of the family who was deported to Siberia in 1949 and when they returned after 9 years the local ….. has destroyed their home. Here you can get an overview of different elements of commemoration ceremonies. And who are the audience: the

2 ORAHIS local authorities and the President and the repressees themselves. Members of Parliament. Speeches based on …... This kind of documentation was not regular yet, but in the year 2009, when was the 60 th anniversary of the March deportation and also 20 years passed from the foundation of Estonian Memento Association, then in view of these two historical events Estonian National Museum launched the audio-visual documentation project, entitled „We remember and we commemorate“. Today in the new millennium we consider essential to find out how the repressees memory community lives in the situation while this experience and memory are not in the social foreground anymore. On the contrary, public discourse in Estonia rather avoids the issue of repressions in the Soviet past. Who are the people that still have personal memories about these tragic times? Why and for which rituals do they keep and manifest their past in Estonia of today? What kind of knowledge would they like to pass on to the next generations? These were the questions with which the documentation project started. The project is focused on the ….. Memento Union as one of the most active local organisations belonging to the Estonian Memento Association. This union is characterised by close cooperation both with local authorities and with local schools and the museum is working still at recording active memory of the people of this association and their enjoyable sense of community as well as the people who have survived repressions. Their reminiscences put in word and in photos in order to provide for the future first time experience, life contact and emotions. Field work of this project lasted for a year. During this period the project team has made videos of different events which were organised by the memento members in …. or where they participated widely commemoration events of June and March deportations, or Estonian repressees gatherings, Board meetings or Christmas party of the memento of the union. Also the team has recorded life story interviews with the 50 members of the union. As a result of the project, the audio-visual archive of Estonian National Museum was supplemented by approx. 40 hours of recorded material which efficiently complemented the documentation of contemporary Estonian everyday life. Not only personal stories, memory and commemoration have been recorded in the picture and sound, but also people’s activity in everyday environment. In the future we can use the collected material for compiling exhibitions and also as studying material for museum and for schools classes. And documentary is also been shot apparently which will introduce this memory community in today’s Estonia. So I will just introduce some two clips on this material. This is the union and the heroes of the project. They are on the way of Estonian meeting of the repressees. This kind of material is one part of our project. And the commemoration. This is the second part – remembering. So different people tell their life stories and also answer about the situation about the repression memory in Estonia.

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Questions and answers.

Q. Well, I have a question to miss or mrs. Terje and I want to ask, for example, the Lithuanian scientists who do the research on the memory of communist crimes or repressions they see the tendency that it is very hard to talk with people about that because people tend to forget these crimes they don’t want to talk about those things and somehow they have been risen the hypothesis maybe the regime was pushing people to forget somehow to erase the memory or maybe that’s the experience which really hurts, so I want to ask do you have in Estonia or, for example, in the Czech Republic difficulties how to make people to talk about that, how to make them well tell their experience. Thank you.

A. Yes, it is, of course, quite problematic in Estonia also, but this project material which I just demonstrated it demanded quite a huge rework and all those members they already knew us before so we documented some commemoration events before and they get know us and we get familiar to them and then we could do these life story interviews, but it depends, of course, from the person how open this situation is and about what themes or events he or she wants to remember. Actually, we do have and we have arranged and there will be a seminar on the 21 st February in Tartu where all the researches in Estonia, museums and archives and libraries who work with life stories get together to discuss about the topic and how to record and what kind of questions and problems arises and how to avoid them and how work with people and what kind of ethical questions. It’s complicated.

Moderator: Maybe Barbara can say a few words about the Czech Republic experience.

A. So at first I would like to divide into two groups: the witness of the victims, let’s say, and officials of regimes. And depending on this the people are more open or more close to talk about the history in the past or its effect. Concretely, as I said during the presentation always when you contact the person or when you want to make an interview we are asking him and we are giving him approval that he knows that it will be published memory of the nations website and also association „Postbellum“ is making documentary on the Czech radio which is quite popular. This question now recently is quite discussed and it is natural that there are people who are not open to talks about that and they say ok this story is not important to the history but there are a lot of NGOs and institutions who are interested in searching and doing the research in the history. So, I don’t know, if you got some more questions.

Q. I have one question about the officials. I mean maybe they don’t want somehow to worsen their reputation or something, we do have problems with that, because we have in the most

4 ORAHIS problems, because they, officials, they do not want to know even if they were participating in that structure, they like to look clean or something.

A. Yes, it is happening also in the Czech Republic. Sometimes it is happening in our archive, because under our Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes there is an Archive for Security Services and in Czech Republic is really open. So really you can come, everybody can come, and ask, if you know the name of the person and the date of birth, you can ask for the materials. So sometimes if you are interested, there is information which is open. So after you can use it, but you must be very careful, because sometimes there is such information that it might seem that this person was collaborating with SDD, but in fact it is not true, because they were looking and they were preparing maybe some cooperation and this person didn’t even know that. Because I think that in the Czech Republic the archive is the most open, and you can find some information in this way, but you cannot really count on it. It is not really reliable, so you must think about it after. Yes, there are officials who do not want to talk about it, but some of them are quite open, but not too many.

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