Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia Ii

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia ii FRINGE Series Editors Alena Ledeneva and Peter Zusi, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeas- urability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area studies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Peter Zusi is Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. By adopting the tropes of ‘repair’ and ‘waste’, this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergen- erational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions. Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory. Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces Francisco Martínez First published in 2018 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Francisco Martínez, 2018 Images © Author and copyright holders named in captions, 2018 Francisco Martínez has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Martínez, F. 2018. Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia: An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353534 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ISBN: 9781787353558 (Hbk.) ISBN: 9781787353541 (Pbk.) ISBN: 9781787353534 (PDF) ISBN: 9781787353565 (epub) ISBN: 9781787353572 (mobi) ISBN: 9781787353589 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353534 The future is but the obsolete in reverse. Nabokov (1952, 22) People will be born – generation after generation – live a happy life, age gradually, but the Palace of the Soviets, familiar to them from their dear childhood books, will stand exactly the same as you and I will see it in the next few years. Centuries will not leave their mark on it; we will build it so that it will stand without ageing, forever. Atarov (1940, 15; cf. Paperny 2002, 17) The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand- new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, lis- tening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. Calvino (1974, 114–15) Preface: Departure and Arrival This is a book about many things. Originally, it appears as a critique of discourses about the past, and yet it unfolds as an ethnography of past- ness that deals with the contemporary city, geographies of affect, generational change and materiality. The work interweaves a number of topics related to how physical and cultural wasting are rarely synchronised, accounting for diverse ways of treating inheritances and the different intensities of urban memory that they generate. By studying the material and social afterlife of the Soviet world in Estonia, I attempt to show the dialectical relation between construction and demolition, and how the need to build something new entails the disinvestment and neglect of the legacies from the old regime. With a fringy anthropology, I explore how the vanquishing over the Soviet world happened on a different time scale from the decay of its legacy, allowing for new availabilities, intricate reappropriations and unforeseen opportunities for recuperation. The research cultivates transdisciplinary intellectual work and appears as deeply contemporary; for five years, my work has been accom- panying actual transformations in a proactive way, insisting that repara- tive practices have a larger political resonance by reconstituting social fabrics that have been neglected or bruised. The ethnographic fieldwork argues for the intimate connection between postsocialist reforms and negative representations of the Soviet world; yet, by reflecting on how Estonian youth are not following the expectations and values of the previous generations due to their distinct life experience, it also shows how we can understand generational change and affective processes of transmission in terms of materiality, since change is made through the repetition of the different. ix The focus on iterations places an emphasis on process and dialogic co-creation, thus showing the multiscalar registers, trajectories and intensities that forge social transformations. Changing notions of legacy and waste in Estonia have been used to define what value is and to provide new accounts for social transformations, generational change, and the interconnections between time and community. Then, the focus on wasted legacies, their nondeaths, afterlives, shifts of value and dissonance helps us to understand affective transmissions, shifting temporalities and the underside of social transformations. Moreover, the research is part of the contemporary preoccupation with waste and the obsolete, and contributes to discussions about how material things represent attributes and convey complex meanings and affects. While designing my ethnographic fieldwork, I faced the challenge of how to compare different historical eras with their own temporal regimes, legacies and urban memories. I finally decided to articulate a narrative through a positionality model of departure and arrival, taken here as a narrative exercise to exposing the complex ways in which conti- nuities interact with changes. Changing happens in reaction to something and for some purpose. Past, present and future are better understood in terms of each other by differentiating experiences and expectations (Koselleck [1979] 2004). Thus, any process of change has to be interro- gated not only by examining the distinctions between past and present, but also the relationships that mutually constitute the aspects between them (Verdery 1996). Therein resides the dialectic of ‘the Old’ and ‘the New’, and therefore, my attempt to expose how things are remembered and forgotten through the tropes of departure and arrival. Instead of a synchronic contextualisation of what happened to the Soviet remains, I rather approach the acceptance or rejection of past things as a process; acknowledging, nonetheless, that social changes do not necessarily happen as a string, one after another, but rather occur through an interweaving of knots, as a field of place-occasions and plural intersecting temporalities. In light of this, we also have to ask what happened in between and how the choices were made, as a condensation that is simultaneously synchronic and diachronic. An example of a synchronic analysis would be to compare the destinations of Tallinn airport in the Soviet era and nowadays (figure 0.1), and then explain the changes in Estonia

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