Voicing past and present uncertainties:
The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial
and the politics of memory in Estonia
Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
Abstract: This article analyzes the politics of memory around the Estonian government’s
decision to relocate Tallinn’s World War II memorial of a Soviet soldier.
It shows why and how legitimizing national discourses resonated with and influenced
personal narratives among ordinary Estonians. It also discusses discourses
of Estonians who took a more critical stance on the relocation. The article argues
that the dominant discourse in Estonia has been characterized by a notion of suffering
and a search for recognition from the West, while turning its back to the
East (Estonian Russians and Russia). In a similar vein, the relocation aimed at a
breakaway from the Soviet past and its discourse, while at the same time reinforcing
its perceived continuity. As such, the Estonian case gives insight into processes
of remembering, amnesia, and the quest for recognition at the new border of the
European Union, within a context of highly contentious minority politics.
Keywords: collective memory, national identity, politics of recognition, postcommunism,
statue politics
Whereas Tõnismägi in Tallinn was historically
crowded on 22 September with singing and
dancing Estonian Russians, in 2007 the place
was almost empty.1
A police car guarded the
spot where the Bronze Soldier once stood, and
where now only planted flowers were to be
seen. Still, there were indications that something
momentous had happened here, that this
ground had a strong, emotional meaning. One
man was nervously waiting at the corner of the
square with red flowers in his hand. When the
policemen drove away for a few-minute break,
the man approached the flowerbed and put his
flowers down as a tear rolled down his cheek.
Clearly, he had not been the only one visiting
Tõnismägi that day: hundreds of red flowers
were brought here, marking the significance of
what had taken place at exactly this spot.
Five months earlier, on 27 April 2007, the
statue had been removed from its original location
in the city center (Tõnismägi) and relocated
to the Estonian Defense Forces cemetery on the
outskirts of Tallinn. This decision was made, according
to Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, to
guarantee public safety (Ehala 2009). Ethnic conflicts
around this World War II memorial, erected
by the Soviet authorities in 1947, started to escalate
in 2006. The Bronze Soldier had become
Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 59 (2011): 33–50
doi:10.3167/fcl.2011.590103
the touchstone for conflicts between (mainly
young) Estonians and Estonian Russians, accusing
each other of having false collective memories.
For the Russian minority who make up
one-third of the population, the Bronze Soldier
is important as the monument is officially dedicated
to the Red Army Soldiers who died liberating
Tallinn from Nazi occupation. For the
majority of Estonians, the statue symbolizes the
“national tragedy” of fifty years of Soviet occupation
(Lehti, Jutila, and Jokisipilä 2008: 398).
Most studies explaining the relocation of the
Bronze Soldier take only a macro perspective,
ignoring how the political processes involved
resonate with everyday discourses. This article,
based on ethnographic research among predominantly
young and highly educated Estonians in
Tartu from August 2007 until February 2008,
explores the often emotional discourses that
these Estonians have drawn upon to either support
or disapprove of the decision of the Estonian
government to relocate the Bronze Soldier,
and the political interpretations of history in
light of which to understand these discourses.2
Many commentators perceive the post–1989
resurgence of ethnic nationalism as resulting
from deeply rooted national identities, resilient
enough to have survived decades of repression
by anti-national communist regimes (Brubaker
and Cooper 2000: 25). However, this “return-ofthe-oppressed”
view is problematic. “The tendency
to objectify identity makes it more difficult
to treat groupness as an emergent property
of particular structural and conjunctural settings
rather than always there in some form” (ibid.:
28). To avoid this tendency, the article acknowledges
the national political, socio-economic,
and international context.
Most post-socialist countries saw a rise of
populist nationalism after joining the European
Union (EU) in the 2000s. Various authors see
economic insecurity and disillusionment as
underlying causes. The turn to identity and nationalism
seem to follow the discrediting of class
politics after 1989 and the difficulties of mobilizing
on a class basis (Kalb and Halmai 2010;
Ost 2005; on Orientalizing the Other, see Buchowski
2006; Repeckaite, this volume). Estonia
was particularly susceptible to a nationalist reaction
to EU interference. From 1991, the country
has been governed mainly by conservative
parties that emphasized national identity and
Estonia’s sovereignty against anything perceived
to threaten it (Kelley 2004; Saarts 2008).
This article argues that the sudden revival of
World War II and Soviet memories can be understood
in the context of Estonia’s increasing
integration into the West and its conservative,
nationalist policies (Brüggemann and Kasekamp
2008: 431). It explores the declining influence
of Western requirements concerning minority
rights after EU accession, which arguably offered
the Estonian government the opportunity to follow
more confrontational ethnic policies (Saarts
2008). It also shows the necessity to understand
the wider “war of monuments” in Estonia, which
was initiated by the erection of the so-called Lihula
monument in 2004, right after the country’s
accession to the EU. EU criticism of this
monument, which depicted a soldier wearing
Nazi symbols, did not lead to attention for the
lacunae or downsides of national memory making.
Instead it inspired radical, nationalist Estonians
to gain support from the population for
“the Estonian”—culturally exclusionist—interpretation
of World War II. These recent controversial
memory politics in Estonia, externally
being labeled fascistic, have internally not been
perceived as such (Brüggemann and Kasekamp
2008: 425).
Monuments, memories, and identities
Monuments are often studied as lieux de mémoire,
places connecting the past and the present
(Nora 1989). In this article, we do not depart
from the idea of a monument’s “inherent”
meaning, but rather from the processes and
contexts in which people provide meaning to a
monument. Although each person might attach
different meanings to the same monument because
of different life experiences, he/she does
not do so in a social vacuum. The memories
connected with and evoked by certain places
are primarily embedded in “vicarious mem-
34 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
ory”; a perception of history as if one has experienced
it him/herself (Climo 2002). In Estonia,
the family is an important community in which
personal memories and emotions are shared.
Moreover, a wider socially constituted framework
is at work here (Halbwachs 1992), first and
foremost directed by political groups.
History is a key ingredient in identity politics,
mobilized to make certain claims or legitimize
certain decisions and power relations
(Wertsch 2002: 31). By means of commemoration
days, ceremonies, and monuments, political
institutions provide a common framework
to group members to interpret the world that
surrounds them. This framework guides collective
remembering as well as intended and unintended
forgetting. Accordingly, the people that
“write history” hold tremendous power as
providers of social frameworks (Lambek and
Antze 1996). Monuments therefore serve as “effective
symbols for revising the past;” their rearrangement
asserts the recurrence of national
power and humiliates the former master, because
the destruction of a statue symbolically
devaluates the commemorated person or event
from sacred to profane (Verdery 1999: 52).
People interact with such politically written
frameworks, as they long for their stories to be
patterned by a collectively shared (official) narrative.
First, linking their personal memories to
“official” stories provides coherency and a
broader meaning (Jenkins 2004: 127). Second, it
can serve as a form of recognition of the “right”
to live up to the beliefs one keeps (see Fraser
2000). Without recognition, people can feel socially
subordinated and become engaged in an
everlasting struggle for official acknowledgement.
The question “is it possible that what has
happened in the past will repeat itself in the future?”
might haunt them (Hodgkin and Radstone
2003: 99).
A feeling of misrecognition, may even lead
to “egoism of victimization”; little or no empathy
for one’s enemy’s suffering, even if the suffering
on the other side is palpably evident and
comparable to or greater than one’s own (Volkan
2001). This occurs in the case of “chosen traumas,”
when a group does not mourn and slowly
accepts an event, but “chooses” to dwell on and
mythologize the event and the suffering it caused.
Consequently, the memory and its humiliation
are passed on to the next generation (ibid.). The
relocation of the Bronze Soldier involves precisely
such processes.
From World War I to Post-Soviet
Independence
Estonia is a relatively young national state. As
most of Eastern Europe, its territory was ruled
for centuries by non-Estonian-speaking imperial
elites: Germans, Poles, Swedes, and Russians.
At the end of World War I, counterrevolutionary
Estonian nationalists and Russians
fought a War of Independence against Trotsky’s
Red Army. Estonia was declared an independent,
parliamentary republic in 1920 (Hiio, Maripuu,
and Paavle 2006). The new state was politically
unstable, and increasingly influenced by
groups with fascist tendencies. The Estonians
who had fought for independence, commonly
referred to as the freedom fighters or the Vaps
movement, organized themselves in the “Estonian
War of Independence Veterans’ League.”
They instigated the drift toward rightist authoritarianism
in Estonia. Kasekamp (2000) has argued
that it is hard not to label these former
freedom fighters as Nazis, partly because one of
their leaders, Hjalmar Mäe, later became the
head of the collaborationist Estonian Self-Administration
during the German occupation.
Although these former freedom fighters, perceived
in society as patriotic war heroes, were
extremely popular, they did not gain direct political
power as they lacked a charismatic leader
(Kasekamp 2000: 155). In 1934, following political
unrest caused by the global economic depression,
all parties supported President Konstantin
Päts’s declaration of a state of emergency;
an in-house coup d’état to head off the seizure of
power by the proto-fascist/opposition forces.
Subsequently, Päts disbanded the parliament and
established authoritarian leadership. In other
words, Päts put much of the Vaps’ program into
practice (ibid.: 157).
Voicing past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 35
Independence lasted for twenty years until
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed between
the Soviet Union and Germany, in which
Estonia was allocated to the Soviet Union. The
Estonian government resigned and was taken
over by the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle 2006: ix). In
August 1940, the Baltic States officially became
part of the Soviet Union. In the following year,
many Estonians were arrested and deported to
Siberia. The exact number of people deported
during the large-scale deportations in June 1941
has still not been established, but the list of the
Bureau of the Register of the Repressed of Estonia
contains 10,861 names, of which 3,150 people
were executed (Kangilaski et al. 2005: xiii,
27). Between 1939 and 1941, Estonia lost about
100,000 inhabitants of whom 59,967 never returned
(ibid.: 14–15, 28).3
In the summer of 1941, during the battle for
Estonia’s territory between the approaching
German forces and the Soviet Army, thousands
of Estonian men voluntarily served in the German
Army (Kangilaski et al. 2005: 28). After
their victory, the Germans mobilized many nationalistic
Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians
to carry out occupation policies in order to
minimize the need for German resources to attack
the Soviet Union. In Estonia, men opposing
the Soviet Union had already organized
themselves as “Forest Brothers.” Together with
former defense force members, they created the
Omakaitse. Their main aim was to free Estonia
of communists and “other hostile elements.” In
interwar Estonia Jews had been associated with
Communism, and this parallel was revived in
World War II (Kasekamp 2000: 73–74).4
After
October 1942 the Omakaitse was financed by
the Wehrmacht and expanded to a force of
40,000 men (Birn 2001: 181–83).
Omakaitse members (about 1,000–1,200
men out of the 40,000) are held responsible for
many of the killings during these years (Hiio,
Maripuu, and Paavle 2006: xxi). Of the 4,500
Estonian Jews, about 3,500 managed to flee to
the Soviet Union (Brüggemann and Kasekamp
2008). Almost all of the remaining Jews were
killed by the Omakaitse and the Estonian police
(Birn 2001: 188; Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle 2006:
xviii). In 1942, Jews from other Central and
Eastern European countries were brought to Estonia
and those who were not selected to work,
were shot (Birn 2001: 191; Hiio, Maripuu, and
Paavle 2006: xviii). During the war, 8,500 (foreign
and Estonian) Jews lost their lives in Estonia,
61,000 in Latvia, and 195,000 in Lithuania
(Weiss-Wendt 2008: 476). In total, 7,800 Estonian
citizens died during the German occupation,
of whom 15 percent were Russian speakers
and 12 percent were Jews (Kangilaski et al.
2005: 29).
In 1944, the Soviet Army approached the Estonian
border again. Politicians from the prewar
era, among others Jüri Uluots who was in
“authoritative moral opposition to the Naziinstalled
Self-Administration” and had avoided
Nazi collaboration so far, encouraged nearly
40,000 more young Estonians to join the German
Army (Brüggemann and Kasekamp 2008:
427–28). The battle was portrayed as a fight for
Estonian survival, in which the assaults on Jews
and Russian speakers in Estonia were downplayed.
In some instances, Estonian men faced
each other in combat; one fighting for the German
Army, the other for the Soviet forces. In
September 1944, the Soviet Army ended German
rule in Estonia, reincorporating Estonia
into the Soviet Union. The resistance of the Forest
Brothers only decreased after Stalin’s death
in 1953 (ibid.).
World War II played an important role in the
process of building a Soviet state, with World
War II monuments erected all over the territory
(Levinson 1998). The Bronze Soldier was one of
these, unveiled in Tallinn on 22 September 1947.
One year before, an earlier version had been
blown up by two Estonian schoolgirls who disagreed
with the official narrative of Soviet “liberation.”
In the Soviet Union it was difficult for
Estonians and other nationalities to share their
personal memories, because “the public sphere
belonged to the party-state, which appropriated
unto itself the rights to space, privilege, discourse
and communication” (Kligman 1990: 398, as
cited in Watson 1994: 10–11). The (state) politics
of memory, however, was not static between
36 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
1922 and 1989. It was under Stalin’s rule that the
deportations of 1941—and the next mass deportation
wave in 1949 to which 32,536 Estonians
fell victim—took place (Kangilaski et al.
2005: 20). Stalin also drastically revised the
public space, replacing Estonian independence
monuments by Soviet victory monuments. Under
Khrushchev’s leadership, the Soviet regime
embarked on a process of de-Stalinization, denouncing
Stalin’s purges, but this was halted
under Brezhnev. In the 1980s, Gorbachev introduced
glasnost, which paved the way for Estonia’s
independence.
At the end of the 1980s, the Estonian Heritage
Society and victim organizations such as
Memento were founded.5
Another important
symbolic event took place on 23 August 1989.
Nearly two million Estonians, Latvians, and
Lithuanians formed a human chain as a form of
protest from Tallinn to Vilnius, to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop
Pact. In 1991, Estonia (like Lithuania
and Latvia) announced its regained sovereignty
in the aftermath of the failed coup of Kremlin
hardliners against Mikhail Gorbachev.
Estonian historiography
After regaining its independence, Estonia drastically
revised its official history. Many of the
politicians who came to power in 1991 had been
independence fighters (often with a history of
political imprisonment), who used “[h]istory …
to restore a nation-state” (Ahonen 2001: 190).
Especially the National Fatherland Party and
the Estonian National Independence Party were
powerful during these years (Kelley 2004: 95).
Images of Estonia as a post-Soviet state were
dismissed, as politicians presented the country
as historically belonging to “Europe,” in particular
to the Nordic countries.
Certain moments are of particular importance
in Estonia’s current official historiography
(Pääbo 2008: 10). Despite the fact that the sovereign
government of the first period of Estonian
independence after 1920 was unstable and
the country was enduring the economic depression
of the 1930s, today the independence period
is remembered as a time of economic growth
and democratic progress, abruptly ended in 1940
by the first Soviet occupation (Kõresaar 2005).
The mass deportations are another crucial
event in Estonia’s historiography. The national
sufferings caused by these deportations explain
why many Estonians welcomed the Germans as
liberators (Brüggemann and Kasekamp 2008:
427), and why so many fought for and alongside
the Germans when the Soviet Army returned.
These men that were called fascists during the
Soviet period, were honored as freedom fighters
after 1991 (ibid.: 428).
In light of these national sufferings, a chapter
on the Holocaust is completely absent from
Estonian historiography. Unlike in Latvia and
Lithuania, it has never become a subject of debate.
According to Weiss-Wendt (2008: 475),
“[m]ost Estonians think of the Holocaust as a
superimposed discourse that has no direct connection
to their country.” The intense remembering
of the suffering during Soviet times and
the partial forgetting of the sufferings under
Nazi rule—although the dominant discourse
does say that both regimes were “equally evil”—
has created an atmosphere in which people remember
the Soviet era as one long period of
repression. Exactly this discourse of victimhood
has become part of Estonian nationhood, which
implies that public Soviet nostalgia is still a problematic
and taboo issue (Grünberg 2009).
Another controversial question concerns 22
September 1944, the day the Soviet Army entered
Tallinn. According to the Soviet narrative,
the Red Army liberated Estonia from the Nazis
that day. Estonian historiography tells a different
story; Estonians had restored their independence
a few days before the Soviet Union
invaded, therefore it was an occupation and not
a liberation (Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle 2006;
Kattago 2009; Pääbo 2008). Thus an important
question arises with respect to the status of the
Russian minority: Were they liberators or occupants
of Estonia?
The politicians that came to power in 1991
tried to restore Estonia as the nation it had been
in the interwar period. This idealized image was
Voicing past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 37
used as a legitimization for a policy that did not
entitle Russians who had come to Estonia after
16 June 1940 to Estonian citizenship (Kelley
2004: 95). In symbolic terms, members of the
Russian minority were classified as illegal occupants
and lacked a positive place in the country’s
history (Ahonen 2001: 180). Surveys conducted
in 1994 indicate that young Russophones felt
excluded from history (Angvik 1997). Besides
this symbolical exclusion, their statelessness
also reduced the official power of the Russian
minority, as many were not able to vote or represent
themselves in politics (Kelley 2004: 95).
By 2002, nearly 180,000 of the Russian speakers
were still stateless (Feldman 2006: 691). In Lithuania,
the citizenship policies have been much
more liberal than in Estonia (and Latvia), granting
citizenship to everyone who applied for it
(Onken 2007: 40).
Differences in valuing
World War II memorials
As part of the ideal to restore Estonia as it was
before 1940, many of the demolished independence
monuments were re-erected and Soviet
statues were either removed or changed after
1991. In the case of the Bronze Soldier, the
plaque that read “Eternal glory for the heroes
who have fallen for the liberation and sovereignty
of our country” was replaced with the
more neutral “For the fallen in World War II.” It
was in this context, in 1995, that the “Youth and
History” surveys were conducted, in which data
was gathered on the importance that people attach
to World War II memorials.6
Figure 1
places the evaluation of WWII memorials in
Estonia in relation to the evaluation in thirty
different countries.
38 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
Figure 1. Importance of the preservation of World War II memorials,
based on the “Youth and History” survey, 1995
Figure 1 shows that compared to other Europeans,
Estonians evaluated the preservation of
World War II memorials averagely (fifteenth
place), whereas this was highly important to
Russians (fifth place). However, when the Estonian
population is split into ethnic Estonians
and Estonian Russians, a remarkable difference
is visible: the black dot represents the Estonians,
the white dot the Russian minority. The data
shows that for Estonian Russians the preservation
of World War II memorials was even more
important than for Russians living in Russia.
Hence, the discrepancy within Estonia was
much larger than between Russia and Estonia.
The Estonian Russians were probably more
aware of “the Russian perspective” on the past
as it distinguished the minority from the Estonians
among whom it was living (Jenkins 2004).
Moreover, the figure shows that no single Western
European country, where World War II memorials
are mainly monuments intended for the
victims, evaluates them less than ethnic Estonians
do, where they are dedicated to (often Soviet)
heroes. Generally, a clear gap between postcommunist
and Western European countries is
visible. Below, based on the interview data, the
article will delve further into the divergent ways
of memory making and explain these differences
in the evaluation of monuments.
From the mid-1990s on, after these data were
gathered, the political climate in Estonia changed
slightly. Although the government was still
rightwing-oriented and nationalist, it was relatively
moderate concerning ethnic issues (Kelley
2004: 97). The EU accession requirements in
terms of minority rights arguably played an important
role in enforcing a more moderate
stance (Saarts 2008). Further, many Estonians
understood that the minority was not leaving
and that practical solutions had to be found to
establish peaceful coexistence. Also, Russian
“non-citizens” increasingly passed the language
test and became Estonian citizens. By the turn
of the millennium, the tense relationship decreased
even further, when the economy took
an upturn and relations with Russia started to
normalize. People were more oriented toward
material wealth and the future than toward their
past experiences (Anepaio 2002: 55; Ehala 2009:
151). The Bronze Soldier managed to survive
the rearrangement of public space in the 1990s,
aside from the replaced plaque and the removed
eternal flame (Kaasik 2006).
Memory politics from 2004 to 2007
The Estonian Geschichtspolitik entered a new
phase when the country joined the EU in 2004.
The requirements to meet European “standards
of multiculturalism” were portrayed in local
media as a new possible threat to Estonian sovereignty.
This was part of the more general fear
that Estonia as a small country would lose its regained
independence from Moscow to the new
paternalism from Brussels (Mikkel and Kasekamp
2008). According to Saarts (2008), the
eventual entry into the EU ended the external
pressure on minority rights issues, paving the
way for a more nationalist stance.
In 2002, Estonian veterans who had served
in the German Army erected a monument for
their fallen compatriots, but the city authorities
dismantled it before its unveiling. In 2004, just
after entering the EU, those veterans did succeed
in erecting the monument in Lihula,
which had a more confrontational mayor
(Burch and Smith 2007: 913). The monument
portrayed an Estonian soldier in a uniform with
Nazi insignia (see Figure 2). The inscription
read: “Estonian men who fought in 1940–1945
against Bolshevism and for the restoration of
Estonian independence” (Lehti, Jutila, and Jokisipilä
2008: 398). The state authorities were invited
to the unveiling ceremony but did not
attend. Prime Minister Juhan Parts stated that
although he honors the Estonian World War II
soldiers, the monument was a provocation and
at odds with “real history” (Brüggemann and
Kasekamp 2008: 431–32).
The BBC covered the event under a headline:
“Estonia unveils Nazi War Monument”
(Brüggemann and Kasekamp 2008: 432). Under
widespread protest and pressure from the EU,
as well as from Russia and Jewish organizations,
the Estonian government decided to remove the
Voicing past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 39
statue. Nationalist Estonians experienced the
demand for dismantlement as a lack of understanding
by Western Europeans of the Estonian
experiences in World War II (Burch and Smith
2007: 914), and felt ignored by their national
government that obeyed the “external” requests.
It was in this context that new organizations
were founded to preserve “Estonian” culture.
The relationship between Estonians and Russophones
moreover became tenser due to certain
political decisions taken at that time. In 2006,
Estonian president Arnold Rüütel announced—
despite contrary advice from members of Estonia’s
cultural elite—that he would not attend the
sixtieth commemoration of the victory over
Nazism in Moscow. He stated that the end of
World War II did not mean liberty for Estonians
(see Onken 2007). This was fuel for the Estonian
Russians who felt ignored as full members
of Estonian society. As the Soviet victory in
World War II became more central to Russian
identity, the Bronze Soldier and Soviet symbols
became increasingly important for these Russian
speakers. The eagerness to remove the
statue from the city center grew among nationalist
Estonians (Ehala 2009: 145). The memory
conflict slowly escalated.
On 9 May 2006, the day the Russians commemorate
the end of World War II, some radical
Estonians came to wave the Estonian flag
and put red paint on the soldier’s face. The police
removed these Estonians from the Russian
40 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
Figure 2. Lihula monument at its current location in the Museum of Fight for Estonia’s Freedom,
source: Wikipedia, DJ Sturm, 23 June 2008
crowd. In order to prevent more vandalism to
the Bronze Soldier, some young Russian speakers
organized a night watch to guard the monument
(Lehti, Jutila, and Jokisipilä 2008: 399).
The next year in the run-up to the national elections
in March, the Reform Party made the removal
of the monument an election promise,
playing into and reinforcing the sentiments of
insecurity, dissatisfaction, and fear among part
of the Estonians, while bypassing the Nationalist
Party on the right side (Pääbo 2008). A law
was adopted to remove the monument and
shortly after that, the Reform Party became the
largest party in the elections.
On 26 April 2007, less than two weeks before
the Victory Day celebrations, Estonian authorities
put a huge tent over the monument to investigate
the bodies buried under it. This act
was perceived as offensive by (mainly young)
radical Russophones and the timing was seen as
a provocation. Russia, which had become assertive
due to its recovering economy and energybased
power, actively used its Russian language
media to play into the fears and dissatisfaction
of Estonian Russians. This further fueled the
Estonian discourse of threat, as Estonian Russians
who demonstrated and threw stones were
described as instruments of the Kremlin (Lehti,
Jutila, and Jokisipilä 2008). At the last minute
(at 3.40 a.m.), the government decided to immediately
remove the whole statue. For two
more nights, people were rioting in the streets;
one young Russian died in the chaos.
The meaning of the Bronze Soldier
for ordinary Estonians
Ethnographic fieldwork in Tartu from August
2007 until February 2008 revealed that the perVoicing
past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 41
Figure 3. Bronze Soldier at its current location at Tallinn war cemetery,
source: Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, 9 May 2007
sonal stories of ordinary Estonians to either support
or disapprove of the Bronze Soldier’s relocation,
clearly reflect the public discourses of
insecurity and victimhood.7
Tatyana, a twentyyear-old
Estonian Russian woman stated:
“The Bronze Soldier is more than just a symbol,
he is somehow holy. That is because it is so
closely connected to the history of our nation.
In World War II all Russians suffered a lot.
There has been no family without sufferings.
My grandfather died, my great grandparents
died, other family members had to flee.”
Indeed, the Soviet Union suffered severely during
World War II. In that sense, the Bronze Soldier
has revealed a competition for victimhood
of the Russian and the Estonian people. Tatyana
emphasized not only the victimhood of Russians
but also their victory, portraying the
Bronze Soldier as a “liberator”: “My grandparents
fought for our liberty, they gave their lives.”
This symbolism is experienced as threatening
by some Estonians, because they perceive
continuity between the former Soviet discourse
and the perceived “false” memory of presentday
Russians. For instance, Ülle, an Estonian
woman in her mid-sixties, drew a parallel between
the cruel Soviet soldiers and the Russian
minority, while legitimating her approval of the
relocation:
“It stood there all the time to honor the Soviet
soldiers … that started here to torture children
and grownups and mothers and fathers. Such
awful memories to [sic] these soldiers who said
that they brought liberty. They gathered here on
every victory day in the night and they said bad
words, drank a lot, and shouted, and so on.”
Note that Ülle did not differentiate between the
“Soviet soldiers who tortured” (“they”) and the
people who gathered near the Bronze Soldier.
The Estonian Russians as successors of the Soviets
are held responsible for past suffering.
Moreover, implicitly, unpleasant but not physically
threatening behavior of Estonian Russians,
is linked to Soviet violence and torture. In this
way, she created a discourse in which the relocation
of the monuments is totally “justified”;
Russian speakers had no right to complain, after
what “they” had done to “us.”
Further note that Ülle was not yet born in
1941 during the first time the Soviets took over
the country and the first large-scale deportations
took place, and she was still young when
the Soviet Army returned to Estonia. Nevertheless,
she spoke about “memories,” due to the
sense of “vicarious memory” (Climo 2002). The
emotional bond between family members allows
the incorporation of someone else’s memories
as one’s own. This sense of “memory” is
further reinforced by the tendency to see the
Soviet era as one homogeneous period. Many of
the informants did not distinguish between
Stalinism and the Soviet regime at large. Thus,
by having experienced some part of the Soviet
era, they feel they were part of the early period
of Soviet repression as well.
Interesting in this regard is that none of our
Estonian informants regarded him/herself as
(post-)Soviet, although Estonia was part of the
Soviet system for nearly five decades. Many Estonians
present their relationship toward “Europe”
and democracy as a definitive break with
being (post-)Soviet, as becomes clear from the
following statement on an Estonian blog discussing
the Bronze Soldier riots:
“It’s about choosing whether you want to be a
‘Soviet person,’ homo sovieticus [sic] who has
no respect for anything and spits on it all, or
whether you want to be a law-abiding person
living in [the] democratic Estonian Republic,
member state of the European Union and
NATO.”8
In this context Soviet is associated with notions
such as backward and non-European, a tendency
Buchowski describes as “internal Orientalism”
(2006; see also Repeckaite, this volume). Soviets
are depicted as people who do not respect European
values and Estonia’s sovereignty.
Here it becomes clear how the public discourse
on minority issues from the early 1990s
resonates in the everyday life of ordinary peo-
42 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
ple. The decision not to grant automatic citizenship
to Russians living or even born in Estonia
was legitimized by depicting the Estonian Russians
as remnants of “illicit colonization” (Brüggemann
and Kasekamp 2008: 429). Assimilation
of the minority was presented as the natural
order of things in a European country, whereas
EU pleas for more attention for values of multiculturalism
and diversity were presented as a
misunderstanding of history and a threat to the
new independence of Estonia.9
The questioned ability of Estonian Russians
to speak Estonian, which is an official requirement
to obtain citizenship, was a frequently
mentioned topic in discussing the relocation of
the Bronze Soldier. Apparently, the link between
the April riots and integration issues was easily
made. Linda (21 years old) for example narrated
about the “unwillingness” of Russians to adapt.
“I once went to buy a white bread in Tallinn, but
the lady behind the desk was not able to understand
me. I can’t even speak Estonian in my
own country!” Not learning the language is perceived
as a sign of disrespect.
Although the need for assimilation, and especially
language competency, was not disputed
by our informants, some of them had a more
nuanced view on the minority’s willingness to
learn Estonian and on its level of Estonian fluency.
Sirje (25 years old) did not complain
about the poor integration of the Estonian Russians.
Just like Maie (21 years old), she stressed
that “the Russians who live in Estonia are part
of Estonia also. … They also want to learn Estonian.”
In contrast, Aino (21 years old) and
Linda, who approved of the relocation, stressed
that the Russian minority “does not want to”
learn the language.10
They linked this perceived
non-assimilation to a discourse of threat and
insecurity.
The discourse of threat
The idea that allowing an open society with diverse
forms of memory-making would be a symbolic,
or even physical and political threat to
Estonian sovereignty, was reinforced by government
actions such as sending text messages to
all citizens to stay at home during the Bronze
soldier riots, and a mounting public discourse
of threat and fear. The Russian minority is not
only being held responsible for the Soviet atrocities
or for bringing up unwanted memories. In
addition, the Estonian Russians, most of whom
changed from “privileged migrants” (before
1991) into a “disenfranchised ethnic minority”
without any political power or economic dominance,
are presented as a threat.
Tiina (32 years old) narrated the sense of
panic and threat she felt during the Bronze Soldier
conflicts:
“In April I walked around in Tartu and I was
thinking that ‘I don’t want Tartu to be destroyed
again’. … Then I realized how easy it is to destroy
something. It takes maybe one or two days
and it is gone, again.”
Tiina was mainly concerned about the fragility
of Estonia, and did not make explicit references
to international security. In other narratives, just
as in the public discourse, the supposed threat
of internal “disloyalty” of Estonian Russians,
molded with discourses of international insecurity—the
threat of the Russian state. Linda stated:
“We are afraid that we will be smashed again,
just like this, so easily.” Jüri (23 years old) stated;
“We have this smaller country next to giant
Russia. That is why we have a bigger sense of
danger.” Andres’s (50 years old) main fear was
Russia’s unreliability: “Many Estonians experience
a feeling of threat from Russia. [Because]
Russia made serious decisions.” For example,
Russia restricted cross-border trade, “attacked”
Estonian websites, and stopped Russian trains
from crossing the Russian-Estonian border
(Brüggemann and Kasekamp 2008; Kattago
2009). Some Estonians even drew up an escape
plan because of their fears.“My mother really has
a plan. She is an absolutely normal and smart
person … She has a plan of escaping when the
Russians come.” Tiina, her mother, and grandmother
believed that the “war of monuments”
could escalate into a real war between Estonia
and Russia.
Voicing past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 43
A few informants had an alternative view.
Those Estonians that did not support the relocation
did not express discourses of fear, continuity
of suffering, or negative attitudes toward
the (Estonian) Russians. For Sirje the relocation
was not necessary: “I didn’t experience the Estonian
independence in a state of loss. … I have
this feeling of security and believe in our government.”
Like Anne (24 years old), she did not
see the Russian minority as (former) perpetrators
but as victims, hence not forming a threat
at all. Anne even felt sorry for the Estonian Russians;
in general they are not treated equally and
now the Estonian government decided to remove
their memorial. The difference in opinions
can be partially explained by the fact that
both Anne and Sirje clearly distinguished between
the Soviet authorities and the current
Russian minority. They differentiated between
Estonian Russians who were “brainwashed” by
the Kremlin and those who were “normal,” and
between Estonians who were “brainwashed” by
Toompea and “normal” Estonians.11
Despite these more critical stances, within
the public discourse there has been little space
for alternative voices.12
It should be noted that
because of Estonia’s small population, there is
quite some overlap between politicians and the
cultural and academic elite. For instance, Mart
Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia and
currently member of parliament, is also an influential
historian who fights for the “acknowledgment
of communist crimes.” The strong influence
the elite have on the development of the
discourse of continuity and threat became apparent
from Andrus Ansip’s claim that he could
not have decided otherwise with regard to the
removal of the monument, because that would
mean that “Estonia was still a Soviet state” (Liiv
2007). People with more nuanced views felt
muted. Sirje once said that she preferred to keep
her ideas to herself rather than have people
think that she was not a “real” Estonian.
The discourse of being misunderstood
In the public debate on Tallinn’s World War II
memorial, most attention went to Estonia’s relation
with Russians and its Soviet past. However,
Western Europe also played a significant role,
and not only for those who approved of the relocation.
For instance, Sirje—who is liberal in
her ideas toward Russians—stated: “For us, the
deeds and the crimes of the Nazis and the communists
are both bad. But Western Europe isn’t
very eager to comprehend it.” She experienced
little understanding from Western Europeans
when it came to the Estonian sufferings in World
War II.
Besides being misrecognized in their sufferings,
many Estonians often feel to be misunderstood
in the EU when it comes to the issue of
Nazi collaboration (Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle
2006). David Feest (2007: 253) quotes the common
argument in Estonia: “We didn’t fight with
the Germans but against Communism.” This
rhetoric of being misunderstood by the West
was omnipresent in the Lihula monument discussions.
Besides, this was also an internal issue;
veteran groups who had fought with the
German Army were disappointed that the national
government had openly expressed its opposition
to the Lihula monument (Brüggemann
and Kasekamp 2008: 425). Therefore, the erection
of this monument could be seen as an
attempt to be heard, both nationally and internationally
(see Fraser 2000).
Instead, the Lihula monument did not lead
to recognition, but to widespread international
dismissal from Jewish, European, and Russian
sides. In the struggle for recognition that followed,
attention was soon directed toward the
Bronze Soldier: if Estonia was not allowed to
erect the Lihula monument because it represents
a totalitarian regime, then surely the Bronze
Soldier ought to be removed too (Burch and
Smith 2007: 914). Such a comparison revealed a
rivalry of victimhood, in which the victims of
communism felt displaced by the internationally
acknowledged sufferings of Jews in the
Holocaust (Logan and Reeves 2009: 11; see also
Darieva 2008). This public discourse appeared
in personal narratives as well. For instance,
when Andres was asked what he thought about
the Soviet statues in Estonia, he answered by
making a comparison with what he regarded
to be a Western European frame of reference:
44 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
“What would you think if there would still be
statues of Hitler in the Netherlands?” And to reinforce
his point, he added that percentage-wise
more Estonians became victims of the Soviet
rule than Jews in the Holocaust.
Although the comparison between Estonian
victims and Holocaust victims is highly disputable
from a Western European perspective
(see Levy and Sznaider 2002), this rhetoric is
widely accepted in Estonia. For instance, Aino
indignantly asked why the Nazi flag is forbidden
and the Soviet one is not. The term “Bronze
Night” (the night in which the Bronze Soldier
was removed) refers to the 1938 Kristallnacht
(Kattago 2009), constructing a parallel between
the attack of the Nazis on the Jews and the “attack”
of the Russian speakers on the Estonians.
It is ironic that this comparison is being drawn
between Estonians, the majority and politically
dominant group, and Jews, who were a disempowered
minority group in Germany at the
time of the attack.
The decision to relocate the Bronze Soldier
implicitly asked for a comment from Western
Europe and could be interpreted as a quest for
understanding: Do they allow us to act according
to our interpretations of history? Aino
stated about the reaction:
“I was really glad that the foreign media was on
the Estonian side. I read a lovely article on BBC:
‘stop bullying the Baltics.’ I don’t like the US
usually but then one high politician called Andrus
Ansip and told him that the Americans are
on our side.”
For Aino and many other Estonians, the reaction
of Western European countries toward the
relocation of the Bronze Soldier was accepted
with relief, as a gesture of recognition, and as
support for Estonia’s international security.
To the Estonians who supported the relocation,
the power struggle with their perceived
“former occupant” had finally been won. As
Aino expressed it: “The most important thing is
that the statue has been removed and we got
what we want.” Yet, the result of the relocation
was not a settlement of power relations. Instead,
it increased ethnic tensions, aggravating the political
polarization that inspired the relocation
in the first place. Moreover, the discourse of
not being understood by the EU, framed in an
(in)security discourse of not being protected
against Russia, should be studied more closely.
In fact, Feldman (2006) showed, based on his
fine-grained ethnographic research in Estonian
and EU diplomacy circles, that despite (or partially
thanks to) its small size, Estonia was actually
quite successful in aligning the EU with its
discourse of Russia’s threat. The Western support
for the relocation of the Bronze Soldier
monument further confirmed this.
Conclusions
After the fall of communism, all former Soviet
republics in some way or another had to deal
with their Soviet heritage. The conservative
parties that came to power in Estonia promoted
the restoration of interwar Estonia, with a strict
policy on granting citizenship. Such strictness
was determined necessary because of the history
of the Independence War, the Nazi slaughters
and brutal Soviet deportations, Estonia’s
geopolitical situation and its large Russian minority.
The discourse legitimizing the strict policy—depicting
the Soviet period as an illegal
occupation and the current Russian minority
as its descendant—created a highly contentious
situation when the national government decided
to relocate the Bronze Soldier from the
center of Tallinn.
This article has investigated how this political
decision resonates within the meanings that
ordinary Estonians attach to this World War II
memorial. It has argued that emotional discourses
on identity and memories that many
Estonians drew upon to support the relocation,
at first sight look like a direct result of the unleashing
of a robust ethnic identity repressed by
the Soviet system. However, as Brubaker and
Cooper (2000: 25) have argued, such a “returnof-the-repressed
view” is problematic as it is a
discursive tool of policymakers that should be
analyzed as such.
Accordingly, the emotional dimensions of
personal stories of Estonians have not been
Voicing past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 45
steady, but have been strongly influenced by political
conjunctures and EU admission.13
As a
result, Estonia saw a resurgence of ethnic identification
and anti-Soviet memories in the years
following independence in 1991, a subsequent
abating of identity issues in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, and a renewed rise of such issues
from 2004 on, culminating in the removal of
the Bronze Soldier.
The embedding of personal stories in the
public discourse became apparent from the
links drawn through time—the perceived continuity
between Soviet atrocities and the behavior
of the current Russian minority, and levels of
agency—the perceived threat by Russia, which
is translated in a threat by Estonian Russian citizens.
The diversity that was present in the public
discursive sphere was polarized along ethnic
lines. However, this article has shown that more
critical opinions exist as well at the micro-level
within the Estonian community. The Estonian
informants who held another view felt muted
by the dominant public discourse.
The discourse on World War II and the Soviet
era, which many Estonians drew upon to
support the relocation, shows some remarkable
paradoxes. First, whereas the Bronze Soldier
was removed with the argument that Estonians
no longer wanted to be reminded of the Soviet
occupation, the relocation did not make the Soviet-era
sufferings disappear from the public
sphere, but instead brought them to the forefront.
In fact, one could argue that suffering has
been a central notion of nation-building in Estonia
(cf. Darieva 2008), even more in a discourse
of “double victimhood” (see Cappelletto
2005: 115). It seems that in addition to the discourse
of national suffering, the perceived misrecognition
of this suffering by significant
others has been an important aspect of national
identity in this young state. Volkan (2001)
spoke of a “chosen trauma,” with the related lack
of empathy for the suffering of others—the Estonian
Russians and the Jews.
There is a second paradox related to the perceived
break with the past. The dominant Estonian
discourse sharply distinguishes itself from
both the Soviet era and contemporary Russian
memory-making. Nevertheless, underneath its
apparent distinctions, the Estonian discourse
shows some striking commonalities with both
discourses.
First, the discourse sketches the Soviet era as
one homogeneous period, with little distinction
between Stalinism, with its repression and deportations,
and the later Soviet years. The whole
Soviet era is characterized with one overarching
terminology; repressive, in the case of the Estonians,
and nostalgic for the (older) Estonian
Russians. Second, the Estonian discourse, just
as official discourses in the Soviet period,
strives for a monolithic vision of World War II
memory, with clear distinctions between heroes
and victims. Third, the Holocaust gets little attention.
In the Soviet era, Stalin stated that the
mass murder of Jews was the suffering of Soviet
citizens; thus arguing that the Russians suffered
most (Snyder 2009: 2). The Jewish suffering is
still a neglected topic in the Estonian discourse,
as well as within the Russian one, except when
it becomes applicable as a means to challenge
the Estonian discourse of suffering.
Despite these similarities with Soviet and
Russian discourses, many Estonians have turned
their backs to the East and are facing the West
in their attempts for recognition. Together with
some other Eastern European countries, Estonia
has tried to make its history—especially
with regard to the Soviet atrocities—part of the
European memory. In 2009, the Estonian Member
of the European Parliament (MEP) Tunne
Kelam—together with MEPs from other postcommunist
countries—tabled a motion for the
institutionalization of a European-wide commemoration
day for victims of all totalitarian
regimes, thus asking Western Europeans to condemn
the communist crimes officially, just as
they have done with the Nazi crimes (Kelam
2010). Although this adoption was accompanied
by firm discussions on equating Nazism and
communism and on the overshadowing of
Holocaust memories, eventually the majority of
the European Parliament voted in favor and in
April 2009, the resolution was adopted.
The Estonian government, as well as our informants,
have focused their attention on dia-
46 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
logue with and recognition from the West.
However, a future of less contentious memorymaking
within the country primarily depends
on improvements in the dialogue with Estonian
Russians, as well as with Russia. A more open
internal discussion on how the communist past
ought to be remembered publicly would be fruitful,
as was the case in the creation of Budapest’s
Statue Park (Nadkarni 2003: 202).
Some recent political developments occurred
in relation to Russia that provide an
opening for a constructive dialogue on the past,
not only in relation to Europe but within Estonia
as well. The invitation to the Polish government
to attend the ceremony to honor the victims
of the massacre in Katyn in April 2010 was
an important step by Russia in acknowledging
the suffering caused by Stalinist repression. The
compassion expressed by the Russian premier
and ordinary Russians after the plane crash that
took lives of the Polish elite on the way to the
ceremony, gave another opportunity for rapprochement.
In the spring of 2010, Russian president
Dmitry Medvedev publicly denounced the
crimes by Stalin, which led Mart Laar to award
him a prize in the framework of “European
Memory and Reconciliation”. The visit of the
Estonian president to the World War II remembrance
in Moscow in May 2010, was another
signal of willingness to build a better relationship
and a less contentious memory-making.
Under communism, wrote Jacques Rupnik
(1989), the future was certain; it was the past no
one could be sure of. In post-communist Estonia,
the future might be less sure, but the past
still remains very much in flux.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Janine Klungel for her support
with the analysis and, together with Mathijs
Pelkmans, for strengthening the focus of this
article. They also thank Jeroen Moes for the
many fruitful discussions on the topic. Also,
thanks to Alice Campbell, Detelina Tocheva,
and the reviewers of Focaal for their detailed
comments.
Inge Melchior is a PhD student in Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the VU University,
Amsterdam. She works on memory politics in
Estonia. She holds a research master’s degree in
social and cultural science from the Radboud
University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Email: I.Melchior@vu.nl.
Oane Visser is assistant professor at the Department
of Anthropology and Development Studies
(Radboud University of Nijmegen, The
Netherlands). He conducts research on Russia
and the former Soviet Union, in particular on
rural transformations. He has published articles
in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Europe-Asia
Studies, Focaal, and numerous edited volumes.
Notes
1. Data for this article was gathered by Inge Mel-
chior.
2. The focus is merely on the ethnic Estonians
(not including Estonian Russians) because this
allows to study the issue more in-depth.
3. According to ZEV committee (the Center for
searching and Returning the Deported Persons)
data.
4. Conversely, the state had passed a very progressive
law (1925), providing the Estonian Jewish
community with cultural autonomy (Kasekamp
2000: 73–74).
5. The first organization was founded by Trivimi
Velliste, a driving force behind the regaining of
independence and currently Member of Parliament;
the second one by, among others, Aadu
Oll (1932–2003), former political prisoner
whose family was deported.
6. The question was: Imagine a highway is to be
built. What is the importance of the preservation
of a World War II memorial? (1 = very little,
5 = very much), number of respondents =
29,463.
7. The research by Melchior included participant
observation, informal conversations, and indepth
interviews with informants selected
through snowball sampling.
8. Blog “What I think of the Riots in Estonia,” 30
April 2007, http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/
Voicing past and present uncertainties: The relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial | 47
2007/04/ what_i_think_of_the_riots_in_e.html
#comment-168064.
9. This is not to say that these values of multiculturalism
are widely shared in Western EU countries.
There are many parallels between the
right-wing negative sentiments in Eastern EU
countries toward the “old” minorities, and toward
migrants in the West (see, e.g., Kalb and
Halmai 2010).
10. Estonian is a difficult language for Russian
speakers because it is unrelated to Slavic (or
Germanic) languages.
11. “Kremlin” refers to the Russian government,
“Toompea” to the Estonian one.
12. Societal initiatives were supportive of state policy.
Aino, for instance, mentioned that a fund
was opened to thank the men who volunteered
as policemen during the riots. It was not clear to
what extent these initiatives were grassroots initiatives
or organized by the political and/or economic
elite.
13. For the influence of politics and populist election
campaigning on the relocation of a Soviet
“liberator” monument in the Czech Republic,
see Svašek (1995: 120).
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50 | Inge Melchior and Oane Visser
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