Abstract
This chapter broadens the focus in order to also include those among the interwar generation who experienced their country being transformed into a Soviet republic. This will, however, be done by continuously contrasting the values of these “home” Estonians with their exile communities in order to encircle the specific civic profile of the first group. I have already mentioned in the introductory chapter that the data reported on this group is less straightforward to interpret, since the home Estonians were interviewed after yet another institutional change had taken place: the regaining of independence and democracy in Estonia. Nevertheless, in order to pinpoint crucial questions about cultural responses to institutional change, the present-day civic commitment and political culture of this group are interesting sources. What is captured is, however, clearly not only the impact of Sovietization but of post-Communist realities as well.
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Notes
Alex Inkeles, 1968, Social Change in Soviet Russia, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, xii.
Archie Brown, 1974, Soviet Politics and Political Science, London: Macmillan,
in Archie Brown and Jack Gray (eds.), 1977/79, Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, London and New York: Macmillan;
Stephen White, 1979, Political Culture and Soviet Politics, London: Macmillan;
Archie Brown (ed.), 1984, Political Culture and Communist Studies, London: St. Anthony’s/Macmillan Series.
Vera Dunham, 1976, In Stalin’s Time. Middleclass values in Soviet fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Mary McCauley, 1984, “Political Culture and Communist Politics: One Step Forward Two Steps Back,” in Archie Brown (ed.), 1984, Political Culture and Communist Studies;
Martin McCauley, 1993, The Soviet Union 1917–1991 (second ed.), London: Longham Publishers.
Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, 1993, The Baltic States. Years of Dependence 1940–1990, London: Hurst and Company, 70–71.
Tõnu Parming and Elmar Järvesoo, 1978, A Case Study of a Soviet Republic. The Estonian SSR, Boulder: Colorado, Westview Press, 6;
Walter Kolartz, 1953, Russia and Her Colonies, London: George Philip and Son Ltd, 112.
Cf. Mart Laar, 1992, War in the Woods. Estonia’s Struggle for Survival 1944–1956, Washington DC: The Compass Press, 53.
Kolartz, Walter, 1953, Russia and her Colonies, 108;
Brian D. Silver, 1978, “Language Policy and the Linguistic Russification of Soviet Nationalities,” Jeremy R. Azreel (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices, New York: Praeger Publishers, 250.
Eders Wimbusch, 1978, “The Great Russians and the Soviet State: The Dilemmas of Ethnic Dominance,” in Azrael (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices, 350.
Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993, The Baltic States. Years of Dependence 1940–1990, 127. It should be noted that the author Rein Taagepera himself was an exile Estonian who had no reason to underestimate the role of the Diaspora.
For example, Jan-Åke Dellenbrant, 1991, “The Re-Emergence of Multi-Partism in the Baltic States,” in Sten Bergund and Jan-Åke Dellenbrant (eds.), The New Democracies in Eastern Europe. Party Systems and Political Cleavages, Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 84.
Misiunas and Taagepera, The Baltic States, 1993, 130.
Ole Norgaard (ed.), 1994, De baltiske lande efter uavhengigheten. Hvorfor så forskellige? Århus: Politica, 32.
Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhon, 1957, How the Soviet System Works. Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 214.
Amir Weiner, 2006, “The Empires Pay a Visit: Gulag Returnees, East European Rebellions, and Soviet Frontier Politics,” Journal of Modern History, 78, June: 333–376.
In this respect, there was a crucial difference between Estonia and her Baltic neighbor Latvia, the consequences of which may provide a partial explanation for the greater difficulties Latvia experiences today in establishing functioning state structures and public administration. While the Estonian Communist-Party (CP) could continue to serve, albeit cautiously, as a safeguard and defender of Estonian interests against the Russian central government, the end of the 1950s witnessed a large purge of homegrown Latvian Communists within the Latvian CP. The central Party’s harsh reaction followed attempts by the Latvian CP to “latvianize” the party and establish stronger Latvian control over local industries. The 1959 purge placed Latvia in an even worse position than before, since it effectively erased the Latvian CP’s chances of defending Latvian interests. (Anatol Lieven, 1993, The Baltic Revolution. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence, New Haven: Yale University Press, 97;
Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993, The Baltic States. Years of Dependence 1940–1990, 145–146). “Many Latvians attribute the caution of Latvian moves to independence, and the poor quality of much of the Latvian establishment in our own time, to the lingering effects of the purge of 1959–60,” writes Lieven (97). It is pointed out that the large purge affected not only the national but also the regional and municipal levels, and that several thousand indigenous Party representatives were excluded. “The pattern of disproportially low representation of native-born Latvians in leadership positions was parallelled at lower levels,” conclude Misiunas and Taagepera (146).
Toivo Raun, 1997, “Estonia: Independence Redefined,” in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras (eds.), New States, New Politics. Building the Post-Soviet Nations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 410.
Seweryn Bialer, 1988, “The Conditions of Stability in the Soviet Union,” in Terry Thompson and Richard Sheldon (eds.), Soviet Society and Culture. Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, Boulder: Westview Press, 256.
Inkeles, Social Change in Soviet Russia, 83. Cf. Aili Aarelaid-Tart, 2000, “Political Generations in Estonia: A Historical Background to the Formation of the Contemporary Political Scene,” in Janina Frentzel-Zagórska and Jacek Wasilewski (eds.), The Second Generation of Democratic Elites in Central and Eastern Europe, Warsawa: Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences.
For the expression “communities of memories” see Robert N. Bellah et al., 1985, Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley: University of California Press.
James R. Millar, 1988, “The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism,” in Terry Thompson and Richard Sheldon (eds.), Soviet Society and Culture. Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, Boulder: Westview Press, 6.
Tõnu Parming and Elmar Järvesoo, 1978, A Case study of a Soviet Republic. The Estonian SSR, Boulder: Colorado, Westview Press, xiii.
Mikko Lagerspetz, Erle Rikmann, and Rein Ruutsoo, 2002, “The Structure and Resources of NGOs in Estonia,” Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, vol. 13, no. 1, March, 73–87.
Marju Lauristin and Triin Vihalemm, 1997, “Estonian and Swedish Values,” in Marju Lauristin and Peter Vihalemm (eds.), Return to the Western World. Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian Post-Communist Transition, Estonia: Tartu University Press, 253.
Lennart Weibull and Sören Holmberg, 1997, “Two Young Democracies and an Old One,” in Lauristin and Vihalemm (eds.), Return to the Western World, 216.
Peter Vihalemm, Marju Lauristin, and Ivar Tallo, 1997, “Development of Political Culture in Estonia,” in Lauristin and Vihalemm (eds.), Return to the Western World, 199.
For an insightful analysis of the informal economy, see, Alena Ledeneva, 1998, Russia’s Economy of Favours: “Blat” Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anu Realo and Juri Allik, 1999, “A Cross-Cultural Study of Collectivism: A Comparison of American, Estonian, and Russian Students,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 139, no. 2: 133–143.
Triin Vihalemm, 1997, “Changing Discourses on Values in Estonia,” in Lauristin and Vihalemm (eds.), Return to the Western World, 271.
Richard Rose, William Mishler, Christian Haerpfer, 1998, Democracy and Its Alternatives. Understanding Post-Communist Societies, Oxford: Oxford University Press;
see also Janos Kornai, Bo Rothstein, and Susan Rose-Ackerman (eds.), 2004, Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Transition, London: Palgrave/Macmillan.
For example, Eva Hoffman, 1993, Exit into History. A Journey through the New Eastern Europe, London: Vintage Publishers;
Slavenka Drakulic, 1993, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, New York: Harpers Collins, for general and detailed analysis and descriptions of the everyday life under Communism.
Grodeland and Miller, 1998, “Foolish to Give and Yet More Foolish not to Take-In-depth Interviews with Post-Communist Citizens on Their Everyday Use of Bribes and Contacts,” 660.
In short, political development and in particular the move toward democracy is seen as intimately connected to structural factors such as economic development and prosperity, the level of education, urbanization, and industrialization. Ronald Inglehart’s theory of economic affluence, spread comparatively evenly across the population as a prerequisite for value change supportive of democratization, is a modern version of this. See, e.g., Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, 2005, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy. The Human Development Sequence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
For an earlier and still highly influential classic see, Seymor Martin Lipset, 1960, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, New York: Doubleday.
Kjell Bergman and Berith Jakobsson, 1984, Ester i Göteborg. Om identitetens bevekelsegrunder, Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 64 (my translation).
In a volume about Poles in American exile, similar sentiments are described concerning the alienation between the émigrés and those Poles who lived their lives in Communist Poland. Mary Patrice Erdmans, 1998, Opposite Poles. Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 93–105.
In many of her essays, the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic analyzes the Communist experience from an everyday perspective, emphasizing how conditions and lives were shaped by the lack of heating and the bad fabric of available clothing. “I sat in many kitchens—because the kitchen was always the warmest room in the badly heated apartments—and listened to the fate of the women, cooked with them, drank coffee if they had any and heard them speak about their children and their husbands, of how they hoped to be able to buy a new fridge, a new stove or a new car (…) Ours was trivial, we saw it from below. But the trivial is political.” Drakulic, Slavenka Drakulic, 1994, Hur vi överlevde kommunismen med ett leende på läpparna, Stockholm: Ordfront, 20 (my translation). English title: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1993). For very insightful reflections on the Communist era and the transition from Communist rule, see Hoffman, Exit into History.
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© 2007 Li Bennich-Björkman
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Bennich-Björkman, L. (2007). Did Civic Commitment Survive Communism?. In: Political Culture under Institutional Pressure. Political Evolution and Institutional Change. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609969_5
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