Leisure in Stalin’s Estonia

The period of Stalinism is usually overshadowed by accounts of terror and a topic like leisure seems not to be appropriate. Nevertheless, leisure was an important aspect of everyday life in Estonia under Stalin’s reign. Some elements of continuity with the interwar period might be identified. The state struggled to control leisure activities and to re-educate the population but obviously failed. Listening to foreign radio stations or reading forbidden books might have been subversive but were not yet signs of resistance. Many leisure activities bore the character of escaping from a harsh reality and from poverty. The paper is based on archival documents, oral history and life stories

Cleansing and Compromise

RésuméÉpuration et compromis : la SSR d’Estonie en 1944-1945En 1944, alors que l’Armée rouge occupait de nouveau l’Estonie, commença une immense vague de purges. Plus du tiers de l’ensemble des arrestations dues au régime stalinien se firent au cours de ces 15 mois, le nettoyage de l’Estonie -- en préparation dès 1941 sur le sol soviétique -- étant une priorité de la politique soviétique dans cette république. Seuls les territoires anciennement occupés par les Allemands connurent de telles mesures. L’article analyse cette vague répressive qui, à l’origine, visait ceux qui avaient « collaboré avec les Allemands » mais s’étendit par la suite aux « nationalistes bourgeois ». En marge des persécutions, se constituait un appareil bureaucratique rassemblant des informations sur un quart de la population. L’on peut néanmoins déceler les éléments d’une politique de compromis. Stalin procéda à des amnisties et des légalisations afin d’affaiblir la résistance et de s’attacher les habitants de ces territoires nouvellement conquis dont un grand nombre, y compris des criminels de guerre, échappa à la répression. Le régime ayant besoin d’Estoniens qualifiés pour diriger la RSS d’Estonie, il fit preuve d’une relative tolérance à l’égard de « déviances ». La combinaison de répression et de compromis faisait partie intégrante de la politique stalinienne.AbstractIn 1944, the Red Army recaptured Estonia and a large-scale cleansing campaign began. In barely 15 months, more than one third of all political arrests during Stalinist rule took place, and cleansing was the Soviet Union’s top priority policy in Estonia. Similar measures were taken all over formerly German occupied territory. Preparations for those actions had already been started in the Soviet rear since 1941. The paper analyses this wave of cleansing initially aimed at “collaborators with the Germans” and later mainly targeted at “bourgeois nationalists.” Behind the persecution was a bureaucratic apparatus which, through time, collected information about a quarter of the population. Apart from persecution, elements of a policy of compromise are also visible. Stalin used amnesties and legalization to weaken resistance and win over the population in newly acquired territories. Many people, including some war criminals, evaded persecution. Because the regime needed qualified ethnic Estonians to run the Estonian SSR, it practiced some toleration of “deviation.” The combination of cleansing and compromise was part and parcel of Stalinist policy

Memory of World War II and the education of history in Putin’s Russia (Tateish, Yoko)

(Proceedings of the Tallinn Workshop, 25-26 August 2014