Childhood years as generational capital: Narratives of the 1970–1978 cohort

Abstract

People born in the 1970s in Estonia spent their childhood during Soviet times and experienced their coming of age during the transition years of the 1990s. Experiencing the Soviet regime as children gave them experiences of that era, but kept them at a distance from involvement in regime’s culpable actions. It also enabled them to start their adult lives during the transition times, adjusting to new transition routes. Remembering the Soviet era and the social change is a powerful resource for this group. This symbolic capital and socialisation perspective accentuates itself in different situations, but among others when evaluating young people’s performance or social conditions. Based on in-depth and focus group interviews with 47 representatives of this cohort and articles written in mainstream media, the article will scrutinise how the memories from the Soviet time as well as social transformation in the 1990s has shaped the generational consciousness of this age group. It will be argued that studying retrospective accounts of children about the times of change can be fruitful as it shows how these experiences are transformed into symbolic weapons in power games and shape the generational landscape and hierarchies. These experiences can be transformed into what will be conceptualised as generational capital.