Sovietisation and Violence: The Case of Estonia ed. by Meelis Saueauk and Toomas Hiio, and: Propaganda, Immigration, and Monuments: Perspectives on Methods Used to Entrench Soviet Power in Estonia in the 1950s–1980s ed. by Meelis Saueauk and Meelis Maripuu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sovietisation and Violence: The Case of Estonia ed. by Meelis Saueauk and Toomas Hiio, and: Propaganda, Immigration, and Monuments: Perspectives on Methods Used to Entrench Soviet Power in Estonia in the 1950s–1980s ed. by Meelis Saueauk and Meelis Maripuu Edward Cohn Saueauk, Meelis and Hiio, Toomas (eds). Sovietisation and Violence: The Case of Estonia. Proceedings of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, 1. Tartu University Press, Tartu, 2018. 336 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €5.00 (paperback). Saueauk, Meelis and Maripuu, Meelis (eds). Propaganda, Immigration, and Monuments: Perspectives on Methods Used to Entrench Soviet Power in Estonia in the 1950s–1980s. Proceedings of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, 3. Tartu University Press, Tartu, 2022. 282 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €16.00 (paperback). In recent years, and especially since the beginning of Russia's war on Ukraine, historians have increasingly turned their attention to the USSR's non-Russian republics, seeking to tell a fuller story of Soviet history that both recovers the voices of other ethnicities and analyses the USSR's incorporation of new frontier regions into its territory following 1939. These two volumes — the first and third in a series of proceedings from the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory — deserve the attention of Western historians interested in a broader picture of Soviet history. Volume One looks at 'Sovietization and Violence' in Estonia, focusing in particular on the most coercive period of Estonia's incorporation into the USSR (roughly speaking, 1940–53). Volume Three examines 'Propaganda, Immigration, and Monuments', analysing the less violent processes by which Soviet power was entrenched in Estonia from the 1950s to the 1980s. (A second volume, in Estonian, examines the country's March deportations of 1949 and is not covered in this review.) Together, the two volumes feature nineteen essays by Estonian researchers — most of them affiliated with the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, though several are faculty at the University of Tartu — that provide a welcome and extremely useful addition to the historiography on the establishment of Soviet power in the republic and beyond. They provide cutting-edge work by Estonian historians; link the Estonian historical literature to the Russian, Western European and American historical literatures on the USSR; and help ensure that the study of the Soviet Union includes the perspectives of nationalities far from the corridors of power in Moscow. The first volume begins with a useful essay by Olaf Mertelsmann on the meaning of 'sovietization', which clearly highlights the many complexities in the process: 'sovietization' was actually a set of different processes that shaped and influenced each other, for example, and the nature of what was 'soviet' changed over time and was pursued in different ways within the original boundaries of the USSR, in the territories incorporated into the USSR in 1940, and in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Mertelsmann complicates the idea of a 'typical' sovietization while providing a series of 'hypotheses' on the nature of sovietization in Estonia and beyond. [End Page 780] This theoretical discussion sets the stage for the remainder of the first volume, which focuses most closely on repression and coercion by Soviet authorities in the late Stalin years. Tõnu Tannberg discusses how the new regime sought to combat the armed resistance movement in the Baltics in the last months of 1944; he notes that local authorities were not able to suppress the resistance movement on their own, that all-union security organs were important collaborators with republic-level authorities, that Moscow was sceptical of local personnel and that the regime failed in its goal of eliminating the armed resistance through the use of force. Several contributions, unsurprisingly, analyse the theme of forced deportations from Estonia: Hiljar Tammela analyses how rumours of deportation affected the population's mentalité, while Aigi Rahi-Tamm compares the experience of deportees with those who fled Estonia for the West. Tammela shows that fear of deportations was a mass phenomenon in Estonia after World War Two (based on the precedent of the June 1941 deportations), with rumours predicting the dates and scale of post-war deportations. When the March 1949 deportations arrived, nearly half of the 20,000 Estonians selected for removal could not be...