In this compact ethnography of a collective-farm town on the Naorootsi Peninsula in north-western Estonia, Singrid Rausing reveals a snapshot of post-Soviet Estonian life in the early 1990's. The book offers insights into Estonia's transition for readers with a range of interests, from the role of material culture and consumption in the transformation of post Soviet life (the focus of the first half of the book), to the history of nation-building in this region (the topic of the second half). The result is a tightly packed contribution to the ethnography and theory of post-socialism.
The central theme of Rausing's book is "normality," a term that she imbues with both theoretical and ethnographic meaning. As a theoretical concept, normality encompasses the centripetal social and material pressures that confined the range of variation in Soviet lived spaces and the material experience of life. She points out that this habitus of consumption emerged not only from the limits of consumer goods production, but also from an underlying fear of standing out. This interpretation of normality as an instrument of Soviet oppression blends into the use of "normality" that appeared throughout her ethnographic interviews with residents of the former collective farm. This post-Soviet concept of normality simultaneously recast Soviet (and, Rausing argues, Russian) everyday practices as abnormal, while aligning Estonians with the "normal" practices of Westerners, including those in neighboring Sweden. At the same time, normality remained a goal still striven for, as residents strove to find those "best" consumption practices and social orientations, which would bring them closer to the Westerness that they considered part of their historical heritage.
"Normality" also appears in informants' evaluation of ethnic identity and relations between nationalities during and after the Soviet period. Rausing links her examinations of material culture and the formation of post-Soviet national identity through several different avenues. In her examination of post-Soviet symbolism, she considers the reorganization of space in transformed landscapes, and time, in reformulation of the calendar and celebration of festivities such as birthdays. In these cases, as throughout the book, the complex relationship between collective farm residents, some of whom are acculturated Swedish Estonians, and Sweden, comes to the forefront. Through the importation of Swedish goods, language, and money (in the form of foreign aid and investment) the West became materially, as well as ideologically, entwined in post-Soviet transition.
Moving from the contemporary role of Sweden and Swedish identity for residents, Rausing devotes the second half of the book to tracing the historical development of Estonian Swedish identity before, during and after the Soviet period. Here, she contextualizes the Estonian Swedish experience in the historical framework of Soviet nationalities policy, bringing forth comparisons to the experiences of other Soviet minority nationalities. This historical framework, the author argues, informs Estonian identity, serving as a resource in building a post-Soviet way of "being Estonian." This becomes particularly clear in the epilogue, where Rausing concludes that "the culture of transition and the reconstruction of identity described in this book, no longer exist" (pg. 153). In this book, that passing moment of transformation is captured.
At under 200 pages, History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia manages to pack in considerable amounts of information while still remaining readable. The level of the text is appropriate for undergraduate courses focusing on Eastern Europe, although graduate students and other scholars interested in material culture and transformation, nationalities policy, or post-socialism in general will also find the book stimulating. This is one of the few book-length ethnographies of the Baltics to appear in recent years, and Rausing has done an excellent job helping to fill this gap in the literature with a book of theoretical and ethnographic value.