Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia: An Anthropology of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces

285 Pages·2018·10.75 MB·English

by  Francisco Martinez

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia
ii
FRINGE
Series Editors
Alena Ledeneva and Peter Zusi, School of Slavonic and
East European Studies, UCL
The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeas-
urability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative
bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area stud-
ies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and
marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in
everyday practices.
Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and
East European Studies of UCL.
Peter Zusi is Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of
UCL.
By adopting the tropes of ‘repair’ and ‘waste’, this book innovatively
manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergen-
erational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past pres-
ent. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings
together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated
out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis,
providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes
of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological
dimensions.
Victor Buchli,
Professor of Material Culture at UCL
This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of
postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez
creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together
with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship
and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and
space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material
effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia,
inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating
to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted
legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows
how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might
reinvigorate political theory.
Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International
Studies at the University of Kent

Remains of the Soviet
Past in Estonia
An Anthropology of Forgetting,
Repair and Urban Traces
Francisco Martínez
First published in 2018 by
UCL Press
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press
Text © Francisco Martínez, 2018
Images © Author and copyright holders named in captions, 2018
Francisco Martínez has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.
This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).
This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt
the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made
to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use
of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Martínez, F. 2018. Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia: An Anthropology
of Forgetting, Repair and Urban Traces. London: UCL Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353534
Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787353534
The future is but the obsolete in reverse.
Nabokov (1952, 22)
People will be born – generation after generation – live a happy life, age
gradually, but the Palace of the Soviets, familiar to them from their dear
childhood books, will stand exactly the same as you and I will see it in the
next few years. Centuries will not leave their mark on it; we will build it so
that it will stand without ageing, forever.
Atarov (1940, 15; cf. Paperny 2002, 17)
The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake
between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-
new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, lis-
tening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.
On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s
Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste,
blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers,
encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the
things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure
Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to
make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is
really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead
the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.
Calvino (1974, 114–15)