UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Thursday 16 February 2:30 – 4:00: Panel B2: Civil Society

Ragne Kõuts-Klemm and Kulliki Korts (University of Tartu): ‘Social criticism in Soviet Estonia: its discursive forms and institutional limits’

The aim of this paper is to delineate the institutional limits and different discursive forms of social critique in Estonia during the Soviet period. Through two sets of empirical material, media texts (cultural newspapers and magazines that were used as arena for more open debate and the readership of which was exceptionally high among all social strata) and biographical interviews with the members of contemporary cultural and academic elite we try to define the sources, boundaries and particular features of this critique. Its carrier, the emerged non-formal (i.e. non-institutionalized) public sphere did not constitute a direct political opposition, but existed (or rather balanced) within the legitimate institutional and discursive boundaries.

Through different decades, and directly related to the level of political and ideological suppression, this critique had different forms and expressions. Emerging after the death of Stalin, the critique and quasi-open debates (restricted first to the academic institutional environment) grow more political throughout the 1960s, peaking with the student movement in the late years of the decade, became confined highly metaphoric literary debates during the deepening stagnation of the 1970 and found a new popular channel through nature and heritage societies (considered politically neutral and thus legitimate by the Soviet powers). As the same people and ideas constituted the kernel of the liberation and democratization movement of the late 1980s, deeper insight into the development of critical social reflection (with its obvious, but significant limits) allows us to better understand the particularities of the state- and nation-building after the regime change.