Mutual help and Networking Strategies: Coping with shortages in Stalinist Estonia

• In Event: Baltic Soviet History

Abstract

The paper focuses on the everyday coping strategies of students in Estonian cities during the Stalinist period (1944-1953). This was an era of multiple challenges due to ideological pressure and repressions as well as economic shortages. Drawing on archival documents and oral history sources, the study analyses diverse ways of obtaining necessary resources for everyday survival and operating in unofficial social networks of friends, relatives and acquaintances.On the other hand, daily practices of managing the limited resources are mapped. The paper also deals with the control of the authorities over students' living conditions and behaviour and the response of young people to official prescriptions and critique.

Short Bio

Anu Kannike. PhD is ethnologist, senior researcher and head of the working group of Estonian ethnology at the Estonian National Museum. Her main field of research is Estonian everyday life, particularly home and food culture in the 20th-21st centuries. She has also published studies on historival and contemporary interpretations of cultural heritage and museology.

Author

• Anu Kannike, Estonian National Museum