Land Reform and Historical Memory in the Baltics

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The issue of who should own land is one of the core questions across social, economic and political systems around the globe. For modern states, the ability to control land tenure (and agricultural production) has become increasingly linked to national sovereignty. For this reason, land distribution and land reform play a crucial role in social and political transformations. At the same time, land reform has become an integral policy of democratisation, economic empowerment, and social integration, designed to deepen the relationship between rural population and the state by shaping social identities and providing the state with legitimacy.

In the Baltics, land redistribution has had a fundamental influence on the formation of societies. Here, ‘nationalizing states’ (Brubaker) were constructed twice: after the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917/18 and of the Soviet Union in 1991. Both state-building projects rested on far-reaching reforms of property regimes, which combined economic, social and political objectives. Moreover, land redistribution in both eras interacted with previous agrarian reforms enacted under ‘foreign rule’. They were legitimised through historical references that were decidedly normative in character, invoking notions of historical justice, morality, Christianity, gender, and modernity. The panel will explore the relationship of post-1918 and post-1991 land redistribution with historical narratives, historical memory, and historical subjectivities, thus providing an access point for a more integrated history of the Baltics in the 20th century.

Short Bio

Irēna Saleniece

Dr. hist. Irēna Saleniece is a professor of History at Daugavpils University. Since 2003 she is a head of the Oral History Centre (DU OHC), till now have organized 14 expeditions in the eastern part of Latvia in order to collect testimonies of the local residents. Now DU OHC collection includes about 1200 life histories processed according to scholarly norms and available for researches. Since 2008 I. Saleniece have participated in various research projects, including the 7th Framework and Horizon 2020 projects. Since 2009 I. Saleniece is a chief editor of the collection of research articles „History: Sources and People” (EBSCO). She is an author of two monographs and has written about 100 scholarly publications devoted to the history of Latvia. Research interests include schools’ policy in the 20th century Latvia, ethnic minorities in Latvia, Sovietisation, historical source study, oral history.

Marta Starostina

Marta Starostina is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Birmingham with a main interest in the history of tourism, Soviet, and Baltic regional history. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the Soviet tourism agency “Intourist”. She has actively participated in conferences across various countries with research papers presented at the International DAAD Summer School in Poland (Wrocław), the AABS conference in Seattle, the ASEEES convention in Philadelphia and the VAHS conference in Liverpool. Marta Starostina is a member of four history research societies, including the Institute for German and European Studies (IGES) in Birmingham, the Royal Historical Society, the Organizing Board of the Graduate Centre for Europe (GCfE), and the Voluntary Action History Society (VAHS).

Elke Bauer

Elke Bauer studied Comparative Religion, Ethnology and Celtic Studies in Marburg and received her doctorate in the postgraduate programme Edition Philology (Editionswissenschaft) at the University of Osnabrück. Since 2001, she has been a staff member at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on Eastern Central Europe - Institute of the Leibniz Association in Marburg, first in the Image Archive, then from 2015 in the Digital Research and Information Infrastructures Department. Since May 2020, she has been in charge of the document collection of the Herder Institute, a collection archive with a focus on the Baltic States.

Klaus Richter

Klaus Richter is a Reader in Eastern European History at the University of Birmingham. His main fields of research are the social history of Poland and the Baltics, Germany’s relations with Eastern Europe, and the history of nationalism and ethnic conflict. Among his publications are the monograph ‘Antisemitismus in Litauen: Juden, Christen und die “Emanzipation” der Bauern. Antisemitismus in Litauen, 1889–1914.‘ (Berlin: Metropol, 2013) and monograph ‘Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915-1929.’ (Oxford University Press, 2020), the latter of which won the 2022 Biennial Book Prize of the AABS. He is currently leading a research project on the impact of the Great Depression on politics and societies in East Central Europe.

Heidi Hein-Kircher

PD Dr. Heidi Hein-Kircher is the head of the department "Academic Forum" at the Herder Institute in Marburg. She studied Eastern European and Modern History as well as Political Science and Yiddish Studies at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, where she received her PhD in 2000 on the topic of the Piłsudski cult. Since 2018, she has worked as a lecturer at the Philipps University in Marburg, after completing her habilitation with a monograph on municipal politics in Lemberg (L'viv/Lwów) from 1861/62 to 1914. Her work focuses on security and conflict history, family and gender history, the history of ethnic and religious minorities, and cultures of memory in Eastern Europe.

Andres Kasekamp

Andres Kasekamp is a Professor and holds the Chair of Estonian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was Professor of Baltic Politics at the University of Tartu in Estonia and Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Humboldt University Berlin. His first book was ‘The Radical Right in Interwar Estonia’ (Palgrave 2000). His second book, ‘A History of the Baltic States’ (Palgrave 2010), has been translated into nine languages. His research interests include populist radical right parties, memory politics, European foreign and security policy, and cooperation and conflict in the Baltic Sea region. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies and is currently the President-Elect of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.

Sub Unit

• History, Memory, and Identity

Chair

• Heidi Hein-Kircher, Herder-Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe

Discussant

• Andres Kasekamp, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• Latvian peasants in the circles of time: perception of agrarian reforms of the 20th century - Irēna Saleniece, Daugavpils University

• Tourism, Collective Farms, and Historical Memory in the Soviet Baltics - Marta Starostina, University of Birmingham

• The Estonian and Latvian land reforms as reflected in Baltic German documents - Elke Bauer, Herder Institute (Marburg)

• Land Ownership and Political Subjectivities in Modern Lithuania - Klaus Richter, University of Birmingham