Ida-Virumaa: Searching for the Forgotten

• In Event: Nostalgia and Urban Change: The Roles of Selective Remembering and Forgetting in Transforming Post-Socialist Cities

Abstract

Nostalgia for the Soviet-past resonates in the Eastern parts of Estonia where the majority Russian-speaking population live, “creating a surplus of negative energy” in the built landscape that resists change and reinterpretation compared to the rest of the western-focused Estonian Republic. Newlyweds in the town of Narva ritually photograph themselves alongside the displaced statue of Lenin in the courtyard of Hermann Castle’s, the old fortress that now looks out over the border between Russia and Estonia. The town center of the formerly closed town of Sillamäe, has hardly changed since it was laid out by Russian-Soviet architects in the 1940s to support uranium extraction in the shale-oil town. Estonians largely shun these areas of their country that perversely cling to a Soviet past that they steadfastly prefer to deny creating a disturbing time-warp of memory and forgetting.

Author

• Marie-Alice L'Heureux, U of Kansas