Soviet Colonial Amnesia and Its Legacies in Eastern European Exceptionalism: Soviet and Post-Soviet Representations of Russian Imperial Expansion in Estonian Museums

• In Event: Museums, Memory, and Violence: From Colonial Turkestan to Soviet Estonia and Post-Socialist Poland

Abstract

In recent years, Estonian museums have developed many decolonizing practices, ranging from research and exhibition projects to public events and artistic interventions. Often, however, these initiatives have been met with strong criticism for associating Estonian heritage with colonial history – and violence. On the one hand, critical voices refer to the much broader idea of Eastern Europe as a region not implicated or entangled with Western colonial expansion and its legacies. But the idea of Eastern European exceptionalism also refers to the legacies of Soviet colonial amnesia, especially in relation to Russian imperial expansion, presented as essentially different from Western colonialism.So far, Estonian museums have mainly used critical collection and object histories to challenge this paradigm. I will argue that alongside this, working with Soviet-era exhibition histories and their links to the broader Soviet colonial amnesia has the potential to unlearn from the colonial tradition. In Estonia, the representation of the involvement of Baltic German-speaking elites in Russian imperial expeditions and conquests provides an interesting case. Focusing primarily on museum histories, I will examine Soviet images of Baltic German elites not only as great explorers but also as symbols of the shared history of the Baltics and Russia, and the implications that these images and narratives have had for post-socialist representations of colonial histories and collections. In addition to academic research, this talk also draws on my curatorial research in the exhibition projects Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023), Art and Science (2022), and The Conqueror’s Eye (2019) (all at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn).

Author

• Linda Kaljundi, Tallinn U (Estonia)