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ABSTRACT
This article is based on a comparative analysis, juxtaposing archival and oral historical sources, to identify changes that took place in the teaching profession in the annexed Baltic States. Attention is paid to the generation of Estonian and Latvian teachers, born in the 1920s–1930s and trained as Soviet teachers in the 1940s–1950s. Their transformation into ‘Soviet people’ included acceptance of Soviet values and rejecting the inherent ones. Therefore, the research focuses on the course and outcomes of reeducation of teachers pursued by the Soviet authorities up to the early 1960’s.
Acknowledgments
Aigi Rahi-Tamm’s research for this article was supported in the framework of the project ‘Estonia in the Cold War’ (SF0180050s09) and ‘Practices of Memory: Continuities and Discontinuities of Remembering the 20th Century’ (ETF8190).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. South-eastern Latvia (Latgale and South Sēlija region) is historically a multiethnic community, where a number of religions are practiced. It has stable traditions of ethnic and religious tolerance and mutual cultural enrichment. For centuries it has been inhabited by Latvians, Lithuanians, Belo-Russians, Russians, Germans, Polish, and Jewish people, with the major religious groups being Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Russian Orthodox, Old-Believers and Judaic. Everyday life was marked by mutual interaction and the enrichment of various cultures that gave rise to a particular culture and conduct. Tolerant treatment of ‘others’ was considered polite and was understood.
2. Since 2011 the State Archives of Latvia has been a structural department of the Latvian National Archives.
3. The use of the proper names Republic of Estonia or Republic of Latvia were also forbidden, according to Soviet historical treatment the period was called the ‘ruling of bourgeois dictatorship.’
4. After the war, 97% of the Estonian education system used Estonian as the study language; by 1956/57 there were only 77% of Estonian-based general-education schools left. The policy favoring immigration reduced the native population: At the beginning of the 1980s Russian-based education formed one-third of the entire educational sphere in Estonia. In the 1937/1938 study year, Latvian as the language of instruction was used in 78.7% of schools, but in 1993/1994 only 49.2% of school children attended Latvian schools and about 50% attended schools with Russian as the language of instruction. Russian-based schools used Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic study programs, so the contact with the native population and its culture remained weak, teaching the Estonian and Latvian languages was often formal, giving rise to two different language – and culture-barred communities (Karjahärm and Sirk Citation2007, 82–84; Saleniece and Kuznetsovs Citation1999, 244–246).
5. Local history began to be taught in Estonia again in the 1957/1958 study year when a new history textbook was issued, and Estonian history was also unofficially taught in some schools earlier than this. In 1957, a new program for the history of the CPSU was worked out (Raudsepp Citation2005, 71, 94).
6. In the autumn of 1941, an organization of ZEV – Zentralstelle zur Erfassung der Verschleppten Esten (Centre for Registration and Retrieval of Deported and Mobilized Estonians) – was setup in Nazi-occupied Estonia to register those deported, arrested or mobilized by the Red Army and killed for gathering information. No equivalent data has been found for Latvia.
7. About 90,000 citizens from Estonia and 130,000 from Latvia escaped to the West.
8. Stringent punishments were meted out for wearing national symbolic decorations from the first months of Soviet rule. For public use of the Estonian national flag and other symbols in the summer of 1940, a number of schoolboys were among the first arrested. It was absurd because the national flag was not officially banned at that time and so on many houses the Soviet red flag and Estonian tricolor were hanging side by side (Kaasik and Hiio Citation2006, 309).
9. As the activities of the forest brothers declined, underground youth organizations continued their resistance movement, primarily during the years 1955–1962. Numerous school and university students were participants in the resistance movement of that period and they assessed the struggle of the years 1940–1968 as one process. The death of Stalin and the following events changed the youth’s aspirations and activity in quantity but the quality remained the same(disseminating anti-Soviet leaflets, raising national flags, destroying Soviet symbols of power, helping those in active resistance, collecting weapons to be used at the x-hour etc.) (Isotamm Citation2004, 287–294).
10. Ene Kõresaar has underlined the fact typical of teachers’ memories, that the whole of a teacher’s life story is actually the biography of their working life (Kõresaar Citation2004, 293).
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Notes on contributors
Aigi Rahi-Tamm
Aigi Rahi-Tamm is an Associate Professor and Head of Archival Studies at the University of Tartu. Her main field of research is 20th century Estonian history and Soviet history with particular emphasis of the history of mass violence under Soviet and Nazi Germany regimes. She is the author or co-author of several articles and two monographs on the Soviet repressions and war experiences.
Irena Salēniece
Irena Salēniece is a Professor of History and Head of Oral History Centre at Daugavpils University, Latvia. Her main research interests include schools policy in Latvia, Sovietization and Stalinism, identity of the people of the Eastern Latvia, and oral history as historical source. She has published two monographs and about sixty research articles on the topics.