Claiming the ‘right to a happy Soviet childhood’: discursive enactment of memory citizenship among Russian-speakers in Estonia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the concept of memory citizenship, this study examines the discursive enactment of citizenship evoked by social contention around memories of the Soviet past among the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia. It scrutinizes the rhetorical strategies and argumentative practices applied by Estonian Russian-speakers in social media discourse to defy the perceived politicization of Soviet childhood and the claim for recognition and inclusion both as mnemonic actors and political subjects. The paper demonstrates the potential of digital and performative modes of citizenship for minority publics to exercise their civic agency beyond conventional realms and forms of political participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• civic identity
• memory
• social media
• Russian-speaking minority

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Before being elected the president of Estonia in October 2016, Kaljulaid served as a member of the European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg between 2004 and 2016. Thus, as a former resident of Luxembourg, she has also been part of the local Estonian community in Luxembourg.

2. The full answer to the question is originally longer and comments further on the perception of ‘wrongfulness’ in Soviet Estonia, particularly in comparison to ‘free societies,’ and also mentions the books that the president liked to read as a child.

3. In this study, we understand ‘official memory discourse’ as a discourse of collective memory whose formation and propagation primarily relies on and involves the intensive participation of state institutions (cf. Pettai 2016 and the concept of an ‘official memory regime’). ‘Official’ does not mean that it cannot be contested by political actors, such as political parties, who, at the same time, are also among the actors contributing to the reproduction and propagation of the official memory discourse.

4. Yet, we do not intend to idealize the democratic nature of online spaces since, as Papa and Milioni (2016, 302), for example, rightly remind us, social media affordances ‘can equally enable fragmentation instead of unity, and mechanisms of exclusion instead of inclusion.’

5. Though Isin and Ruppert (2015, 8) define digital citizenship through individuals’ political subjectivity in relation to cyberspace, i.e. ‘through the negotiation of their rights such as privacy, access, openness, and innovation and their rights concerning data,’ we find the methodological framework they create also useful for the study of other kinds of acts of ‘performative citizenship’ (Isin 2017) conducted in cyberspace.

6. In the case of posts selected in the second stage of screening, profile information (e.g. place of residence, education, and job, etc.) revealed by the particular Facebook user was taken into account in order to include thematic posts made specifically by Russian-speakers living in Estonia.

7. All translations from Russian to English have been made by authors of the study.

8. The fact that Ilves was born in exile and grew up in the United States was also suggested here as an explanation of his personal ‘ignorance’ of life in the Soviet Union.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Estonian Research Council [PUT1624].

Notes on contributors

Piia Tammpuu

Piia Tammpuu is a PhD Candidate at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her doctoral research focuses on digitally supported modes of translocality and transformations of citizenship.

Jānis Juzefovičs

Jānis Juzefovičs is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, where he is working on a project examining civic identity and transnational media practices of the Russian-speaking populations in Latvia and Estonia during times of geo-political uncertainty. He holds a PhD in media studies from the University of Westminster. He is an author of the book Broadcasting and National Imagination in Post-Communist Latvia: Defining the Nation, Defining Public Television (Intellect, 2017).

Külliki Seppel

Külliki Seppel teaches media and social theories at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research is related to nation-building, inter-ethnic relations and democracy, as well as the social aspects of science and technology development.