Memory and Democratic Pluralism in the Baltic States – Rethinking the Relationship

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Acknowledgements

Financial support for this research came from a Targeted Financing Grant, no. SF0180128s08, from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. I would like to thank Vello Pettai, Siobhan Kattago and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

Notes

1 In Latvia, the annual commemoration day on March 16, at which the veterans of the former ‘Latvian Waffen-SS Legion’ commemorate their fallen comrades, has increasingly become a site for young people, radical Latvian nationalists and Russian-speakers, to protest. The demonstrations prior to and the riots surrounding the Estonian government decision to remove a Soviet-time war monument from downtown Tallinn are another example of a discord over issues of history and memory that is radicalizing.

2 In a study on Latvian memory politics after 1991, I have referred to this understanding of historical debates and controversies as a process of pluralization and diversification of opinions and interpretations of the past as a process of ‘democratizing history’ (Onken 2003).

3 A good example of such a mostly symbolic act of recognition was the campaign of the Broken Cornflower initiated by Estonian president Lennart Meri. In summer 2001 Meri conducted a two-week tour of Estonia, where he met personally with former victims of Soviet suppression and handed out symbolic mourning tokens bearing the insignia of a broken cornflower (the Estonian national flower) (Anepaio 2002, p. 62).

4 Both in Estonia and Latvia the History Teachers’ Associations are quite actively involved in history teaching and school textbook projects. Most of these projects are supported by the ‘European Association of History Educators’, EUROCLIO of which they are full members. See http://www.euroclio.eu, accessed 11 August 2009.

5 Reinhart Koselleck speaks in this context quite memorably of the ‘six P's’, the priests, professors, PR specialists, politicians, poets and publicists (in Tamm 2007, p. 115).