Abstract
An exotic and bohemian setting to a western journalist, to others a country of almost “European” standing—this was the young Estonian republic in which the individuals of the political generation that constitutes the empirical case in this book grew up.1 This chapter is an attempt to portray the state and society in which their early socialization took place, with a particular focus on exploring the predominating cultural themes that could have influenced these individuals in an enduring manner. I seek to describe basic cultural features of interwar Estonia through the eyes of my interviewees in order to have some knowledge about the country that was left behind: Estonia between the two wars.
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Notes
Estonia and the other Baltic states attracted the interest of contemporary journalists and “travellers” who wanted to see for themselves these small states at the crossroads of East and West. MacCallum Scott was a British journalist who visited Estonia’s capital Tallinn in 1925 and was struck by the city’s wild atmosphere as compared to the orderly Finnish capital Helsinki. About Tallinn (Reval) he wrote that “(t)he crazy walls, the unplanned, crooked streets, the anachronisms, the mediaeval smells, the antiquarian lumber of Reval are repugnant to Helsingfors, which is as spick and span as a motor-car.” See MacCallum A. Scott, 1925, Beyond the Baltic, London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 248.
Other journalists who wrote about the region were Hampden J. Jackson, Estonia (1948), London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. and The Baltic 1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Owen Rutter published The New Baltic States and Their Future. An Account of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, London: Methuen & Co, Ltd. in 1925.
Cf. the later description of Estonia by Alfred Bilmanis (1944) in “Grandeur and Decline of the German Baits,” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 22, no. 4: 50–80.
See Ants Oras, 1949, Slagskugga över Balticum, Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 16;
David M. Crowe, 1993, The Baltic States and the Great Powers. Foreign Relations 1938–1940, Boulder: Westview Press, 4–5;
Walter Kolarz, 1953, Russia and Her Colonies, London: George Philip and Son Limited, 113.
Harry Eckstein, 1997, “Social Science as Cultural Science, Rational Choice as Metaphysics,” in Richard J. Ellis and Michael Thompson (eds.), Culture Matters. Essays in Honor of Aaron Wildawsky, Boulder: Westview Press, 31–32.
Robert D. Putnam, 2000, Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 48.
See, e.g., Alex Inkeles, 1968, Social Change in Soviet Russia, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, for an analysis of the Russian mentality.
Andrejs Plakans, 1974, “Peasants, Intellectuals and Nationalism in the Russian Baltic Provinces, 1820–90,” The Journal of Modern History, March–December, 459; Michael H. Haltzel, 1981, “The Baltic Germans,” in Edward C. Thaden Thaden (ed.), Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland 1855–1914, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 111.
Nicholas Hope, 1994, “Interwar Statehood: Symbol and Reality,” in Graham Smith (ed.), The Baltic States. The National Self Determination of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, London: Macmillan Press, 47.
Juhan Kahk and Enn Tarvel, 1997, An Economic History of the Baltic Countries, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 107.
John Gibbons, 1939, Keepers of the Baltic Gates, London: Robert Hale Ltd, 158.
Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm (eds.), 1997, Return to the Western World. Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian Post-Communist Transition, Tartu: Tartu University Press, 271.
Hampden J. Jackson, 1940, The Baltic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 237.
Erik Nerep, 2001, “Från en union till en annan—Estlands rättsliga dilemma,” i Bernitz, Ulf, Sverker Gustavsson, Lars Oxelheim (eds.), Europaperspektiv 2001. Östutvidgning, majoritetsbeslut och flexibel integration, Göteborg: Santerús förlag, 62.
See, e.g., Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, 1963, The Civic Culture. Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, New Jersey: Princeton University Press;
Harry Eckstein, 1966, Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway, Princeton: Princeton University Press;
James Coleman, 1960, The Adolescent Society, New York: The Free Press;
Uri Brofenbrenner, 1970, Two Worlds of Childhood, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
The ethnic relations in post-Communist Estonia (and also Latvia) have attracted consideable interest. See, e.g., Juan L. Linz and Alfred Stepan, 1996, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, Chapter 20;
Paul Kolstoe, 1995, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics, London: Hurst and Company;
Aili Aarelaid-Tart, 2006, Cultural Trauma and Life Stories, Helsinki: Kikimora Publications;
Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, 1996, Russians as the New Minority. Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press;
Rein Ruutsoo, 2002, “Discursive Conflict and Estonian Post-Communist Nation-Building,” in Marju Lauristin and Mati Heidmets (eds.), The Challenge of the Russian Minority. Emerging Multicultural Democracy in Estonia, Tartu: Tartu University Press;
Vello Pettai and Klara Hallik, 2002, “Understanding Processes of Ethnic Control: Segmentation, Dependency and Co-operation in Post-Communist Estonia,” Nations and Nationalism, vol. 8, no. 4: 505–529.
Cf., e.g., Jonas Linde, 2004, Doubting Democrats? A Comparative Analysis of Support for Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Örebro: Örebro Studies in Political Science 10, Chapters five and six.
For an extensive study on the political impact of the Veterans during the 1930s see Andres Kasekamp, 2000, The Radical Right in Interwar Estonia, London: Macmillan.
Lennart Weibull and Sören Holmberg, 1997, “Two Young Democracies and an Old One,” in Lauristin and Vihalemm (eds.), Return to the Western World.
Jan-Åke Dellenbrant 1991, “The Re-Emergence of Multi-Partism in the Baltic States,” in Sten Berglund and Jan-Åke Dellenbrant (eds.), The New Democracies in Eastern Europe. Party Systems and Political Cleavages, Aldershot:Edward Elgar, 81–82.
Rein Ruutsoo, 2002, Civil Society and Nation Building in Estonia and the Baltic States. Impact of Traditions on Mobilization and Transition 1986–2000—Historical and Sociological Study, Rovaniemi: Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis, 59.
Georg Von Rauch, 1970, The Baltic States. The Years of Independence. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania 1917–1940, London: Hurst and Company, 156.
Von Rauch, 1970, The Baltic States;
David J. Smith, 2003,“Estonian Independence and European Integration,” The Baltic States Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, London: Routledge, 19–20.
The literature on the breakdown of democracies in Europe in the period between the two world wars is huge. A book that takes up the question of why some democracies survived during these troublesome years while others succumbed is Gerard Alexander, 2002, The Sources of Democratic Consolidation, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Bo Rothstein, 2003, Sociala fällor och tillitens problem, Stockholm: SNS förlag.
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© 2007 Li Bennich-Björkman
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Bennich-Björkman, L. (2007). The Context of Early Socialization: Estonia between the Two Wars. In: Political Culture under Institutional Pressure. Political Evolution and Institutional Change. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609969_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609969_2
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