Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:43:40.146Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Symbolic Boundaries and National Borders: The Construction of an Estonian Russian Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Lisa C. Fein
Lisa C. Fein*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

If the destruction of the Berlin Wall came to symbolize freedom in Central Europe, for the republics of the former Soviet Union it was the construction and recognition of new walls in the form of national borders that represented liberation. In the case of Estonia, the end of what was considered illegal Soviet occupation marked a return to the country's republic's rightful place as an independent, European nation. In demographic respects, however, Estonia could not easily escape the legacies of Soviet rule, due in part to the migration of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Estonians to the Estonian SSR. Far from completing a clean break with the past, Estonian independence has replaced legal distinctions between nationalities with social and symbolic boundaries between ethnic groups.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 33 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Identity Formation and Social Problems in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan , September 2005 , pp. 333 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Aksel Kirch, The Integration of non-Estonians into Estonian Society: History, Problems and Trends (Tallinn: Estonian Academy Publishers, 1997), p. 15, footnote 16.Google Scholar

2. Estonian Population Census 2000; Other Russian speakers include Ukrainians, Belorussians, and members of other nationalities who are neither Russian nor Estonian and use Russian as their primary language of communication.Google Scholar

3. Estonian Population Census 2000.Google Scholar

4. Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969); Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology, 28 (2002), pp. 167–195; Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Joel S. Migdal, “Mental Maps and Virtual Checkpoints: Struggles to Construct and Maintain Social Boundaries,” in J. S. Migdal, ed. Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

5. Lamont and Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.”Google Scholar

6. Lamont and Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” p. 168.Google Scholar

7. Henri Tajfel and J. C. Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” in S. Worchel and W. G. Austen, eds, Psychology of Intergroup Relations (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1985).Google Scholar

8. For discussions of stereotyping by Estonians and how Estonians view the boundary that separates them from Russians in Estonia, see Martha Merritt, “A Geopolitics of Identity: Drawing the Line between Russia and Estonia,” Nationalities Papers, 28, 2 (2000), pp. 243–262.Google Scholar

9. I would like to thank the Institute for International Education Fulbright program for funding this project, as well as the Institute for International and Social Studies (IISS) in Tallinn for hosting my stay in Estonia and providing invaluable assistance for the 10 months that I was in the field.Google Scholar

10. Grant McCracken, The Long Interview (Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1988).Google Scholar

11. In each Ford project focus group, numbers were assigned to respondents with the same first names.Google Scholar

12. Although interview respondents described themselves as different from Estonians and Russians in Russia, most did not discuss the salience of these differences. As this paper is only intended to demonstrate the existence and content of the symbolic boundaries between groups, the salience of these boundaries does not affect my analysis.Google Scholar

13. The speaker is referring to situations of ethnic strife in Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation, respectively, following the break-up of the Soviet Union.Google Scholar

14. Kennedy, Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).Google Scholar

15. Janet Hart, New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, “Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the Social Construction of Identity,” in Craig Calhoun, ed. Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), pp. 37–99.Google Scholar

16. Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (London, New York: Routledge, 1998).Google Scholar

17. David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

18. Pilkington, Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia .Google Scholar

19. Graham Smith, “The Ethnic Democracy Thesis and the Citizenship Debates in Estonia and Latvia,” Nationalities Papers , 24, 2 (1996); State Programme: “Integration in Estonian Society 2000–2007,” http://www.riik.ee/saks/ikomisjon/programme.htm.Google Scholar