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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, lisafein@umich.edu
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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 

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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

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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

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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

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