Everything Is Wonderful

Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

Sigrid Rausing

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780802192813
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Baltic History
• Index: History

"Pages of dreamlike prose explore Estonia's terrible Nazi-Soviet past, the trauma of dictatorship, and how memory processes that trauma." — The Financial Times A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year Just like it was taken for granted that houses could be abandoned and slowly decay, so it was taken for granted that people died in prisons, and that it was possible that no-one would really ever know the cause of death. This is the nature of totalitarianism... In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, Sigrid Rausing completed her anthropological fieldwork on the peninsula of Noarootsi, a former Soviet border protection zone in Estonia. Abandoned watch towers dotted the coast line, and the huge fields of the Lenin collective farm were lying fallow, waiting for claims from former owners who had fled war and Soviet and Nazi occupation. Rausing's conversations with the local people touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of western products, and the Swedish background of many of them. In Everything Is Wonderful Rausing reflects on history, political repression, and the story of the minority Swedes in the area. Here she tells her story of what she observed as she lived and worked among the villagers—witnessing their transition from repression to freedom, and from Soviet neglect to post-Soviet austerity. "A delicate, precise, and richly informative memoir of a forgotten Europe and a vanished world." —Timothy Garton Ash

SEVEN

Dear Comrades

When I was doing my fieldwork I was not as yet aware of most of the history I have just described. Not all of it was accessible yet—­President Lennart Meri set up the Estonian International Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity in 1998, which was succeeded in 2008 by the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, established by President Toomas Ilves. The Museum of Occupations opened in 2003. Much of the history was still largely unknown in 1993–94. I visited the historical archives in Tallinn to see what I could find. It was empty and quiet. A pale librarian tried half-heartedly to help me, but the place was still Soviet enough to make it a difficult process, and my Estonian was not good enough to make sense of what I read.

That same day I went on to Rocca-al-Mare, the Estonian Open Air Museum, outside Tallinn. Soviet guides, apparently, used to tell tourists that the poor nineteenth-century wooden huts and houses were how all rural Estonians lived before the Soviet liberation, ignoring the 1920 land reform, and twenty years of thriving independent farming. Now, the museum was busy with women and children selling crafts to the few tourists. Farther away from the entrance, hidden by the old peasant dwellings, impoverished people were selling their own belongings to the few tourists coming by: cutlery and plates, cheap sweaters, old vases and lamps.

Seeing it, I remembered St. Petersburg. I had been there two years previously, in the autumn of 1991, and wandered through the market with a Russian friend. Men and women were sitting on the street and pavement, bleakly, quietly, selling what they could. A man, his feet wrapped in rags, sat in front of a small pile of rusty nails. Next to him a man was selling small fish the Neva River, four or five of them on a cracked plate. A woman nearby was selling some broken plates. My friend walked past in silence, her pockets crammed with the contents of the minibar, and all the soap and shampoo, from my hotel room. We were walking back to her family’s flat, a relatively privileged few rooms from a subdivided pre-war building. She gave me tea made from water filtered, boiled, and frozen, to purify it.

By October it was getting cold in Estonia. Tiina, the new teacher who had lived in Denmark for a year, affected not to understand why the school was so cold, or why Toivo and Inna’s flat, where she visited me, was so cold. I looked at her in disbelief, and she hastily changed the subject.

By now I was writing long reports, divided into tentative quasi-anthropological headings: “Displacement, Comprehension, Production,” “Sanity and Representativeness,” “Gender,” “Inside/Outside,” “The Material Culture of the Home,” “Silence and Distance,” “Transience and the Extraordinary Variety of Breakfasts.” I analysed every conversation, and wrote long field notes. But sometimes the depth confused the surface. “Don’t drink that cold water,” Toivo would often say, commenting, I thought, on how much water I drank, and the difference in patterns of consumption between us. The Estonians seemed to drink nothing but coffee, tea, and alcohol. You could build an argument on a comment like that—in fact I think I probably did. Later, I found out that the kitchen water had been condemned as “not of drinking quality.” Toivo and Inna didn’t quite want to say, but nor did they really want me to be poisoned.

Toivo got drunk on a regular basis, a periodical drinker. When he wasn’t drunk he was unhappy, wandering between the kitchen and the living room, sighing deeply, his suffering so ostentatious, and yet so existential. One drunk night he showed me his military diary, a tiny notebook filled with drawings and poems. There was an Estonian flag, crossed with a whip and a spiked club. Got uns Mit [God with Us], he had scribbled under it in broken German. To the right was an eagle—Russia—with blood dripping from its outstretched claw, beak open in an imagined hiss. There were American cars, women dancing with a devil grinning in the foreground, the legs of dancing people, and, sadly, a bottle crossed out. His friends teased him, he slurred, looking at me intently, about having a “beautiful woman” living with him, “a second wife.” He professed to love me as a “brother” and not a “husband,” but he hovered uncomfortably near me, both physically and mentally. Inna was away again—she left, usually with the children, when he drank, leaving me alone with him.

Sometimes they tried to entertain me together. One such evening I remember because they got their old photo albums out. His were mostly from his time in the army in Novosibirsk in 1968–70: small snapshots with a brownish tint. Military service was supposed to be “an honorable duty of Soviet citizens.” An honorable duty with brutal, sometimes fatal, bullying in the ranks, directed against most minorities. The Estonians stuck together in the army. The photos in the albums were mostly staged jokes sent back to his mother, of his head sticking up from the sand, or flying through the air, looking like a tougher blond Elvis, with sunglasses and long sideburns. There was one photo of Toivo sitting with his friends on a bench in front of a concrete block on the sand, looking at a small bag of nuts from Sweden, part of some relatives’ food parcel. I looked at the Swedish peanuts—the packaging was comforting, a familiar sign, even in that black-and-white snapshot from so long ago.

At about this time I had an accident with my car, driving over a stone on the road, two hours from the collective farm. The car ground to a halt, and I was stuck, with the hitchhiking kids I had picked up some miles back. We sat around waiting until a car with three men stopped. They examined my car for at least half an hour, leisurely discussing what might be wrong, trying to extract, with some difficulties, the precise details of the accident. Then a car mechanic from Haapsalu stopped his lorry to help, too. The men continued to worry over the engine, and finally decided that they would tow the car, with one of the men, rather than me, behind the wheel. “The power brakes don’t work so well when the engine is turned off,” one of them explained kindly, “but don’t worry, he is a good driver.” The children and I climbed into the lorry, and the other men followed. We drove to Risti, the nearest town, where the mechanic knew the local policeman, a Russian, but nevertheless deemed a decent enough guardian of the car whilst arrangements could be made.

The policeman, holding a mangy growling Alsatian on a rope, agreed to keep the car in his yard. The men proceeded to discuss the precise location of where it should be parked in the yard, in surreal detail. The children, used to waiting, lounged about, as did I, by now barely a participant in my own fate. The position finally agreed, the parking done, the men suddenly left with the children, leaving me barely enough time even to thank them. They had already arranged with the mechanic that he would drive me home, a detour of some fifty kilometers.

It turned out, as we chatted in his cab, that the mechanic’s mother was Swedish, though he himself didn’t speak the language. He came with me into the flat, and he and Toivo had an intense and prolonged consultation. Toivo told me to go and wait in the kitchen, and I did, by now exhausted and somewhat emotional. Erki came in, and asked in his hoarse and monotone English (I taught him) what had happened. I told him, voice unsteady. He didn’t say anything, standing by the sink, looking down, thumbing the cheap fake wood surround, his presence comforting nevertheless. Toivo and the mechanic returned, having settled on a plan, and had some coffee in the kitchen. The mechanic left, as suddenly as the others, refusing any payment before I had even offered it, Toivo nodding sagely in the background.

Soon my car became a concern of the whole village. Kulla’s daughter in Tallinn was roped in, because she had so many “contacts,” knew so many “young men,” in Tallinn. At two she rang, saying that the car would have to be towed to the Tallinn Volvo centre. She said she would ring and get a price for the repair, and would call me back. I said not to worry, they couldn’t know the price before seeing the car, and she agreed half-heartedly. Toivo would have to arrange it with the school, she said, shouting on the crackly line that she would call me again “if she had any news.” Toivo rang Laine, who rang four people to see if they could take me, towing the car, and, finally, offered me the help of the school driver. I said I would pay for the petrol. She made an airy gesture, and said, “How nice of you, but don’t let us speak of such things.” Then she looked at me meaningfully and said that if I didn’t like it in this family she could find me another one, or I could move back to the hotel. She knew, of course, about Toivo’s drinking, but she wasn’t going to mention it.

I should have moved out there and then: nothing good could have come of staying, particularly not for my hosts, as would soon become obvious. The car incident delayed the move, because I felt so well cared for afterwards. A short time later I accidentally set fire to the kitchen in the flat, forgetting to switch off the nonautomatic electric kettle. I had put the kettle on for tea and forgot all about it, reading in my room. Toivo and a friend arrived home, drunk, to smoke and smouldering lino. They shouted, and threw water on the flames. I ran out into an arena of two silhouetted men moving through the smoke, coughing. Soon the fire was out, the floor wet and charred.

Inna was away, but got back shortly afterwards. She was very calm. “Juhtus,” she said soothingly, “it happens.” I was deeply upset. Neither Inna nor Toivo seemed to mind at all, and seemed, in fact, mildly puzzled by my emotion. I wonder now if their lack of recrimination, their instant forgiveness, came about because Inna felt guilty about the high rent she was charging me, or ashamed, perhaps, of Toivo’s bouts of drinking and her own regular absences. But they were also essentially kind people, and they didn’t want me to feel bad. In the end, though, I think also that the fire genuinely didn’t matter much to them. They seemed surprised by how upset and remorseful I was. The lino was scarred, and I bought a rug to cover it. The kettle was ruined, and I replaced it. They probably didn’t see the scarred lino again until they packed up the flat and moved on several years later. I got a reputation for being accident-prone, which amused them, and we all carried on.

There was something liberating about their attitude towards material goods—they did not identify themselves with anything they owned. They did not think of others in terms of what they owned. Everyone on the collective farm owned not only roughly the same amount of things, but actually more or less exactly the same things. I thought then that perhaps we care too much about our belongings, our cleanliness, our fussy and fastidious material arrangements. Maybe something really is lost—time, and ­solidarity—in our obsession with material goods, our trap of savings, loans, and debts, our caring for the endless things that we collect along the way.

The accident and the fire broke down a barrier between us, however, and in the long run that was not helpful. My second report to my supervisor ended on a bleak note: “Since I started this report the situation in my family has become untenable, and I am about to start the process of finding a new family, which is rather daunting and difficult. The alcoholism of the father makes it impossible for me to stay, since I haven’t been able to re-build the barrier between us [since the fire], and he is becoming threatening when drunk, especially when his wife is not here. I lock my door at night, and hear him pacing up and down, talking to himself, putting the radio on full blast, muttering angrily.” I ended, with slightly pathetic bravura: “It makes me realise that issues about self-reflexivity are essentially experiential questions, which you are bound to come up against in the field, but which there doesn’t seem much point in spending much time on before you go. Hoping to hear from you soon.”

My supervisor wrote back, cutting to the chase: “The issue of your sexuality is clearly the most difficult issue of all. Honorary man is the best hope. I was able to be honorary woman in Trinidad which worked very well. Much as I want to see your work progress,” he added, “your safety and welfare come first and therefore do not hesitate to shift your ground or even move field site if you think you are in any danger at all. It’s just not worth it.”

I didn’t think I was in danger, but honorary man? The best I might hope for was honorary (accident-prone) child, and even that was quite hard to maintain. I suspect that the transition from man to honorary woman is generally easier than that from woman to honorary man. But perhaps, also, when you do fieldwork in a culture so similar to your own it’s less easy to conceal your identity. Much as I knew them, I think now, they also knew me.

I had to replace my car whilst it was being repaired, and eventually found a “contact” via Riima, my journalist friend in Tallinn, to help. He took me to the second-hand car market in Mustamäe, a huge repository of second-hand Western cars replacing the eastwards-drifting Ladas.

“I can say that the Russian market is such a big hole for the Ladas,” he said in English as we wandered around the huge market, my feet like blocks of ice. A Lada in St. Petersburg cost $500 more than in Tallinn—they liked Ladas because they could get parts. “They think it’s normal,” he said, “to have such a battle with the car.”

“It must have been strange,” I said, tired, “when all the Western cars started to come into Estonia.”

“Why?” he said sternly, looking at me intently. The young and business-minded didn’t want to be reminded of the past.

I found, eventually, a little Renault that seemed all right, though in fact it was a failure from the beginning. I had several hitchhikers with me as I drove back to the peninsula the following day, some of whom were my students, and a Russian woman I didn’t know. They sat in thoughtful silence as the car inexplicably ground to a halt, time and time again. I have no memory of what I did with that clapped-out old car, but I know I eventually got my Volvo back, with a brand-new engine from the Volvo centre. But in the depths of winter it wouldn’t start—in the deepest cold, when the collective farm Ladas started easily, my Volvo was dead. The men would gather around it, hood open, to help me start it. There they stood, without gloves or hats, leisurely discussing the internal workings of the Volvo, whilst I stood with them, nearly weeping with the numbing cold of minus 30 degrees. And the guilt of being helped by people who expected nothing in return.

On that trip back from Tallinn we made it—just—in time for me to join the new aerobic class in school. The class, attended by teenage girls, was surprisingly lenient. The most taxing exercise was a fast walk in a circle to very loud music. The rest of it consisted of leisurely stretches—circling the wrists and ankles and so on—to encouraging and entirely superfluous shouts from our tracksuited and trim instructor, whom I had never seen before. I only went once, and I don’t think it continued, in any case. Winter eventually ended most extracurricular activities. Life became increasingly routine, circumscribed by the cold and the dark, and a kind of winter fatigue that affected everyone. I recorded a grim succession of days in my diary, including a record of the food we ate, because I was always mildly hungry. Thus I know that on 15 November 1993 I had stale bread with cheese for breakfast, and that I then went for a walk, though I felt too tired to go all the way to Österby, the nearest village. I washed a sheet in the bucket, and picked up my post. School lunch was cabbage soup and dry bread. I corrected the horrifyingly bad English tests. Dinner was buckwheat with little bits of meat. The snow, I wrote, was drifting like dry white dust across the roads, and it got dark by three in the afternoon. At night the temperature dropped to minus 15 degrees. The following day I walked in the hazy afternoon, the sun setting across the fields, trees frosted and wintry. Everything was blissfully quiet. I was tired, and often hungry, but even now, twenty years later, I miss those long quiet walks in that melancholy and restful landscape.

At about this time Toi...