Nostalgia as Practice The nationalist government that was in power in the early 1990’s wished to see Estonian independence primarily as a reversion and to deny the intervening history. This project based on the wishful thinking of historians concerning “major” events did not take into account that everyday stories, the ongoing process of daily life, are lost this way. This is what led to the entire wave of Soviet nostalgia with a vengeance 10 years later. Andres Kurg, GB, 2005.
It is said that the 20th century began with futuristic utopism and ended with nostalgia. Nostalgia is ordinarily interpreted as longing for another time dimension, whether it be childhood or the time of one’s youth, sometimes more distant history altogether. Nostalgia is also seen almost without exception as a certain kind of rebellion against the present time, disregard for progress and the march of time: “The nostalgic desires to turn history into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”1 Nostalgia is thus in and of itself the hopeless pursuit of a more stable era, in other words one that “stands still”, an escape from the current rapidly changing spatial environment to a more secure personal space. Nostalgia for timelessness embodied by traditional forms is also one of the more typical interpretations of postmodernism in architecture. 152
Tallinn (and to a lesser extent other smaller Estonian cities as well) has gone through a total makeover in the last ten to fifteen years, and this has understandably led to lively discussion of the threshold of physical endurance. Different camps have been formed in the public sphere, like cultural heritage conservators versus developers, civic movements versus developers, municipal authorities versus citizens, architects versus cultural heritage conservators, and so on, all of whom regroup as needed. The topic of preserving historical heritage and preservation of a certain environmental status quo is one of the so-called dividing lines separating the different camps. This defensive reflex concerns city quarters built before the Second World War first and foremost or the architecture of that time. So called Estonian era architecture is everything that architecture from the Soviet period is not: low-density and small scale with traditional forms and décor, with classical street space, with a style of construction based on hand craftsmanship, on the background of an independent country, and so on. At the same time, the Soviet era is a period that most people of today have a direct connection to and have experienced first hand. We remember that city and those rural settlements, and their demolition, reconstruction beyond recognition or inevitable disintegration gives rise to opposition in us towards living in a rhythm of constant “total change”. The farther that period recedes from us, the more completely the regime is “forgotten”, the more the purely architectural values of buildings start being highlighted as original ambassadors from an era when square metres were not counted in the case of special projects (model project design was subject to strict standards in terms of maximum floor space after all) and the issue of land ownership was not a problem – everything belonged to the state. Naturally, the other side of the same phenomenon has led to a retro wave of Soviet era consumer goods and products in all the so called post-socialist countries and more broadly to a wave of copying the aesthetics of the 1960’s and 1970’s in pop culture. Nostalgia is spoken of in the study of culture as cultural consumer goods that originate from the experiences of a certain age group