Everything Is Wonderful : Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia read online book PDF
9780802122179 English 0802122175 "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 1993-94 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, fleeing 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. She lived and worked amongst the villagers, witnessing their transition from repression to freedom, and from Soviet neglect to post-Soviet austerity., * In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, a young student working on a PhD in Anthropology, went to spend a year living in Estonia, a remote Baltic State that had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union. Armed with a notebook, rudimentary Estonian, and a clunky laptop, she arrived in the peninsula of Noarootsi, on Estonia's north-western tip, and made her way to the village of Purksi, the place that would be her home for the next twelve months. Purksi was the site of the Lenin Collective Farm, a now dilapidated reminder of the total control of the USSR had enjoyed just two years previously. In her year on the former collective farm, Rausing documented the lives of the ordinary people there--from Ruth, a Seventh Day Adventist who in 1952 saw a vision of Stalin lying in a grave and became intensely religious (Stalin died a year later), to Astrid, who once taught Rausing how to milk a cow and produced a feast of a dinner for her, to the cynical alcoholic Toivu and his wife Ina, who owned the apartment where Rausing rented a small room. Rausing's conversations with the locals touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of Western products, and the Swedish background of many of the locals, which was the focus of Rausing's anthropological study. Rausing was profoundly affected by the beauty and isolation of the forests, the rocky coastline that marked the border with the West and was off limits during the Soviet period, and the trials of a people who enjoyed just nineteen years of independence in four centuries. In Everything Is Wonderful, she reflects in impressive prose upon her time in a country that for the first time was beginning to carve out its own place in a new, post-Soviet Europe., In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, a young student working on a PhD in Anthropology, went to spend a year living in Estonia, a remote Baltic State that had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union. Armed with a notebook, rudimentary Estonian, and a clunky laptop, she arrived in the peninsula of Noarootsi, on Estonia's north-western tip, and made her way to the village of P�rksi, the place that would be her home for the next twelve months. P�rksi was the site of theLenin Collective Farm, a now dilapidated reminder of the total of the USSR had enjoyed just two years previously.In her year on the former collective farm, Rausing documented the lives of the ordinary people there--from Ruth, a Seventh Day Adventist who in 1952 saw a vision of Stalin lying in a grave and became intensely religious (Stalin died a year later), to Astrid, who once taught Rausing how to milk a cow and produced a feast of a dinner for her, to the cynical alcoholic Toivu and his wife Ina, who owned the apartment where Rausing rented a small room. Rausing's conversations with the locals touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of Western products, and the Swedish background of many of the locals, which was the focus of Rausing's anthropological study. Rausing was profoundly affected by the beauty and isolation of the forests, the rocky coastline that marked the border with the West and was off limits during the Soviet period, and the trials of a people who enjoyed just nineteen years of independence in four centuries. In 'Everything Is Wonderful', she reflects in impressive prose upon her time in a country that for the first time was beginning to carve out its own place in a new, post-Soviet Europe.
9780802122179 English 0802122175 "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 1993-94 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, fleeing 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. She lived and worked amongst the villagers, witnessing their transition from repression to freedom, and from Soviet neglect to post-Soviet austerity., * In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, a young student working on a PhD in Anthropology, went to spend a year living in Estonia, a remote Baltic State that had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union. Armed with a notebook, rudimentary Estonian, and a clunky laptop, she arrived in the peninsula of Noarootsi, on Estonia's north-western tip, and made her way to the village of Purksi, the place that would be her home for the next twelve months. Purksi was the site of the Lenin Collective Farm, a now dilapidated reminder of the total control of the USSR had enjoyed just two years previously. In her year on the former collective farm, Rausing documented the lives of the ordinary people there--from Ruth, a Seventh Day Adventist who in 1952 saw a vision of Stalin lying in a grave and became intensely religious (Stalin died a year later), to Astrid, who once taught Rausing how to milk a cow and produced a feast of a dinner for her, to the cynical alcoholic Toivu and his wife Ina, who owned the apartment where Rausing rented a small room. Rausing's conversations with the locals touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of Western products, and the Swedish background of many of the locals, which was the focus of Rausing's anthropological study. Rausing was profoundly affected by the beauty and isolation of the forests, the rocky coastline that marked the border with the West and was off limits during the Soviet period, and the trials of a people who enjoyed just nineteen years of independence in four centuries. In Everything Is Wonderful, she reflects in impressive prose upon her time in a country that for the first time was beginning to carve out its own place in a new, post-Soviet Europe., In 1993, Sigrid Rausing, a young student working on a PhD in Anthropology, went to spend a year living in Estonia, a remote Baltic State that had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union. Armed with a notebook, rudimentary Estonian, and a clunky laptop, she arrived in the peninsula of Noarootsi, on Estonia's north-western tip, and made her way to the village of P�rksi, the place that would be her home for the next twelve months. P�rksi was the site of theLenin Collective Farm, a now dilapidated reminder of the total of the USSR had enjoyed just two years previously.In her year on the former collective farm, Rausing documented the lives of the ordinary people there--from Ruth, a Seventh Day Adventist who in 1952 saw a vision of Stalin lying in a grave and became intensely religious (Stalin died a year later), to Astrid, who once taught Rausing how to milk a cow and produced a feast of a dinner for her, to the cynical alcoholic Toivu and his wife Ina, who owned the apartment where Rausing rented a small room. Rausing's conversations with the locals touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of Western products, and the Swedish background of many of the locals, which was the focus of Rausing's anthropological study. Rausing was profoundly affected by the beauty and isolation of the forests, the rocky coastline that marked the border with the West and was off limits during the Soviet period, and the trials of a people who enjoyed just nineteen years of independence in four centuries. In 'Everything Is Wonderful', she reflects in impressive prose upon her time in a country that for the first time was beginning to carve out its own place in a new, post-Soviet Europe.