ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and Totalitarian Regimeis that usually the people we love most are also geographically closer tous, whilst leaning on Enlightenment philosophy we should be impartial(Smith, 2000). Even the so-called first law of geography says thateverything is connected; only close-by things are more connected.Sometimes there is another sort of distance at play: a mental distance.In humanistic, phenomenological, and perceptual-behavioural geographya subjective distance (in terms of time or money) can matter morethan the “real” one (e.g. kilometres). For example, dear people that arementally close to us can be far away and vice versa.In the following article I would like to explore these moral categoriesof “appropriateness to a place” and “likeness of geographicallyclose people” in Kohtla-Järve, Estonia. But first some remarks aboutEstonian life stories in general.Biased Estonian life storiesEstonia, as one of the former republics of the USSR (Union ofSoviet Socialist Republics), suffered under the totalitarian regime andas such “official” historical documents of that period are biased. Thisbias can at least in some places be counterweighed by nowadays biographicresearch. “The coming of the “biographical turn” to the postcommunistcountries [see also Humphrey, et al., 2003; Passerini,1992], including Estonia, coincided as a rule with the disintegration ofthe Soviet Union” (Hinrikus & Kõresaar, 2004, p. 21). The first ever lifestory written in Estonian was recorded by a forward-looking peasantin 1880 who was conscious of himself as a subject of history. Calls forsending in life stories emerged in February 1988 and were publishedin newspapers in 1989. Still, in 1997 troubled questions surfaced concerninga writer’s future destiny if and when the “Russians” should evercome back. The first calls for life stories in Russian appeared in 2003(Hinrikus & Kõresaar, 2004). The heyday of sending in life stories maybe over, but research continues (Aarelaid-Tart, 2006; Hinrikus, 2000,2003; Hinrikus, et al., 2006; Kirss, et al., 2004; and Kõresaar, 2004, toname a few).235