With Elnara Taidre
Tallinn, février 2007
N&b
14 minutes
music: a remix by PX-Band of
Мой адрес Советский союз
(my address is the Soviet Union)
by the group Samotsvety
"As I was a Soviet child, I knew that somewhere there was Moscow.
Also when I learned to say my address, in case I got lost, I knew the house, the street, the city and I also knew I was from the Soviet Union. So it was like a conceptual size of the world or conceptual limits or borders. The border between West and East didn’t exist for me, because I wasn’t thinking of travelling at all, I thought it would happen when I grow up. But I had a friend who was talking about having been to Finland, finally she told me that it was a secret, that she was lying! Her mother had been to Finland and had told her in details how it was and my friend felt that she had been there herself. It was a rather strange feeling that you needed to tell that you had been abroad, it was very important.
I was seven when my mother was talking to my aunt and mentioned that there was no more Soviet Union but a kind of consolidation of the sovereign or independent republics. It meant nothing to me though, because I didn’t learn history. I was in the first or second grade and I just understood that everything or something had changed: we didn’t have our school uniforms anymore, we started to learn Estonian and teachers were talking about citizenship. I understood that I needed a passport. We were told that if we didn’t know Estonian we wouldn’t get citizenship nor a passport. And I remember that I made a passport for myself when I was about eight years old. As I knew that in Soviet times the passports were red, I also painted it that colour, but actually the new Estonian passport was blue! My mother tongue was Russian and at home we spoke Russian, then I discovered that my surname was actually of Estonian origin. At school we had a kind of register where they put down our nationalities. When the parents of a pupil had not said his nationality, the teacher would put down that the pupil is Russian. And I told the teacher “Well! I am Estonian!” and –amazingly though- she changed the data.
I am from Narva, and Narva is situated close to the border with Russia. Accross the river there is another city: Ivangorod. In the Soviet time, Narva and Ivangorod were like one city, we were just used to get over the bridge to see friends, acquaintances, relatives, and we also had graves at the graveyard there. I know that they have more simple visas or they practice double citizenship for some people who have relatives in Ivangorod, in Russia, but as we do not, we have to buy visas and wait in queues. This border situation in Narva is quite unpleasant but on the other hand, for what concerns Europe, it is amazingly pleasant: since we have joined European Union, we are just showing our passport and there is no need to buy a visa.
When I was a little girl we used to go to Leningrad as it was called, now Saint Petersburg, quite often, and I knew that I could go to Hermitage or the Russian State Museum. Now, I feel that I can’t go easily anymore, because for Russians we became like aliens, we are separated and we are from Estonia.
I remember once, it was in Soviet Time in Leningrad, we went with the school to a market to buy music records, because there were extremely cheap in Russia. And a man asked us: “Are you from Estonia? You are not like people from here. Although you are talking Russian, you are smiling, you are more open, you are happy, you are definitely not from Russia!” We did not know whether he wanted to sell more of his music records to us or if he was sincere!"