The Echoes of the Russo-Ukrainian War in Estonia: The Last Phase of De-Sovietization?

In this article, we discuss how the ongoing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine transformed Estonia's attitudes toward material legacy of the Soviet past. Our nodal points for research are the Estonian government’s policies of relocations of monuments semantically associated with the communist power. Such a perspective allows us to demonstrate how these practices of de-glorification triggered new narratives aimed to legitimize or delegitimize, as well as securitize and de-securitize the continued public exposure of the material symbols of foreign domination. The theoretical framework of our approach is a combination of heritage studies, post-colonial literature, and the concept of securitization; our main methods are visual and discourse analysis. Our database consists of participant observation materials, field notes, along with a panoply of public narratives (policy stakeholders’ speeches, position statements and media debates).