Anteckningar från en kolchos

by Sigrid Rausing, Lena Karlin (translator)

Sigrid Rausing var 31 när hon flyttade till en by i Estland för att under ett år studera ”avkolchosifieringen”, hur människor upplevde frigörelsen från Sovjetunionen, och hur de förstod och tänkte på Estlands historia. Hon läste socialantropologi på University College London, och detta var hennes fältarbete.

Metoden kallas deltagande observation. Forskaren lever i det sammanhang som studeras, hon deltar, iakttar, skriver ner, och jämför. Sigrid Rausing kom till ett utkylt och smutsigt hus i byn, där hon också arbetade som lärare. Samhället var i förfall. Människorna fick det allt värre och kunde inte veta hur länge den akuta fattigdomen skulle bestå. Sigrid såg deras vanmakt och hopp, och deras strategier för överlevnad. Så småningom resulterade hennes arbete i doktorsavhandlingen History, memory, and identity in post-Soviet Estonia: the end of a collective farm, utgiven som bok av Oxford University Press (2004).

Nu, tjugo år senare, skriver Sigrid Rausing om samma period, men nu berättar hon också om hur den påverkade henne själv. Hur hon långsamt lärde känna människorna hon studerade, och hur det kändes att vara tillbaka i ett nordiskt baltiskt landskap, så likt det hon saknade från Sverige. Estland var som ett sovjetiskt Sverige, och hon såg där hur det abstrakta begreppet bad governance sätter verkliga spår, både i landskapet, och på människorna.

Anteckningar från en kolchos är en paradoxalt vacker skildring, genomsyrad av empati. Sigrid Rausing är en klok och ödmjuk iakttagare. Hennes berättelser om ester och ryssar, om villkoren i kollektivjordbruket, om sommaren och vintern, om gamla kvinnor och unga män mitt emellan två samhällssystem är historier som blir historia. Hon skriver i ett eftersinnande tempo, och scenerna som växer fram ur hennes anteckningar präglas av den äkthet som bara kan uppstå hos en betraktare med respekt för det hon ser.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel, Anthropology, Sweden, Russia

236 pages, Hardcover

First published June 3, 2004

About the author

Sigrid Rausing is Editor and Publisher of Granta magazine and Publisher of Granta and Portobello Books. She is the author of History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm and Everything is Wonderful, which has been translated into four different languages.

Reviews

[Hana · Rating 3 out of 5]

All that I know of Swedish culture I've learned from Ikea catalogs. In Ikea everything is wonderful: clean, spare, priced for the perfectly egalitarian world. When you take, say, a cabinet home from Ikea you have to assemble it yourself. What looked simple suddenly becomes puzzling, an exercise that leaves you rather humbled at your own cluelessness, at your own clumsiness.

This is a book written by an expat Swede now living in Britain remembering her anthropological graduate research field year (1993-1994) spent in the once Swedish region of post-Soviet Estonia. Rausing was studying the remnants or re-membering of Swedish culture in a land emerging from totalitarianism. I suspect you are already a bit confused. Entirely appropriate. So am I. Perhaps clarity (or an Ikea chair) will emerge as I read on.

Okay. I think I've almost got this figured out.

Part of the problem with Sigrid Rausing's book is that it doesn't have proper instructions (or maybe I'm just not bright enough). She jumps around a lot--from her own childhood memories of Sweden, to historical information about the Holocaust in Estonia, to scenes in 1993 that too often go unexplained and uninterpreted. Why (in a region with almost no Swedes--since they were all evacuated in 1944) are Estonian schoolchildren marching to the piano music of Swedish films? Rausing mentions that it's a "way of building Swedishness"--but that raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps the school had something do do with various sporadic Swedish charitable efforts to revive post-Soviet Estonia, but it was never clear to me. Another problem: characters come and go in rather random ways, or are reintroduced chapters later with no little clues that help the reader remember who they are. The overall effect for me was frustration.

The frustration was made worse because when she's on form Sigrid Rausing writes beautifully.

There are wonderfully atmospheric descriptions of the land, ravished and then abandoned by the Soviets. The Noarootsi Peninsula, where Rausing worked as an English teacher and did her field studies, was once a military border zone with watchtowers that "still stood, stripped and weathered, not yet historical landmarks, but no longer structures of authority. They all had that indeterminate Soviet look, between incompletion and dilapidation: white brick badly put together, concrete poured on the ground to form haphazard paths, woodwork rotting on the platforms, signs in Russian rusting on the floors, long since stripped of wire and anything else of value."

Perhaps the cheeriest place in town was a basement bar named Gorbyland in ironic commemoration of Mikhail Gorbachev's unsuccessful effort to curb Soviet alcoholism. Gorbyland "was small and cosy, selling Western chocolates, ice cream, cigarettes, and packets of coffee as well as Russian and Estonian vodka, sangria, Soviet liqueurs, and beer...That night there were about ten men and three boys there, silently watching a Russian videotape of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, cheaply and probably illegally dubbed by one bored voice making only the slightest pretense of drama." Overall, the impression is of relentless cold, grubbiness and poverty. And drunkenness. Alcoholics are everywhere; drinking seems the only way one gets through life. Everyone stinks of unwashed bodies and clothes, booze and cigarettes. It was seriously, deeply depressing.

Things improve in the spring with its "intoxicating sense of opening up, and the realisation that what had preceded it had been a state of near hibernation. The outside again became a public and noisy meeting place after the dark and snow-bound silence of winter. The summer was relentless in its own way; a long heatwave of glaring sun and dry wind day after day." And flies. The kind that go for your eyes and nostrils. And great clouds of mosquitoes.

Altogether Post-Soviet Estonia was about as far from an Ikea catalog as one can get and perhaps a dose of Swedishness would not go amiss. As of 2015, Ikea has yet to expand to Estonia although things are looking up and fake Ikea furniture is now available [lawsuit pending]. Meanwhile, I was glad to finish the book and felt terribly down for two days after. Three and a half stars.

Content rating PG for way, way too much drinking and a dreary scene in a topless bar.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1940, Estonia was formally annexed by the Soviet Union. Despite a brief blurp of Nazi occupation, Estonia was changed into a world of collective farms (around 20, give or take, decreasing as they merged). While the title of this book may lead the reader to expect the isolated life of a collective farm, it is more of a play on the idea of an entire nation reduced to the philosophy of collectivism (fully realized in 1949) and its aftermath (ending in the early 1990s.)

Sigrid Rausing did her anthropological fieldwork for her PhD in the village of Pürksi in 1993-1994. She had grown up in Sweden and was fluent in Swedish, something which would help bridge the gap considerably since Estonian was such a difficult language to master. In anthropology (and folklore, which is where I started out), fieldwork requires a year at minimum to establish a true insider perspective of a place and a people through participant observation. This means that Rausing was not just staying in a ritzy hotel and taking notes on her days off; she was living with everyday Estonians (sometimes at personal risk to herself) and caught up in the same mundanity of daily life that everyone else was seeing.

This memoir has the benefit of time. Her original fieldwork was published in an academic book much closer to the time of her research; this looks back at the same information and the same time with the benefit of personal and historical perspective. Much of what I learned about Estonia's history was not known to her when she was entrenched in the fieldwork in the 1990s.

The portrayal of post-collectivism Estonia is pretty bleak. The Swedes (formerly making up 7/8 of Estonia's population) fled from the Russians. The Jews fled from the Nazis. The Germans fled from the Russians. In the end, the villages are sparse and many of the family farms are left unclaimed. Items of cultural importance - songs, stories, histories - were lost or morphed into less reliable sources. While it is interesting to study a culture at such a significant time of tradition, it almost seemed like she had very little to study! There is a sense of loss, of emptiness, and ennui throughout the retelling. Still, it doesn't suffer from unwieldy academic language, and I think this type of book allowed her to talk more about the characters she interacted with, rather than reducing them into archetypes and themes.

I received a copy of this through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Books from Estonia are hard to find, so I was happy to find this!

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose Sigrid Rausing's Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia as part of my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. I was quite looking forward to it, particularly as I have included very little non-fiction on my list. It seemed as though it would offer something a bit different, and whilst a lot of the themes are similar to some of the other Eastern European literature which I read before it, the very fact that it is a memoir makes it all the more fascinating.

Between 1993 and 1994, Sigrid Rausing, a Swedish anthropology student working towards her PhD at University College London, travelled to Estonia to undertake fieldwork. She stayed in a former Soviet Union border protection zone named Noarootsi. She met and interviewed many different people for her project. The book's blurb proclaims that '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 their people.' In this memoir, published twenty years after her fieldwork ended, Rausing reflects upon history and political repression, and the way in which the wider world affected the individuals whom she met.

Of the aims of her PhD, Rausing writes that she wanted to explore the themes of history and memory in Estonia: 'I was there to study the local perception and understanding of historical events in the context of the Soviet repression and the censorship of history.' The collective farm which she stayed and worked on folded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was 'officially closed down in February 1993, following a vote by all the members in which just one person voted for its continued existence.' Rausing lived and worked in the village, immersing herself as much as she was able into gatherings and the like, and trying her best to learn the very difficult Estonian language.

One gets a feel for Rausing's surroundings almost as soon as the book begins. She writes: 'The rest of the villages on the peninsula - bedraggled collections of grey wooden houses with thatched rooves, sometimes propped up by shoddy white brick - were like villages all over the Soviet Union at that particular time. Forgotten places sinking into quiet poverty.' Rausing gives many examples of the visible changes within Estonia following the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and the effects which poverty and strict rule had: 'Haapsalu was the nearest town to my prospective field site. It had been a spick-and-span little coastal town in the 1930s, a summer spa where people came for mineral mud baths. Now, the baths were long since gone, the paint on the beautiful wooden houses flaking and unkempt... The main street was wide and muddy, with many shops selling few things, and almost no cars.'

The most fascinating element of Everything is Wonderful is the way in which Rausing manages to be at once a participant and an outsider in Noarootsi. Because of her position, she is able to gather so many different perspectives on issues affecting Estonian people. She builds a full picture of life for those villagers and townsfolk 'forgotten' by the wider world, often lived in poverty: 'The people on the collective farm had little connection either with the land or with high culture. They just got by, day by day, enduring the uncertainty, the confusion, and the quiet fear: fear of unemployment, fear of Russia, fear of the future.' Everything is Wonderful is stark and bleak, but very human; it is at once enlightening and harrowing. Rausing's memoir is a fascinating and important piece of social history, told from a position of retrospect, but working from the notes which she collected whilst on her fieldwork trip.

[Daria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I run into this book in the library of Tartu University several years ago, when I was myself considering the idea of continuing my studies in a very similar field as the author of this book. After, plans changed, and life happened, but I wonder if its course would have been different, had I read this book back then. Such was the impact of the account/memoir of a year spent by Rausing in an Estonian village conducting the field work for her own doctoral thesis. Having lived and experienced Estonia as a foreigner myself, I felt that some pages spoke directly to me.

There were two modes to my experience of being in Estonia, one almost surreal and extraordinary, and the other very real—­reassuringly real—which had something to do with being in that landscape, so grey, so ordinary, so reassuring.

Rausing, originally from Sweden but living in London, spent a year in the Estonian village of Pürksi, once home of a large minority of Swedish speakers, doing her anthropological research. It was 1993, during the transition of Estonia from the planned to the market economy, and her research focused among other things on the demise of a collective farm.

Personal and collective memory, or the lack thereof, in uncertain times, are at the center of many considerations in this book, making it invaluable for those who, like me, has an interest in anthropology and memory studies.

One day in 1952 she fainted at work, and woke up to hallucinations, including a vision of Stalin, dead, lying in his grave. She saw the school in the village in flames […]. She saw, too, all the many records of surveillance, interviews with informers and interrogations incriminating local people, sucked up in a whirlwind above the manor house[…]. . Where was she, then, I wondered, on that fine line between religion, dissidence, and mental illness? She must, at least, have felt free, the freedom that madness brings in totalitarianism, because when her co-workers gathered around her, she told them what she saw.

This recount highlights the way in which politics can interfere and influence individual lives, a lesson we should not forget, when we take the freedom we have now as given.

He had died because some work at the kolkhoz had been given to a younger man. Timo later said he’d heard that he had drank himself to death. Someone else said he had died of a heart attack, or perhaps blood poisoning. Without a functioning state, causes of death were uncertain. He didn’t reach the life expectancy of the times, that dismal 60.5 years for men. Perhaps he actually did die of the combination of the causes people talked about, all of which were implicated in that low life expectancy; perhaps he died from alcohol, and a heart attack, and blood poisoning, and losing his job, and giving up.

There is also a sense of loss and nostalgia, the sense of something that however terrible it might have been for people experiencing it, it also constituted their life, their reality, the universe of their values, and was now disappearing forever as Estonia became absorbed in the “Western world”.

There was something liberating about their attitude towards material goods—they did not identify themselves with anything they owned. They did not think of others in terms of what they owned. Everyone on the collective farm owned not only roughly the same amount of things, but actually more or less exactly the same things. I thought then that perhaps we care too much about our belongings, our cleanliness, our fussy and fastidious material arrangements. Maybe something really is lost—time, and ­solidarity—in our obsession with material goods, our trap of savings, loans, and debts, our caring for the endless things that we collect along the way.

The first and completely deserved 5* of this year.

[Tarmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kui ma 1998 Tallinnast Haapsallu tööle läksin, vaatas mõni mind nagu vaimuhaiget. Sigrid Rausing tegi aga mitu astet kõvema hüppe. 1994. aastal Londonist Pürksi aastaks Noarootsi kooli võõrkeelt õpetama. Praegu on ta üks Suurbritannia rikkamaid naisi, jagab oma heategevusfondi kaudu iga aasta u kakskümmend miljonit laiali. Siis oli lihtsalt Tetrapaki kaasasutaja laps. Noarootsis tegi ta oma antropoloogiaalase lõputöö ja selle kõrvalt hiljem selle raamatu siin.

Raamat on Noarootsis päris palju võnkeid tekitanud. Need, kellele see ei meeldi, leiavad, et Rausing kujutab siinset elu liiga mustades toonides ja kohati on võõrustajate vastu lihtsalt ebaviisakas. Minu arust see ei ole nii. Ka mulle tundub ka see aeg hoopis kenam kui Rausingu raamatus, aga samas lõpetasin ma sel ajal keskkooli ja alustasin iseseisvat élu - elu oleks helge ja ilus tundunud ilmselt igasugustes oludes. Mäletan oma esimesi kuid võõras ja väikses Haapsalus. 1998 oli juba jupp maad uhkem kui 1994, aga tunnen Rausinguga ikka hingesugulust.

Ja kirjutatud on see hästi, lakooniliselt, jahedalt ja täpselt.

Igal juhul on lahe mõelda, et nii mõjukas tegelane tuupis 20 aastat tagasi keset talve Pürksi kolhoosikeskuse maja sooja vee ja korraliku kütteta korteri eesti keelt (õppiski ära), jõi viina mahlaga, käis üle jäätee Haapsalus kinos ja paarutas rattaga mööda poolsaart ringi.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually, it sounds like everything was pretty miserable.
Review of the Audible Audio audiobook edition (June, 2014) of the Grove Press (May, 2014) original

Philanthropist Sigrid Rausing is perhaps best known as the publisher of Granta Magazine and Granta Books. In 1993-94 she was completing work on her anthropology PhD by doing fieldwork while also teaching English in the village of Pürksi in the parish of Noarootsi in northwestern Estonia. The PhD paper became the basis of her 2004 book History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm and the experience itself became the basis for this 2014 memoir which came out in paperback in early 2014 as Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia.

Estonia had declared its renewed independence from Soviet Russia on August 20, 1991 but it took a further 3 years until August 31, 1994 for the occupation troops to leave. The early post-Soviet years were difficult as the new democracy broke with the centralized Soviet system and worked towards a free-market economy. The system of Soviet collectivized farms had never been a success under the totalitarian regime which led to shortages of food and market goods being supplemented by the black market.

The area of Noarootsi is unique in Estonia due to its history of a Swedish speaking minority. Rausing billets at various private homes while learning about the local history and dealing with the local populace. Some of the alcoholics are a bit menacing, but the overall tone of the book is melancholic. It gives a picture of a people failed by an earlier system and in a limbo while a future tries to begin. The history of the area and of odd trivia such as the founding of the Swedish village Gammalsvenskby in the Ukraine is covered quite well.

Trivia and Link
One of the unnamed Estonian prog-rock albums that Rausing hears is the group In Spe’s Typewriter Concerto (1985) written by its then leader Alo Mattiisen:

… whilst Ivar played particular pieces of Estonian music from the mid 1980’s for me. Grave avant-garde ensembles, some based on folk songs, most with no lyrics. One famous one was dedicated to the typewriter, and featured a typewriter as an instrument, subtly antibureaucratic, and hence anti-Soviet. “That was the time for Estonian music,” he said. “Now it’s all in English, all the same."

You can hear the Typewriter Concerto & the rest of its 1985 vinyl album on YouTube here.

[An · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book very much, both for the insights in the lives of the Estonians trying to get by right after privatisation of their collective farm, as for the glimpse behind the scenes of the anthropological fieldwork that led to the book, from going flat to flat to carry out a survey, to accidentally setting fire to the landlord's kitchen.

[Mae Lender · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgia. Karm ja valus, aga ikkagi oma. Kuigi antropoloogist autor on välitööl Pürksis, siis võiks sealse ´93-´94 olustiku paigutada kuhu iganes üle Eestimaa. Tohutult äratundmist, paljud asjad olid tänaseks ununenud, kuid hoolimata süngevõitu meeleolust, on mul nende meenutuste üle hea meel.
Mulle meeldib Rausingu stiil ja hämmastab sisseelamisvõime. Oskus märgata, kuigi jah, eks ta ameti poolest peabki. Ja ikkagi... see lääneliku ahmimine, tühjad pakendid, lahustuv kohv, külmad toad ja kõle kinosaal, hambutud joodikud poe taga, kolhoositöökojas lõputu putitamine, kodust kodusse sarnased raamaturiiulid, magusad liköörid, humanitaarabi... Nii-nii palju veidraid pisiasju, mis taas loovad mäluseoseid.
Võin eksida, ent mulle tundub nagu oleks ilmunud juba päris palju dokumentaalkirjandust 90ndate algusaja linnaelust (kuritegevus, katuse pakkumine, vägivald, prostitutsioon jne), kuid kui vähe on sama ajastu maaelust kirjutatud! Ilukirjandust ehk jah, aga mitte tõsielulist.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.6 stars, rounded up.

I think I would enjoy this more on a second read-through. I really struggled with historical context overwhelm at the 20% ish mark, and it just never improved enough for me to really enjoy this book or get much out of it. No discredit to the author! This is well-written and highly human-conscious, which I appreciate. I just needed a little more about Estonia's situation before coming into this.

I really value the last sections discussing the value of shared cultural memory and discussion of what happens to individual memory when cultural memory is fragmented or shunned. Very cool!

NOTES WHILE READING:
The entire discussion on Western ideologies of material culture is FASCINATING and, I think, quite well done. Here's a decent quantity of text on Sigrid's observations + reasoning for any anthropologists out there:
P 53-54


"The older books, the Soviet Classics, came with the territory – cheap, ubiquitous, and unread. The best they could be said for them was that if one day a bookish child would be born into one of the village families, those hardback additions of the classics will be ready and waiting. It was a surprise to me to find that the villagers were so lacking in materialism and materialist aspirations. They really did live in a more immediate and experiential world. The scene, as it were, was already set. The props were simple and excepted as such, the quality of the play not judged by the simplicity of the stage that. Now, however, that expensive Western goods were arriving in dribs and drabs, the material life of the collective farm was beginning to look and feel poor and tawdry in comparison. The empty bottles on the bathroom shelves in the village, and on shelves across western Estonia, were originally modest gifts from Swedish visitors. They couldn’t have predicted that the utilitarian soap and shampoo they brought would have the effect of making the Soviet-quality shampoo seem forever not good enough. They couldn’t have foreseen that their presents of Swedish coffee would make Estonian coffee taste thin and bitter, or that their very presence on the collective farm it would make the villagers feel poor and provincial in comparison.
The logic of the gift, an anthropological terms, is that the giver is enriched, whilst the recipient is placed in a position of obligation, of social debt. The Swedes, coming from a deeply egalitarian culture, followed this logic by often appearing dimly ashamed of their gifts and seeming too rich, and yet they felt they should bring something. It was complicated. Sometimes people avoided the issue by giving me the gifts instead of the villagers.”

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the early 1990's, Sigrid Rausing did her anthropological fieldwork in Estonia, studying the Estonians attempts to reconcile post-colonialist privatization with their Soviet, collective farming past.  Everything is Wonderful
There was much to like about this book, given the author's interest in the people and their past.  Estonia is a land that isn't mentioned much in the books I read, so this memoir was a welcome look into a country previously closed off to Westerners.

I found much of her writing depressing, though.  The Soviet history left little for these people to build upon.  Everything seemed to be cold, outdated and dirty.  They had little access to goods from the modern world - mostly because it required money they didn't have.  Even with the attempts of former Swedish/Estonians to resettle, the future looked bleak.  Still, I'm glad to have gotten a glimpse into this world.

[Mentai · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real insight into the struggles of life on a collective farm in Estonia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
A beautifully written ethnography that delves into history, ideology, ethnicities, materiality and culture through attending to the particular, through slowly getting to know people, and understanding the local language. Raussing's challenges that year are the reader's challenges and we have to construct an impoverished society in transition.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1993 Sigrid Rausing spent a year in a remote village in Estonia working on her PhD, an anthropological study of a country and a people who had just gained independence from the recently collapsed Soviet Union and were caught between their communist past and capitalist future. Purksi was her home for a year and she lived and worked amongst the villagers, witnessing the sometime difficult transition from Soviet neglect to a very different way of life. She was never just an observer, but an active participant in the villagers’ daily life and as a result the book is a very evocative study of ordinary people living in extraordinary times. The people she makes friends with, the daily grind of finding heat and food without adequate electricity and water, the lack of money, the severe weather – all are vividly portrayed and chronicled in this blend of travelogue, memoir and anthropological study. Rausing maintains an excellent balance between writing about her own thoughts and feelings and those of her subjects, and the result is an absorbing and enlightening portrait of a small society in its historical and cultural setting. A very enjoyable, entertaining and informative read.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating peek into the past from a very particular perspective. It captures the culture of the collective farm and the surrounding environment, and Rausing details her experiences and observations with a journalistic eye. As she gets closer to the characters she encounters or perhaps becomes semi-accepted (or at least tolerated) as a member of the community, she finds herself in situations where the community disinterestedly helps her--her car needs repairs, and so it gets repaired with the help of people who ignore her as an element in the situation; they know how to get things done and she's the strange foreigner who doesn't, and the thing needs to get done.

Rausing's narrative is put forward with a neutral, non-judgmental tone, but you can fill in the blanks about how she may have been surprised, frightened, frustrated, concerned, or moved at turns. A beautiful book about a moment and place in history. We are fortunate she chose to record her experiences and share them.

[Jane Hammons · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chose to read this book because I wanted to learn more about Estonia for something I'm writing. A pleasant surprise--I didn't expect it to be such a powerful memoir. Rausing has a PhD in anthropology in addition to being an editor and human rights activist, so it is also deeply informed and reflective. Beyond the tight focus on Estonia, from which I learned a lot, she has much to say about anthropology, fieldwork, memory and history. It is, as she explains in the opening, some combination of the research she did for her PhD (and that research became a traditional academic text) and her memories of that time, also updated with a visit about 10 years after she finished her fieldwork. She is in Estonia when it becomes independent from Russia, then the failing Soviet Union.

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tyckte mycket om. En långsam läsning, det kändes som att jag spenderade hela året där med henne, men på ett bra sätt.

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stayed for a year. In the end, I was profoundly relieved to leave, and yet I also sometimes day-dreamed about staying on in that grey and tired modernity. It was so peaceful. People’s idea of post-Soviet security was to lock their doors, leaving the key in the outside lock. There was no crime and, in fact, no reason for the kolkhozniks, the collective farm workers, to steal from one another, since no one had anything much to steal. I am not suggesting that it was idyllic—the poverty was harsh, particularly in the cold winter, and although independence (1991) was welcome, most people were impoverished by the changes. (7)

In the early 90s, Rausing took to Estonia for a year, to live in a bleak post-Soviet town that had not—like, I think, so many other post-Soviet towns at the time—worked out what independence meant for them. She was studying Swedish culture in the region (god, this is why I love thinking about anthropology—the tiny specificities that people find to study), but while some of that is interesting, in many ways what is most interesting is simply the bleakness of the town, the isolation of living somewhere you don't speak the language fluently and know nobody and outsiders are not so common as to be comfortably welcomed. And yet:

I eventually got my Volvo back, with a brand-new engine from the Volvo centre. But in the depths of winter it wouldn’t start—in the deepest cold, when the collective farm Ladas started easily, my Volvo was dead. The men would gather around it, hood open, to help me start it. There they stood, without gloves or hats, leisurely discussing the internal workings of the Volvo, whilst I stood with them, nearly weeping with the numbing cold of minus 30 degrees. And the guilt of being helped by people who expected nothing in return. (103)

It doesn't sound like a happy year. An interesting one at at times probably a staggeringly dull one—all that time, all that isolation. Sometimes stress from a too-friendly landlord or a question of what, really, is being accomplished. I will note that from the (sub)title I had expected more about the collective farm, which is not really the case—and not exactly a disappointment, but it does make me want to know a bit more about Soviet and post-Soviet collective work, and about the people living in such communities.

Where was she, then, I wondered, on that fine line between religion, dissidence, and mental illness? (63)

I had this in my queue, I think, because I've found memoirs about post-Soviet Eastern Europe (I'm using 'post-Soviet' broadly here—literally anything from 1992 to the present) written in English to be relatively scarce, especially as I'm most interested in books about people who stayed somewhere, at least for a while, as opposed to, e.g., taking a road trip around the region. On that level, then, this was satisfying. What strange and similar lives people live.

[RYD · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for anything Soviet/post-Soviet, so this book started with a point or two with me. My older sister is an anthropologist, as well, and I found Sigrid Rausing's musings on some of the fundamental questions of that profession interesting.

From the book:

"All we know are clichés. Fieldwork can get you beyond the clichés, but only if you stay with the people for so long that you almost want to just stay forever. Then you have to leave, before you tip over the edge and go native."

Or, "Not long after this, I got sick. The room, my room, felt drained of colour, and I felt sick of the place as well as in body, angry and frustrated. I wanted, suddenly, normal life and intelligent conversation. I felt the idiocy of talking in a language I knew only the barest bones of, the idiocy of never understanding properly, or saying what I deeply meant or thought. This was either the low point of my fieldwork or a brief return to sanity from the practice of anthropological fieldwork. Or perhaps it was both."

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

a re-cap of authors phd in social anthropology. estonia, a kind of anvil where the hammer of ussr, nazi germany, bolshis, stalin and about anybody else wanting to hammer some serfs, has had a hell of a history, and post ussr, out on the west coast, the collective farms were dead. the estonian-swedes evacuated in wwii never came back and like any poor, traumatized farming area was having a hard hard time dealing with the 'trasition". author rausing re-visits the people and places she came to know in early 1990's (but before the economic explosion of the noughties, and subsequent bursting of said bubble, and the slow come-back of 20teens) . so the litany: poor health care, poor transportation (but hells bells, bettern oklahoma), poor farmers, poor outlooks, and she tries to talk to lots of folks about history (lots know very little) , farming, fishing, swedish memories, death camps, etc.
a nice look a back o beyond estonia. has beautiful maps, no pics wha?!, and helpful timeline.

[Meg Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both an intriguing history and a beautifully written memoir. I feel like I learned a lot from this book about the history of Estonia, and my only wish is that she had more discussions of the actual people that she met. I feel like I got her thoughts and less about what her experience was like, somehow.

[Colin Rennert-may · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of the book were really fascinating. Some of the descriptions of life in those early post-Soviet years were rich and detailed, especially in the early chapters. But as the book went on, the book felt self-indulgent.

[Marcella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. The prose was almost lyrical, Rausing did a great job of demonstrating the dichotomy of feeling lost and sad and unwelcome in such a forbidding place while simultaneously falling for long lonely walks and slowly-made friends.

[Leona · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because I will be going on a Baltic cruise and Estonia is one of the ports.
First, my opinion is the title of the book does not describe the contents; I was expecting more of a hands on experience. The author is doing fieldwork in Estonia in 1993 for a year. The book has a lot of history as well as her personal experiences.
The first Swedish farmers and fishermen first settled in Estonia in the 13th-14th centuries. In 1541 Northern Estonia became part of the Swedish Crown and the Southern forms the Duchy of Livonia. 1629 all of Estonia becomes part of the Swedish Crown. 1721 Sweden loses Estonia to Russia. 1940 USSR invades Estonia, 1941 Tallinn is occupied by Nazi forces, and 1944 under Soviet control. On August 20, 1991 Estonia becomes independent. Some of the timelines.
I did not know the history of this area. Besides the history, the author writes about her hardships and friendships. She returned 10 years later with her husband and found a lot of changes.
4 *

[Deniss Ojastu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huvitav vaade Eesti elule 1990-te alguses Läänest tulnud antropoloogi poolt, kes elas kohalikega Noarootsis umbes aasta aega. Kõige huvitavam oli minu jaoks eestirootslaste ajalugu läbi sajandite, samuti isiklikud autobiograafilised seigad autori elust (nii-öelda seiklused post-sovjetlikus Eestis).

Samas aga jäi minu arvates osa tema kui antropoloogi tööst tegemata - ta ei mõistnudki lõpuni kohalike inimeste ideaale, rõõme ja unistusi. Ta jäi natuke pinnapealsele tasandile - kirjeldatud ja läbi mõtestatud sai ennekõike see, mis jäi silma ehk materiaalne vaesus, alkoholism, abiorganisatsioonide töö, Lääne kaupade järk-järguline tulek ja muud nähtused, mis olid 1990-ndatel üle Eesti hästi nähtavad.

Raamatu suur voorus on ausus ja kirjelduste täpsus.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sigrid Rausing’s autobiographical work, based on diaries from her time doing fieldwork on a former collective farm in Estonia, is a fascinating portrait of the post-Soviet Estonian psyche. As a foreigner living in Estonia for the past 6+ years as my adopted country but never really integrating, I found her experiences and anthropological perspective illuminating… and resonant.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to read this with no attachment or relationship to Estonian (or Sweden). But as someone who is very much living with the consequences and progression of their history, within this culture, 30 years down the line, I found this book to be a marvelous read, and still extremely relevant.

[lara phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoir of an ethnographic fieldwork done in former Soviet Estonia, soon after the collapse of the USSR. this book is sort of the outtakes of the author's academic fieldwork book, so it's easier for laymen to relate to. I would have preferred a more narrative history, but I could relate to the author's feeling of displacement being from a developed country and living and working in a place of comparative deprivation. A good reminder that many countries in Europe got the double whammy of Nazi and Soviet occupation in the 20th century and have taken decades to recover.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by a young Swedish anthropologist, who spent a year in an Estonian village that had been home for several generations to Swedes. Who knew? Not me! And during the Nazi occupations the Swedish government was given the opportunity (which of course they took) to evacuate the Swedes (many of whom had never lived in Sweden) for a price per head. The author is writing post-Soviet occupation and life is hard, hard, hard. Poverty, little hope for the future, little sense of community.

[jm · Rating 2 out of 5]

This must have been such an interesting period, and the book is really good when Rausing just records observations of village life, but unfortunately most of the book is irrelevant details of her own life (like what she had for dinner), or things that people did with her because she was an outsider.

[David Steele · Rating 1 out of 5]

I finished it.
Nowhere near enough about collective farms or the people on them. A passing nod to history. way too much about Ingrid and the most tedious field trip in existence.
Maybe that was the point. This book shared with me the true spirit of a bleak and pointless existence by helping me to experience it for myself.

[Hana Gabrielle (HG) Bidon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since I traveled to Estonia, I've always wanted to learn more about their history. I'm grateful for a member of myTBR.co to have recommended this to me because I breezed through it and learned a lot about Estonia's history during the Soviet Union and post-USSR. It's extremely informative and highly recommended reading it. I just wish it was longer so I could read more about the author.

[Alesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book to learn more about Estonia during and after the Soviet period.
It contains a lot of useful information.
However, I gave up about halfway through because it was so depressing.
And (sorry to say) it was kind of boring, too.