ABSTRACT
The break-up of the old political structures in the Baltic states has released an avalanche of memoirs, diaries and life stories, many of which are about the experiences of displacement and deportation to Siberia, Tajikistan and other distant areas of the former USSR. Similar developments took place in other East and Central European states (Skultans 1998:25-6). This literary deluge has been accompanied by social movements for recovery of factual history, many of which have adopted ‘correction of collective memory’ and ‘retrieval of history’ as explicit parts of their political programmes (Osiel 1997). By retelling the stories of displacement and resistance, the governments by and large have shown that they are sympathetic to the requests of these movements. Thus, after the ‘organized oblivion’ (Koonz 1994:258) of the communist period, the restored polities tried to establish a shared sense of history among the people in whose name they govern.
