ABSTRACT
The majority of the Swedes escaped or were evacuated to Sweden during the war, and the area was partially resettled by the German army with Estonian refugees from the front. The choice between the old and the new shop was complex, revealing some aspects of the process of transformation which the village was passing through. The relationship between consumption of Western goods and the concept of the ‘normal’ is associated with a second relationship between the notion of what qualities constitute Estonian-ness – i.e., thrift, order, quiet, stubbornness and individualism – and the conception of a set of opposite characteristics which are associated with the Russians and the Soviet Union – profligacy, disorder, emotionality, and a tendency towards collectivity and brutality. The process of cultural change which was part of the transformation of the collective farm was largely framed by the contemporary notions of what it meant to be ‘Estonian’, constructed, mainly, as the non-Soviet northern European.
