ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the Estonian National Museum which was created as a part of the national movement in 1909 and which then established itself as an important symbol of national memory and identity. For the majority of ethnic Estonians much of the twentieth century was an immensely traumatic experience and with the restoration of independence in 1991 came the hope that the nation might pick up from where it left off more than fifty years before. The draft of the profitability and feasibility analyses of the future museum declared that future exhibition spaces would tell the story of non-Estonian groups, particularly Russian speakers, for the first time in the nation's history. A dialogical national museum permitting shared authorship calls not only for the modernisation of the museum's communication and consultation apparatus; it may also require a fundamental shift in the underlying concept of Estonianness.
