ABSTRACT
This chapter examines narratives of Estonians’ encounters with Soviet military units and border troops from 1956 to the 1980s as represented in life writing and oral history. This material reveals the mismatch between local naturecultural practices and Soviet-imposed systems of control. This mismatch was typically perceived through a strong ethnic coloring: those who control the land have arrived from elsewhere and speak a different language. Such border zone encounters significantly impacted the way that ethnic Estonians regarded Russophone populations as cultural others. In the general context of the era, the conflictual encounters with border guards were situated within the colonial matrix of Soviet rule—more specifically, within the matrix of systemic colonial ecosocial violence.
