Authors

Discussion

This paper takes a bottom-up approach with the history of land redistribution in Estonia from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Experiments in land user rights and ownership produced a new constellation of Estonian subjectivities. I focus on the land reform as a crucial factor in the making the post-socialist subject. The impact of land restitution depended on how individuals navigated the complicated legal and administrative processes, reassessed one’s relationship with land, and came to terms with dispossession and historical injustice.

Based on egodocuments and oral history interviews, I focus on how narrators situate their individual experiences of the land reform within the broader contexts of disruption and continuity during the long transition from Soviet land management to post-socialist restitution and privatisation. I argue that landowning subjectivities in post-socialist Estonia are the products of not only historical memory, but also of customary land use rights and the experience of uncertainty during the restitution process.