Some Political Aspects of the Modern City
	Mart Kalm

	The wish of a modern city to provide everybody with decent housing is democratic, egalitarian and no doubt noble. Although many countries have indeed been able to house innumerable people, they have not been able to create a pleasant environment for them. The dull uniformity of planned cities has been widely criticised, and in various cases the negative impact can even double, for instance when the state housing policy uses new residential areas as a means of colonisation.
	During World War II, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union. In 1944 when the Red Army reinvaded the territory that had previously been conquered by Nazi Germany, one tenth of the population fled to the West in fear of the Communist terror. And with good cause, as another one tenth was deported to Siberia in late 1940s. Since the war had passed over Estonia twice, and because of systematic bombing, most cities were in ruins. The postwar Stalinist construction process was clumsy and slow, the work was largely manual, and the abundant Classicist décor demanded a lot of energy. The mid-1950s' Khruschev's "thaw" period brought about a rapid transfer to factory-made mass buildings and the founding of new towns with free planning. In 1958, the first factory for producing room-sized panels (both the panels and the factory were developed in France) was opened in Taskhent. Other similar factories emerged all over the Eastern bloc. The same technology formed the basis for millions of flats built from the late 1950s until the early 1990s.
	In Estonia, the modernist dwelling areas were initially welcomed. The post-war shortage of flats, enhanced by the rural people moving to towns to escape collectivisation, and the massive postwar immigration from the whole Soviet Union, resulted in flats being shared by more than one family. By the beginning of the "thaw", the depression of people who had lost their independence and had been tormented in the clutches of Soviet terror, was profound. The mass building of new apartments, i.e. the chance to escape the communal flats in old buildings which lacked most conveniences and to move into a flat of their own with warm water and central heating, meant a definitely positive change in life. When Tallinn's construction factory was completed in 1961 and lorries were seen in the streets carrying huge panels with windows in the middle, which looked like parts of a child's toy set, it really did seem as if the favourite slogan of the time - "revolution of science and technology" - might indeed finally reach every ordinary citizen. The central notion of the Soviet rhetoric was "providing people with accommodation", measured by square metres per person. Thus huge apartment buildings were erected everywhere, but infrastructure remained largely nonexistent. Only the inevitable schools and kindergartens appeared between the houses, as practically all women had a job. The new residential areas saw even fewer shops, service centres and places for entertainment than the historical city centres.
	The apartments in the Soviet Union belonged either to the state or to the workplace, and to a lesser extent to co-operatives. An apartment of either of the first two cost the inhabitant practically nothing; a co-operative flat built with one's own money, on the other hand, was quite expensive. It was practical to build such a flat only when there was really no chance to obtain a cheap state one. There was no free market for flats. The typical scheme was the following: factory X built a block of flats and the trade union distributed the flats to the workers. First on the list were naturally the bosses who wanted an even better flat than they already had, then came the most diligent workers who had to be rewarded with something, followed by the recently married, and only then came the turn of those on the normal-priority list. The factory could well use a new block of flats as a decoy for attracting a fresh labour force. A person who did not work in a huge enterprise, such as a teacher or a doctor, had to wait for a state flat in a general queue. Due to corruption, the normal person hardly ever moved up at all.
	For many Estonians, a modern flat in a new residential district remained a dream. Between 1960 and 1980, active industrialisation required an ever larger work force that was imported from all over the Soviet Union. Immigration was so intense that after regaining independence in 1991, the percentage of Estonians in the capital Tallinn was less than half, whereas during the pre-Soviet occupation the percentage of Estonians had been 90.
	Russification was not the aim of industrialisation, but a most welcome unifying side-effect from the empire's point of view. The Russian-speaking migrants, wandering from one part of the empire to another, in search of a job and a promised flat, could not care less where they settled down. For these people, the Soviet Union was divided not by cultures, but by climate zones. Once in Estonia, they naturally realised the advantages of a Protestant cultural context, and enjoyed a higher-than average standard of living and more civilised circumstances than in the rest of the Soviet Union. At that time, West Germany or Sweden took on workers from Turkey or Yugoslavia who were quite keen on assimilating to the local culture. In Estonia, the situation was the opposite. Estonia had never asked for foreign workers to come: they were only needed in huge, Moscow-subjected enterprises. As for assimilation, the new arrivals did not consider Estonian society and culture worth the effort. The construction companies kept building apartments, and immigrants kept pouring in. The Russian-speaking work force, hired by factories, were soon given new flats which naturally made them feel superior to the local population. Estonians, on the other hand, resented the privileged immigrants for whom no queues existed, whereas they as second-rate citizens had to wait ages. In the ten years since the re-establishment of independence, the once new residential districts have been turning into areas for the poor that the more affluent, both Estonians and Russians, have fled. For Estonians, the Soviet housing areas stand for Russification. They very much dislike living there and wish these districts to be replaced by new, more humane ones. People who arrived together with the factories still consider such districts quite habitable - for them the newly independent Estonia has created other, far more unpleasant problems. Thus the idea of a modern city in Estonia has been doubly discredited for Estonians, but not for Russians.
	| Estonian Art 2/00 (8) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2000 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |