During the past decade, miraculous metamorphoses have occurred in the remembrance of Soviet time. The time that evoked anger and contempt only at the beginning of the 1990s has now become a source of style parties and funny stories. How can this be possible? Why has the Soviet time become like a phoenix rising from the ashes? Is this nostalgia? And if it is, then what is its object? It cannot easily be imagined that a youth organisation would hold a reunion (at least not publicly) requesting its members to appear wearing Nazi uniforms. But parties where the guests wear clothes from the period of the Soviet Union have recently come really popular. Based at least on this example, we could say that fascism seems to have died after its breakdown, but communism is still thriving and even organising merry events.

The Soviet time very skilfully kept people in a constant state of fear. This was accomplished in such veiled ways that it is almost impossible to find traces of the fears of those times, especially among young people. A few years ago I attempted to find traces of these fears by perusing the "secret" and "top secret" correspondence of the Estonian Communist Party, and I almost felt disappointed, because I found practically no separate documents that directly spoke of causing fear or terror. Only one letter, sent by Nikolai Karotamm, the leader of Estonian Communists and thus the most important man in the ESSR, at the end of 1949, to the Minister of Security Boris Kumm, contains an example of a direct, robust effort to frighten. Karotamm wrote that one of the deputies to the Minister of Security had several times told him that strange boats, some of them of non-Soviet origin, had been found on the seashore where the summer houses of the secretaries of the Estonian Communist Party were located. Karo tamm added that he had been surprised by the question of why the sea had tended to wash these boats ashore just at that precise location. The deputy minister had laughed at the question. But having thought about all these letters that I had read, which amounted to hundreds all together, I realised only then, how immersed in fear the world of that time had been. Fear was such an organic part of the Soviet era, and it was hidden in such a skilful way, that its traces have almost totally been lost. Thus the nostalgia for the Soviet time seems to be relatively innocent and mostly funny, since it is mostly directed at the surface of things, giving the impression that much fun was had at that time. This fact is confirmed by the posters and other publications of the time, featuring young men and women dancing happily. But the communist regime could not have existed without fear - this regime was based on fear. All classes of society, from the retinue of the great leader down to the common citizen, were restrained by fear. The difference often lay only in the fact that in terms of the fear coming from above, a person could have been at the same time both an object and a subject, causing fear in those positioned below him. Nostalgia for such a regime is unavoidably the nostalgia for an atmosphere of fear. The Soviet regime is just like a gift parcel from the same time, which, in addition to a good book in short supply, also contained a booklet of "Red" ideology. Acquiring the parcel for one of its components, one unintentionally acquired also the other component.

The fear of the Soviet time was so abstract in its universality that it has almost entirely been erased from memory. The historical memory of most people generally does not want to preserve bad things, and when the bad has been hidden behind a smiling mask, it is easier to forget about it. Besides, who wants to remember his fears and pass them on to his children? It is much better to give future generations the idea of our having been brave people who laughed at the whole milieu and environment of the Soviet time. And what\rquote s more, this later laughter relieves my generation of a kind of inevitable feeling of guilt.

To search for an answer to the question of whether history remembers, we do not need to delve into the Soviet past. It is enough to recall the new heated discussions regarding the problems of the most recent past of Estonia (of which memory should still be quite exact), where numerous contradictory claims were presented to the exclusive true rememberer. It has been proven that even events only a decade old, in which we all participated, can be remembered in very different ways. What should then be said about the Soviet time?

Historical memory has now and then suffered from such intense distortions that, with certain reservations, we could even ask whether the past has been more ruined and corrupted by direct violence or by manipulations of memory. Or, rather, whether history ceases existing when it has been corrupted, or when it has been forgotten.

The experience of the past testifies that usually it is easier to replace historical memory with something else rather than to erase it. Replacement is a much more effective way of achieving oblivion than erasure and prohibition. Besides, applying replacement as the method, we can use the carrot, dispensing with the stick. What are, then, the replacements for truthful historical memory? Usually, they are legends and fictions, such as stories that, instead of the real past, offer us something to identify with. This allows us to acquire a fictional past, or offers us something that would make forgetting agreeable.

There is nothing bad in laughter and fun, just as there is nothing bad in nostalgia. But if this merry nostalgia makes our close Soviet past look desirable, this notion is either too narrow and one-dimensional, or in the worst case, simply evil. The Soviet time was far from being a time of parties and fun; it rather was a time of overwhelming fear. But mankind has always wanted to be free of fear, and has partied to forget it.

David Vseviov (1949), historian, extraordinary professor of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Has researched history of culture, Russian history, history of philosophy.