Breaking the silences? Contradiction and consistency in representing victimhood in Baltic museums of occupations

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Baltijos šalių okupacijos muziejai; Nacionaliniai naratyvai; Atminties konfliktai; Baltic Museums of Occupations; National narratives; Memory conflicts.

ENUpon entering the small, transparent building of the Museum of Occupations on the hill of Toompea in Tallinn, Estonia, the visitor is greeted by two towering locomotives in the middle of the room, one bearing a swastika, the other, a hammer-and-sickle. Situated in a room lined with a seemingly endless atray of modest, worn-out suitcases, the locomotives drive home the central focus of the exposition - the forced deportations which pitted the humble Estonian population with their hurriedly packed suitcases against the Nazi and Soviet terror machines. In the Museum of Latvian Occupations in Riga, a similar framing device is used by lining the main exposition hall with excerpts from Latvian poetry written in Siberian exile. In Lithuania, the state-funded Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius is housed in the former K GB headquarters while the commercial Grūtas Park in Druskininkai is surrounded by a calm forest with mock guard towers and barbed-wire fences. The museums of occupations in the three Baltics states underscore a point repeatedly made by scholars over the past decades: the predominant national narratives in the three countries are based on stories of collective tragedy in the form of forced deportations to the Soviet Gulag. Such stories are important in fostering collective commemoration of tragic events as well as in helping to create a sense of unity and stability, but they can just as well foster antagonism and create cleavages of historical memory by dividing the world into a Manichean opposition of "oppressor" and "victims", by sacralizing one perspective at the expense of others, and overlooking important historical details, sacrificing histotical accuracy for social unity.However, as the mass riots on the streets of Tallinn following the removal of a Soviet-era memorial to the victory in World War II have all too clearly shown, attempts at institutionalizing a single narrative in a society with a plurality of emotionally affective narratives of the past is ultimately detrimental to both historical accuracy and social cohesion. This chapter looks at how four museums of occupation in the three Baltic States deal with writing the recent histoty of the Baltics. These museums of occupations - defined as museums dealing explicidy with the history of the tecent past from the perspective of a national experience of foreign rule - are particularly important loci of investigation. They arc academic institutions of critical inquiry, charged with a scholatly investigation of the past, and discursive establishments, conduits of power, transmitting and shaping narratives of national identity through their scholarly and political authority. Museum expositions, particularly those dedicated to such high profile and politically charged issues as occupations, form a part of the "imagined community" of a nation-state. There, history is collected, systematized and transformed into a narrative that can animate a nation and mould the shape of civil society. Because of this dual role of scholarship and nation-building, we must investigate the narratives these museums convey to determine which stories are privileged, which are contested or underplayed, and which are completely ignored. [...]. [Extract, p. 178-179]