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The Estonian Family in Transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Anu Narusk
Anu Narusk*
Affiliation:
Institute of International and Social Studies, Estonian Academy of Sciences
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Extract

All of the sociological surveys of Estonians carried out after the Second World War have highlighted family life and children as the main values for Estonians. Family and children were also the values that survived the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet system, becoming even higher ranked in Estonians’ value priorities. Other rising values during the transitional period were health, close friends, self-education, and a pollution-free environment. Among those aspects suffering considerable decline were participation in social as well as in cultural activities (visiting cultural institutions, reading books, etc.), professional work, and taking care of one's own physical well-being. The rural lifestyle together with Lutheran religious values, which emphasize the family and a “good mother,” have been the main cultural orientations handed down through generations of Estonian families. Even the Soviet period with its forced industrialization, collectivization and political terror did not break this value-system but, quite the opposite, often meant that the family became a place that provided “refuge, and temporary escape” from these pressures, thereby preserving important elements of an earlier cultural orientation. Through its ideologically restricted social studies and deformed official statistics, which left people without reliable information about reality, the Soviet system managed to preserve the relatively strong impact of cultural traditions on people's behavior.

Type
Part I: Estonia's Path to Identity and Independence
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 141 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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References

Notes

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