Oldal 355 [355]
OCR
The Meaning of Photos in the Context of Memory and Remembering by the narrators anchored in the present time juxtaposed the ruins, fear and lack of food of the post-war Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia to the abundance of merchandise, safe life and well-tended bridges and buildings of the pre-war Republic of Estonia. One popular symbol of the former security, permanence and prosperity was the Stone Bridge, destroyed by the retreating Soviet troops in 1941, which had magical connotations in folk tradition. The bridge was dedicated to Empress Catherine II, built in the eighteenth century at one end of Tartu’s Town Hall Square, and opened to traffic in 1784 (Figs 150, 151). The blowing up of the Stone Bridge was always described as a very dramatic event. The narrators talking about this showed compassion with what happened, because they had either in a direct or indirect way seen it, and now, more than 50 years later, have become eye-witnesses to the event. Narrators described where they were at the time, where the debris fell, and what they had felt at the time: I remember when the Stone Bridge was blown up. My father took me to town, and I saw it, when there were great piles of birch logs on the bridge, and the Russian soldiers kept bringing more. That was the day before, and my father said that they were going to blow it up, and that he wanted me to see it so that I would remember it. He liked the bridge so much. And now I do indeed remember it. I also remember that in the countryside everyone knew that the bridge would be blown up at four in the morning. No one dared to sleep. Then all of the windows shook. The ammunition was so powerful, and then (...) well, they blasted the bridge. And there were a lot of them throughout the city, for a long time, the stones.‘ In the Soviet period, Tartu became a ‘forbidden city’ that was closed to outsiders because of the local Soviet army air force base; foreigners were not permitted to visit the city without a special permit. The totalitarian system’s control mechanisms also forced people to maintain silence about everything that had ever happened in the city. Verbal communication in the Soviet period was not only divided into private and public, but was based on mutual trust and the guarantees provided by social networks. The same applied to photographs—people lived in a two-faced pictorial world. The Soviet public menu of images lacked post-war photos, especially photographs of destroyed towns. Everything was expected to appear neat, progressive and proper. The Soviet public rhetoric spoke of the “restoration” of the city of Tartu, which in actuality did not involve any reconstruction, but instead only the ‘Told by Laine Haamer (b. 1930). The interview was made in 2001 and is kept in Estonian Folklore Archive manuscript series EFA I 82, p. 27. 353
