Oldal 355 [355]
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 mer¬
chandise, 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 picto¬
rial world. The Soviet public menu of images lacked post-war photos, especially
photographs of destroyed towns. Everything was expected to appear neat, progres¬
sive 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