JÜRI REINVERE ⟩ A generation is emerging that has little memory of dictatorship or none at all

Composer Jüri Reinvere. Photo: Mihkel Maripuu

• The upheaval of the 1990s was much greater than people realize.
• People with experience of authoritarian society are being replaced in power.
• Power is increasingly in the hands of a generation that recognizes only economic growth.

The differences between ages and generations are like some kind of dark cosmic mass that affects processes in society, composer Jüri Reinvere writes.

While I was living in Poland, it was still a must to kiss a woman's hand. By now, this custom has blurred and survived only at high-level events among Poles themselves. However, in the early 1990s, before the great Western-style changes, kissing a woman's hand was so ironclad that if you didn't do it, you were considered a boor.

When I took academic leave and flew all the way from Warsaw to Finland, to a small town in Karelia on the Russian border, I didn't realize that the women in that town actually flinched when I took their hand and kissed it. It took a couple of weeks, a lot of startled glances and some vague retracting movements until I realized that it was probably better not to do it there.

For the congregation where I worked as an organist, it was customary to take group trips to a nearby health spa. In the Turkish sauna, in a room full of steam, the congregation's staff – men and women – mingled as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And there I sat, naked as a jaybird, between deaconesses, recalling the time just a couple of months earlier in Poland, where the congregation would have rather died of shame than allowed deaconesses and organists to sit together naked somewhere, engulfed in steam.

The upheaval of the nineties was a powerful event both in the East and the West. In the West, it was because the market of the East opened up for them, which halted their degeneration processes, pushing them 30 to 40 years forward, to the present moment. What happened in the East is familiar to us Estonians, and we still feel its consequences today.

In both art and science, a generation of people who had, for the most part, received a very good Russian education, had to start earning money for their families instead of jumping to the top of science in the West. And Estonians could not benefit from functioning international networks like the ones that the intelligentsia in Moscow or Leningrad managed to preserve amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is the most primary reason why one generation of Estonians seems to have been «skipped» and only the current young generation is starting to have a say in the international context, even though the networks are not yet strong. We see traces of this upheaval in a very large community of Estonians, and in the constant threat of the country running out of people.

In the early days of my radio work, Helve Võsamäe, who was my mentor in the secrets of radio work, said that in her opinion, the upheaval of the nineties was greater than the changes of the forties – which I found difficult to believe. However, it is probably true that the upheaval 35 years ago was much greater than people realize even today. That upheaval took us to a world that badly needed us, but was not expecting us at all, and was not ready to give anything central of itself.

***

The change of the nineties stands out brightly above all in terms of how today's world functions. Both in art and in the thinking world in general, people are divided in two: those who still remember dictatorship, and those who have little memory of it or none at all. Both generations operate differently to this day, and both are struggling with their expectations for the present day.

The generations that experienced dictatorship were accustomed to linking the understanding of themselves and their creative work to constant confrontation, to proving themselves, to proving their principles. The generation that followed, on the other hand, is built on adapting to financial and social circumstances, literally adapting to them with as little conflict as possible, and building success through this.

This change has become particularly pronounced in the politics of the EU's eastern member states. Increasingly, people with experience of authoritarian society, and thereby a certain intuition about which decisions are harmful, are being replaced in power by a generation that recognizes only economic growth. And for this generation, playing with dark forces – such as ultra-right crypto-fascism or even Polish-style clerical fascism, which is constantly bubbling beneath the surface of Polish domestic and foreign policy – does not seem dangerous at all.

It is difficult to blame this generation for this – we as humans have been so created that in our hearts we believe and know only what we have experienced ourselves. Speaking and history classes help a little – if any. The new generation has also grown up in an environment where the intertwining of fields and knowledge has no longer been desirable – instead, precision concentration in one narrow area has been encouraged everywhere.

For my part, I notice a difference in those who grew up in the Brezhnev era of complete stagnation. I haven't examined the statistics, but my own experience from my own generation is that we are the ones with the highest incidence of all sorts of symptoms of mental weakness.

In a dictatorship, people must handle everything by themselves and use a wide array of means to cope with life, whereas in a market economy, it is desirable to optimize resources to avoid unnecessary burdens. This difference is why parts of society function as if they are disconnected from one another, making interactions between different parts of society increasingly difficult – people simply no longer know how to connect with each other.

Against this backdrop, what we see in Western society is rather paradoxical. People in Eastern Europe, especially the older generation, would possess all the knowledge and wisdom to solve or at least alleviate today's problems, such as growing polarization, reckless political experiments, and a constant need for escalation. However, they are mostly disappearing, and those who remain have long been pushed out of power. The new generation of politicians, artists, and thinkers, on the other hand, no longer has a connection to historical experiences and has developed completely opposite methods for survival.

The differences between ages and generations are almost invisible, yet they, like some kind of dark cosmic mass, are perhaps the most important influencers of processes in society and become immediately visible when spoken of by proper names.

***

The change of time is as natural as the change of language, and I have always found it difficult to relate to people who complain about the world changing. Back in the days of ancient Rome, people also scratched desperate messages about changing generations on the walls. What matters is understanding and a conscious attitude toward this, as well as grasping the reasons behind changes and what can be influenced at all.

After all, we live in such peculiar post-World War I world where nation states seem to be at the core of everything. Yet the economy and other major forces are global and do not care about nations, states, or the borders between them. For us Estonians, the nation state is still a prerequisite for survival at the moment, but for most states it is not.

One more paradox: we live as if in one world, repeating to ourselves every day in the news, writings, and classes in school that the world consists – for the most part – of nation states, while at the same time, this has an increasingly smaller impact on the actual state of the world.

Even the UN, which was supposed to protect this world order at all costs and prevent and avoid new world wars, is becoming increasingly weaker. So weak that any country can take the liberty to march in and announce that this is how it is now and you others should rearrange your affairs – and apart from giving a relatively faint warble, the UN has no means to change this situation.

Once again, we encounter a paradoxical double reality: the world is supposed to operate as we hear everywhere and still perceive in our minds – yet, in reality, it hasn't functioned that way for a long time. This is primarily because new generations are emerging who see the world in a completely different way.

This should be very easy for us to understand – the same Helve Võsamäe, who was born in the prewar Republic of Estonia and remembered that time through the eyes of a child, often said to me that she saw a significant difference in the mentality of Estonians in terms of where they were positioned relative to this historical divide: whether the person still remembered the time of the prewar Republic of Estonia or did not remember it.

Those who remembered, she said, were relatively strong as human beings, generally cheerful and believing in themselves. Those who did not remember, however, were bearing deepening hallmarks of the homo soveticus, including the belief that there are few things that one can influence, and quite often had a growing hunger for theft and pilfering.

For my part, I notice a difference in those who grew up in the Brezhnev era of complete stagnation. I haven't examined the statistics, but my own experience from my own generation is that we are the ones with the highest incidence of all sorts of symptoms of mental weakness, and there is one or even two cases of suicide at a young age in almost every circle of people I know.

Once, during a meeting in Helsinki, I shared this observation with the audience. Initially, the room full of Estonians disagreed. However, many approached me afterwards and said, «Jüri, you know, you're right. I started thinking about it and remembered one case, and then another, and then yet another. But I had completely forgotten about it all!»