An etching of a glassblower hanging behind a rural bar in Estonia has become an unlikely national emblem, brought to light as students start cataloguing artwork in a country whose fraught history many try to forget. The simple piece, completed in 1963 by graphic artist Olev Soans, is one of hundreds of Soviet-era artworks—including murals, mosaics, frescoes, and stained glass—that remain throughout the country as a worn-down but persistent symbol of the nation’s occupied past.
While the NATO and EU member country has sought to distance itself from the Soviet period since regaining independence in 1991, many of these communist-era artworks were created by Estonian artists, prompting a re-evaluation of their meaning. “It’s a part of history for us that the Soviet Union was here and occupied us,” Siiri-Liis Huttunen, one of the project’s coordinators, told the media. “Life didn’t stop, and the artists also worked and did their studies during that time, which is also a collective heritage of ours,” she added.
Commissioned by Estonia’s Board of Heritage and organised by the Estonian Academy of Arts and Tallinn University, the months-long project aims to map the country’s Soviet-era monumental-decorative art, providing the first-ever overview of its presence and value. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Tallinn has been a staunch ally of Kyiv, amid fears it may be Moscow’s next target. The NATO eastern flank country shares a 294-kilometre border with Russia and has experienced numerous drone incursions into its territory and probes by Russian fighter jets into its airspace, repeatedly prompting the alliance’s intervention.
Along with its Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia is actively removing symbols of Soviet domination, including military monuments and Red Army graves, from its landscape. However, for younger generations born after the USSR’s collapse, art from the country’s 51-year occupation is an opportunity to reframe history and highlight the creative contributions of Estonian artists. The artists “are not at fault for being born during Soviet time,” Huttunen noted.
In their pursuit of art, students engaged in the project travel across the country, scouring schools, former factories, abandoned collective farms, and old townhouses for signs of history and identity. Many artworks from the period have been destroyed as the buildings housing them were demolished, requiring those engaged in the project to scour through archives and newspapers and speak to locals at the sites of their visits.
By compiling data on what remains, the country’s heritage board will determine “which are valuable enough to preserve, and which need urgent preservation,” Hilkka Hiiop, rector of Estonia’s Academy of Arts, told the media. The project does not include military artworks containing Soviet-era political symbols. Many such works have already been removed from buildings or covered “to ensure that the occupying regime is not glorified in today’s public space,” Reesi Sild, a Cultural Heritage adviser at Estonia’s Ministry of Culture, explained.
Industrial motifs, ubiquitous in socialist realist art across the former Soviet bloc, reflect the “ideology behind everything,” including “the five-year plans and work as a central theme,” Maria Leemet, a doctoral student and project coordinator, stated. Even in works created in what seems like typical Soviet style, some students say signs of resistance—which managed to elude censorship undetected—linger beneath the surface.
“I don’t know if it’s just me, but maybe the hat looks even more like a traditional Estonian folk hat,” Martin Danilas, a 23-year-old student at Tallinn University, remarked while observing the glassblower work. This ongoing inventory serves as a bridge between the painful memories of occupation and the recognition of the artistic resilience that persisted despite the political constraints of the era.
Ultimately, the project seeks to balance the necessity of national de-Sovietisation with the preservation of cultural artifacts that define the lived experience of Estonians during the 20th century. By documenting these works, researchers hope to provide a nuanced understanding of how art functioned as both a tool of the state and a medium for personal expression during decades of foreign rule.
The NATO eastern flank country shares a 294-kilometre-border (183 miles) with Russia.
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