Communication and International Relations

May 1, 2007: A woman holds a Communist Party news paper depicting the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet war memorial removed from a central part of the Estonian capital, as she attends a traditional May Day demonstration in downtown Moscow. The statue was removed despite protests from ethnic Russians and Moscow, and re-erected at a military cemetery outside the city center. The move has strained already tense relations between Russia and Estonia, and highlighted long-standing Russian complaints about the treatment of Russian-speaking minorities in the ex-Soviet Baltic states. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev)

Media play an important role in building and sustaining citizens' national identity. But what happens when the national identity is not your identity? In 1991 the small Baltic country Estonia declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Today, forty percent of this nation consists of mostly Russian speakers whose parents or grandparents moved to Estonia during the Soviet Union rule. Prior to break-up of Soviet Union, those people identified themselves as Soviets. The collapse of the Soviet Union swept away this collective identity, creating a desperate need to either remodel their old identity or build a new one.

The question of the development of the identity of this Russian diaspora has attracted many scholars. In their 2003 Journal of Baltic Studies article, "Identity Dynamics of Russian-Speakers of Estonia in the Transition Period," Triin Vihalemm and Anu Masso surveyed the ways in which Russian speakers in Estonia define who is "us" and "them" and what role the media may play in their identity mindset. After interviewing 402 people who considered Russian as their primary language, the authors found that most of the people who previously identified themselves as Soviet citizens began an identity transformation. They developed a sense of local identity as 'citizens' of Estonia no longer identifying with their Russian homeland. Yet, curiously, they still categorized themselves as Russians, and not Estonians.

The authors conclude that this confusion in social identities was due, in part, to media. They found that access to some domestic Russian newspapers, and later to news channels from Russia, helped to maintain a Russian group-consciousness. At the same time, new sources of media within Estonia and the European Union allowed Russian-speakers to move on with their lives and distance themselves from the fragmentation of their past identity.