The silent articulation of private land rights in Soviet Estonia: A geographical perspective

With an explicit focus on the spatial articulation of landownership, this paper explores various ways in which pre-Soviet land rights were expressed in rural Estonia during the Soviet period (1940-1941, 1944-1991). Drawing on cartographical analyses and interviews made in the rural district of Muhu, the paper demonstrates that people who owned land before the Soviet occupation kept track of the officially annulled pre-Soviet land rights, by relating to inertial landscape elements as memory-aids. To local inhabitants the landscape, in which past and present structures always merge, provided substantial evidence in support of the idea of legal continuity of pre-Soviet land rights. Hence, the post-Soviet land restitution reform often implied a re-discovery or re-expression of property rights that had been silenced, but not lost.