Mediocre elitism
	Eva Näripea

Eesti keeles
	Õismäe is the middle one. Chronologically between Mustamäe and Lasnamäe*. It is like the middle child, without the privileges of the first-born and the fuss made over the youngest.It has suffered from this lack of attention. The Mustamäe of the optimistic 'thaw' period of the 1960s enjoyed the heroic aura of a socialist urban construction hero; it marked the end of the narrow-minded bourgeois dictate and the beginning of a new all-embracing era of equality, of homo sovieticus. Lasnamäe carried radically different but equally intensive and bathos-filled shades of meaning, primarily the fact that the new urban districts were demographic Trojan horses which served the interests of migration, rather than those of the local population. Lasnamäe bore the stamp of the final decline of the Soviet system. The district popped up as a weighty anti-Soviet argument in the rhetoric of the pre-Singing Revolution period and during it as well. Together with the singer Ivo Linna, thousands yelled in the night: "Stop Lasnamäe!" In all likelihood, many of those 'revolutionaries' had a few decades before sat at their tables and hummed along to the tune of the one-time Mustamäe hymn - the Mustamäe Waltz... Õismäe does not even have its own song. It is round and nondescript like a politician's speech. It grew out of a grassy area without much fuss. There were no beautiful sand dunes and pine coppices (as in Mustamäe) or ancient stone graves (as in Lasnamäe), no valuable natural or historical items of heritage that the bulldozer could have threatened. Õismäe sprang up to the delight of all concerned, like a simple pretty flower. After all, even the trolley bus and bus stops were given the names of field flowers (Globeflower, Cowslip, Forget-Me-Not), and not of some historic figures instilling morbid heroism and immortalising the milestones of progress. While Õismäe was being built, the papers mostly published obligatory reports from the district's authors and architects, supplemented by occasional - and equally obligatory - notes of (self) criticism. Nothing too dramatic, however.
	Õismäe is elitist. Of Tallinn's three new districts, it is the most valued. It acquired a kind of status as early as the 1970s and 1980s, but even today the quite considerable real estate prices are proof of the region's reputation. The reasons are the compactness of the urban area and its relatively small population (the planned number was 40 000, several times less than in Mustamäe or Lasnamäe, which later grew out of all proportion), better-planned flats and higher construction quality than in Mustamäe (the building company involved reputedly reached the peak of quality here), as well as the existence of a local beach (Harku Lake) and the steadily fading myth that this, in contrast with Lasnamäe, was an area of Estonians. As early as the 1970s Õismäe was regarded as a model urban district: Õismäe was one of the ten new urban districts to participate in the all-Soviet research programme of environmental psychology and sociology. This was a most trendy undertaking at the time and in the Estonian context, incidentally, had quite an opposite effect to the one desired - it strove to undermine the idea of mass construction. This did no harm to the reputation of Õismäe, however. The positive image was further enhanced by high recognition from the authorities - in 1986 the designers received the Soviet Union State Award. Quite by coincidence, the head planner of the urban district, Mart Port, had just released a documentary film based on his own script, Small Õismäe - A Circular City. It was hollowly commercial and had a typically Soviet rhetorical screen language. The hugely popular writer Raimond Kaugver's equally popular novel It's Not Our Fault shows the elitist and seemingly glossy everyday life of an 'inhabitant of Õismäe', but also the sad consequences of a careless careerism. A somewhat na•ve TV film Flamingo - A Bird Of Fortune was made on the basis of that novel: a spoilt son of successful parents (the mother someone important in commerce, the father a middle-level building bureaucrat - under conditions of a consistent shortage of essential things both jobs were even more important than high salaries) becomes a criminal. What started out as a little joke for a gang of boys ends in tragedy - an old man is pushed into the pond in the heart of Õismäe where he drowns. At that moment the mediocrity of Õismäe vanishes. Instead of elitism there is Uncanny, and for a split second we get a glimpse of the anxiety-evoking 'metaphysical space' so well described by Mati Unt in his Autumn Ball where he relied on Mustamäe. Never has Estonian literature or film found anything like that in Õismäe. Õismäe's identity is schizophrenic, just like that of a Soviet citizen: mediocre and elitist at the same time. * Õismäe, Mustamäe and Lasnamäe are urban districts filled with high-rise buildings erected in Tallinn during the Soviet period [Ed.]
	| Estonian Art 1/03 (12) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2003 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |