Authors

Discussion

This paper looks at changing relationships between people and the state in three former socialist towns in the Baltics: Visaginas in Lithuania, Daugavpils in Latvia, and Sillamӓe in Estonia. The mainly Russian-speaking residents of the three towns are deprived of recognition to various degrees; some of them are non-citizens and/or do not speak the official language. Several local officials also described the residents as passive and dependent on the state, ascribing this to their Soviet past and associated mentalities. This paper, based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamӓe between 2017 and 2019, demonstrates that the Russian-speaking residents did not expect the state to simply provide for them, but perceived themselves as contributing subjects deserving of state’s attention. They strove to be in an equal and reciprocal relationship to the state. Unable and/or unwilling to make claims towards the Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian state as good national and/or neoliberal subjects, the residents assembled their own language to claim recognition and deservedness. The paper demonstrates that the Russian-speaking residents of Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamӓe usually made claims based on three grounds, which are the residents’ taxpayer identity, the responsibility of the state and the European Union in closing down the industries their towns depend on, and the language of “ecology.”