Model photo of Väike-Õismäe, 1968

Elaborating socialist heritage is not a weightless venture. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the former Eastern bloc has been attempting to somehow reshape, reframe the built heritage of the socialist past, forming a new national and European identity that rejects the haunting spectre of communism. However, the way out of the socialist era and its built heritage is meandrous and full of contradictions. What is worth preserving from the legacy of the socialist past? Does preserving this past also mean preserving socialism to rethink it for the 21st century? 

Architecture operates here as a medium, an ever-changing object in time. The built heritage of the Soviet era has undergone processes of forgetting and erasing through institutionalised European processes of preserving in which political will and social transformations are representing the ever-evolving attitude towards socialist heritage (Iankova & Milova, 2020). Enthusiasm, curiosity, hate, oblivion, neglect, othering, thesewide range of emotionally led actions are detected in several sites of socialist heritage, meanwhile, these sites are still around us either well-maintained or in disrepair/dilapidated.

The Väike-Õismäe subdistrict of Tallinn, built in the 1970s, was one of the well-planned so-called micro-districts (mikrorayon) of the era. It is unfinished and yet still alive. Can a socialist housing estate endure the passing of time? What kind of heritage of it is still valid today?

How is the public perception of architectural history formed? How do these sites interact with contemporary perceptions?

In this essay, through the case study of Väike-Oismäe residential estate in Tallinn, I attempt to unravel some of the innumerable layers of socialist heritage and elaborate on how this site is represented and thereby preserved.