1. Cited in A. D. Smith (1995) Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press), p. vi.
2. For a full analysis of the life-story interviews with the historians of Estonian, Russian and Estonian Russian background, see M. Wulf (2006) ‘Historical Culture, Conflicting Memories and Identities in Post Soviet Estonia’ (PhD thesis, University of London). For an overview of political elites in post-1991 Estonia, see A. Steen (1997) Between Past and Future: Elites, Democracy and the State in Post-Communist Countries. A Comparison of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Ashgate: Aldershot).
3. When telling one’s life story the respondents reconstruct the meaning of their past retrospectively, whereby making sense of their past is essentially about giving meaning to their present lives. Critics point to the difference between lives lived and lives remembered and argue that memories can be false or distorted. In life-story interviews;however, it is not about proving the interviewees wrong, but about respecting their authorship. See P. Niedermüller (1987) ‘From the Stories of Life to the Life History: Historic Context, Social Processes and the Biographical Method’, in T. Hofer and P. Niedermüller (ed.) Life History as Cultural Construction/Performance (Budapest: Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science), p. 468
4. G. Lucius-Hoene and A. Deppermann (2002) Rekonstruktion narrativer Identität. Ein Arbeitsbuch zur Analyse narrativer Interviews (Opladen: Leske & Budrich).
5. Investigations into the immediate past were hampered by the fact that many KGB files had been taken to Russia in the winter of 1989. J. Kivimäe (1999) ‘Re-writing Estonian history’, in M. Branch (ed.) National History and Identity. Approaches to the Writing of National History in the North-East Baltic Region Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society), pp. 205–11.