I didn't know what she was crocheting originally but, in the time-honoured tradition of librarians, I asked her and was rewarded with an answer. From enquiring about her own käsitöö project, we went on to discuss the Estonian obsession with woolen crafts and ended up discussing various other aspects of the Estonian culture and landscape.
It was a very interesting conversation, and I'm sure it will provide fodder for a number of future posts.
Among the things discussed, we got around to talking about ugly apartment buildings. Now, I have previously mentioned the proliferation of ugly apartment buildings in Estonia, as well as my opinion that it was some sort of plot by the Soviets to crush the souls of the occupied peoples. Either that, or provide cheap accommodation. Either way, they're really ugly - and not in a good way.
I mentioned this to my crocheting companion, and she confirmed the "affordable housing" theory, and agreed that the buildings were unnecessarily horrible. There was no good purpose for making a building look that much like soulless slab of concrete, but the Soviets just didn't bother making things pretty.
In the course of the conversation, we came to the conclusion that this was their biggest mistake - they never improved anything. They never made a place better for having them there.
Now, it must be stressed that I'm talking about the Soviets, not the Russians. When you see the buildings created by the "old believers" and the Russians fleeing Soviet Russia, they're quite nice. Heck, their churches are absolutely amazing - I didn't see a single Russian Orthodox church that wasn't fabulous.
No, it's the Soviets who, for some reason, decided that the only way all citizens of the USSR could be equal was for them all to be equally miserable.
The Russians still like to think their "occupation" was something else - something nice. They didn't replace one undesirable regime with another one, they "liberated" these vulnerable countries from the Nazis. The countries they took under their wing were better off - being members of the Soviet Union was good for them, and they should be grateful...
Let's not go into the politics for why the Soviets didn't actually liberate the Estonians from anyone - let's instead look at the ugly apartment buildings:
(These aren't the worst apartment buildings I saw in Estonia, just the worst ones I could find on KV.EE when I was only going to spend less than five minutes looking.)
Now, seriously, who could possibly be grateful for having those things shoved into your previously nice, pretty town? And that's not all. While the Soviets were in town, they also burnt down the nice buildings and knocked over the statues and public works of art - then replaced them with new buildings and monuments that were... *ahem*... "functional" and "workmanlike", and were specifically designed to inspire people to remember they were all comrades under the Soviet government.
I'm sorry, Mr Stalin, but workmen are allowed to have some beauty in their lives as well - and things can be "functional" without being devoid of any pleasing qualities.
If the Soviets had only let people keep their own art and culture and create their own beautiful things, instead of pushing them all through the "miserable and ugly" Soviet cookie-cutter, they might have been tolerated quite happily. Instead, they moved into town and made things worse - not better.
That's (one of the reasons) why the occupied countries will probably never see the Soviets as a kind and benevolent people who were only trying to make the world a better place.
So, if anyone else out there is thinking of starting up a totalitarian regime and calling it a "benevolent" power, I have a piece of advice for you: make sure everything you do is beautiful in some way. People may take a lot longer to notice you're squeezing them dry if you aren't also crushing their souls.
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