Paper short abstract:

This paper reconsiders the mineral, logistic and aggressive character of Soviet modernity by paying attention to the reproduction and destruction of energy infrastructure. Ethnographically, it shows how extractive activities and the related infrastructure changed the sociality of Eastern Estonia.

Paper long abstract:

During the 20th century, Eastern Estonia experienced industrialization, the birth of an independent state, the patronage of a nationalistic regime, war devastation and occupation, Stalinist repression and deportations, economic and technological stagnation, the articulation of a transition economy with limited financial capacity and know-how, and the integration within global markets and transnational institutions with a particular intensity.

Based on five years of fieldwork in the mining region of Ida-Virumaa, this paper discusses the ways in which secrecy takes place and how a particular kind of sociality has been constituted through the reproduction and destruction of energy infrastructures. The ethnographic research shows how the exploitation of natural resources and the displacement of people and things rarely follow a simple linear trajectory. Instead, they produce complex reverberations and fundamental changes in sociality; because mining, as an ecological incident, does not end with the closure of a mine or an industrial plant, nor with the abandonment of railways, housing, roads and power lines. Years later, once natural resources become just substances again and once the geopolitical wheel spins around, regions such as Eastern Estonia appear as a dead-end, characterized by loss, pollution and stigmatization.

By paying attention to practices of secrecy in relation to energy infrastructure, the paper expands the space for locating culture, politics and infrastructure, showing, in turn, alternative forms of sociality. Secrecy emerges not merely from within the relations among individuals, or between individuals and institutions, but also contingently out of topological, material structures and wider socio-cultural processes and representations.