ABSTRACT
This book has made a grand tour across a range of topics and ideas—among them, the interweaving of the singular and the collective, the performative and the pedagogical in the Soviet-era Baltic states. It has investigated the role of cultural imaginaries and Soviet normativities in personal lives, and has posed the larger question of the changing topography of the possible in the Soviet era. The core period of the analyses has also marched slowly forward in time. After a pair of introductory chapters, Chapter 3 considered changes in Baltic societies in the late 1940s and 1950s in order to pose the question of whether a nation-state can be colonized. Chapter 6 ended with an analysis of disputes over the possible place of existentialism in Soviet society in the late 1960s, and Chapter 7 focused on the Soviet home in the late Soviet period. This concluding chapter turns to the late 1980s and the end of Soviet rule in the Western borderlands —and, indeed, the end of the Soviet Union itself. Given all that has so far been established in this book concerning the topography of the possible, we will consider the ways in which the topography of the possible changed in these last years of Soviet society. How, for example, do we understand the factors that conditioned the rapidity of this change? What made possible the quick and general mobilization of masses for a new political cause, after a period of general indifference toward the political?
