Baltic Worlds (Sep 2014)
Creating the Ideal citizen by improving the citizen's life
Abstract
The present study compares the housing policies of Sweden and Soviet Estonia, with a focus on Stockholm and Tallinn, during the first decade of the postwar period. The focus is not on policy-making, however, but on how the housing policies were carried out — that is, on the practical and the local level. Like many other modern states, both the Soviet Union, with its authoritarian socialism, and Sweden, with its social democracy, strove to shape their citizens’ lives for the better. Both states considered it their duty actively to plan, organize, and control housing. We begin by asking what differences existed in visions and practices between Sweden and Estonia. Since the turn of the 20th century, the Swedish state had considered it necessary to mitigate market forces and steer them in the right direction.6 In Soviet Estonia, meanwhile, the state supplanted the market’s role entirely by centrally planning the building and distribution of housing. Both countries aspired to control the housing market and to allow other forces besides purely economic ones to regulate a sector that was considered vital to citizens — and to society. This control brought with it the potential for conflict between the state’s overriding interests and the individual’s ability to shape his or her everyday life.
