• Residents of Ida-Viru County do not trust the Estonian state as the latter has treated them as a security risk and a remnant of the Soviet era, especially since the start of the war in Ukraine.
• Basements, bunkers, dachas and garages are so-called hidden spaces where people can occasionally escape reality. These are places where one can function without having to conform to society.
• Constant surveillance and visibility turn a person into a commodity, while hidden spaces offer privacy.
• Such refuges provide insight into what society is unwilling to articulate about itself. In this sense, an entire region, such as Ida-Viru County, can become a kind of geopolitical basement where uncomfortable issues are tucked away.
• In a hidden place, such as a garage or basement, a person does not have to define themselves in black-and-white terms as a liberator or occupier, a European or a communist, an Estonian or a Russian.
• People in Ida-Viru County feel a strong connection to their home region, but express it in their own way.

In the subtitle of your recent book "The Future of Hiding," you refer to Ida-Viru County as Estonia's Siberia. Why?

The idea of Ida-Viru County (Ida-Virumaa in Estonian – ed.) as "Siberia" partly came from my sources. For example, Estonian language teachers who now move to Ida-Viru County for work describe their experience as "moving to Siberia," as if it were not part of Europe.

It also appears in diaries depicting life in the region during the interwar period, which I read. In the 1930s, Ida-Virumaa was called Siberia because of the oil shale mining boom and the economic opportunities that came with it. Since the government at the time favored an agricultural way of life and did not encourage Estonians to move to new industrial towns, foreign workers settled in Ida-Virumaa instead. As a result, one could often hear Finnish, Polish, Swedish or Latvian spoken in places like Kiviõli, Järve or Narva. Gangs also emerged and people carried firearms. If an Estonian version of a Peaky Blinders-style series were made, it would be set in Ida-Virumaa.

There is also a third reason: publishers' marketing departments prefer subtitles that use keywords easily searchable on Google. My personal favorite subtitle might have been something like "Stories from Estonia's East." However, the current version works well too, as it grabs attention and raises questions — like yours, for example. I am also aware of the waves of deportations to Siberia, how Ida-Virumaa was repopulated after the war and the fact that half of its original population was not allowed to return.

In your book, you focus on hiding and secrecy — the so-called shadow side of Estonia. Are you referring more to physical spaces and places or to the mindset of local people? Is this invisibility preventive or reactive?

In a way, the entire book answers that question: how the ecological memory of a place and the way Estonian identity has been constructed have turned Ida-Virumaa into the shadow of Estonian society — culturally, economically, politically and environmentally. It is a border region, which means locals generally do not identify with just one identity; and even when they do, it tends to be performative and context-dependent. The region is characterized by hybrid identities, as well as a dense mix of connections and disconnections.

To shape their public image, people make use of hidden spaces where they can feel free and are not required to display a fixed identity. These kinds of back-of-the-scenes places include basements, dachas, garages or bunkers — spaces rooted in the region's recent history and architecture. This is not escapism, but rather a negotiation over how to exist as part of society.

These hiding places expand residents' autonomy in relation to institutions, while also offering opportunities for personal transformation or for broadening one's lived experience. At the same time, many feel that in order to belong to society, they must also protect themselves from it. This is not a new phenomenon: the same pattern existed during the Soviet era and under Tsarist Russia.

Could you describe your methods a bit — how did you study Ida-Virumaa?

I spoke Russian with a Spanish accent and approached people without preconceived notions. I met one person who introduced me to another and it continued from there. I did not always know what I was looking for, nor did I fully understand what was happening. I don't mean the language, but rather my own limitations in interpreting local relationships. Over time, I realized that there is also a deeper, not always visible reality that plays an important role in how local society functions. It's like the part of an iceberg hidden beneath the water.

To grasp this hidden reality, I came to understand that I needed to expand my ethnographic toolkit by collaborating with others — artists, designers and urbanists. We organized workshops and exhibitions to present our findings while also studying how locals responded to them. Without the contributions of Viktor Gurov, Anna Škodenko, Darja Popolitova, Keiti Kljavin and Andra Aaloe, the book would not have taken its current form; and without the help of Jelena Antuševa, Dmitri Fedotkin, Jekaterina Grafova, Svetlana Ivanova and Meelis Muhu, the research itself would not have been possible.

Now that the submerged part of the iceberg has been put between the covers of a book, why did you feel there was a need for it?

For decades, there has been a passive-aggressive relationship between the Estonian state and the residents of Ida-Virumaa. It is a kind of mutual pretense of indifference: one side acts as if it cares, while the other pretends to listen.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, however, local residents have been reframed as a geopolitical problem. They are seen both as a risk and as remnants of an aggressive empire, regardless of their personal views. The removal of Soviet monuments, the revocation of voting rights for so-called gray passport holders and radical changes in school language policy have not helped them feel like part of the state. As a result, there is widespread distrust toward institutions. People tend to expect the worst from both the state and from change itself — even when they urgently need both.

I tried to make the book accessible to readers from different backgrounds, although the text may still come across as somewhat academic. When I began writing, I had just moved back to Tallinn after working in Finland and England. I had bought an apartment and was trying to find my place in society as a permanent resident, working at Tallinn University and the Estonian Academy of Arts.

I have lived half my life abroad, so my own sense of identity is quite complex. In trying to understand the people of Ida-Virumaa — their incomplete sense of belonging and layered identity — I began to identify with them. As a result, I started to feel at home there. After visiting Ida-Virumaa at least once a month for five years, I now experience a kind of mental border when crossing the Purtse River: I relax and think to myself, "I'm home again."

You talk about hidden spaces and the right to opacity. What are these hidden spaces and what kind of mindset lies behind them?

People have always needed hiding places — spaces where they can protect their privacy and temporarily suspend the rules of the visible world. These are places where the world loosens its grip for a moment, allowing us to disappear from the gaze of others.

As long as no one is watching, it becomes possible to practice different ways of being in the world. Constant visibility, however, makes us predictable because when everything is visible, privacy becomes diminished. The book defends the need to occasionally disappear, since constant exposure erodes privacy, care and diversity. When people feel continuously observed, they stop asking questions and begin to seek conformity.

Visibility plays a central role in narratives of minority emancipation. For example, the expression "coming out of the closet" frames visibility as liberating. But visibility can also be confining and being in the spotlight can become a form of control. States and corporations, for instance, constantly seek clarity: who you are, what you think, what your positions are.

The right to hide, to remain opaque and to withdraw from view from time to time is therefore a form of political agency. In an era of data capitalism and surveillance societies, visibility means being turned into information — a commodity. Yet we have the right to disappear and to decide who gets to see what — not as a form of escape, but as a precondition for ensuring that we cannot be fully defined or contained. This way of thinking challenges a deeply rooted idea of modernity: that light equals knowledge and that exposure always leads to liberation.

If myths reveal what societies think about themselves, then hiding places expose what we would rather not confront directly. What is concealed within them belongs to the intimate, the uncomfortable or the temporary. In that sense, tracing what people keep or hide opens up our relationship with the world.

However, hiding places do not exist only at the level of the body or the home. Societies also create their own shadow zones. Entire regions can function as geopolitical basements — territories where unresolved conflicts, uncomfortable memories and strategic resources are stored, sustaining visible life elsewhere.

In this way, the book offers an unconventional perspective on a defining phenomenon of our time. Rather than analyzing visibility — widely examined through surveillance and data — it focuses on its opposite: the shadow as a source of knowledge. In the book, I propose understanding hiding places as necessary social infrastructures — spaces where ways of living are tested, shifting identities are protected and negotiations with power take place.

Are you suggesting, in a sense, that locals in Ida-Virumaa resist normalizing forces, that they want to be different and are proud of that difference? Or do they also want change, but on their own terms?

A garage or a dacha is like an artist's studio or a laboratory. It is a space where one can experiment or create personal rules without serious consequences, disregarding normative regulations and classifications. In this sense, hiding places point to our capacity to protect personal autonomy.

In Ida-Virumaa, people do not feel a full sense of belonging. This stems partly from how Estonian identity has been constructed since 1991 — as a monolingual ethno-national state whose legal framework and historical narrative reinforce the interwar republic. But it also comes from the region's own ecological memory, shaped by deportations, industrial militarization, pollution from mining and its location on the boundary between civilizations.

Since regaining independence, Estonia has pursued a language-centered nation-building project. For many Estonians, this represents the restoration of sovereignty long delayed by decades of Soviet occupation. For many Russian-speaking residents, however, it means being seen as occupiers, remnants of a collapsed empire, and now — after Russia's invasion of Ukraine — geopolitical pawns.

Hidden spaces allow for a more nuanced stance toward institutions — one that remains out of sight but is not necessarily hostile. These spaces resist the demand to categorize people into clear-cut identities: occupier or liberator, Estonian or Russian, communist or European.

At the start of Russia's invasion, suspicion, distrust and the need to demonstrate civic loyalty intensified. Some residents of Ida-Virumaa openly condemned Russia's aggressive imperialism; others remained silent; a small number expressed nostalgia for the Soviet past. Conspiracy theories also circulated, echoing Cold War narratives.

Fear of Moscow's influence and broader historical anxiety have turned the Russian-speaking population into a geopolitical issue. The state frames integration and citizenship largely as a question of language acquisition, but belonging is not only a legal matter — it is also emotional, historical and environmental.

Residents of Ida-Virumaa do not control NATO strategy or Kremlin propaganda. What they do control, however, is their visibility: by using garages, basements and dachas to spend time or to conceal ideas and relationships that cannot be publicly expressed.

Could you give some examples here: how do locals in Ida-Virumaa express their identity in basements, bunkers, garages and dachas?

In Narva, a teacher named Katja keeps a broken balalaika, her grandmother's shoes and a stack of Soviet-era songbooks. On the street-level floors, she teaches in Estonian; in the basement, she curates an unfinished archive.

A basement is never just a storage space — it is a social technology designed precisely for coping with in-between times. Things that do not fit into the present-day narrative can cool off there, be postponed or placed on hold. This is because basements are places where people, in a sense, gamble on the future.

Dima keeps his childhood underground: toys, schoolbooks, a cassette by the Soviet rock band Kino and VHS tapes of the animated series "Nu, Pogodi!." "These are part of my identity," he says, unable to throw them away.

Cultural heritage and monuments publicly declare what should be remembered and actively preserved. Hidden objects, by contrast, enable a quiet, informal form of pedagogy. They pass on dissonant memories without institutionalizing them.

Should these hidden spaces remain as they are? Why?

The Ida-Virumaa region needs change and the state, but locals tend to expect the worst from both. There is also a lack of trust in institutions, shaped by an incomplete sense of belonging and the region's ecological memory: a century of industrial mining, military occupation, repopulation and later neglect.

Many of the people I encountered in my research feel a strong connection to their region and to Estonia, but they express that connection in their own ways. This shows that belonging is not merely legal — it is also emotional, historical, environmental and tied to the landscape. It also demonstrates that Estonia is not as homogeneous as institutions and the media often portray it.

Of course, I also heard more troubling views — support for the war in Ukraine or statements identifying Putin as "their president," even from people living in Estonia. Others claimed that the United States started the war. In such cases, I listen to them because this too is important information for understanding the region — it reflects the structure of local sentiments.

Despite everything, these individuals are part of society. I may disagree with them, but if I wanted to understand what is happening in Ida-Virumaa and give locals a voice, I had to take such perspectives into account as well.

Are such hidden spaces kept out of public view unique to Ida-Virumaa or should we try to create them elsewhere as well? Would that help make everyone more resilient?

My book is not only about Ida-Virumaa. Some of the ideas within it speak to the human condition more broadly. Secrets are part of what make us human and even as we become part of a digital society, they are not going anywhere. On the contrary, new kinds of hiding places are constantly being invented because people want the possibility of not always having to show or say everything.

How does so-called "mainstream" Estonia relate to these hidden spaces in Ida-Virumaa? Is there pressure to demolish dachas and basements?

Russian-speaking residents mostly live in cities, in buildings dating from the Stalin or Khrushchev eras. Many Estonian-speaking residents, however, tend to live in rural areas — perhaps because land was returned to them in the 1990s. The relationship between urban and rural ways of life and ethnicity is therefore quite interesting.

To my surprise, the biggest difference in how basements and dachas are used was not based on ethnicity, but on generation. Older people use these spaces more deliberately and attentively than younger ones.

If a reader becomes interested in your book, what is its main message and that of your research more broadly?

I would be happy if the book helped make perceptions of Ida-Virumaa less negative and if readers came to understand that there are many ways of being Estonian.

I have seen that Estonian society is not as uniform as the media and government often portray it. Many of the people I spoke with feel a strong connection to where they live and to the country — albeit in their own way — and this despite the mining shafts, the chemical smells, distrust of institutions and the neglect they experience from the rest of Estonia.

I might also recommend a few books that I personally appreciate about Estonia: "Kõrboja peremees" by Anton Hansen Tammsaare, "Paigallend" by Jaan Kross, "Kompromiss" by Sergei Dovlatov, "Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu" by Andrus Kivirähk and from the social sciences, "Everything Is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia" by Sigrid Rausing.

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