Introduction

This contribution is an Édouard Glissant-inspired investigation into a history and geography of a town – Paldiski on the Pakri Peninsula, the south coast of the Gulf of Finland, on the Baltic Sea – that never got to be the hub that it was envisioned to be, despite a multitude of efforts to create a superior military port, or at least a flourishing commercial centre in a location persistently argued to be ideal for such enterprise.¹ This is not to say that there are no physical traces of a settlement in this particular spot but its assumed potential has been contained within a strictly defined outline and described persistently in similar terms despite numerous tumultuous changes in the physical environment and political system. This compels us to paraphrase a question Michael Wiedorn (2021) asks about environmental determinism. Has Paldiski emerged because its geography and history encourage us to think in certain ways, or have they rather prohibited our thinking in other ways?

The aim is therefore to take a different approach to examining place by highlighting its archipelagic connections within a Glissantian Tout-monde – the contemporary world and our consciousness of it – and the imaginaire – a perception of the whole world outside any set limits (Glissant 1996). Glissant, who disliked precise definitions, argued for a poetics of place that would not presuppose an immediate or harmonious world, either physical or mental, but that would open up for new connections and therewith possibilities to examine how imagination can shape real locations and their relations to the world. In this spirit, I probe when and why such a strong idea of Paldiski’s character, its potential and possibilities, was formed, and why it has persisted. Three aspects of Paldiski may be highlighted – its harbour, its inhabitants (more precisely the question of their indigeneity and belonging), and its ruins. All have their origin in a steadfast conviction that natural conditions in this location are ideal for a flourishing harbour of great strategic and economic significance as summarized in an oft-presented image from 1798 (see Figure 1). The reality of mundane activities in a shadow of pretentious constructions is better captured in a forgotten image published a few years later (see Figure 2). Faith in its potential, recently again presented in a master’s thesis as a “new” vision for Paldiski (Tanne 2018), has not faded.

An outline with some keywords describing local history and geography inspired by Glissant (discussed further below) and deep mapping (for methodology, see Springett 2015), is provided in Figure 3 for a reader not at all familiar with the setting. The sequence of events and the lay of the land is otherwise ignored; instead, the focus is on identifying a few moments in time, events, some actors and their deeds, or the exploits of others in their name as keys for understanding the imaginaire of Paldiski. These “keys” are not necessarily the ones that would be familiar from previous research and descriptions of the town, tourism literature, or journalism, although the latter two genres have played a notable role in enforcing a certain persistent idea of what Paldiski either is, or should be, about. Before examining this specific case more closely, a short recess into archipelagos and edgelands is necessary for a broader contextual setting. Glissant’s engagement with language and the poetics of place certainly encourages a closer and critical look at concepts and how and where they are used.

Archipelagos and Edgelands

Glissant’s poetics and philosophy of Relation (Glissant 1996, 1997) have been used widely in art, literary and postcolonial studies but they are less known in geography, and attempts to apply his ideas to other places in the world rather than the Caribbean have been met with criticism (Diaz 2006; Drabinski and Parham 2015). His writings were firmly anchored in Martinique but in his later work he argued that the whole world was becoming an archipelago. Although his argument was not meant to be taken literally (Wiedorn 2018), the adaption of his ideas in another part of the world, namely the Baltic – where the spatial and temporal context are as far removed from the Caribbean as can be imagined – is intellectually motivating both in regard to a broader geographical view on Glissant and in examining the connections between nature and culture, place and its peoples with a complicated and myth-bound history and a colonial past. The latter is not usually taken up in the Northern European context except when discussing Sámi rights, although the issue of “natives” and “colonists” combined with ethnicity, connectedness to place and indigeneity require a broader approach in the Baltic as well.

Glissant was a juggler of time and history, as well as of rhythm and narrative form. He made broad use of spatial terms, such as landscape (Baudot 1989; Mardorossian 2013), in his work but not in the sense in which geographers usually approach these concepts, instead he did so with times and places superimposed on each other. In Glissant’s writing, the physical setting is inseparable from the human being, and the human being is a tributary to the environment; they are bound on a journey through life. The Glissantian course, however, leads in many directions, often also backwards, and appears to make no progress. Glissant saw a history of layers where tensions prevailed between the past and the future, between the existing and what was to be. His map of time was to be read in all directions and with special attention to aspects that are opaque or not glaringly obvious. There was, nevertheless, always a future in his writings – the future of abundant possibilities amidst a landscape bearing memories. The signs of time on this course are moorings – landmarks – that travellers strew all along their meandering journey, with detours, returns, repetitions, variations, and variants (Bojsen 2021). In scoffing at the traditional linear view of history and geography’s spatial organizing powers, Glissant’s story is opposing that one-dimensional view. History is registered in a space that it energizes, while, at the same time, taking on the properties of that space (Glissant 1997).

Glissant has been criticized for his “nomadism”, the ideas of deterritorialization and chaos (for context, see Dash 2006), as well as for giving unprecedented significance to his own place of origin in a world that in his view is supposed to be of equal values (Wiedorn 2021). Having a firm vantage point, an anchor is not necessarily amiss. In Glissant’s writing the turning towards particularity may be interpreted as a turning towards all other places. He argued against closed units, in favour of seeing his own Lieu (understood as place) as open and with material and conceptual ties to the whole world (Drabinski 2019). This is a paradoxical combination of simultaneously belonging to a particular place (and, in a way, using that place as a base) while sensing the entire world. In this world places and people are connected but have the right to their own past and future, their stories are told not to muster the numbers or the influence of counternarratives but to be remembered and possibly to offer an alternative for the future.

The vantage point of Glissant’s archipelago may also function as both a physical and mental frame for the in-between in the sense that Edward S. Casey (2008) has argued. Casey concludes that edges serve more as frames than as limits, they act as shelter and support and thus foster alternatives: changes happen at edges where anything is possible. Adapting this idea into the physical setting, the concept of edgeland was coined by Marion Shoard (2002). It was originally used to describe an area between the city and the country (being properly neither). Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (2012) extended the concept of edgelands to include areas characterized by having to accommodate numerous unpleasant, better-out-of-sight activities. As such, these areas are often quite centrally located but hard-to-classify and are seen in planning discourse to be in a limbo, waiting to become something else, or simply in wait for a (better) future, or as true wilderness. Paldiski’s geography and history cover all of these aspects of the edgeland. As an interfacial area it draws attention to fluid cultural processes locally and in its connections to the world. It is worthy of analysis, not only to highlight the flaws but in its own right, as rich in possible constellations and articulations. Abstract and material relations serve as an exemplary point to illustrate the paradoxical state of being a centre and a connected frame at the same time. Every place is created in relation to the world and framed in that world. It is the centre and an edge simultaneously.

The Vantage Point on the Edge – Paldiski

The port was founded in 1718² by Russian Tsar Peter I (see Figure 4) and the town ceased to exist as an independent administrative unit within the Republic of Estonia in 2018. In between, its history contains glimpses of great hope for a bright future and far longer periods of failure and degradation, as well as a mythological pre-history of great expectations (indicated in the legends of a Danish 13th-century city and a Swedish 16th-century port), as well as an afterlife with a brilliant future. The inevitable outcome of the failed plans is the physical setting of ruins that have dominated the local environment throughout its recorded history. In a nutshell, the narrative to justify embarking on yet another flamboyant plan is created around the declaration that everyone has desired the spot as their own. Everyone in this case indicates colonial powers – be it the Teutonic knights, the Danish or Swedish Kingdom, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany. To date, all have failed. Local processes are, as Glissant has shown with creolization (Dash 1995), never simple and seem to defy intentions, taking off in unexpected directions, therefore they have been given far less attention thus far.

Peter I’s strategic spot was named Port Baltique (Baltic Port, at the time commonly known by the translation into German – Baltischport; in Russian Baltiysky Port)³ in 1762 by Russian Empress Catherine II. She made it a provincial centre (Kreisstadt) twenty years later, despite its meagre population of less than 200 civilians. The name reflects the ambitions, for it was supposed to become the ultimate port of the Baltic Sea. In another fifteen years, in 1796, her son Paul I withdrew the provincial town and military port status, leaving the town in limbo. In the mid-19th century, a campaign to build a railway from the port through Tallinn to Saint Petersburg enlivened the town for a while. The construction was completed in 1870 but the harbour was never extended and the rail connection to the Russian hinterland was only sporadically used. The vicinity of the port was too poor (in every sense of the word) to support any type of local industrial enterprise. Among English sailors the harbour was jokingly called “ballast port” indicating that ships forced to enter due to unfavourable weather conditions or mishap at sea rarely found the expected shelter, support, or cargo other than gravel as ballast.

The area became a soviet military base in October 1939 and the civilian population was evacuated in June 1940. After World War II, it was a base for soviet submarines and spy missions and remained closed to civilians until 1994. The soviet era has overshadowed many aspects of its past with the notable exception of a perfect harbour. Today it is a slightly exotic tourist destination with a centre around the lighthouse (Packerort) and the coastal cliff. The roots of heritage-based tourism are found in the 1930s when a farmhouse on the island of Väike-Pakri was turned into the first folk museum in Estonia (Ipp-gården). The port (today North and South ports) has extended activity in wide fenced-in areas, simultaneously cutting off free access to the sea and possibilities for other enterprise.

The current slogan for Paldiski is “the city of green energy”. Once again, no false modesty in aiming at attracting fantastical enterprise⁴ to a location that, as stated by all promoters and visionaries, has had a poor reputation. Once again, the main attraction might be the gravel extracted in the process of building the new plant.

The People

Very little is known of the first settlers and local settlement history is as myth-bound as that of the harbour.⁵ Historically, the population in Paldiski and in its vicinity included settlers from Sweden and Finland; Estonian serfs (for farming history see Peil and Bonow 2014); merchants from mainly German and Russian cities; officials from Latvia, Lithuania and Poland; seafarers from neighbouring countries but also from farther away, and military personnel. Free settlers, nobility and serfs, convicts, displaced persons and prisoners of war have lived side-by-side in Paldiski. The miserable living conditions for prisoners and their high death rate were habitually lamented in soviet history texts. The consequences of their presence and large numbers (in periods ten times the number of civilian population) for Paldiski have rarely been discussed (for an exceptional first-hand description of the conditions in town, see Petri 1802).

Self-determination was fluid, ethnicity defined by language or religion seemed not to have mattered and the inhabitants could declare themselves either German, Swedish, Estonian, or Russian at some stage of their lives. Other combinations, including Danish, Finnish, French, Livonian, or Polish occurred as well, although without necessarily being able to speak the language or able to find only meagre connections to the supposed motherland. Regrettably, very little has been recorded about local languages to discuss the “Creole” of Paldiski at any point in history and the particularities of local communication have been lost.

Religious belonging was also flexible among the people who have lived in Paldiski, with numerous conversions from Lutheran to Orthodox and back again, or from Lutheran to any of the free churches, from Judaism to Lutheran, and from Catholic to Orthodox. It seems that the only group for which faith was a determining factor of identity was the Orthodox Old Believers or Raskolniki, who were moved from their original settlement areas to Paldiski because of their refusal to adopt liturgical reforms. A persistent town legend insists that their curses have prohibited the town to prosper, which attributes a rather significant role to this group and their convictions, although there were many others with a multitude of reasons to curse the place.

Paldiski imagined

Paldiski has been determined by the claim of a perfect ice-free harbour, an ideal location with respect to seafaring and military strategy. The persistence of this supposition is all the more surprising given that its military history is one of failure and consists of rare military events that have ranged from embarrassing to downright ridiculous. The Danes and Swedes did nothing substantial (despite the folklore stating otherwise) but as Russian Tsar Peter I decided to act in the early 1720s, he is the indisputable founder of the town. However, due to his death in 1725, not much was completed in these early years. Intentions, along with their memorial and mythical traces can, however, also shape places, and his person inspired others into action. Most notably, Catherine II followed the course set by Peter I, whereas others did so more half-heartedly. Peter I was certainly an inspiration for Carl Friedrich Kalk who often used the tsar’s name in justification of his argument for the superiority of the location, adding the statement regarding the port being (nearly) ice-free. Hence, Kalk is the founder of Paldiski, its imaginary as we know it today, in equal measure to Peter I.

The creation of these two men, the claim to being an ideal ice-free harbour is still the most often repeated characterization of Paldiski today. Given the town’s latitude 59° 21’N it is baffling and may be seen as the “non-space” between content and expression, suggesting a mode of subjectivation and agency that is similar to Glissant’s (1997) errantry, or as Lauro (2014: 23; trans. Emily A. Maguire), has described, Glissant’s path “calling for continued repetition and contradiction, sometimes accepting rhetorical detours in the name of a poetics freed from the constraints of logic.” These are global connections based on local minutiae, or they are simultaneous displays of the persistence of the past and projections into the future.

Representations of the harbour suggest ambivalence about its nature, both popular and scholarly; the port is a reflection of the town’s absence, rather than its materiality. There is a sense that the port is a space of spectacles from far-flung countries or a space riven and traversed by invisible lines of social segregation or actual huge engineering projects (still on-going). That imaginary is compelling and has framed and limited development in Paldiski but it may also be a figure of potential that makes transformation in thought, and subsequently transformation in life possible. The natural divisions in the physical environment and the supernatural hauntings of past events and people can, however, only be made visible by a particular form of storytelling not yet undertaken for Paldiski.

Conclusions

Glissant’s archipelagic thinking highlights the adaptation and transformation of material, cultural and political practices, and frames the world as one in process with its vantage points and edges. In such a world, the edgeland as an area in-between draws attention to fluid cultural processes and sites of abstract and material relations of movement. Such sites – as a great port that might once have existed, has existed only in a reverie, or might still come to be – are dependent upon changing conditions of articulation or connections to oblique reflections. Glissant’s understanding of archipelagos and their shaping of human mentalities is manifest in, among other things, a particularity, or a sense of belonging to a particular place while defined by the relation to the entire world. At first glance, it may seem that the point illuminated here is a location where everything is fluid and to which nobody belongs, or has been allowed to belong due to the whims, dressed up as military strategy, of emperors and dictators. This should easily have led to Paldiski slipping into obscurity but for one man, Carl Friedrich Kalk, who made creating the town his life mission using a wide range of means. Some of his arguments were so powerful that they have created an imagery of a geography and history that, although not usually acknowledged as his creation, shapes the past, present and future of the town without letting anyone think of it in any other way than as an ideal, strategically located ice-free harbour. As a port, Paldiski has been influenced by its relations to the world, but at the same time, the town has never fulfilled its imagined potential, despite various efforts throughout the many state formations (i.e., political and ideological frameworks) that caused human suffering but no flourishing. The Bashkirs’ declaration of Paldiski as “holy ground” reinforces an entirely different, mythical connection to the world.

Paldiski, in its continued oblique, ruined form, could be seen as providing a truly particular vantage point in the spirit of Glissant’s archipelagic thinking. Paldiski is at once one and many. It is not Glissant’s archipelago of reference and the true creole, but nevertheless it is a complex spot in its own right. Paldiski could gain from opening up for exploration, and a future of abundant possibilities amidst a landscape imbued with histories and memories of ambition. I have argued that, to date, geography and history have rather prohibited thinking in other ways about Paldiski. Both the people who have lived in it, in its vicinity, or elsewhere see Paldiski not as a place to belong to but as a place for waiting amidst ruins for a better future.