Cultural trauma is the re-ordering of the society's value-normative constellation due to sharp, violent, usually political events. The cultural trauma under consideration was caused by the occupations of Estonia in 1940-45. After half a century of suppression the memories of these events resurfaced as different public discourses. There have been 148 life stories recorded for the purposes of the thesis, describing the long-term, often inter-generational strategies of coping with the value collapse. The following three trauma discourses have been reconstructed:

• the forced adaptation to Soviet order of the homeland Estonians;
• the difficulty of reserving Estonian identity in exile (Sweden);
• the identity crisis of the Russian population of Estonia.

Analysing the discourses shows that opposing experiences and worldviews cause conflicting interpretations of the past. Different social and ethnic groups consider coping with cultural trauma as a matter of self-defence and create appropriate usable pasts to identify with.