This article discusses contacts between local inhabitants and Soviet military and border guard personnel in Estonian coastal regions to which access was limited during the period of Soviet rule. Employing the so-called entanglement perspective, we ask, how did the pragmatic coexistence of these groups play out in the Estonian coastal landscape? We focus mainly on the period of the 1970s and 1980s, when relations between the foreign armed forces and the local population had stabilised for the most part.

For this study, we conducted interviews involving both Estonian- and Russian-speaking local inhabitants in the surroundings of Hara Bay and Pärispea Peninsula in Lahemaa in Northern Estonia and on the Western Estonian islands. We also gathered earlier recollections from various databases, publications, and memoirs.

The material heritage of the 20th century military legacy in Estonia has been recorded and described relatively well. Stories that consider military heritage from the perspective of its immediate users and of those who experienced it by living in its vicinity have hitherto not been as extensively or systematically gathered and analysed. The application of the oral history method in such a ‘grey area’ makes it possible to highlight everyday practices of coexistence in a restricted space in a more nuanced way. Situations and ways in which ‘guards and those under guard’ communicated with one another became evident in the conducted interviews and in the sources that have been used. Coexistence in closed areas inevitably meant the need to take each other into consideration and sometimes also to meet one another halfway. Recollections and their analysis indicate that these mutual relations were based on assumed benefits rather than continuous antagonism.

Topics discussed in this article include access to the sea and the necessary preconditions for the locals; border guarding-related youth activities in local schools; the perceived sense of security, but also incidents with unfortunate consequences stemming from close contacts between individuals. In the case of individual contacts, a certain curiosity regarding the exotic ‘other’ continued to hang in the air on the one hand, yet there also remained a sense of danger associated with the fact that one party in the communication was armed but the other was not. Contacts between locals and soldiers that took place thanks to animals (primarily due to neglect towards animals) also provide interesting material for discussion. In the case of all the above-mentioned contacts, the decisive circumstance was that everyone moved about and operated in a restricted space where the presence of one another always had to be taken into consideration.