Recently, all major history museums in Estonia – the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum as well as the Estonian Museum of Occupations and Freedom Vabamu have opened new permanent exhibitions containing innovative approaches to the 20th century past. While history museums (particularly the so-called occupation museums) have been understood as the main creators and mediators of the occupation paradigm in the Baltic states, the rapid development of museums in Estonian memoryscape calls for re-visiting the museological representations of Communism with regard to change or persistence of the immediate post-communist antagonistic narrative. This paper analyses the possibilities and limits of constructing subject positions in museum narratives with regard to both historical actors and contemporary members of mnemonic communities. In deriving from the recent discussion in memory studies on overcoming antagonism, limits of cosmopolitan memory as well as possibilities and challenges of agonistic remembering, this study understands subject position as an attribute of museological mnemonic discourse that frames subjects into different kinds of actor roles and relations that enable different modes of remembering. The study demonstrates that the representation of the communist past in Estonian museums is diversifying in terms of incorporating new historical actors, allowing new subjective agencies, and internalizing cosmopolitan museological and mnemonic discourses on the 20th century violent past. The differences between museum choices should be juxtaposed to the museums' assumed role in inter/national museum and mnemonic landscape.
