This article explores young women's orientation to work and motherhood in the post-communist context of radical socio-economic transformation in Europe. Based on a qualitative-explorative study into meanings of work and unemployment among young people in post-Soviet Lithuania, the paper introduces an empirically grounded classification of imagined gender-work arrangements. The single patterns of the classification are based on the three configurations of work and motherhood, work and partnership, and work and provision. The findings inform the reconstruction of the 'landscape' of imagined gendered adulthoods in Europe as well as the analysis of emerging gender relations under conditions of rapid social change.

In the nineteenth century, the transition from a Baltic-German-controlled manor-and-serf economy to individually owned farmsteads transformed all aspects of life including the spatial organization and form of farmhouses in the western provinces of Tsarist Russia. Agricultural experts and social reformers discussed how to update the traditional threshing-room dwelling house (rehielamu) into a healthy dwelling for successful farmers and, after the Estonian War of Independence, for new settlers. Using material culture such as contemporary plans, I show that changing household relationships, in addition to economic and technological factors, helped to transform the ancient rehielamu into a modern dwelling.

This article analyzes debates over the national question and non-territorial autonomy in Estonian settlement communities in Siberia from 1917 to 1920. The article demonstrates that similarly to many Siberian communities, Estonian refugees and political activists incorporated demands for non-territorial autonomy into their political agendas and established proto-institutions of non-territorial autonomy. Amid political instability during the Civil War, however, the national mobilization of the broader masses in politically relatively inactive agrarian settlements was not particularly successful. Public debates over non-territorial autonomy ended in January 1920 when Siberian political life was confined to the framework of the Russian Communist (Bolshevik) Party.