In the post-Soviet counties, the end of the 20th century was a critical period of transition when the structure of the social institutions, and the norms of people living through the transition, were radically changed within a very short time. The process of change in Estonia had impacted more on the Russian community, whose social mobility has considerably increased within one generation, when compared with the Estonian population, since even before the restoration of Estonian independence, industrial workers made up half of the adult population (Tammaru 1999). Thirty years earlier Herbert Marcuse (1966) had noted that in western cultures deproletarisation was a new feature of culture, with the industrial working class being replaced by workers in the services sector. The result for most people had been a more unstable and mobile style of life. The Russians living in Estonia had learned to expand their cultural horizons, to take risks on their own initiative, and to teach these new worldviews to their children and grandchildren.