Every generation writes its history anew and that history is the only one they got of the world. (G. H. Mead). Our interest lies in processes of official history-making in Estonia during the Soviet period and after national independence was regained. Special attention is given to the historians themselves, their personal strategies and self-understanding of their role as codifiers and mediators of historical memory. There is little doubt that historians are amongst the interpretative elite of a society. As memory agents they actively shape the ways the past is understood, remembered and forgotten. In a period of political transformation, history is more frequently referred to and employed in day-to-day politics; consequently, historians can barely avoid having a fundamentally political role to play. It is hard, therefore, to imagine that other academic professionals in the former Soviet Union experienced as total a change in their political status and intellectual image as did historians. They had an important legitimizing function during the Soviet period when the academic means of producing historical knowledge were under persistent political control. During the last years of Soviet power, Estonian historians appeared as a surprisingly diverse and divided guild of experts. During Soviet rule there always existed an undercurrent of discontent between different groups stemming from differing attitudes towards the party-state and its strategies of legitimacy. These tensions became visible during the transition periods of 1945–1953 and 1956–1961, and finally fully surfaced with the Singing Revolution in the late 1980s. In this article we concentrate particularly on the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the new Soviet system of historical research and writing was introduced, as well as the time leading up to independence in 1991, when historians became official ‘truth-tellers’ and rebuilders of national history.