Citizenship and Unsystematic Action of Intellectuals in Soviet Lithuania

Abstract

The subject of this article is an assessment of unsystematic action by intellectuals in Soviet Lithuania according to the criterion of citizenship. Unsystematic action is understood as an everyday, institutional and theoretical activity that is at variance with Marxist-Leninist ideology and the Soviet totalitarian state that embodied it in one or another form. Our research is based on the premise that the form of the totalitarian state, which Lithuanian society endured after the Second World War and especially after Stalin’s death, changed ever-more considerably with time creating some favourable possibilities for independent social action. Another significant term ‘citizenship’ is used here in a republican rather than liberal sense underlying the participation of the inhabitants of the state ‘from below’ in the activity of the society being formed in which it was sought to defend the general public interest, and human rights, as well as the rights of a citizen. On the basis of a theoretical analysis of different authors, a general model of the functioning of civil society existing in Western society is presented here and on this basis the statement is made that there were three manifestations of such citizenship in Soviet Lithuania: anti-systematic, unsystematic and systematic. The practice of unsystematic action, which was initiated by informal groups of the cultural elite, is considered in more detail.