Memories of Discipline in Soviet Lithuania: Stories in Oral History

If the home remained a safe space for families during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, why is it that the memories of women’s domestic lives in Soviet Lithuania are so fragmented? In Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania, Dalia Leinarte deftly challenges the commonplace ‘kitchen culture’ idea that the home was a site of silent resistance where traditional Lithuanian values continued to be nurtured. Instead, this fascinating book reveals how the totalitarian state gradually abolished the private lives of Lithuanian families altogether. Based on over 100 interviews and an array of archival sources, this book analyses how family policy formed the everyday life of men and women and considers how the internalisation of Soviet ideology took place in the private sphere. From a well-developed after-school activity program for children to strict rules regarding the working hours of men and women, ultimately the family could not remain isolated from the regime. Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania is the first book to explore family policy in the Soviet Baltic states and is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Soviet and gender history.

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.

Based on oral history narratives and original archival research, this article discusses how the Soviet medicalization of homosexuality has affected the self-identification of queer women and how it currently features in the narratives that lesbians tell about themselves in post-Soviet Lithuania. The article shows that the medicalization of homosexuality in Soviet Lithuania was inseparable from the broader pressures of Communist morality, which aimed to guide the private lives of individuals, and that the pathologizing of female homosexuality was tightly interrelated with the social pressure on women to fit into their gender role and adapt to the frameworks of femininity. The article also reflects on how the medicalization of homosexuality, as imposed by Soviet modernity, continues to be felt in the region and how it affects the current state of the LGBTQ community.

Commentary

The author discusses an issue of forming questions in oral history. There are two types of them – research questions and interview questions. Instead of analyzing how to ask questions, the interviewer should rather focus on why to ask them. The article proves that asking questions in oral history is less about formal elements such as what language should be used or what matters should be raised, but more about such elements as emotions or the overall atmosphere of an interview. The author gives some clues on how to prepare proper questions, what difficulties may appear and what to avoid in order to carry out a good interview.

The spoken words are more natural and perhaps better understood than the written letters, which are invented to capture and to re-enact human mind, intention, emotion, opinion, view, experience and prediction among other things. Oral narratives, all over the world, set the pace for the written literature. It is an integral part of every human culture. However, the sophistication of the modern world, particularly the globalisation, has directly or indirectly affected the potency of oral narratives in Africa. Having discovered the neglect of orature in Africa as a whole and in the Yoruba land in particular, this article seeks to explain the essentials of this aspect of life which is at a dangerous point of extinction. The study sets its search light on certain elements of African oral literature such as folklores, myths, legends, proverbs and oral poetry which emanate from the Yoruba community. Using the theme study method/approach, the article aims at reversing the dying fortune of the oral narratives being a tool to achieving sustainable socio-cultural transformation among the African people. Key words: Orature, folklores, myths, legends, proverbs, socio-cultural space, sustainable development.

The retelling of oral narratives provides a powerful lens through which to examine the intricate interplay between agriculture and its socio-economic facets. This research paper attempts to provide additional empirical evidence from qualitative inquiry and process and ask, what is the retelling process of oral narratives on the intersections of culture, traditions and agriculture especially along the socio-economic facets in Calabanga, Camarines Sur, Philippines? After exploring the retelling process situated in the context of Calabanga, the researchers examined the possibility of transforming the literary piece from text to theater. Combining document review of previously written research, observation of the actual process of bulungan and interviews with randomly identified practitioners of bulungan, we set out to answer the following research questions: (1) How bulungan as a cultural practice could be transformed into a script as a retelling of an oral narrative? (2) What is the plot structure of the script and how does it relate to the oral narrative from which it was derived? (3) How does the script create and develop its characters, and what role do these characters play in the overall narrative? (4) What is the relationship between the script’s structure and the cultural context in which it was produced? (5) What are the implications of the script’s structure for broader debates on sustainability of culture? The study’s findings on the traditional business practice of “bulungan” in Calabanga can have significant implications for the town’s agriculture and socio-economic facets. The documentation and preservation of this tradition through the script “Sarong Aldaw” can serve as a means to promote and sustain local businesses and livelihoods, particularly among fishermen and fish vendors in San Miguel Bay. By uncovering the stories within agricultural traditions, practices, and interactions, retelling oral narratives deepens our understanding of the complex relationships between agriculture and socio-economic aspects and its ensuing benefits towards education for heritage management. Researchers recommend further investigation on the role of traditions and culture in shaping oral narratives on the agricultural sector. As the agricultural landscape evolves and communities adapt to new challenges, these narratives remain vital tools in preserving heritage, guiding policies, and fostering sustainable development.

This article aims at demonstrating that an alternative to Soviet society –a socium with expanded parallel institutions of education, information and culture that were independent of the regime and impervious to its ideology existed in Soviet Lithuania which answers the idea of ‘parallel polis’ developed by Vaclav Benda, the famous Czech dissident and theoretician. To substantiate the above statement, first of all the concept of ‘parallel society’, which is not widely known in Lithuania, is disclosed relating it to the conception of opposition to a totalitarian system that has been discussed also by Lithuanian philosophers for some time past. Secondly, the article briefly dwells on the structure of the primary components of parallel society – ethno-cultural movement and Catholic underground – revealing their scope and forms of operation at the same time disclosing the way alternative institutions of education, information and culture functioned. Finally, with the help of tools of social network analysis the symbiosis of these two movements is displayed validating the statement that they can be considered elements of one-piece alternative society.

As communism performed a constraint of both individual and collective memory, its fall in 1989 opened the path to a plurality of voices that generated alternative accounts to the official discourse maintained by the regime. While many victims were sharing their stories of suffering, compromise, resistance or dissent, oral history was taking its first steps in connection to these unique and valuable testimonies. The interest of the researchers gradually expanded towards documenting different aspects of everyday life and identities during communism and post-communism. Starting with an approach of the theoretical and ethical issues behind Romanian oral history making, the paper reviews the main initiatives leading to the establishment of oral history as an academic discipline, while at the same time inquiring into the reasons that propelled the practice of oral history in Romania. Both the actors and institutions that have made and managed oral history will be taken into account.

Empowered through Labor and Buttressing Their Communities: Mayan Women and Coastal Migration, 1875-1965

The success of mass mobilization in Lithuania against Soviet rule in the late 1980s can be attributed in part to the spread of the ethnocultural movement in the post-Stalin era. Characterized in this paper as the “rustic turn,” it began in the late 1950s with the Soviet-wide rehabilitation of kraevedenie (local area studies), part of Khrushchev’s effort to rejuvenate grassroots political participation across the USSR. In Soviet Lithuania, the rehabilitation of kraštotyra had the unintended consequence of restoring nation-building practices from the interwar period and reintegrating individuals repressed under Stalin into public life. Rather than shaping Soviet subjects, the ethnocultural movement developed rituals of transformation that imbued the rustic ethnic past, not the Soviet future, with the aura of sacrality. Ostensibly apolitical, the movement nevertheless cultivated strong associative ties among citizens from various walks of life. With the outbreak of free discussion under glasnost, mass gatherings built upon the rituals of the ethnocultural movement to generate a community of affect grounded in nostalgia for a lost, mythical past and the trauma of displacement under the Soviet regime.

River Pigs and Cayuses: Oral Histories from the Pacific Northwest. By Ron Strickland. Introduction by William Kittredge. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, Pp. xx + 155, preface, introductions, photographs, glossary. $17.95 paper); Whistlepunks and Geoducks: Oral Histories from the Pacific Northruest. By Ron Strickland. Introduction by William Kittredge. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 268, preface, introductions, photographs, glossary. $19.95 paper) We are all storytellers if given half a chance. All we need is a listener. So begins Ron Strickland's introduction to River Pigs and Cayuses. While traveling around back-country Idaho, Montana, and Washington, researching hiking trails for Pacific Northwest trail guidebooks during the 1970s and '80s, the author was interested by some of the older people he met along the way, and how readily they would share a or two from their experiences as rural Northwesterners. After a number of these encounters, he decided to record and publish some of the stories. The results of his story mining, as he calls it, are River Pigs and Cayuses and its sequel, Whistkpunks and Geoducks. The two volumes, originally published separately in 1984 and 1990, are here reissued as a set by Oregon State University Press. Most of the thirty-one oral histories in River Pigs and all of the forty-nine in Whistlepunks are from the state of Washington. Each chapter includes a brief introduction to its narrator. The majority of the interviews are with older people, but some middle aged and younger people are also included. Although most of the interviewees are rural, there are a few city folks, including a Vietnamese refugee immigrant, a retired labor leader who was once a national figure, and an Episcopalian cathedral dean, all Seattleites. A few interviewees are Native Americans from tribes indigenous to Washington. People unfamiliar with Northwest rural vernacular may be startled by the curious words that make up both books' titles. (From the glossaries: River Pig. a lumberjack who controls the logs as they float downriver to the sawmill; Cayuse. a mustang or Indian pony; Whistlepunk: a logging crewman who, with a jerkline, signals the steam donkey engineer as to how the machine's cables should be deployed; Geoduck: a large bivalve (Histellidae) averaging two or three pounds and weighing as much as sixteen pounds, much prized for chowders along the Northwest coast.) It seems likely that the author intended to pique the reader's curiosity in this way, for what the two books do most successfully is impart a flavor of the uniqueness of a rural Northwest whose older citizens were, at the time of Strickland's collecting journeys, barely removed from pioneer times. Their stories reveal numerous aspects of Northwest life and tradition, many of which are moribund as well as almost completely unknown outside the rural Northwest. …

Introduction Jeff Sahadeo (bio) As I wandered Tashkent’s streets during my dissertation research in 1998, I would furtively peek into the windows of the city’s few remaining tsarist-era houses. I imagined, if I could be transported back a century, what I would ask the “average” Russian settlers who once occupied them. I had heard their voices sporadically in the archives, mediated through police reports and trial transcripts, or sometimes in letters, usually written by scribes. But what stories would they tell me, face-to-face, in their own words? I wanted to hear everyday experiences and encounters from their perspective, to understand their beliefs and feel their emotions. I wanted these people, whose movements and interactions appeared so important to my own story, to be agents in their own history. I hoped to comprehend their sometimes violent actions toward the local population. I resolved to move my next project forward in time, to interrogate my sources, to privilege their voices, experiences, and encounters, with all the opportunities and challenges that oral histories entailed.1 Adrienne Edgar, Ali İğmen, and Marianne Kamp reached similar conclusions after their successful first projects on early Soviet Central Asia. Their articles in this issue highlight how oral history interviews allow scholars of the Soviet Union access to intimate daily lives and thoughts, broadening our understanding of lived experience. We see Soviet citizens, not to mention the Soviet Union, as complicated. Each voice heard here betrays a thoughtful, considered balancing of lives, relationships, and beliefs with ideas, identities, and policies deriving from a state centered thousands of kilometers away. Each author finds their Central Asian subjects—Uzbeks remembering times of hardship, Kazakhs recounting the naming of their children, Kyrgyz recalling successful lives in Soviet theater—using their interviews to consider compromises between personal hopes and the realities that surrounded them, as [End Page 227] they dealt with spouses, parents, collective-farm administrators, and artistic directors, all within the terrain set down by an evolving Soviet regime. Oral histories have gained acceptance slowly, and somewhat begrudgingly, among historians of the Soviet Union. I recall substantial unease among my academic forebears, social historians who preferred the sanctity and ostensible reliability of the written word, during workshops and conferences in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Documents from aggregate statistics to press reports, instead of individual impressions recorded decades after the fact, were the path to understanding the nature of Soviet society. The 1990s witnessed a rush to the archives rather than, sadly, a rush to interview elderly Soviet citizens—for example, World War II veterans, few of whom are available to researchers today. Lived experience remained secondary to the desire to explore macrolevel controversies and expose the “truth” of the Soviet state.2 Hopes for such an achievement had faded by the time Donald Raleigh’s work on Soviet Baby Boomers demonstrated the value of oral history for an understanding of not only daily life but also mobility, Sovietness, and the relationship between the state and its citizens.3 His interviews added color to a time—the post-Stalin era—seen then as rather gray and dull by historians, as written sources of the time were filled with the formulaic and often apparently empty discourse of a now mature Soviet state. Color allowed us to see the nuance in the Soviet world, the absence as well as the presence of the state, the way citizens accommodated, adapted, and resisted words and policies from above. We understand motivations as well as outcomes, and how citizens place themselves within their society. We see the how as well as the why at the microlevel, and how it redounds upward. What led one Uzbek to start eating potatoes in the 1930s, and another to refuse them as haram, forbidden by Islam? Why did one mixed Russian-Kazakh family name their child Tat´iana instead of Akbota? What did that mean to them and their families, and what did that say about the power of belonging and ethnic and related hierarchies? How did one become a “star” in the Soviet Union through the fine arts? Decades later, how do these former actors consider Soviet values, as compared to those they...

This thesis examines the emergence and sustainment of milicias (militias) in the 1990s in the West Zone ‘margins’ of the city of Rio de Janeiro. It considers the rise of milicias as they coincide with urbanisation, economic liberalisation, democratisation, decentralisation and the rise of violent drug trafficking organisations. This thesis sets out to answer the following overarching research question: ‘How and why did milicias emerge in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone since the 1990s and how and why were they sustained? What is their relationship to the management of (dis)order?’ The analytical approach developed to answer this question draws on an historically situated political settlements framework to understand milicias as power relations within coalition formations and as facilitators of rent extraction and distribution. The framework introduces urban and political geography literatures on frontiers to advance a thesis that milicias in Rio de Janeiro are coercive brokers that mediate urban frontier zones. This study draws on ethnographic fieldnotes from direct and participant observation, in-depth interviews and oral histories, and extensive archival research of parliamentary documents. It argues that milicias emerged to provide temporary ‘solutions’ to address the violent inequalities, structural insecurities, and the threats and insecurities posed by drug trafficking organisations in the urban frontiers. They emerged through ‘bottom-up’ processes but were also seen as convenient to political and economic elites in the central state who were unable (or unwilling) to provide formal security in the West Zone. However, this thesis makes the case that there was a trade-off for the central state as paramilitaries, as accrued power in the urban frontier, they also attempted to reshape state institutions. Because of their roots in local communities, this thesis also recognises the dependency of milicias on legitimacy, ideas, beliefs and norms, and the power imbued in community relations. This study contributes to the literatures on milicias by accounting for their role as co-producers of (dis)order in the urban margins, the literature on political settlements by intertwining questions of violence and conflict with spatiality, and finally the Latin American literatures on local political order and governance by advancing a conceptualisation of armed groups straddling state and society and challenging conventional state/-non-state binaries.

The purpose of the present study is to understand the possible impact that political and educational reforms that occurred between the years 1925 and 1940 had on the teaching of the Portuguese Language. Obviously, as this is a study that is based on oral histories, end up being included when analyzing data, references to other school subjects. The work has the axis memories of times students and professors of a retired teacher of 93 years old. The methodology employed was thus oral history (HO) generated from semi-structured interview. The analytical path was guided by an interest in answering the following research question: How political reforms in education in Brazil, in the periodbetween 1925 and 1940, focused on educational activities of the time, especially in the racing discipline Portuguese Language?