The memory of the armed anti-Soviet resistance during the Cold War

Abstract

This chapter discusses the memory of the Lithuanian partisan war conducted throughout the Soviet occupation. This memory did not develop as a continuous social and cultural phenomenon, but instead, spread along different narratives in two different spaces: in Soviet Lithuania and in the Lithuanian diaspora in the United States. However, it could not function entirely in either of these spaces. In Soviet Lithuania, an authentic memory based on experience was only preserved by some families. In the public sphere, the Soviet propaganda narrative presented the Lithuanian partisans as ‘bandits’, as economic oppressors or ‘kulaks’, as ‘bourgeois nationalists’ struggling to regain their former privileged position in society, and as Nazi collaborators. Despite particularly strict controls, the traumatic experiences began emerging in artistic works, providing alternative interpretations. In the diaspora community, attempts to exploit the political potential of the partisans were unsuccessful. Lithuanian émigrés had left their country before the second Soviet occupation and had no first-hand experience of the partisan war. Although the narrative of the partisans did reach them, without personal experience it lost multiple dimensions and a sense of overall vitality. In addition, the diaspora lacked political institutions, and the political significance of the partisan war also faded in the absence of them. The study also revealed that generational differences transformed collective memory regardless of political and social circumstances. The three peaks of interest (and memory transformations) on both sides of the Iron Curtain occurred in the early 1960s