Soviet Lithuanian Research Articles

The Influence of Translation Politics in the Formation of Canon. The Example of Judita Vaičiūnaitė

The author of this article explores how, during the 1960s–1980s, certain actions and decisions within the literary patronage system determined which Lithuanian authors were incorporated into the Soviet Lithuanian literary canon. The article focuses on the turbulent thirty-year history of Judita Vaičiūnaitė’s recognition as a Lithuanian literary classic and the complex and ambiguous conditions of the dissemination of her writing. These points in turn reveal the significant stages of a more general process – the formation of the Lithuanian literary canon during the Soviet period.During the Soviet era, translation of an author’s work into Russian was a mandatory step in the broader dissemination of his or her work (in particular in terms of foreign readers). The author of the article treats quantitative indicators related to selection of works for translation as the criteria which most reliably indicated an author’s suitability for inclusion in the emerging Soviet literary canon and the actual position of a writer within the literary hierarchy of the time. The new archival documents examined reveal at least in part the process for selecting authors and works. Other factors regulating Soviet translation policy did not survive – they were undocumented and depended on extra-literary factors. In particular, the stages of the official literary patronage involved assessment of the ideological suitability of a work and took into account the author’s longterm loyalty, both of which were rewarded by greater possibilities fordissemination.

Bourgeoisie as internal orient in the Soviet Lithuanian literature: Roses Are Red by A. Bieliauskas, 1959

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the concept of internal colonization is applied to the Soviet initiatives of re-socializing the large parts of the population and creating a socialist working class from peasantry, artisans, and residues of the bourgeoisie. The internal colonization, or the power relations between native Communists and their subalterns in Lithuania, is analyzed on the basis of Roses Are Red, a novel by Bieliauskas. Here, class is invented as substitute of race. The Soviet socialists stand for hegemonic standards of “normalcy,” whereas bourgeoisie is portrayed as subject of difference, as internal Orient and as internal colony, and the relationship between the two can be legitimately defined as internal colonialism.

Adventure, Suffering, and Propaganda: World War II in Soviet Lithuanian Children’s Prose

The subject of war in children’s literature is problematic because of its impact on the addressee’s mentality and of adults’ ideological manipulations. The article examines the representation of World War II in Soviet Lithuanian children’s prose, i.e. in the texts about the years under German occupation written during the Soviet occupation. Most of the literary works about the war addressed to the young adult reader were dominated by male protagonists. The analysis of short stories and long-short stories by Liūnė Janusytė, Mykolas Sluckis, Jonas Dovydaitis, Vytautas Petkevicius, Vytautas Bubnys, Vladas Dautartas and Emilija Liegutė from the late 1940s to 1990s reveals a strongly ideologized interpretation of World War II as a battlefield between major powers with Lithuanians stuck in-between. The positive characters support the Soviet troops, always depicted as kind, friendly, and understanding, while the Germans are caricatured or shown as extremely brutal. The post-war narrative contained elements of adventure and playfulness; later literature more and more focused on children’s sufferings (disabled families, orphans, death, and etc.) and criticized the very phenomenon of war. However, propagandistic heroism remained the principal attribute; literature praised children’s courage and active involvement in the war. The exception was a collection of short stories by Icchokas Meras The Yellow Patch (1960) that presented the main character (a Jewish boy) not as a hero but as a victim of war. Keywords: Lithuanian children’s literature, Lithuanian Soviet literature, World War II, heroism, propaganda. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/zz.2015.21

PETRO GRIŠKEVIČIAUS PERSONALINIS TINKLAS: TARP KLANO IR KONSOLIDUOTOS NOMENKLATŪROS?

The notion of a clan of the first secretary in the soviet Lithuania or, in contrast, speaking about the consolidated titular nomenklatura enables to penetrate deeply into the governing of a soviet republic. The key questions here are: what kind of networks? Could the sort of networks and trust help us explain political dynamics in the soviet Lithuania and reasons why exactly Soviet Lithuanian Communist party became the first one in the Soviet Union that break with CPSU in 1989? What kind of circumstances and political context made possible the horizontal links among nomenklatura members and made nomenklatura likely to be a more consolidated network than the personal clan of the first secretary in such a centralized soviet system?Seeking to draw a difference between the clan and the consolidated titular nomenklatura, useful is the concept of krugavaya poruka presenting the Lithuanian nomenklatura as a cycle of functionaries bounded with interpersonal ties and collective responsibility against Moscow to drain out the political forms of nationalism in society. This article focuses on the personal network of Petras Griskevicius, the first secretary of the Communist party of Lithuania (1974–1987), revealing the importance of his networking in controlling the soviet Lithuanian nomenklatura.Griskevicius’ leadership network consisted of professionals and technocrats (functional nomenklatura), on the one hand, and the functionaries loyal to Griskevicius personally (Griskevicius’ personal clan) on the other. Tensions between members of functional nomenklatura and representatives of his personal clan appeared in many sectors of political, economic and social life of the republic. The article investigates cases of intelligentsia and technocracy in order to show how Griskevicius had used the competition between the functional nomenklatura and members of his personal clan aiming to gain more power.While the first secretary succeed in keeping balance among nomenklatura members, his power was limited by political circumstances. There were at least three factors that made possible the distinguished situation in the soviet Lithuania: 1) high expression of nationalism in society, 2) low status of the first secretary of the republic’s Communist party, 3) the role of the second secretary of the Communist party sent by Moscow into republic’s leadership.The obligation against Moscow to drain out political forms of nationalism in the republic led to functionalism in its nomenklatura leadership. Threat and political responsibility for the expression of nationalism demanded functional skills from party and soviet managers able to deal with political, social, and economic problems in the republic. For this reason, Griskevicius could not behave in the nepotism way by recruiting only trusted and personally loyal to him functionaries into leadership; he needed professionals.Secondly, in contrast to the “masters” in other republics, the first secretary of the soviet Lithuania had a comparatively low status in all-Union institutions. Both the first and second secretaries were only a member and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. This low status of the first secretary in all-Union bureaucracy ranking made an impact on the behavior of the local nomenklatura, because it got a room for the personal play between the first and the second secretaries.

Self-publishing of Lithuanian cultural periodicals in Soviet and contemporary times

The aim of this article is to analyse self-publishing trends of Lithuanian cultural periodicals focusing on the historical and contemporary contexts. The article provides an overview of the reasons for historical cultural periodical self-published texts, known as samizdats, to appear, as well as their publishing and circulation trends in Lithuania. It also analyses what contemporary cultural self-publishing is: whether it is a completely independent, logical consequence of the digital age, which emerged under favourable circumstances, or if it can be characterized as having something in common with the past experiences. The most active years of the periodical underground press publishing in Soviet Lithuanian self-publishing development were between 1975 and 1981. Self-published texts ideologically diverged into three main directions: religious, civic, and cultural-artistic. A total of 22 publications were being published for a longer or shorter period of time. While analysing contemporary cultural self-publishing topics, the report focuses only on online cultural texts, irrespective of the printed ones. Survey method was used to find out how much and in what aspect modern Internet users perceive historical periodical self-publishing, and how and in what aspect they value modern cultural self-published texts. The results show that 18-35-year-old respondents have not acquired the skills necessary to analyse samizdat publishing. They associate the word self-publishing with digital texts only, which due to favourable conditions spread easily through social networks and blogs. In the era of advancing computer technologies and the Internet, every person who has the time and desire may become a developer, an author, or at least a disseminator of information: this tradition is becoming more and more topical and quite frequently – an almost self-evident phenomenon.

Changing the Modes of National Representation: Anthologies of Lithuanian Poetry for Foreign Readers (1978–2013)

This article examines how Lithuanian poetry was represented for foreign readers in 15 anthologies published from 1978 to 2013 in Lithuania and abroad. The object of investigation is not a huge corpus of authors representing the official canon but the cultural, historical, political, and aesthetic aspects of Lithuanian poetry revealed in the prefaces of the anthologies. The 35 year-long process of anthologisation reveals the changing modes of national representation: the trajectory from the unknown, closed or even censored Lithuanian literature (which was oppressed by social realism and divided in two parts – exodus and Soviet Lithuanian literature) to a united picture of national literature and later to the crumbling mosaic of its parts (representing particularities grouped by gender, generations, subjects, grouping and so on). During the Soviet period the more precise translation process of Lithuanian poetry for foreign readers became possible in 70s. Till the end of the 20th century the main goal of compilers of anthologies as well as authors of prefaces was to represent national literary history beginning with the 18th century and its origins in folk culture, and highlight the historical circumstances of delayed development of national literature. From the beginning of the 21st century the care about national literature’s representation turns into a commercial project orientated towards international text circulation. According to global conditions the political resistance clearly expressed in poetic writings which was so important for the compilers of the 20th-century anthologies has transformed into the political-economic literary battlefield (the battle for publishing, translations, resistance against the dominant literary tendencies, establishment of individuality) marking a radically different political resistance.

Soviet Manipulation of the Memory of the Lithuanian Guerrilla War

Abstract The paper analyses the transformation of the collective memory of the Lithuanian guerrilla war (1944–1953) during the Soviet occupation. The problem that arises on observation of the collective memory of Guerrilla war period is the disparity between the sense and meaning of the guerilla war as it was happening and the shapes of its memory that emerged at the beginning of the perestrojka and the reestablishment of the independence. The shift from the high support for the resistance and it’s goals in the 50’s to the ignorance of it can be observed, as well as the changing of the perception of it as the fight between two sovereign countries (Lithuania and the SSRS) towards the internal conflict in Lithuanian society. The paper raises the question about the reasons for this transformation and the impact of Soviet propaganda (expanding it to the scope of “historical culture” in Jorn Rüsen terms). The research of one peculiar sphere of soviet historical culture, that is, the building of monuments and carrying out of the related memorial practices, proved, that the forms and the intensity of the development of the soviet narrative of the Lithuanian Guerrilla war were poor and inconsequential. Such a results support the hypothesis that the soviet historical culture was not decisive in transformation of a collective memory, and that suggests to pay more attention not to the actions of the regime, but to sociological, sociohistorical and anthropological research of Lithuanian soviet society.

The Hidden Violence of Totalitarianism: Policing Soviet Society in Lithuania

This article deals with the historical development of the militia in the Soviet Union. The discussion concentrates on the post-Stalinist era, when terror as a method of rule was largely rejected and the regime shifted towards the use of propaganda and education as a mode of governance. On the basis of archival materials, the article describes how militia activities in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) were organized during the period 1969–1975. Particular attention is given to the attempts of the state authorities to make the militia more legitimate and acceptable to the general population, reduce the antagonism between the militia and society, decrease the amount of direct physical violence and find new, less violent and more consensual ways to police Soviet society.

Private and professional life in autobiographies of Lithuanian women writers

The article analyzes women’s autobiographies published in the most recent edition of Soviet Lithuanian writers’ autobiography collection Tarybinių Lietuvos rasytojų auobiografijos (Autobiographies of Soviet Lithuanian writers, ed. Aldona Mickienė, Vol. I and II, 1989). Due to their professional careers, the Soviet Lithuanian female writers were part of the patriarchal and normative elite of the society, and thus acted as secondary characters of the said elite. In order to be treated as equals, the female writers, just like their male counterparts, primarily tried to present themselves as professionals, hence their autobiographies are dominated by public activities. On the other hand, the autobiography as a secondary genre, served well to express personal observations that were not considered fit for other, more official genres. The article aims to highlight the complex connection between personal traits of an individual and his or her living conditions the way it is reflected in autobiographies. It is then helpful to review the women’s autobiographies written during that timeframe by relying on both, the research traditions of women autobiographies as well as the documentary studies of the Soviet society.

In the Captivity of the Matrix: Soviet Lithuanian Historiography, 1944−1985 by Aurimas Švedas (review)

In the Captivity of the Matrix: Soviet Lithuanian Historiography, 1944−1985 by Aurimas Švedas (review)

Autobiography and Soviet Lithuanian Women Writers

This article focuses on autobiographies by women writers published in the last, two-volume version of a collection titled Tarybinių lietuvos rašytojų autobiografijos (Autobiographies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers), published in 1989 (previous versions appeared in 1957, 1967, and 1977). Solveiga Daugirdaitė explores what women writers felt it was appropriate to say about themselves to their society, and what can be gleaned from their statements about the nature of that society, the strengths and weaknesses it accorded its female members, the demands it made on them, the “spirit of the times”, and so on. Examining these autobiographies, she tries to reconstruct that social actor’s – the Soviet woman author’s – collective and individual identity, her courage and her fear of revealing herself, and the tension between her roles as public persona and “regular woman”. In Soviet Lithuania, although women writers’ professional work accorded them a place within that patriarchal, dominant society’s elite, they remained secondary players within it. Seeking to be recognized as equals, these women writers presented themselves as professionals, and for this reason their public accomplishments have pride of place in the autobiographies. The goal of this article is to decode what is nevertheless said about their private lives, as much as it is possible to separate that from the public. In reading women’s autobiographies from this period, it is therefore appropriate to draw both on the traditions for studying women’s autobiography, as well as studies of documents from the Soviet period.

Historiography of the Lithuanian national movement. Changing paradigms

This article shows how the modern Lithuanian historical narrative came into being and evolved with special attention to the perception of the Lithuanian national movement. During the 'long nineteenth century' Lithuanians constructed their concept of history as an alternative to the Polish construct and to a lesser degree its Russian counterpart. The history of Lithuania was considered to be the history of (ethnic) Lithuanians. The concept of National revival was elaborated at that time. The anti-Polish paradigm became even stronger during the interwar period. Historians at that time focused their attention on the Lithuanian opposition to the so-called Russification. After the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1940 and again in 1945, the official historical view propagated by the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic had to be not only Marxist but also in line with the ideologem of friendship of the peoples. However, there was also a different approach to the history of the Lithuanian national movement. One group made an attempt not to follow the ideologem without leaving the realm of Marxist methodology; a second group represented the traditional Lithuanian, essentially primordialist, view on nationalism.

The Role of the Second Party Secretary in the “Election” of the First: The Political Mechanism for the Appointment of the Head of Soviet Lithuania in 1974

On 5 February 1974, a Tuesday, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Ivan Kapitonov paid a visit to the Politburo member Mikhail Suslov at Moscow's Old Square. Kapitonov was accompanied by the Soviet Lithuanian functionary Valerii Kharazov, who presented to Suslov a blue notebook containing the opinions of the Lithuanian nomenklatura about the potential candidates for the position of first secretary of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party (LCP). Kharazov's visit to Suslov was the crucial moment in the appointment/ election of the new head of the republic after the death of Antanas Snieckus, who had held the position from 1940 to 1974. Kharazov (b. 1918) has survived in Lithuanian collective memory as one of the most ruthless Soviet governors-general. This was the title conferred behind their backs on all the second secretaries of the Central Committee of the LCP, who--with the exception of a brief period from 1953 to 1956--were not locals but Russians sent from Moscow. The political institution of the second secretaries was important for Moscow as a means of controlling the national republics--functionaries would be sent from Moscow to all the national republics (with the exception of the three Slavic republics). Having arrived in Soviet Lithuania, the second secretary directly supervised the work of important departments--notably those of Organizational Party Work and Administrative Organs, which oversaw the judicial system and the Committee for State Security (KGB). His key function was to supervise the work of the local nomenklatura and report regularly to the sector for Belorussia and the Baltic republics of the Department for Organizational Party Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Kharazov's career followed a trajectory similar to second secretaries of most other republics. Before being appointed to Lithuania, he worked as an instructor at the Department for Organizational Party Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU in Moscow. There he supervised the work of the party apparatus and administrative institutions in neighboring Belorussia. (1) In 1964, he was promoted to become an inspector in the Central Committee, already not attached to a concrete republic. Now he was directly responsible to the secretary and head of the Central Committee department rather than the head of the department sector. (2) Kharazov's duties included organizing inspections in the Soviet republics and leading commissions formed by the Central Committee for solving newly arisen problems or issues. Kharazov was not the only actor in this election. The workings of the Lithuanian nomenklatura, and in particular its use of personal relations, provide an opportunity to look more thoroughly into all-union politics from the local perspective. That investigation, in turn, makes possible distinctions between the statuses of Soviet republic and Russian region (oblast'), which fundamentally affected the nature of relations with the center. The long drawn-out interregnum, which began after the death of Snieckus on 22 January 1974 and ended with the election of Petras Griskevicius as the new first secretary on 18 February, is important not only as a case study of a period that marked a new stage in Soviet Lithuania's administration. It also sheds light on the changing relationship between the center and a Soviet republic in the Brezhnev era, as well as shifts in Moscow's cadre policy. Three main theoretical approaches have been used to analyze center-region relations in the Soviet system. Two approaches--the totalitarian and the corporatist--have a direct bearing on the subject of Soviet nationality policy, while the third one--the patron--client, or clientelistic approach--is generally used by scholars investigating center-region relations rather than nationality policy. I explain why the totalitarian approach is not sufficient as an explanatory model and how the two other models--corporatist and clientelistic--can be integrated in the concrete case of Lithuania in 1974. …

The Hunting Club of Petras Griškevičius and the Consolidation of the Lithuanian Nomenklatura

This article focuses on informal practices and, in particular, hunting, which was perhaps the most important ‘extra-curricular’ activity of the nomenklatura. Hunting became an excellent platform for a new secretary to establish his authority in consolidating the nomenklatura, which was quite fragmented for many years after the death of the head of Soviet Lithuania A. Sniečkus (1903–1974). This article analyses the composition of the hunting clubs of the authorities, their organisation and their leadership in informal activities, and claims that the hunt served the interests of the Soviet Lithuanian nomenklatura, because it allowed the leader of the Soviet republic to structure and consolidate his clientele. By manipulating the composition of the most important – first – hunting club, into which people close to him were introduced, but ignoring the possible contenders for the informal leaders, Griškevičius took over control of the members of this hunting club. He first introduced the regulations of the first club of nomenklatura hunters. The ‘normalisation’ of hunting was an effective strategy which allowed Griškevičius to establish his authority and power, limiting and restricting the potential of the grouping of the Lithuanian nomenklatura. The consolidation of the nomenklatura not only served to strengthen Griškevičius in the post of the new leader, but also lowered the possibilities for the centre’s intervention in the management of the republic.

KINO ATMINTIES MUZIEJUS: DEIMANTO NARKEVIČIAUS PAMINKLAI

The paper aims at describing the problem of historical memory such as it emerges in the films of the contemporary Lithuanian video-artist Deimantas Narkevičius. The questions raised are whether it may be conveyed through cinematic means and which techniques in particular may well preserve and nourish it. In the oeuvre of Narkevičius, the problem is closely tied to the autoreflexivity of the medium itself, since cinema allows recalling events both personal and “universal” and moving them from one context to another, forcing them to lose their documental status in the process. Yet no manipulation of document and history may pass without consequences, and all historic images, traumatic narratives and translating between different languages and experiences reveal ruptures in the narrative texture. This, in turn, makes us question the possibility and probability of memory itself. These questions are in the forth of Narkevičius’ films, yet they are posed wordlessly, through images alone, thus making the spectator wonder as to whether cinema might have its own techniques of working with the memory, history, and forgetting.Editing is the main cinematic technique used in the process, and the “Role of a Lifetime” of Narkevičius, to quote his another film, proves to be one of the Great Editor. Editing empowers one with the means of control over cinematic discourse and thus provides a very particular type of cinematic memory. Instead of merely showing things, the editor has control over what shall and shall not be seen. Yet Narkevičius chooses not to merely tell documentary stories about a life long gone. Instead, he reviews the once-traditional ways of looking (soviet filming techniques, film and TV genres) aiming at revealing their own inner instability, forcing them to display their own ruptures and discontinuities. A strategy like that closely resembles such practices of the Soviet Lithuanian art as the so-called “Quiet Modernism” or “Aesop’s language”; yet the overall status of Narkevičius’ work is under the question. Is such a strategy merely a suggestion of a way of remembering? Or, is it a convenient and institutionally approved way of opposing the mainstream? The films analysed here provide no definite answer; however, they do prove that the means of the medium play a significant role in how we perceive and understand our past.

A Bakhtinian Lesson, or the History of Lithuanian Soviet Novel as Described by Algimantas Bučys

The paper deals with the analysis of the history of Lithuanian Soviet novelas represented by a literary critic Algimantas Bučys in his book “Novel and the Present Day” (1973, 1977). This book contains a strong Bakhtinian methodological introduction (it addresses Bakhtin’s concept of the novel) and extensive quotes from Bakhtin’s book “Epic and Novel”, in which the novel concept is introduced. Bakhtin’s text was very little known and hard to find back in the 1960s. As it is obvious from the analysis, Bakhtin’s theory plays an ambiguous role in Bučys’ history of the national novel. On the one hand, Bakhtin’s theory provides theoretical grounds for the novelization of genres and is a suitable methodology for research into Lithuanian novel. On the other hand, Bučys uses a dogmatic type of analogy, and the analysis itself is based on comparing rather than on interpretation.

Hooligans, Hippies, and Immature Youth: Negotiating Communist Party Narratives of May 18, 1972 in Kaunas

In the aftermath of the street demonstrations in Kaunas in May 1972, Communist Party leaders developed a narrative of the events that downplayed nationalism or political dissent as motivating factors for the unrest. Initially, Soviet authorities blamed marginal elements in society, specifically hooligans and hippies, for instigating what they called a ‘disturbance of public order’. However, the demographics of participants forced Party leaders to explain why young people who were students, workers and even Komsomol members would take to the streets shouting slogans such as ‘freedom for Lithuania’ and ‘freedom for hippies’. As a result, the Communist Party focused on the failure to inculcate Soviet youth with proper ideological values, making them susceptible to manipulation by ‘hostile elements’. In doing so, Party leaders were able to use the political practice of self-criticism to keep the events of May 1972 within acceptable ideological bounds. However, the recognition of its own weaknesses did not stop the Lithuanian Communist Party from blaming other groups, such as parents, schools and cultural organizations, for failing to provide a proper upbringing for Soviet Lithuanian youth. Although cultural and intellectual organizations were only one of the factors blamed for the political immaturity of youth and their susceptibility to corrupting influences, they were the ones to suffer the consequences of the Soviet authorities’ crackdown after the street demonstrations. Through a process of applying and discarding various discursive options, Lithuanian communist officials were able to use Soviet ideological narratives to protect themselves from criticism and to eliminate disruptive cultural and intellectual leaders in Kaunas.

Museum Commemoration Paradigms of Soviet and Soviet Times’ Writers

Paper evaluates museum commemoration narratives and paradigms of memory of Soviet Lithuanian writers and writers who lived in Soviet times. Evaluated historical role discourses of these writers suppose museum visualization character and leads to the establishment of or failure to set up writers’ memorial and literature museum. Activation museum visualization, communication is motivated objective writers activity and they creative assessment, prominence of international relations and contexts, and real or seeming relevance of writers at present. The Memorial Museum of writer Antanas Venclova in Vilnius transforming to the Venclovų House-Museum illustrates concepts of discourses about the writer as a Soviet and Soviet times and valuation an artist as beyond Soviet times, Soviet times, and post-soviet times.

The Personalities in the Political Field of Soviet Lithuanian History: Behavioural Strategies and Chances of Survival

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Illustrarium: Soviet Lithuanian Children's Book Illustration , and: Illustrarium: Contemporary Lithuanian Children's Book Illustration , and: Illustrarium: Illustration by Young Lithuanian Artists , and: Illustrarium: Twenty Books from Lithuania for Children and Teenagers , and: Illustrarium: The Best Lithuanian Books for Children 2000-2010 (review)

Illustrarium: Soviet Lithuanian Children's Book Illustration , and: Illustrarium: Contemporary Lithuanian Children's Book Illustration , and: Illustrarium: Illustration by Young Lithuanian Artists , and: Illustrarium: Twenty Books from Lithuania for Children and Teenagers , and: Illustrarium: The Best Lithuanian Books for Children 2000-2010 (review)