The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania

The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania
Author: Violeta Davoliūtė
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2014-01-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134693583

Appearing on the world stage in 1918, Lithuania suffered numerous invasions, border changes and large scale population displacements.The successive occupations of Stalin in 1940 and Hitler in 1941, mass deportations to the Gulag and the elimination of the Jewish community in the Holocaust gave the horrors of World War II a special ferocity. Moreover, the fighting continued after 1945 with the anti-Soviet insurrection, crushed through mass deportations and forced collectivization in 1948-1951. At no point, however, did the process of national consolidation take a pause, making Lithuania an improbably representative case study of successful nation-building in this troubled region. As postwar reconstruction gained pace, ethnic Lithuanians from the countryside – the only community to remain after the war in significant numbers – were mobilized to work in the cities. They streamed into factory and university alike, creating a modern urban society, with new elites who had a surprising degree of freedom to promote national culture. This book describes how the national cultural elites constructed a Soviet Lithuanian identity against a backdrop of forced modernization in the fifties and sixties, and how they subsequently took it apart by evoking the memory of traumatic displacement in the seventies and eighties, later emerging as prominent leaders of the popular movement against Soviet rule.

Soviet and Post-Soviet Lithuania – Generational Experiences

Soviet and Post-Soviet Lithuania – Generational Experiences
Author: Laima Zilinskiene
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000516180

This book explores the impact on different generations of Lithuanians of the fifty-year Soviet modernisation project which was implemented in Lithuania from 1940 to 1991. It reveals the specific characteristics of ‘the last Soviet generation’, born in the 1970s, and sets this generation apart from those who were born earlier and later. It analyses changes in attitudes, choices and relationships in a variety of social spheres and contexts and the adaptation skills which were required during the late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation processes. Overall, it presents a great deal of detail on the social experiences of different generations in late Soviet and post-Soviet society.

Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania

Family and the State in Soviet Lithuania
Author: Dalia Leinarte
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350136115

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.

Lithuania

Lithuania
Author: V. Stanley Vardys
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-02-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429967713

This book explores Lithuania's pagan ancestry and epochal struggles with Germanic and Russian states and examines Lithuania's struggle with the legacy of Soviet rule as it strives to establish democracy and economic prosperity.

Lithuania 1940

Lithuania 1940
Author: Alfred Erich Senn
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9042022256

In June 1940, as Nazi troops marched into Paris, the Soviet Red Army marched into Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; seven weeks later, the USSR Supreme Soviet ratified the Soviet takeover of these states. For half a century, Soviet historians insisted that the three republics had voluntarily requested incorporation into the Soviet Union. Now it has become possible to examine the events of that tumultuous time more carefully. Alfred Erich Senn, the author of books on the formation of the Lithuanian state in 1918-1920 and on the reestablishment of that independence in 1988-1991, has produced a fascinating account of the Soviet takeover, juxtaposing a picture of the disintegration and collapse of the old regime with the Soviets' imposition of a new order. Discussing the historiography and the living memory of the events, he uses the image of a "shell game" that focused attention on the work of a supposedly "non-communist" government while in the hothouse conditions of military occupation Moscow undermined the state's independent institutions and introduced a revolution from above.

Authoritarian Laughter

Authoritarian Laughter
Author: Neringa Klumbytė
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501766708

Authoritarian Laughter explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbytė investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor. Broom was multidirectional—it both facilitated Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.

Forest Brothers

Forest Brothers
Author: Juozas Luksa
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-09-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9789639776586

An autobiographical account of the armed resistance against the Soviet Union, which took place between 1944–1956. Published in English for the first time in unabridged form, Lukša's memoir remains one of the few reliable eye-witness accounts of the "Invisible Front", as dubbed by Soviet security forces. At its zenith 28,000 guerilla fighters participated in battles and skirmishes throughout Lithuania, Lukša (partisan codename Daumantas) being one of the leaders. Forest Brothers also documents the role of women in the resistance, giving equal credit to these often silent partners. In 1948 Lukša and two comrades broke through the Iron Curtain on the Polish border. He sought training from the French intelligence and from the CIA. Lukša was flown back into the Soviet Union under the radar on the night of October 4, 1950. He managed to survive and operate eleven months until his near capture and death on the night of September 5, 1951. His account, written during 1948–1950, while he was living in hiding in Paris, describes in vivid scenes and dialogue the daily struggles of the resistance.

The Unknown War

The Unknown War
Author: Arūnas Streikus
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2022-05-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000595145

The armed anti-Soviet resistance movement which arose in the second half of 1944 in Lithuania, as Soviet forces began to reoccupy the Baltic countries and Galicia, sparking a nearly decade-long fierce military conflict, has yet to become established in the common narrative of contemporary European history. However, controversy regarding the nature of this `war after the war' and its legacies constitutes one of the core elements in the contemporary information warfare waged by Russia against its neighbouring countries. The origins of various distortions surrounding the story of the partisan war in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union can even be traced to the final stages of that war, when Soviet propaganda sought to discredit the campaign as a battle waged by criminal elements. In this example of a historical event charged with controversial memories and geopolitical connotations, a thorough academic approach is extraordinarily instrumental. Responding to the growing need for historical research capable of providing international readers with the latest findings in the thematic field under question, six scholars from Vilnius University address the diverse aspects of this phenomenon as well as its role in the culture and politics of memory. Toward this end, this analysis – among the most comprehensive explorations of this history to date – is being released in both Lithuanian and English.

Soviet and Post-Soviet Lithuania

Soviet and Post-Soviet Lithuania
Author: Laima Žilinskienė
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-12
Genre: Cohort analysis
ISBN: 9781032170848

"This book explores the impact on different generations of Lithuanians of the fifty-year Soviet modernisation project which was implemented in Lithuania from 1940 to 1991. It reveals the specific characteristics of 'the last Soviet generation', born in the 1970s, and sets this generation apart from those who were born earlier and later. It analyses changes in attitudes, choices and relationships in a variety of social spheres and contexts and the adaptation skills which were required during the late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation processes. Overall, it presents a great deal of detail on the social experiences of different generations in late Soviet and post-Soviet society"--