The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania

Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War

Violeta Davoliūtė

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138204485
• eBook ISBN: 9781134693580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1Modernity and tradition between the wars

Modern Lithuanian nationalism was born in the second half of the nineteenth century with the celebration of the language and culture of the peasantry. By the beginning of the twentieth, it had evolved into a relatively small but fastgrowing social and political movement that staked a claim to a Lithuanian presence in the cities as an essential precondition of modern nationhood. And as the sons and daughters of the more prosperous farmers began to migrate to the cities to study and find work, they formed the core of a small but ambitious urban elite, seeking to challenge the social, economic and political dominance of the more established communities.

The Lithuanianization of the cities accelerated dramatically upon the establishment of independence in 1918. Lithuanians streamed into Kaunas and other cities to work at government institutions, leading to an unprecedented degree of interaction between Lithuanians and Jews, communities that had lived next to each other in smaller towns and villages for centuries but with little direct interaction. In the countryside, land reform destroyed the dominance of the Polish aristocracy over the rural economy to establish the single-family, Lithuanian homestead as the social basis of what was remained an overwhelmingly rural society.

As the provisional capital, Kaunas became the focal point of a modernizing, nation-building project to articulate and project the essence of Lithuanian national identity. The desire to “catch up” with the advanced nations of Europe lay at the heart of a strong, modernist thrust seen in architecture, literature and the arts, but this competed with an equally strong, anti-modern impulse to assert Lithuanian distinctiveness, drawing from the folk customs of rural communities and the heritage of medieval statehood represented by the Lithuanian Grand Dukes.

After a military coup in 1926 installed the dictatorship of Antanas Smetona (1874–1944), Kaunas sought to emulate the centralized programmes of mass culture and politics pursued in Moscow, Berlin and Rome.¹ The popularization of national culture through folk art, concerts andmass festivalswent hand-in-hand with a grass-roots cultural campaign asserting Lithuanian claims to Vilnius.²

The dream of returning to Vilnius was realized in October 1939 but swiftly turned into a nightmare as the country was subjected to successive Soviet (June 1940) and Nazi (June 1941) occupations. The shock of war and occupation reinforced the nativist impulses of interwar Lithuanian culture, unleashing an outpouring of anti-Semitism and searing the agrarian myth of the homestead, the medieval heritage of the Grand Dukes, and an idealized vision of Vilnius into popular memory as key loci of native identity.

A peasant nation

Lithuania's predominantly agrarian society was still divided into clearly defined estates when industrialization and urbanization finally gathered speed in the late nineteenth century. The landowning aristocracy was mostly Polish, and the townspeople were mostly Polish and Jewish with some Russians, while Germans were predominant only in the coastal city of Klaipėda (Memel). The countryside was populated mostly by Lithuanians, and the very concept of being a Lithuanian had long become synonymous with the social status of the peasant.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the provinces of the Russian Empire that more or less corresponded to present-day Lithuania were populated by 2,676,000 people, of whom 58.3 percent were identified as Lithuanians, 14.6 percent as Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, 13.3 percent Jews, 10.3 percent Poles, with Germans, Latvians and Tatars making up most of the rest.³ This territory included the guberniia or Russian province of Kaunas (Kovno), along with several districts of the Suwalki and Vilnius (Vil'na) provinces.⁴

Three quarters of the population were classified as peasants living in villages, cultivating small to medium-sized plots and earning their livelihood from agriculture. Of this population, 96 percent were ethnic Lithuanians.⁵ Poles and Jews accounted for only one quarter of the overall population, but well over three quarters of those who lived in the cities, with Jews accounting for up to 80 percent of the population in many of the smaller towns.6 Kaunas was the most “Lithuanian” of cities, with about 21.⁶ percent of its population classified as Lithuanian speakers in 1909. Lithuanian speakers comprised less than 10 percent of most other towns, and as little as 2 percent of the population of Vilnius.⁷

The typical Lithuanian village formed a clannish environment, a locally bounded network of ties among neighbors with relatively little interaction with the outside world.⁸ As distinct from communal traditions of the typical Russian village, where parcels of land were redistributed among households according to current needs, Lithuanian land tenure was based on inherited right.⁹ This led to a settlement pattern where several homesteads inhabited by closely related families formed the core of a settlement, with other homesteads distributed further away in the fields. On average, there were between two and four related families in a village, but in some large villages there could be up to eight such families established as separate households.¹⁰

Lithuanian society was thus characterized by a lack of mobility between town and country well into the late nineteenth century, which reflected the rigid categorization of ethnic groups into distinct social layers. To illustrate the persistence of these distinctions among the separate social groups and the quasifeudal nature of their relations, historian Saulius Sužiedėlis cites the following vignette from a contemporary newspaper:

… a loaded wagon is flying with great speed toward the town in the hope of avoiding the guard and the required market levy. At this very moment, a war-like command reverberates: “Halt!” – in an instant, the wagon is stopped. The Lithuanian, caught in his reckless deed, scratches his head, then pleads that he has nothing with which to pay, that he has barely enough money for market. He steps down from the wagon, whip in hand, bargaining with the unyielding guard. Sometimes, he even refuses to obey; woe then to the impudent! A dozen Jews cluster around him, while the Lithuanian staves them off as best as he can with his riding crop – a little Jewish fellow, kneading the peasant constantly with his knees and mussing his hair, keeps crying: “Pay! Pay!” The Lithuanian … seeks to lift his arms to beat off the unwelcome “guest”, when a new rattling of arriving wagons and a dozen fists under his nose, or, on occasion, even a careful shove, applied from a careful distance, deflects his attention from his pestered head.Willy-nilly, he reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a small bag … Confused and unable to regain his composure, the peasant finally pays a few groszy with great difficulty … There's nothing to be done; one must drive on. The peasant settles into his wagon, spurs on his horses, all the while shaking his head with dissatisfaction. However, once he arrives in the town square and glances at the white peasant overcoats … a smile returns to his face. He greets his brothers happily and forgets about his ruffled hair.¹¹

In this representation, the Lithuanians appear as peasants by definition, farming the land and bringing their goods to market, while the Jews occupy an equally stereotypical role as toll-collectors in service of the authorities. This condescending, Polish-language sketch, written from the perspective of the urbanite in Warsaw, was meant to entertain the reader with caricatures that were in all likelihood taken as self-evident at the time.

Indeed, for the vast majority of ethnic Lithuanians in the late nineteenth century, cities and towns figured as strange and foreign places, generally visited only for the purpose of trade or worship. Society in the larger cities was dominated by the Polish language and culture, while some dealings with official institutions were conducted in Russian. In the smaller towns, where Jews often formed a plurality or sometimes even a majority of the population, the Catholic church and the farmer's market were the only familiar spaces, encircled by buildings such as a synagogue and Jewish schools, shops and bathhouses.¹²

The ethnic division of society between the town and country was by no means unique to Lithuania. All along the East Central European strip running from Helsinki in the north to Sofia in the south, the cities were populated largely by people of nationalities different from those of the rural population. In the northern towns, Germans and Jews predominated, while Italians and Greeks predominated in the southern towns.Meanwhile Finns, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Romanians, Bulgarians, and other nationalities living in the surrounding countryside were seen as “peasant” peoples. This ethnic stratification implied a close linking of the social and the national question, and a specific pattern of interaction between the city and the country.¹³

This pattern had evolved over several hundred years. Lithuania emerged as a medieval state in the thirteenth century with a simple social structure that consisted of the Grand Duke and his family, the nobles (bajorai) who served the duke as warriors, and a more numerous class of farmers (laukininkai). As the Grand Duchy slowly integrated into Western Europe through a dynastic union with the Kingdom of Poland in 1385, society became increasingly stratified, and relations between the estates became formalized. Lithuania still kept a separate set of institutions, but Polish and Lithuanian noble families had formed a common political identity, with the Lithuanian nobility having slowly assimilated to Polish culture.¹⁴

Meanwhile, as the rights of the Lithuanian bajorai increased to match privileges of the Polish szlachta, the rights of the laukininkai were circumscribed. Constant warfare throughout the fifteenth century made the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: misplaced memories
• 1 Modernity and tradition between the wars
• 2 War, the city and the country
• 3 Reconstruction and nation-building
• 4 Engineers of urban souls
• 5 Soviet Lithuanian renaissance
• 6 Soviet modernity and its limits
• 7 The rustic turn
• 8 The rustic revolution
• Epilogue: memory’s many returns
• Appendix: biographies of people interviewed for this book
• Bibliography
• Index