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The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the
Wake of War by Violeta Davoliūtė

Article  in  Ab Imperio · January 2014

DOI: 10.1353/imp.2014.0081

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Рецензии/Reviews Ab Imperio, 3/2014
Eglė RINDZEVIČIŪTĖ ania intense urbanization began in on the use of rural culture forms in cohesion in rural communities and
the interwar period, was disrupted the arts and architecture in interwar a lack of earlier urban–rural mobil-
Violeta Davoliūtė, The Making by the Soviet and Nazi occupa- Kaunas, then the provisional capital, ity. Nevertheless, the longer view on
and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: tions, and resumed, under different and Vilnius when it was regained history would reveal that the Lithu-
Memory and Modernity in the Wake conditions of the Soviet centrally at the cost of a pact with the Soviet anian countryside had experienced
of War (London: Routledge, 2014). planned economy after 1945; all of Union in 1939. The second chapter drastic changes since at least the late
212 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. this makes for a good rationale to focuses on population losses and eighteenth century, associated with
ISBN: 978-0-415-71449-5. consider the development of Lithu- describes the purge of Lithuanian incorporation to the Russian empire,
anian national culture in the context cities’ populations during World multiple land reforms, and anti-
In her monograph Violeta of urban–rural movement. Another War II, when the extinction of Lithu- Russian uprisings in the nineteenth
Davoliūtė clearly and convinc- important contribution of this book ania’s Jews took place in parallel to century. Furthermore, the history
ingly argues that the dynamics of is its embedding of the cultural a certain Lithuanianization of city of Lithuanian migration, including
urban–rural population movement discourses on nation in a particular spaces undertaken by both the Nazi peasants, has been quite widely
in Lithuania during World War II social setting. This is a highly wel- and then Soviet authorities. In doing researched, yet Davoliūtė’s story
and after underpinned the construc- come perspective in the existing this, Davoliūtė skillfully narrates the does not benefit from these studies
tion of a displacement discourse cultural history of Lithuania, where stories of Lithuania’s Jews and their as much as it could have.2
that was employed by Soviet Lithu- cultural aspects of urbanization so culture, describing Nazification and Not only migration but also the
anian intellectuals and artists to far have been limited to the history Sovietization from a variety of per- postwar resistance in Lithuania
forge a new cultural idiom of the of art and architecture and where spectives of different ethnic groups. remains a field that demands basic
Lithuanian nation. This is the first the role of cultural intellectuals in This chapter closes with an overview research and fewer broad generaliza-
study exploring the cultural impact both nation-building and Sovietiza- of the Lithuanian countryside, torn tions. This is evident, for instance, in
of mass urbanization on Lithuanian tion has so far been predominantly by catastrophic events: the Holo- the somewhat less than convincing
nation-building after World War II, analyzed in relation to the political caust and a “war after the war” – that references that Davoliūtė uses to
which should be read with interest power struggle but not so much in is, the armed anti-Soviet resistance. support her account of postwar re-
by both scholars of Soviet society relation to wider social processes.1 The latter postwar resistance period sistance. Thus saying that locally re-
and the general public. If urban– The book begins with an out- is quite important for Davoliūtė’s cruited stribai or local collaborators
rural movement characterized all line of the historical background overall argument that postwar re- with the NKVD were “almost never”
societies undergoing modernization, of Lithuanian nation-building in sistance completely destroyed social ideologically motivated, and in turn
the twentieth-century East Euro- the twentieth century discussing cohesion in the Lithuanian country- suggesting that postwar resistance
pean urban–rural movement was it from the perspective of ethnic side communities thus preparing could be interpreted as a civil war
exceptional because it intertwined divide and urban–rural stratifica- the basis for subsequent exodus to and rather than a geopolitical strug-
with geopolitical changes. In Lithu- tion. Particular emphasis is placed the cities. gle, is certainly intended to question
While this is definitely an in- the popular interpretation of postwar
1
For cultural intellectuals and nomenclature see Mindaugas Tamošaitis. Didysis apakimas: teresting hypothesis, it also draws resistance as a fight for Lithuania’s
lietuvių rašytojų kairėjimas 4-ajame XX a. dešimtmetyje. Vilnius, 2010; Vilnius Ivana- upon a number of assumptions, such independence. Although recent work
uskas. Lietuviškoji nomenklatūra biurokratinėje sistemoje: tarp stagnacijos ir dinamikos as, for example, preexisting social detailed the ways in which the lo-
(1968−1988). Vilnius, 2011. A number of studies pursued under the flag of memory
studies have also begun addressing the formation of Lithuanian national identity in the
urban context. These are the works by historians Vasilijus Safronovas, Rasa Čepaitienė 2
See A. Eidintas. Lietuvių kolumbai: Lietuvių emigracijos apybraiža. Vilnius, 1993, and
and sociologists Irena Šutinienė and Vladas Gaidys. many recently defended doctoral dissertations in Lithuania.
56 57
Рецензии/Reviews
cal Lithuanian population suffered
from the “freedom fighters,” much
more empirical research is needed
to advance the thesis of civil war,
whereas Davoliūtė substantiates this
statement by a reference to video-
recorded interviews conducted by
an amateur researcher Jonas Öhman
(Pp. 47–48).
In Chapter 3, Davoliūtė turns
her attention to the process of re-
construction and nation-building in
what were then Soviet Lithuanian
cities. Here again she masterfully
interweaves the story of urban re-
construction with narratives created
by contemporary writers, who hailed
from different ethnic backgrounds
and were eyewitnesses to these
postwar changes, to take readers to
Chapter 4, which centers on a par-
ticular group of young Lithuanian
writers who matured as artists in
postwar Vilnius. The focus is on
Justinas Marcinkevičius, Alfonsas
Maldonis, and Algimantas Baltakis,
all born in the countryside in the late
1920s–early 1930s, who became
canonized as national poets. These
as well as other young future writ-
ers began their studies in the late
1940s thus encountering firsthand
the atmosphere of Stalinism; a
mixed experience that, as Davoliūtė
details, presented a complicating
and confusing combination of feel-
ings of being young, liberated from
both hardships and tedium of the
countryside, but also exposed to the
58
hovering threat of Stalinist terror and
a scarred urban landscape (P. 84).
According to Davoliūtė, this
new, but also difficult experience
of encountering urban life inspired
these postwar writers to resort to
particular themes in their work,
leading to what she calls a “So-
viet Lithuanian renaissance” that
coincided with the Thaw of the
late 1950s, to which Chapter 5 is
dedicated. This chapter also in-
troduces a new dynamics into the
overall urban–rural story, namely,
encounters or rather nonencounters
between the emergent Soviet Lithu-
anian cultural elite and returning
deportees. Many of the returned
deportees, although by no means all
of them, came from middle-class and
intellectual backgrounds and ended
being socially marginalized under
the Soviet regime. The unspoken
experience of deportation coexisted
with a rising powerful discourse on
displacement from the idyllic coun-
tryside, the heartland of the Lithu-
anian nation. The tension between
these two traumas of displacement,
one that could be put into words and
another that could not, reverberates
in Davoliūtė’s text, leading readers
to apprehend the astonishing insen-
sitivity and self-deceit of the new,
official literary elite, who were busy
forging a new Soviet Lithuanian
literature (Pp. 92–94). If, having
returned from deportation, Juozas
Keliuotis, a prominent interwar
intellectual and literary critic, lived
in extreme poverty and suffered
ill health, “the conscience of the
nation,” Marcinkevičius, enjoyed
many perks offered to the Soviet
intellectual nomenclature.
The forging of the Soviet dis-
courses on the Lithuanian identity
was influenced not only by local but
also by international, both Western
and Russian, developments. Thus
Chapter 6, “Soviet Modernity and Its
Limits” discusses the first contacts
between Lithuanian and Western
writers from the mid-1960s. The
cases described in this chapter re-
veal a certain version of patriotism,
espoused by the officially sanctioned
Lithuanian writers: for instance,
when Marcinkevičius met Jean-
Paul Sartre in Paris, in 1967, he was
shocked to hear Sartre’s suggestion
that Lithuanians should write in
Russian instead of Lithuanian, in
order to reach worldwide audiences
(P. 118). Probably not entirely coin-
cidentally, shortly after this meeting
Marcinkevičius wrote his prominent
poetic trilogy, Mindaugas, The Ca-
thedral, and Mažvydas, which traced
the development of Lithuanianness
through the political struggles for
the medieval duchy of Lithuania,
shaping an image of a nation that
lost its political sovereignty but kept
its language. This magnum opus
consolidated Marcinkevičius’s sta-
tus of a national icon. In Chapter 7,
Davoliūtė goes on to advance her
Ab Imperio, 3/2014
own original thesis that the develop-
ment of Soviet Lithuanian literature
experienced a highly significant
“rustic turn,” the roots of which lay
not only in the Lithuanian tradition
of depicting life in the countryside
but also in Russian village prose and
a typical modernist escapism that
looked beyond urban civilization
for more genuine values. By way of
contrast to this rustic turn, Davoliūtė
introduces the cosmopolitan ideas
of Tomas Venclova, then a young
writer and later a prominent dis-
sident and poet, who was one of the
few to argue against an exclusionist
identification of Lithuanian heritage
with the countryside. The rustic
turn, according to Davoliūtė, was
not limited to literature but involved
a wide array of cultural practices,
ranging from amateur folk art, pho-
tography, and hiking clubs to interior
design examples. The power of this
rustic turn, Davoliūtė suggests, was
rooted in an underlying “discourse
of trauma and deracination” (P. 146)
as a village described, photographed,
and visited was a village scarred
by war and collectivization. Ulti-
mately, the loss of the village was
a metonymy of the lost heartland of
the Lithuanian nation. This trauma
of loss and displacement, expressed
in these various cultural discourses
would be mobilized to underpin
“the rustic revolution,” where the
experience of displacement would
connect the Lithuanians situated at
59
Рецензии/Reviews
the opposite poles of the political
power spectrum.
This argument is pursued in
Chapter 8, which introduces the
beginning of democratization in
the 1980s through the little-known,
but very important case of a former
deportee, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, who
sent her memoir to Marcinkevičius,
then a member of the official, Soviet
literary elite. In 1987 the two met
and Marcinkevičius, impressed by
the manuscript, would incorporate
parts of Grinkevičiūtė’s text into
his own literary texts calling for
Lithuania’s national revival. This
would lead Marcinkevičius, writes
Davoliūtė, to abstract “the experi-
ence of deportation into the more
general concept of displacement in
public discourse” (P. 165).
In my view, Davoliūtė captures
very well the mechanism of the
power of national liberation dis-
course of the 1980s: the call to return
(to the homeland) was established
in Soviet public discourses through
the rustic turn, it spoke to both
rural–urban migrants and former
deportees as well as to Lithuanian
émigré communities in the West.
The discourse of displacement also
empowered the idea of returning to
Europe, thus assuming a clear geo-
political orientation. I must add that
the discourse of displacement, to be
sure, was not the only power driver
3
Eglė Wittig-Marcinkevičiūtė. Nacionalinės etikos griuvėsiai arba kaip nužudyti valstybę.
Vilnius, 2013.
60
of the national liberation program,
which also included human rights,
environmental issues, and, not the
least, economy. Yet the experience
of displacement was arguably a
powerful common denominator that
spoke to different social and ethnic
groups and therefore had astonishing
power to mobilize the whole Lithu-
anian society.
Having said this, I would like to
turn now to the broader context of
historiography of Soviet Lithuania to
situate Davoliūtė’s argument in the
current debates. First of all, recent
discussions have showed that the
writing of Soviet history in Lithu-
ania places a significant burden on a
scholar’s choosing of his or her ana-
lytical perspective or even research
objects. For instance, some argue
that analytical deconstruction of the
history of Lithuanian statehood by
revealing the artificial, engineered
character of nationalist ideology or
focusing on internal rifts, cases of
injustice that dethrone the elevated
groups, such as freedom fighters,
the Soviet cultural intelligentsia,
or even deportees, is premature.
Here one of the most vocal critics is
Eglė Marcinkevičiūtė-Wittig who
recently argued that still not enough
has been done to understand and
commemorate ant-Soviet resistance
and Soviet crimes. 3 In contrast,
others, often Western scholars, see
Ab Imperio, 3/2014
the focus of Lithuanian historians demand at the international level:
on resistance and deportation as a because the field of Baltic studies,
symptom of unwillingness to engage not to speak of Lithuanian studies,
with different perspectives, whether is so small, international publish-
those of ethnic minorities or those ers do not encourage books that
drawn from social history.4 focus on in-depth, specialist cases,
I suggest that both sides have a instead asking for generic overview
point and this is not a paradox at all. monographs, indeed in the very field
The guild of historians of Lithuania, of nationalism and nation-building,
albeit growing, remains painstak- that can be marketed as teaching
ingly small despite the huge profes- material. This is why the existing
sional and public demand placed publications in English on Lithu-
on them. I expand on this simply anian subjects tend to come as part
because this institutional context and parcel of the three Baltic states
explains why both constructivist (where Rein Taagepera and Romuald
and nationalist approaches to Soviet Misiunas set the template of narrat-
Lithuanian history are so vulnerable ing and connecting these histories
to criticism. This vulnerability is the that has been replicated many times
result of an unfortunate combina- since with some modifications, such
tion of academic demand for grand as adding gender issues).5 On those
narratives, theorization and general- rare occasions when a monograph
ization, and the everyday reality of on the Lithuanian subject is allowed
scarce empirical data. Both construc- to stand on its own, it somehow
tivist and nationalist approaches becomes “a history of everything,”
often advance ambitious arguments, where again a historical narrative
erected, however, on shaky empirical tends to cut through long periods,
ground. Furthermore, grand stories often at the expense of empirical
are also conditioned by a particular precision.6
4
James Mark. Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in East
Central Europe. New Haven, 2010.
5
Romuald Misiunas and Rein Taagepera. The Baltic States: The Years of Dependence,
1940–1990. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1993; Thomas Lane, Artis Pabriks, Aldis
Purs, David J. Smith. The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. London and New
York, 2002; Dovile Budryte. Taming Nationalism? Political Community Building in the
Post-Soviet Baltic States. Aldershot, 2005; Andres Kasekamp. A History of the Baltic
States. Basingstoke, 2010; Richard Mole. The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to
the European Union: Identity, Discourse and Power in the Post-Communist Transition
of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. London and New York, 2012.
6
Tomas Balkelis. The Making of Modern Lithuania. London, 2009, and the critical
review of Balkelis by Darius Staliūnas in Journal of Contemporary History. 2010. 45.
Pp. 881-883.
61
Рецензии/Reviews
In this context of the shortage of
both demand (from the publishers’
side) and supply (of empirical data),
The Making and Breaking of Soviet
Lithuania presents an example of
a relatively well-focused study
that can satisfy both specialists
and general readers and, to some
extent, provides a more complex,
sociological approach to Lithuanian
nation-building. Readers are treated
to some fine-grained analysis of
little-known views on social change
and nation, espoused by Soviet
Lithuanian writers. A temptation to
write a history of everything, how-
ever, is not completely absent from
this book and as a result the text
sometimes resembles examples in
shorthand. As a result, complexity
and analytical precision are some-
times lost. For instance, the author
operates with simplified categories
of “the intellectuals,” “masses,” and
undifferentiated “peasants” when
referring to the countryside popula-
tion. There is, however, some room
to account for the highly interesting
complexity of social stratification
in Soviet Lithuania, where some of
those “peasants” were recent Polish-
speaking landowners or, indeed,
exiles from the city. Furthermore,
in the nineteenth century, the pro-
cess of ethnic categorization was
hugely complicated in that group
ethnic identities were not rigidly
defined at all, in contrast to what
Davoliūtė suggests (P. 18). Again,
62
a more complex approach to the
interaction of Lithuanian, Polish,
and, indeed, Russian cultures in the
formation of Lithuanian cultural
elites from the nineteenth century
would have been welcome, because
the complexity is not well captured
by the notion of “Polish gentry” that
is used in the book (Pp. 20–22). In
all, it seems that the author conflates
language use with ethnicity, which
leads to an oversimplified portrayal
of ethnically divided urban–rural
landscapes in Lithuania.
The author is undoubtedly a very
skilled writer, and she depicts the
postwar exodus, part of which was
not forced, to the cities in a very
engaging way. However, the book
would benefit from more contextu-
alization at this point. It may well
be true that Marcinkevicius and
others grew up in isolated small
villages; yet there was a significant
Lithuanian middle class of those
who were educated in Moscow
and Saint Petersburg universities
or the West at the beginning of the
twentieth century, and who traveled
internationally during the interwar
period, including the family of
Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, but also
Irena Veisaitė, whom Davoliūtė in-
cluded in the analyzed generational
cohort. These groups also oscillated
between the urban and the rural for
a variety of political and economic
reasons, and arguably experienced
displacement in their own ways,
which probably had to do with their
social background. Furthermore, the
experience of migration and urban
life was more widespread among
ethnic Lithuanians than readers
might assume from Davoliūtė’s
analysis. For instance, in his recent
overview of Lithuanian migration,
Egidijus Aleksandravičius detailed
that Lithuanian nobility joined
the Poles in the wave of the great
emigration in the nineteenth century
and settled in Paris and, indeed, in
many other European and American
cities. Mobility was experienced
quite differently by more humble
classes, yet many Lithuanian peas-
ants traveled throughout the Russian
Empire as army recruits. Moreover,
there were cases in the 1860s when
Lithuanian peasants filed requests to
their local administration asking for
permission to relocate to Siberia.7
These examples show that mobil-
ity there was not something alien,
but something quite present in the
mindset of even the poorest dwellers
in the Lithuanian countryside. And
finally, following Aleksandravičius,
if one tries to look at a wider picture
of migration in the Russian empire,
interesting statistics appear that
reveal a different dynamics of ur-
ban–rural movement, which shows
that in 1915 almost 400,000 Lithu-
anians lived in the industrial urban
7
Egidijus Aleksandravičius. Karklo diegas: lietuvių pasaulio istorija. Vilnius, 2013. Pp.
103, 118, 139.
8
Ibid. Pp. 145, 152.
Ab Imperio, 3/2014
centers – not in Lithuania proper,
but in Russia and Latvia. Thus at the
beginning of the twentieth century,
more Lithuanian-speakers worked
in Moscow, Riga, and Warsaw than
in Vilnius and Kaunas.8
Another context that is central
for understanding the extent and
limitations of the rural turn was the
birth of completely new discourses
of science and technology as drivers
of social change that had very much
to do with the cities in the 1960s.
Soviet Lithuania developed its own
version of C.P. Snow’s discussion of
two cultures – that is, humanities and
exact sciences – a debate that spread
quickly beginning in the 1960s in
both the East and West. As I have
argued in my Constructing Soviet
Cultural Policy: Cybernetics and
Governance in Lithuania after World
War II (2008), Lithuania had its own
debate on fiziki / liriki, also pursued
by Tomas Venclova, who wrote the
first popularizing books on cyber-
netics and information, and Jonas
Trinkūnas, a mathematical linguist
who would turn to the Baltic version
of the New Age pagan culture in the
late 1960s. But the most important
factor is that eventually a new type
of very urban writer was born, and
that these new authors derived their
inspiration not from the village and
the past, but from exact sciences and
63
Рецензии/Reviews
the future. Among these authors is
Ričardas Gavelis, who produced cy-
berpunk accounts of Vilnius and its
denizens, the first one, Vilnius Poker,
published in 1989. To be sure, born
in the 1950s–1960s, Gavelis, just
like Jurga Ivanauskaitė, the author
of New Age and alternative urban-
youth stories, were of a different
generation than the group analyzed
by Davoliūtė, but they were hugely
important during de-Sovietization,
mainly in creating a new idiom of
nonrural Lithuanian fiction and be-
ing the cult writers of young people.
Therefore a gesture to the emergence
of these very urban writers would
place “the ruralists” in a suitable
perspective.
To conclude, although some
of the authors’ interpretations can
be questioned, the book is very
timely, well-written, and thought-
provoking. It certainly marks the
qualitative development of studies of
Lithuanian national culture beyond
internalist, institutional accounts
of folk culture and language-based
ethnic nationalism by explicating
underlying social mechanisms that
enabled these particular discourses
of national culture to rise to promi-
nence. As such, Davoliūtė’s study
is an important step toward the
acknowledgment of a greater social
complexity underpinning Soviet
and post-Soviet culture, and will
certainly stimulate further studies in
this direction.
64
View publication stats
Claire LE FOLL
Elissa Bemporad, Becoming So-
viet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment
in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2013). 276 pp., ills.
Selected Bibliography, Index. ISBN:
978-0-253-00822-0.
This monograph is a fundamental
contribution to the history of Soviet
Jewry, and probably one of the most
compelling attempts to revitalize it.
Elissa Bemporad’s study, as mod-
estly and briefly acknowledged in
the introduction, has to be seen in
the context of post–Cold War histo-
riography. Bemporad’s book shares
the new historical narrative born
out of research based on documents
found in the archives that opened in
the 1990s, and distances itself from
the preperestroika focus of historians
on the rupture of 1917 and tendency
to present the history of Soviet
Jewry as a succession of tragedies
(including the Bolshevik attempts
to destroy Jews and Judaism). A new
generation of historians (Arkadii
Zel’tser, David Shneer, and Anna
Shternshis, to name a few) underline
“continuities,” the persistence of old
Jewish practices and beliefs, and the
emergence of new ones through the
creativity of Soviet Jews. Bemporad
demonstrates that it was possible in
interwar Soviet Minsk to be a Jew
and act like a Soviet citizen, and that
Jews managed to keep some aspects
of their prerevolutionary way of life
under the constraints imposed by the
Bolsheviks. The study explores the
“wide range of possible behaviors
that existed vis-à-vis the Soviet
system, fluctuating between active
support and forced adjustment, devi-
ance and defiance” (P. 7).
Besides the new approaches to
Soviet Jewish history, this book
contributes to and is a product of
other historiographical trends. Re-
gional studies, microhistory, and
postcolonial studies have all inspired
the author and converged to make
this study convincing, nuanced,
and sharp. Equally as important as
Arkadii Zel’ter’s book on Jews in
the Vitebsk region,1 this research
uses the regional or local approach
to reassess Jewish Soviet history in
general, and adds a lot to our un-
derstanding of the history of Soviet
Belarus, a quite neglected area of
Soviet history. Focusing on a few
“voices” and working on the “mi-
cro” scale, Bemporad lets us into the
world of ordinary Jewish people (as
the “microhistorian” Carlo Ginzburg
did with Menocchio in The Cheese
and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller) and intro-
duces us to their social and mental
environment, thanks to very lively
and truly three-dimensional descrip-
tions of the streets and institutions
1
Arkadii Zeltser. Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki 1917–1941. Moscow,
2006.
Ab Imperio, 3/2014
of Minsk. Finally, challenging the
traditional “imperial model” that
looked only at the relations between
Jews and the state (here the Soviet
state), she also integrates into her
analysis the Belarusian perspective
and looks at the horizontal relations
between Jews and other groups of
local population, as well as at the
inverted relations between the new
center of Jewish culture (Minsk) and
the former imperial centers that now
became its peripheries (Moscow,
Vilnius). Thanks to a very animated
and incisive tone and the use of a
variety of sources, including archival
documents, oral history, press, and
statistics, Bemporad brings to life
the transformation of “traditional
Jews” into “Soviet Jews” in a stimu-
lating and nuanced way.
The first chapter is a vigorous and
pertinent summary of the history of
Minsk. On the one hand, Bemporad
argues that Minsk was a typical Jew-
ish city of the Pale of Settlement,
with about half of its population
being Jewish, largely Yiddish-
speaking, and engaged in crafts and
trade. On the other hand, she shows
the specificities of the city: its rapid
modernization underscored by its
status as an administrative center and
previously modest scale of urbaniza-
tion and industrialization; the “Rus-
sianness” of its Jewish community
65