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

In her monograph Violeta Davoliūtė clearly and convincingly argues that the dynamics of urban–rural population movement in Lithuania during World War II and after underpinned the construction of a displacement discourse that was employed by Soviet Lithuanian intellectuals and artists to forge a new cultural idiom of the Lithuanian nation. This is the first study exploring the cultural impact of mass urbanization on Lithuanian nation-building after World War II, which should be read with interest by both scholars of Soviet society and the general public. If urban–rural movement characterized all societies undergoing modernization, the twentieth-century East European urban–rural movement was exceptional because it intertwined with geopolitical changes. In Lithuania intense urbanization began in the interwar period, was disrupted by the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and resumed, under different conditions of the Soviet centrally planned economy after 1945; all of this makes for a good rationale to consider the development of Lithuanian national culture in the context of urban–rural movement. Another important contribution of this book is its embedding of the cultural discourses on nation in a particular social setting. This is a highly welcome perspective in the existing cultural history of Lithuania, where cultural aspects of urbanization so far have been limited to the history of art and architecture and where the role of cultural intellectuals in both nation-building and Sovietization has so far been predominantly analyzed in relation to the political power struggle but not so much in relation to wider social processes.¹

The book begins with an outline of the historical background of Lithuanian nation-building in the twentieth century discussing it from the perspective of ethnic divide and urban–rural stratification. Particular emphasis is placed on the use of rural culture forms in the arts and architecture in interwar Kaunas, then the provisional capital, and Vilnius when it was regained at the cost of a pact with the Soviet Union in 1939. The second chapter focuses on population losses and describes the purge of Lithuanian cities’ populations during World War II, when the extinction of Lithuania’s Jews took place in parallel to a certain Lithuanianization of city spaces undertaken by both the Nazi and then Soviet authorities. In doing this, Davoliūtė skillfully narrates the stories of Lithuania’s Jews and their culture, describing Nazification and Sovietization from a variety of perspectives of different ethnic groups. This chapter closes with an overview of the Lithuanian countryside, torn by catastrophic events: the Holocaust and a “war after the war”–that is, the armed anti-Soviet resistance. The latter postwar resistance period is quite important for Davoliūtė’s overall argument that postwar resistance completely destroyed social cohesion in the Lithuanian countryside communities thus preparing the basis for subsequent exodus to the cities.

While this is definitely an interesting hypothesis, it also draws upon a number of assumptions, such as, for example, preexisting social cohesion in rural communities and a lack of earlier urban–rural mobility. Nevertheless, the longer view on history would reveal that the Lithuanian countryside had experienced drastic changes since at least the late eighteenth century, associated with incorporation to the Russian empire, multiple land reforms, and anti-Russian uprisings in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the history of Lithuanian migration, including peasants, has been quite widely researched, yet Davoliūtė’s story does not benefit from these studies as much as it could have.²

Not only migration but also the postwar resistance in Lithuania remains a field that demands basic research and fewer broad generalizations. This is evident, for instance, in the somewhat less than convincing references that Davoliūtė uses to support her account of postwar resistance. Thus saying that locally recruited stribai or local collaborators with the NKVD were “almost never” ideologically motivated, and in turn suggesting that postwar resistance could be...