Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945−1970 by Dalia Leinarte (review)

Dalia Leinarte’s book is an important contribution to the study of Soviet and post-Soviet memory, remembrance, oral history, and most important, gender. The book aims to uncover memories and experiences of Lithuanian women during the post–World War II decades, as they were adjusting to the Soviet society and becoming Soviet women.

The book is arranged into two main parts and one small introductory part. In the first part the author introduces the concept of personal narrative and interview technique. Oral history has been playing an important role within the field of Baltic studies for a long time. Leinarte continues this tradition by claiming that “interview provides the possibility of uncovering subjective processes, which are difficult to get at using regular archival materials or by analyzing social groups that have not, generally, left any written history” (P. 9). Although interviews are highly subjective and might not be completely accurate factually, oral narrative communicates personal experiences and feelings that are unique for a specific epoch and society. In Leinarte’s book, personal life stories reconstructed through interviews both shed light on a complex social process of Sovietization and uncover its psychological dimension. The study raises important questions: how did this transformative experience shape their lives and their perceptions about the system, and what was their role in this system − that of citizens of an occupied country, or active agents of Sovietization?

In the second part of the book, the author reviews the narratives of identity that the Soviet system offered to the Soviet-Lithuanian women. Leinarte’s contextual narration of Soviet women’s social roles and personal identities are gendersensitive: she looks into the actual meaning of being a working mother, or the perception of categories such as love, friendship, or family values. With great attention to details, the author analyzes the entanglement of state policies, discursive scenarios of gender, and self-perceptions of Soviet-Lithuanian women.

The final part of the book is dedicated to the publication of interviews and personal testimonies. The study is based on ten personal interviews. Leinarte separates them into three groups. The first group represents those who remember the Soviet Union positively, who enjoyed social mobility and other opportunities under the Soviet system, and contrasted them to negative experiences in post-1991 independent Lithuania. One such example is the interview with Leokadija Dirzinskaite “Everyone was creating socialism, and everyone was looking at it with hope” (P. 105). A former top-rank communist, Dirzinskaite tells the story of a successful female apparatchik. The second group of interviews introduces the women who had difficulties adjusting to the Soviet regime. Keeping their discontent and frustration private for decades, only in interviews they were able to share their dark and even tragic memories (like Monika Jonynaite-Makuniene, mother of a disabled child). The third group includes personal testimonies promising to retell the past “as it actually happened”, but which, according to Leinarte, produce the most illogical and incoherent accounts. This is the case of attempts to reshape personal narratives in accordance with the ideals and expectations of the post-1991 epoch: those condemning the Soviet period and presenting one’s own past in a direct teleological perspective, toward the future independent Lithuania. Leinarte concludes that such manipulated recollections signal the failure to produce “new memory” and that “the new identities women started to develop in independent Lithuania after 1989−1990 have not yet been internalized, as women seem to lack a socially-justified memory” (P. 15).

All of the interviews in the book were selected in such a way that the narrative continued from the prewar period up to the independence era. Most of the interviewees were born in the 1920s and 1930s, so their recollections are structured by the same grand historical signposts of the Lithuanian twentieth century: WWII, forest guerillas, concentration camps, hard work. It is against this general historical...