The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War. by Violeta Davoliūt˙e (review)

Historian Violeta Davoliūt˙e has written one of the most significant recent books on the history of 20th-century Lithuania. Focusing on the construction of the Soviet Lithuanian national identity after World War II, the book offers new ways of understanding the complex interplay between nationalism and Sovietization in the Baltic context and how this dialectic created the particular Baltic anti-Soviet nationalism of the 1980s that eventually contributed to the downfall of the USSR.

Solid scholarly studies of contemporary Baltic history that have as their chronological focus the decades of Soviet domination from the 1940s to the 1980s are few and far between. In academia, interest in researching this period of Lithuanian history is limited. Beyond the wave of publications about the Stalinist repressions, the fate of deportees, and aspects of the anti-Soviet guerrilla "war after the war," historians have generally been unwilling to dig deeply into Lithuanian society's Soviet past. In part, this could be a generational issue. Many established scholars at the zenith of their careers may find that studying their own formative Soviet past with the required critical distance is extremely difficult. This phenomenon, in turn, has created a niche for some younger, self-imagined dissident Baltic historians to engage in producing Soviet Alltagsgeschichte that speaks to the nostalgic instincts of a popular readership weary of two decades of constant reforms and upheavals. With the lack of a nuanced general picture of the Soviet period in the scholarly literature, debates about the recent past (particularly the years under Leonid Brezhnev) have become polarized into a conflict over whether this was a period of brutal oppression and heroic victim-hood or of normalized totalitarianism, circumscribed but orderly if one abided by the rules.

Precisely for this reason, contributions such as the one under review are exceedingly important. Davoliūt˙e challenges the underlying precepts of both these established discourses of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The narrative of the book divides roughly into two halves. The first part tells the story of how the Soviet regime sought to foster a sense of Soviet Lithuanian national identity through a program of forward-looking modernization. War-torn society would be reforged into a new Soviet nation by urbanization and industrialization, processes that not only would free the youth—the future of the country—from the stifling traditions of the primordial village but would also allow young people to escape being drawn into the fratricidal guerrilla war that gripped much of the countryside. The Soviet city offered promises of education and the fruits of progress. Even more interesting is the discussion of how Soviet Lithuanian nationalism tapped into preexisting nationalist sentiment regarding the reclaiming of Vilnius as the spiritual and political capital of Lithuania. Fulfilling a nationalist dream of the interwar era, the Soviet regime could manipulate the Lithuanians' desire to claim the city as their own, channeling this Lithuanianizing fervor into a cleansing of the city of its Polish (and Jewish) past—populations and identities that no longer fit with the shining new future envisioned under Communism.

At the center of these processes was the younger generation of intellectuals, particularly writers, who fit the archetype of new Soviet Lithuanians. With ideologically sound peasant pedigrees, they arrived to study in Vilnius and soon benefitted from the opportunities that Soviet modernity had to offer. Recruited into becoming stakeholders in the Soviet system, they helped formulate a new, largely autobiographical modernist Soviet Lithuanian national narrative of optimistic youth working toward a better common future for the Lithuanian people. Enjoying the kind of success that only totalitarian cultural politics can grant rising literary stars, these young men (and they were inevitably men) bestowed the Soviet system in Lithuania with a legitimacy of promoting the greater good, thereby obscuring, at least partially, the brutality of the war against the guerrillas, the forced collectivization of the countryside, and the...