The Sovietization of Lithuania after WWII: modernization, transculturation, and the lettered city

ABSTRACT

This article approaches the Sovietization of the Baltics in the light of two critical notions developed by the noted Latin American critic Angel Rama: “narrative transculturation” and “the lettered city.” By revisiting key moments in the development of Soviet Lithuanian culture and intellectual class against a backdrop of forced collectivization, urbanization, and modernization, the article aims at a novel interpretation of what Sovietization meant in the Lithuanian context, the significance of de-Stalinization and cultural modernism during the Thaw in the 1960s, and the cultural preconditions for the emergence of the popular movement against Soviet rule in the late 1980s.

KEYWORDS:

• Lithuania
• Sovietization
• intellectuals
• colonialism
• urbanization
• modernization
• transculturation
• subjectivity

Acknowledgments

This article was submitted for publication in April 2013. Some of the issues it addresses were subsequently treated at greater length in The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War (London: Routledge, 2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Violeta Davoliūtė

Violeta Davoliūtė is senior researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius and at Vilnius University and a fellow in Baltic Studies at Yale University (2015–2016). She has published widely in the fields of memory, trauma, and cultural studies in Eastern Europe, including The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania (London: Routledge, 2013).