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The Politics Of Cultural Identity: Affirmation of National Heritage in Soviet Lithuania
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19967 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
4,716 Words |
| Author
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Romuald J. Misiunas
Romuald J. Misiunas, a member of Trumbull Associates of New
York, is an independent research contractor specializing in
Soviet and Baltic affairs. He presently is located in
Vilnius, Lithuania. |
Lithuania's declaration of independence on March 11, 1990, can be said to have marked the first step in the dissolution of the USSR. A tense year and a half of standoffs and bloody incidents followed. Lithuanians resisted brute Soviet might: Resolution overcame force. By mid-August 1991, when Kremlin hard-liners attempted to stem the tide that was to sweep them from power, the Lithuanian example had permeated Soviet consciousness to a remarkable degree. The masses in Moscow who defended the Russian Parliament instinctively followed the example of events enacted earlier in Vilnius.
The history of Lithuania, since its occupation by--and incorporation into--the USSR in 1940, presents dramatic evidence of the political force of culture. Absorption resulted in an artificially imposed barrier to normal interaction with Europe, a cultural milieu in which Lithuanians had participated since the Middle Ages. As with its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Latvia, however, the two decades of independence between the two world wars provided a firm foundation for the survival of Lithuania's national culture.
Largely ethnically homogeneous, Lithuania underwent extensive industrialization and urbanization only during the late 1950s and '60s. Its national identity and culture had taken shape in a traditional milieu of close-knit agricultural communities and extended families. As a result, the bulk of its urban population during the Soviet period (including the technical elite and ruling party functionaries) was just a generation removed from a cultural base that demonstrated considerable immunity to imposed Soviet cultural uniformity.
The struggle to foster a national cultural life
The struggle to foster a national cultural life, and to develop it in a spirit of Western modernity, characterized occupied Lithuania. Soviet cultural norms (labeled "socialist realism") reflected a primitive streak of nineteenth-century Russian populism, and their lack of sophistication and link to the system of occupation resulted in their wholesale rejection. Lithuanian self-identity overwhelmingly focused on indigenous cultural traditions, constantly seeking to accentuate the fundamental cultural differences between Russia and Lithuania's own Western, European, and Catholic orientation toward modern development.
Occupied and under threat of extinction, for Lithuania, survival as a nation came to be identified with the maintenance and development, under modern
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