"Leninopad‘s" echoes: changing approaches to the Soviet Monuments in Lithuania (2014-2022)

• eLABa: knygos tekstas

ENThe Soviet regime created myths and interpretations of the past, based on its ideology and presented as “the only true one”. The latter were constantly broadcast through schools, the media, museums, exhibitions, commemorations, festivals, rituals, etc. (Gill, 2011). In this system, monuments and memorials, together with the ceremonies they contain, have been placed at the very centre of the official narrative and have acquired a symbolic and sacred charge, serving both to educate citizens and to exclude other, competing, alternative collective memories. The hierarchical - from party leaders to war and labour heroes, to national communist figures and finally to well-known personalities of local cultures – nature of the Soviet memorial culture has led to the creation of a fairly unified, coherent and ubiquitous symbolic landscape. It helped to maintain a supra-national Soviet identity, ensure loyalty of a multi-ethnic population to the regime, and, despite the locale cultural differences, strengthen the socio-political cohesion of Soviet people. The intertwining of Soviet and national elements in this symbolic space was so profound that, after the collapse of the system that created and sustained it, it was not easy to separate its local and alien elements. The processes of nation-building in the post-Soviet states still provide numerous examples of symbolic struggle over meanings, signs and objects inherited from the recent past, which cannot be solved quickly and easily. By manipulating these public disputes, Russia is actively interfering in the internal affairs of independent states and accusing them of alleged ingratitude and disrespect for the memory of the war dead.In my previous article on the conservation of communist heritage in Lithuania I focused more on the socio-political context of this process and on the public debates about the remnants of Soviet past (Čepaitienė, 2021, 58-72). This time I would like to focus not so much on the circumstances of removal of the Soviet ideological monuments in the beginning of the 90-ties and in 2015, but on what happened afterwards. That is to say, how these ideologically empty places were reinterpreted often using installations or temporary art objects created by local artists. Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has been going on since 2014 and will escalate in 2022, has had a significant impact on the Lithuanian state and society’s attitudes towards the surviving monuments of the Soviet period. Therefore, at the end of the article I will discuss in more detail the manifestations of the new, already “third” wave of Soviet monuments withdrawal in Lithuania. [Extract, p. 96]

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