Ethnicity and identity in the memoirs of Lithuanian children deported to the Gulag

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Vaikų ištremtų į Gulagą atsiminimai; Tautybė; Tapatybė; Memoirs Children deported to the Gulag; Ethnicity; Identity.

ENOn 27 March 1953, three weeks after Stalin's burial, the Chief of the. Soviet political police Lavrentii Beria, who had been involved in the mass deportations for more than two decades, issued an amnesty to non-political prisoners and all prisoners with sentences of five years or less. Of about 1.5 million Gulag inmates at this time, more than a million people were now liberated. Yet the large-scale return of Baltic deportees was a long-term process that intensified only as late as 1956-1957 with an order of MVD Nr. 00597 dated on 16 July 1954. By 1970 about 80,000 people returned to Lithuania (2,0,000 from prisons and camps and about 60,000 from special settlements). For thousands of the deported Lithuanian children it meant that now they could enact their exile utopia - to return to their homeland. Although the amnesty signified an official end of exile, their displacement continued in other forms. Many even after their release felt unable to integrate into normal life due to Soviet society's continuing demonstration of suspicion and fear towards the former deportees. For instance, Grinkevičiūtė was forced out of her medical jobs several times and condemned by local party organisations. Former exiles found it extremely difficult to register in the places of their former residence, to enter universities, and to find good jobs, new homes, or social security. They were discriminated not only by the state authorities, but also often by local population who viewed them with mistrust because they could claim back their properties. The psychological consequences of displacement and their manifestations (the inability to integrate into "normal" civilian life, feelings of guilt, attempts to forget what happened, mistrust toward all state institutions, political radicalism) were much more serious and perhaps cannot be adequately measured.The experience of displacement of an entire generation of Lithuanian youth, indeed the fate of all Lithuanian deportees, only fully came to light after the rccstablishmcnt in 1990 of an independent state. It is now inscribed in the collective memory of Lithuanian society and as such is one of the core elements shaping Lithuanian national identity today. If the narratives of survival of the former deportee children testify to the brutality of Soviet crimes, they also reveal that their ethnicity, early social and cultural links with ethnic communities of exiles, and their memories and imaginings of homeland played a key role in the formation of their identities. Yet the memoirs of children also show that their ethnicity was not something "organic", taken for granted, simply inherited from their adult relatives, or native environment. Their ethnic identities were also inscribed on them as a result of displacement. The children's sense of ethnic belonging was generally reinforced by the social world of the Gulag where the line between 'us' and 'them' was drawn sharply. Despite its defects, and the need for children often to operate outside its bounds, the ethnic community was a key guarantor of the children's survival. For the many who lost their relatives, the community served as a social safety net that could provide at least minimal protection in the ruthless Gulag hierarchy. But perhaps more importantly the community could also offer a certain common goal and motivation to survive "spiritually" until the dreamcd-of return to the homeland. It could become a venue and medium through which to satisfy their personal needs of rootedness and belonging. In the ethnic community they could relive and share a common nostalgia for their homeland. Yet, in the extreme circumstances of deprivation, the isolated community could also become a trap that would decrease their chances of physical survival.As Utopias typically involve a displacement in both space and time, so the Lithuanian exiles' "homeland" became a temporal symbol of their early childhood and an ideal space of harmonious social and political order. Many have interpreted their displacement from the child's normative "places" of comfort - home, family, and childhood itself, as an initiation into the adult world. Although in these narratives the "homeland" is often devoid of any specific details, their personal stories provide the conceptual framework in which they were able to intct prct their experience of displacement. Pethaps it was this homeland nostalgia, not the reality of displacement, which lent to their exile identities a degtec of "rootedness", otherwise hardly conceivable in the Gulag. Their refusal to accept various identities o f homeless refugees or Soviet citizens, stripped of ethnic background, is indeed remarkable. [Extract, p. 70-71]