"We are all deportees". The trauma of displacement and the consolidation of national identity during the popular movement in Lithuania

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Poslinkio trauma; Tautinės tapatybės įtvirtinimas; Sąjūdis; Atmintis; Trauma of displacement; Consolidation of national identity; Sąjūdis; Memory.

ENSąjūdis capitalized on the publication of deportee memoirs by cultivating a collective sense of Lithuanian selfhood based on a sacred and inseparable relationship between the people and their territoty. The individual works of Gulagsurvivors were essential, but not sufficient to atticulatc the experience of trauma in a manner that could be appropriated by the majority of Lithuanians who had more or less accomodated themselves to the Soviet regime. The return of memory based on historical rrauma and the charting of a new fututc for the nation involved a repudiation of the past. But this repudiation raised a host of difficult questions: who was to blame for what happened? Beyond the police and security forces responsible for political repressions, should the list include government officials, party members, members of Komsomol, the establishment intelligentsia? And who precisely were the victims of the regime ? Was it only those who were deported, imprisoned, or killed? Those mobilized into the army, those forced to work in a specific location, those prevented from working in their chosen profession? The collectivization of deportee memory played a critical role in resolving such intractable problems by raising the question to a higher level of abstraction, allowing for almost all Lithuanians to free themselves from any association with the regime. The social transformation and sense of solidarity that brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets was cemented by the myth of universal deportation and inculcated by rituals of return that were filmed and broadcast to the entire population, accompanied by a highly emotive discourse of trauma and appeals to an indigenous sense of national identity. The euphoria that accompanied the Soviet collapse was short lived.The consolidation of the nation unravelled quickly upon the achievement of independence, as internal social divisions resurfaced in the pluralist atmosphere of democratic politics. Debates over collaboration and accomodation gained ground, and the myth of universal deportation and return began to unravel, although slowly. The sense of national history as a history of suffering is deeply entrenched, but it is ill-adapted to the demands of building a democratic polity in an independent state. It obstructs social reflection on the experience of other groups, namely Poles and Jews, and it leaves many blank spots in the memory of the Soviet period, notably where Lithuanians were not so much the victims, as the agents of history. The affective reception of the deportation testimonies played a role in the re-establishment of Lithuanian independence. But at the same time it obscured the plurality of experience and any differentiation among the historical actors within the category of the nation. To this day, the notion of memory's "return" implies a non-comparative, totalizing approach to history as the history of either heroism of victimhood. Perhaps because of this reason there is still relatively little academic, comparative and analytical studies into the body of deportee testimonies. With the unravelling of the myth of univctsal deportation, this rich literature continues to beckon intensive study. [Extract, p. 135-136]

• Sociologija / Sociology
• Istorija / History