Hegemony or legitimacy? Assembling Soviet deportations in Lithuanian museums

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Atmintis; Muziejai; Muziejų ekspozicijos; Tremtiniai; Memory; Museums; Museum expositions; Deportees.

ENKnowledge production involves processes of assembling and representing. Things need to be assembled in order to produce facts. These material assemblages are transformed into representations by accompanying narratives and other scripts. Both assembling and representing entail selections. It is ccttainly important to explore how selections were made: which things were invited to take part in the story and which narratives were articulated to give a sense of belonging. But how can a social historian studying such memory practices tell whether an intentional selection has taken place? The study of public knowledge regimes is therefore a minefield of unknowns: the histotian depends on great many discourses in order to evaluate the wotk of representation. It is futile to try to arrive at any closure in this kind of historical analysis: assembling and representing are ongoing processes in the public and private spheres. That said, museums provide important material settings for stabilising knowledge about the past through material objects and scripted narratives. It is important to note that the organisation of a museum exhibition is a highly complex process: there is no simple and straightforward translation of a verbal histotical narrative into a material assemblage. Museum exhibition is a different way of atticulating and stabilizing knowledge than an essay published in a newspaper. Museum exhibitions arc much more costly, materially heterogeneous and demand an ongoing collaboration between different institutional, individual and corporate actors. Claims that the key legitimate Lithuanian nationalist discoutscs stress national suffering under Soviet rule as the foundational collective experience arc quite right in relation to programmes issued by the Lithuanian government, patliamcntary speeches, and great many declarations.However, this official rhetoric was not effortlessly translated into a material homage to the victims of totalitarian regimes. I doubt if these legitimate discourses on national suffering have become hegemonic in the Lithuanian museum sector. Indeed, since 1990 the biggest state investments in culture were channelled into projects relating to the more distant past; particularly the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For example, the government spent more than ioo million Euros to build the Palace of Sovereigns in Vilnius. The largest private donation to culture so far entailed the building of a Modern Art Centre in the capital. Neither public nor private money, however, were directed to build a flagship monument to the victims of Soviet terror. Even the first major novel about Soviet deportations of Lithuanians was written not by a native Lithuanian writer, but by the American novelist Ruta Šepetys (Between Shades ofGrey, zon). This, I suggest, leads us to ask alot of questions about the role and status of'hegemonic ethno-nationalist narratives' in the broad fields of Lithuanian cultural policy and the cultural sector. My point is methodological as well as theoretical: the mere existence of a particular museum display is a proof of neither an underlying consensus, nor a governmental strategy. Narratives about the difficult past, such as Soviet deportations, articulated in state museums, can be understood as a legitimate story of the events. However, it is a methodological mistake to automatically infer the existence of a consensus view on the status of these narratives among workers at the museum in question, the public cultural sector or governmental agencies. A closer look into a wider variety of sources would reveal that the narratives often reflect only the story propagated by one particular group, for example, the museum workers or just some of these workers, while other museum employees might hold quite different views.The reasons why these and not other narratives happen to be articulated in a given museum can only be found in specific history of that museum, and patticulatly in its resource base and organisation. With respect to the construction of museum exhibitions, the term "memory" is often used to justify the work of volunteers and non-specialists within the framework of the formal organisation of the museum. The task of a researcher into this process is to elucidate the many actors and rationales of'collective memory work' and to tackle the highly messy and complex mechanisms of production. [Extract, p. 176-177]