This article addresses the issue of nostalgia – signs indicating yearning for the lost world and/ or attempts to re-construct and perform it repeatedly – in the public events (including artistic performances) of the late Soviet period as experienced in colonized countries like Lithuania. The problem of the complex attitude of the central Communist Party power towards ethnicity as well as local, rural and folk identity (both Russian and non-Russian) has been covered extensively (especially the early period before World War II)5. Less has been said, however, of the later development of imperial Soviet culture after Stalin’s death when nostalgia turned into a complex and ambivalent element of the official aesthetics of the regime. The use of folk and ethnic elements in official representations, mass celebrations, such as the song and dance festival, as well as in Soviet art was an encouragement of nationalist nostalgia and a way of keeping the limits of ethnic sentiments under control. Mass nostalgia was a tool to fortify what was unstable, ambivalent and equivocal within the imperial discourse itself, namely the discrepancy between the liberating historical vision and constraining imperial geography.