Sovietinių metų lietuvių kultūrinio elito samprata apie tautų klestėjimo projekciją

Abstract

Questions of the nation’s role in the Soviet system were tied with Leninist national policy, which emphasized the ideas of internationalism and the benefits of socialism to national development. Although Soviet discourse produced stories of the progress of nations, the Western totalitarian perspective on Soviet studies looked at it sceptically, and this scepticism became even stronger in post-Soviet Lithuanian historiography, blaming the Soviet regime for occupation and the trampling of the honor and interest of the Lithuanian nation. The article mainly discusses ideological/symbolic areas of the local cultural elite in the sense of cultural production and showing the attitudes on Soviet national and cultural policies. The dominant context-shaping Soviet national policy was related with the ideas of internationalism and “blossoming of the nation”, with “blossoming” in this text becoming a powerful metaphor, eliciting several competing meanings, national aspirations and the strategies of local cultural elite. Cultural policy in the USSR was clearly related with the national ideology. By using the idea of internationalism and a planning system, the national issue was at the stage of party rhetoric. Tied with the projection of the “blossoming of nations” it had to show the advantages of the system for national development. All context of Soviet modernization was conducive for this projection. In the cultural sphere there was plenty of evidence: development of education, spread of “collectives of kultur” in different establishments, huge state support for writers and other artists, etc. Otherwise, by looking at the everyday level and analyzing networks of culturalists and their bureaucratic practices, there could be seen a performative shift supporting local interests who did not always comply with the central projection and mobilized national identity. All this illustrates the multi-edge perspective of “blossoming” by understanding the central attempts and the context of industrialization, and also naming the bureaucratic/social ability to maneuver and overpass the principles of Soviet policies by filling their content with local affairs (it clearly constructed different ideas of Lithuania), which symbolically become very important in the late 1980s as the input of intellectuals initiated a national revival.