Population Displacement In Lithuania In The Twentieth Century

Population Displacement in Lithuania in the 20th Century: Experiences, Identities and Legacies offers an account on how two world wars produced a series of population displacements in Lithuania in the course of the 20th century.

In this book, Tomas Balkelis explores how the Lithuanian state was created and shaped by the Great War from its onset in 1914 to the last waves of violence in 1923. As the very notion of independent Lithuania was constructed during the war, violence is seen as an essential part of the formation of Lithuanian state, nation, and identity. War was much more than simply the historical context in which the tectonic shift from empire to nation-state took place. It transformed people, policies, institutions, and modes of thought in ways that would continue to shape the nation for decades after the conflict subsided. In telling the story of the post-WWI conflict in Lithuania, War, Revolution, and Nation-Making in Lithuania, 1914-1923 focuses on the soldiers and civilians involved in the conflict, rather than the strategies and acts of politicians, generals, or diplomats. The volume's two main themes are the impact of military, social, and cultural mobilizations on the local population, and different types of violence that were so characteristic of the region throughout the period. The actors in this story are people displaced by war and mobilized for war: refugees, veterans, volunteers, peasant conscripts, POWs, paramilitary fighters, and others who took to guns, not diplomacy, to assert their power. This is the story of how their lives were changed by war and how they shaped the society that emerged after war.

This book is a biography and reception history of the Lithuanian–American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994). It presents the first transnational account of Gimbutas’ life based on historical research, and an original examination of the impact of her ideas in various feminist contexts, both academic and popular. At the core of this book is a success story of an Eastern European woman who survived both Soviet and Nazi occupations of her homeland, lived as a displaced person in postwar Germany, and built her career and scholarly authority within the androcentric American academia. At the same time, it is also a story of a controversy, which followed Gimbutas’ theory of Old Europe – a prehistoric civilization, characterized by peacefulness, egalitarianism, women’s leadership, and the worship of the Great Goddess. First introduced in 1974, this theory inspired women’s movements worldwide, but was harshly criticized by other archaeologists. This book examines the various intellectual contexts (feminist, nationalist, theoretical) in which Gimbutas’ ideas were formed, received, and interpreted, as well as appropriated for different political goals. This timely study will appeal to scholars and students in the following fields: history of archaeology, prehistoric archaeology, gender studies, feminist studies, women’s history, Baltic studies, and religion and spirituality.

An Unproclaimed Empire: The Grand Duchy of Lithuania is an interdisciplinary study of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) that is historical in subject but social scientific in approach. It is also the first study to apply this comparative and social scientific method to the GDL. In this book, Zenonas Norkus draws on national historiographies and applies theories from comparative empire studies involving historians, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and scholars in the theory of international relations, allowing it to transcend differences in national viewpoints. It also provides answers to contested issues in the history of the GDL, and raises a number of new questions, including whether the Grand Duchy was an empire or a federation, and why and when it failed. By adopting this "imperial approach" of considering the GDL as an empire, this book brings something new to the research surrounding the Grand Duchy and is ideal for academics and postgraduates of early modern Lithuania, early modern Eastern Europe, historical sociology, and the history of empires.

This book explores the ways in which memories of Stalin-era repression and displacement manifest across times and places through diverse forms of materialization. The chapters of the book explore the concrete mobilities of life stories, letters, memoirs, literature, objects, and bodies reflecting Soviet repression and violence across borders of geographical locations, historical periods, and affective landscapes. These spatial, temporal, and psychological shifts are explored further as processes of textual circulation and mediation. By offering novel multi-sited and multi-media analyses of the creative, political, societal, cultural, and intimate implications of remembrance, the collection contributes fresh interdisciplinary perspectives to both the field of memory studies and the study of Soviet repression. The case studies in this collection focus on the personal, autobiographical, and intimate representations, experiences, and practices related to the remembrance of Stalinist repression and displacement as they are mediated through memoirs, fiction, interviews, and versatile commemorative practices. Taken together, the book asks: what happens to memories, life stories, testimonies, and experiences when they travel in time and space and between media and are (re)interpreted and (re)formulated through these transfers? What kinds of memorial forms are gained through processes of mediation? What types of spaces for remembering, telling, and feeling are created, negotiated, and contested through these shifts? What are the boundaries and intersections of intimate, familial, community, national, and transnational memories? By analytically contextualizing the various case studies within broader memory discourses in a range of geographical and political contexts, the book offers rich and multilayered interpretations of the enduring ramifications of communist repression. The collection demonstrates that these multiply moving memories not only reflect Eastern European memory culture but also reach far beyond and have transnational and transgenerational significance. As such, this timely book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the former Soviet Union or memory studies more broadly.

This handbook provides the first systematic integrated analysis of the role that states or state actors play in the construction of history and public memory after 1945. The book focuses on many different forms of state-sponsored history, including memory laws, monuments and memorials, state-archives, science policies, history in schools, truth commissions, historical expert commissions, the use of history in courts and tribunals etc. The handbook contributes to the study of history and public memory by combining elements of state-focused research in separate fields of study. By looking at the state’s memorialising capacities the book introduces an analytical perspective that is not often found in classical studies of the state. The handbook has a broad geographical focus and analyses cases from different regions around the world. The volume mainly tackles democratic contexts, although dictatorial regimes are not excluded.

The volume focuses on violence during the breakdown of East Central European states brought by one of the most violent periods in modern European history: from the start of the Great War in 1914 until 1923 when Europe, finally, achieved peace after a series of civil conflicts and interstate wars. The contributors offer several case studies that cover the vast region stretching from the Baltic states to Hungary. They explore different types of violence against its civilian populations with a particular focus on communal violence committed by civilians onto their neighbors. They suggest that disintegration of state power brought by the Great War was a key condition that produced violence. Yet the process of post-WWI state building was equally or more violent as nascent East Central European states institutionalized the use of violence to achieve their political agendas.

This book considers competing memory politics in European border towns after the First and Second World Wars. In the twentieth century Europe’s borders shifted dramatically in the wake of war, and towns were often moved from one state to another despite their physical locations remaining unchanged. Urban spaces adapted to incorporate new place names, monuments, and requirements, overlaid onto the cultural heritage of previous settlers. This book investigates how the memories of different ethnic groups compete and sometimes contest with each other in the town’s space, using the case studies of Vyborg/Viipuri in present-day Russia, Klaipėda/Memel in Lithuania, Szczecin/Stettin in Poland, Flensburg in Germany, Trieste in Italy, and Rijeka/Fiume in Croatia. The book considers how public memories are built and how old traditions are moulded to new forms in urban settings. Drawing on perspectives from across borderland, urban, and memory studies, this book will be an important resource for researchers with an interest in Europe, and in how urban memories are constructed and contested.