“Project – HOMO SOVIETICUS”

In Tuskulėnai Manor House an exposition entitled “Project – HOMO SOVIETICUS” is displayed. The aim of the exposition is to reveal the efforts and means of the Soviet totalitarian regime to create a new social, cultural, and political environment. It is an attempt to understand an individual, residing in the Soviet Lithuania, a member country within the Soviet Union, who is sometimes referred to as homo sovieticus, as well as it is an effort to reveal his/her characteristics and the living conditions, pertaining to that period of time.
Objects, texts, fragments of memoirs and other exhibits, reflecting that world, serve to reveal the spirit of that time and general peculiarities of the Soviet era. In an effort to emphasise the multifaceted nature and internal paradoxes of the Soviet era, the entire exhibition is presented at three levels: the upper part of the screens and exhibits is devoted to the things that were seen in public, officially announced and propagandised; the middle part reveals what the daily life of people looked like and what was considered as “normal”; the bottom part represents the deviations from the Soviet “normality”, ranging from crime to the fight and resistance against the system. Such division is, of course, conditional since everything is intertwined in life. The location of some exhibits is likely to raise doubts or trigger thoughts that it should be moved elsewhere.
The description of the exhibited objects aim at emphasising the paradoxical nature and internal contradictions of the Soviet reality. All this reveals a fundamental feature of the exposition which is as non-definitive as the assessment of the Soviet era or the effort to understand it.

After Lithuania’s occupation the efforts were focused on changing the values and moral consciousness of the local population. Bourgeois morals had to be replaced with a new Soviet morality. During the Stalin era, it was believed that there was no human morality but only class morality. This suggested rejection of compassion for the enemies of the working class, by linking all moral norms to class struggles, particularly the Proletarian struggle for the victory.
After Stalin’s death, such combatant morality began to decline gradually and was replaced by the principles of what could generally be referred to as human morality resembling the truths of Christianity, but different in name. A clear example of this was the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, which laid down twelve moral principles that the New Soviet Man had to comply with. This code was expected to serve as a tool for social control in consolidating the rule of the Communist Party and educating proper citizens. Despite the mass ideological campaign, aimed at promoting the new values, the New Soviet Man did not adopt them, while the old Christian values declined considerably. This resulted in the development of the morality that directly contradicted to the principles, defined in the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, by developing an indifferent attitude towards Communist ideas and the Soviet Union as the motherland, dishonesty at work, unstable family relations, tolerance to injustice, parasitism, etc. This was the clearest testimony to a failure of the Soviet project.

In order to consolidate the new Soviet regime, the state had to “rewrite” the history of the inter-war period, to erase the memory of Lithuania’s past, to destroy the evidence of its existence. By controlling publicly available information, the state could put all its weight on an individual in order to change an individual’s identity. Besides the state’s attempts to rewrite history textbooks, destroy books that were ideologically unacceptable, and conduct censorship of artworks, the living environment was also changed. Streets were renamed, urban planning changed radically and new public spaces emerged. They were dedicated to various Soviet rituals. New settlements of kolkhozes and their buildings were distinctly different from a traditional rural setting which was regarded as a symbol of backwardness. The enforcement of the Russian language and spread of Russian culture played a considerable role in transforming the Lithuanian identity.
The regime promoted mutual relations and cultural exchange among Soviet Union republics to make people give up their Lithuanian national identity in favour of the common identity of “brotherly Soviet republics”. The regime wanted to replace the concept of the nation with that of the people. This people’s identity enabled citizens to express their deeply-harboured national sentiment and at the same time it allowed the Soviets to suppress people’s aspirations for political independence, which posed a threat to the regime. However, these attempts had failed. As soon as the state pressures waned, the ethnographic character was transformed into the deliberate display of the nation’s uniqueness and came to symbolise the struggle for autonomy and independence.
Of course, the transformation of identity was not only the result of the state’s efforts: lifestyle changes along with economic and social transformation produced an even greater impact. This resulted in the development of a rather anti-Russian, conservative and defensive identity. It kept the memory of independent Lithuania alive and eventually manifested itself during the rallies of the Reform MovementTautą mėginta paversti liaudimi. Tokia liaudies tapatybė leido išreikšti visuomenėje rusenančius tautinius jausmus ir kartu nuslopinti pavojingus politinės nepriklausomybės siekius. Vis dėlto režimui nepavyko to pasiekti. Kai tik valstybinis spaudimas nusilpo, etnografinis savitumas virto tautinio išskirtinumo demonstravimu ir pradėjo reikšti atskirumo ir atsiskyrimo siekius.
Žinoma, tapatybę keitė ne tik valstybės pastangos – dar didesnę įtaką darė ir besikeičiantis gyvenimo būdas, ekonominiai ir socialiniai pokyčiai. Tai sukūrė gana antirusišką, konservatyvią, gynybinę tapatybę, kuri puoselėjo nepriklausomybės atmintį, pagaliau prasiveržusią Sąjūdžio mitinguose.