Introduction
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.
