„Nieuželi vsio bylo plocho?“ arba kaip vertiname sovietinę istoriją
„Nieuželi vsio bylo plocho?“ or How Do We Estimate the Soviet History?

Summary/Abstract: The article explores attitudes towards the history of the Soviet period in contemporary Lithuanian historiography, and its starting point is Nerija Putinaitė’s book “The Unbroken String. Adaptation and Resistance in Soviet Lithuania”. The author of the article draws attention to the fact that the present-day moral evaluation of the Soviet period was initiated by Nerija Putinaitė’s book where the Soviet regime is considered as “the empire of evil” (according to Hanna Arendt and other so-called totalitarianists). According to Putinaitė, socialism created a surrealist society which was condemned to die and extinguish together with the regime. That is why communism could not be revised, amended or reformed. In other words, the inevitable outcome of the Soviet empire was the self-destruction of the system itself. N. Putinaitė consistently follows the traces of the “empire of evil” in her book and tries to estimate the consequences of this regime for the citizens of the Soviet society. Nevertheless, the author of the article claims that even after 20 years after the restoration of independence of Lithuania in 1990, there still exist not only confrontations but also different moral estimation regarding the Soviet period among Lithuanian academy.

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