Coming to Terms with the Dictatorial Past: Rising of Conservative Trend in Contemporary Lithuania
Coming to Terms with the Dictatorial Past: Rising of Conservative Trend in Contemporary Lithuania

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to disclose the direction in which the regulation of public remembrance in Lithuania has moved during the last decade. It deals with the attempts to manage the dictatorial past in post-Soviet Lithuania and proposes several explanations as to why the process of managing of the past had faced certain obstacles. The author discusses the strategies used by both right-wing and left-wing Lithuanian politicians to use the past in interior and foreign policy battles, presenting the Lithuanian efforts for establishing the equality of the crimes of the Nazi and the USSR regimes on the EU level as a part of these battles. He finally argues that the criticism of the “European politics of history” and a draft of a new Law on the Nation’s Historical Memory, both advocated recently by the right-wing circles, are further evidences of the retreat from the pragmatic line that had predominated during the first two post-Soviet decades and accompanied the reworking of the past in Lithuania.

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