IDEOLOGINIAI VIEŠOJO DISKURSO KONSTRUKTAI IR ATMINTIES POLITIKA POSOVIETINĖJE LIETUVOJE
IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTS IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN POST-SOVIET LITHUANIA

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes the most important socio-political changes in Lithuanian public life during the 1990s. It highlights the major stages in the transformation of the society in the 1990s which reveal essential paradigmatic clashes and primary points of societal development. By evoking the most significant examples of building new monuments, rebuilding memorials of the inter war republic, and destroying Soviet monuments in the late 1980s and 1990s, the article explores this period‘s „politics of memory” that signified the most important processes of social change. Cultural elite - intellectuals with critical attitudes, responsible for articulation and institutionalization of social change - became the most significant ideologues and agents of change in the post-Soviet society. It was precisely the cultural elite that hegemonized signifiers of the most important ideological constructs, shaped their content, generated and sustained value systems, as well as social myths. After becoming the main moulder of the „politics of memory,“ the post-Soviet elite was also responsible for changes in the signifying of public spaces, as well as commemoration of monuments, memorials, busts and other artifacts of historical significance. In the juncture of the 1980s and 1990s, building of new monuments, rebuilding of the ones destroyed during the Soviet era, and removal of propaganda monuments left by the occupation became an important task for the post-Soviet elite. Thus, the major changes in the public spaces of that particular time attested a change in power relations and ideology, and resounded the general ideas of the decade.

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