SOVIETINĖS LIETUVOS INTELIGENTIJA SAVIVOKOS KONSTRAVIMAS
INTELLIGENTSIA OF SOVIET LITHUANIA: CONSTRUCTION OF SELF-REFLECTION

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with texts about the intelligentsia in Soviet Lithuania; the texts were written in 1950–1989 in Lithuania and the USSR. In this period the intelligentsia was considered to be a social stratum specializing in mental work. While used in the Soviet environment the term intelligentsia was often replaced by the terms staff (cadre) and specialists. This tendency reveals an attempt to view the intelligentsia in a manpower context. A great deal of research is reviewed in this article. The texts were written and published by a variety of researchers: historians, economists, demographists, and sociologists, all dealing with the engineering, technical, scientific, medical, artistic, educational, and administrative intelligentsia, both urban and rural. Little of the analysis was original; these studies were supposed to serve as evidence for and to bolster Marxist-Leninist schemes of societal development. Only a few sociologists were capable of producing an “allusive” if semiofficial sociology. The construction of party discourse in late Soviet socialism was secret, classified, and ossified linguistically: some made-up phrases were wandering from one text to another. Humanitarian and sociological discourses were affected by these alterations as well. Statistical data and party resolutions were circulating round and round. Topics of graduation dissertation often were similar, or even analogous to each other, so the illusion of originality was obtained by manipulating statistical data.

• Details
• Contents