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Session Submission Type: Panel
The panel addresses the question of how the discourse and practices of KGB and Soviet censorship ensured state security and protected Soviet ideology and party regulation. We look at how state security officers and censorship officials classified deviations from “the Party line”, how they attributed the deviations to various types of activity, and how they formalized the persecution of persons responsible for and suspected of organizing and executing anti-Soviet and nationalistic events. These things show how exh the Soviet regime perceived and qualified such events. While following centralized guidelines drawn up by Moscow, the Chekist and Glavlit machines inevitably had to manage local peculiarities. Therefore the question arises: how did state agencies justify their actions to the centre in balancing between the requirements of Moscow and the actual situation in the Republic? This allows us to discuss 1) how “formalization” of persecution and control facilitated the display of “local peculiarities” in the context of Soviet universalism and 2) whether the limits of persecution and control drawn by the Soviet system were adequate or surplus justifying expansive interests of the KGB and Glavlit as bureaucratic systems rather than existential needs of the system.
KGB Semiotics: Between Soviet Universalism and 'Local Peculiarities' - Saulius Grybkauskas, Lithuanian Institute of History (Lithuania)
You Have Been Warned: Managing Threats to State Security in Lithuania under Soviet Rule - Mark Harrison, U of Warwick (UK)
Censorship in post-Stalinist Lithuania: Framing Local Threads or Embracing All-Union Trends in Lithuanian Glavlit Activities - Vilius Ivanauskas, Lithuanian Institute of History (Lithuania)