Cleaving the Baltic National Movements: The Role of Cultural Professionals as Leaders

• In Event: Mobilizing National Identity During the Soviet Era: Cultural Actors and the Field of Power in the Baltic Republics

Abstract

Existing research on the development of national beliefs amongst the Soviet peoples emphasizes the historical legacies of mass lative-language literacy. However, this conventional wisdom fails to account for the full diversity of ways that nationality was imagined and re-imagined during the waning years of the Soviet multinational project. In a larger book manuscript, I argue that in the later decades of the Soviet Union, writers, artists, professors, and other “intelligentsia” radically reshaped how Soviet citizens thought about nationality in some republics, but not others. In this paper, I test this argument in the case pair of Soviet Lithuania and Latvia. While the Baltic states share broadly similar pre-Soviet histories of statehood and a grassroots character of their national movements, substantive differences in patterns of mobilization from 1987 to 1991 suggest deeper variation in the way these nationalist movements formed. This paired comparison cleaves Lithuania and Latvia by showing how those cultural professionals that led the Lithuanian national movement wielded nationalist credentials, enjoyed public celebrity, and possessed a history of issue advocacy that was less pronounced amongst their Latvian counterparts. In Lithuania, an influential generation of shest’desiatniki cultural professionals monopolized the most important official positions in the republic-level cultural apparatus, and used those positions to revitalize a brand of Lithuanian ethno-nostalgia that pushed nationalist themes without directly challenging Soviet multinationalism. Many of these same cultural professionals became leaders of Sąjūdis and the Lithuanian independence movement.

Author

• Matthew Reichert, Harvard University