The collection gives much valuable information about the policy of the Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee towards the Lithuanian national intelligentsia and the Lithuanian national heritage. The documents cover the most dramatic and repressive period in the history of Soviet Lithuania.
Location
01103 Vilnius Gedimino prospektas 12 , Lietuva
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Languages
Lithuanian
Russian
Name of collection
Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee collection (1944 – 1953)
Provenance and cultural activities
The collection is stored in the Lithuanian Communist Party Documents Archive, which is a subdivision of the Lithuanian Special Archive. The Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee (LCP CC) started to collect documents in 1940. Up to 1946, all the files were kept in a special CC archive. In 1946, the documents were passed to the Lithuanian Communist Party Archive, a branch of the Institute of Communist Party History. After 1946, the CC regularly sent documents to the archive. The archive was closed not only to the public but even to historians, except those who worked in the Institute of Party History. The situation changed dramatically after 1990. In 1991, the Institute of Party History was closed, and the archive was transformed into the Lithuania‘s Society Organisations Archive. Since then, the collection of Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee documents (fond No. 1771) was opened to researchers and the public. (This collection is probably the most popular with Lithuanian and foreign researchers.) In 2001, the archive was reformed once more, and became a subdivision of the Lithuanian Special Archive.
The collection gives an understanding about the government’s cultural policy during the most repressive and dramatic period in the history of Soviet Lithuania. The sovietisation of Lithuanian culture was the main aim of the regime; any manifestations of cultural autonomy and creativity were criticised and suppressed. Members of the national intelligentsia who had careers and had become famous during the interwar period were the main target of the government’s criticism for 'anti-Marxism' and 'bourgeois nationalism'. In general, from 1946 to 1953, cultural life in Soviet Lithuania was strongly influenced by Andrei Zhdanov's doctrine of zhdanovshchina, according to which artists were obliged to conform to the official ideology and the Party line in their creative work.
Description of content
The collection consists of various documents: transcripts of Party congresses, decisions of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, reports, and correspondence between the Lithuanian intelligentsia and the Party leadership. The documents reflect first of all the policy of the Communist Party during late Stalinism, how the leadership of the LCP tried to control and indoctrinate the Lithuanian national intelligentsia. The most dramatic period for Lithuania‘s cultural elite (writers, scholars and artists) was from 1946, when the famous Lithuanian intellectuals and writers Balys Sruoga (1896–1947) and Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas (1893–1967) were strongly criticised and persecuted by the Party leadership. They were accused of 'anti-Marxism' and 'bourgeois nationalism'. Artists who were part of the Soviet system and officialdom (such as Antanas Venclova [1906–1971] and Eduardas Mieželaitis [1919–1997]) also became objects of criticism for their 'social-political passivity', 'imitation of Western modernism' or 'glorification of Lithuania's past'.
Maslauskienė, Nijolė , interview by Ivanauskas, Vilius, Sirutavičius, Vladas , Grybkauskas, Saulius, September 26, 2016. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection
