Politics With a Human Face: Identity and Experience in Post-Soviet Europe 9781138242197, 9781315278971

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Politics with a Human Face

Politics with a Human Face presents a holistic understanding of identity formation in post-Soviet Europe, arguing that since politics is fundamentally a human affair, in order to adequately understand it, one needs to understand its human side first. Drawing on the thought of Dilthey, Ricoeur and Plato, the author employs empathy as a method, together with visual and historical analysis, to analyse the role of human experience in post-Soviet politics. As a result, the book offers a theoretical approach for assessing the influence of non-rationalistic factors, such as associative symbolism, human experience, political images and historical narratives, in both domestic and foreign affairs. A study at the juncture of Social Sciences and Humanities, Politics with a Human Face explores a number of cases, including Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia, as well as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, examining issues of liminal transition, ‘far-right’ movements, victimhood, ethnic conflict and political paradoxes. Seeking to shed light on the region’s agency and perception of both its own political and existential situation, and that of the surrounding world, this book constitutes a timely and original contribution to understanding post-Soviet Europe. Arvydas Grišinas is a researcher at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania.

Contemporary Liminality Series editors: Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland Series advisory board: Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, UK

This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as ‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of ‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically-focused paradigm in social theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling and even going beyond mainstream concepts such as ‘system’ ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, liminality is increasingly considered a new master concept that promises to spark a renewal in social thought. In spite of the fact that charges of Eurocentrism or even ‘moderno-centrism’ are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, it remains the case that most theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on taken-for-granted approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition, whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking, have been either marginalised and ignored, or trivialised. By challenging the assumed neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian foundations of modern social theory, and by helping to shed new light on the fundamental ideas of major figures in social theory, such as Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, whilst also establishing connections between the perspectives gained through modern social and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical anthropology Contemporary Liminality offers a new direction in social thought. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ sociology/series/ASHSER1435 Titles in this series 5. Politics with a Human Face Identity and Experience in Post-Soviet Europe Arvydas Grišinas 6. The Rise of Consumer Capitalism, 1880–1930 Cesare Silla

Politics with a Human Face Identity and Experience in Post-Soviet Europe

Arvydas Grišinas

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Arvydas Grišinas The right of Arvydas Grišinas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-24219-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-27897-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements

vi viii xiii

Introduction

1

1

Politics from the Human Perspective

4

2

The Face and the Mask: Lithuania

22

3

Political Images and Identity

64

4

Common Images, Contesting Narratives: Maidan

84

5

Liminality and Sovietism

104

6

Violence, Victimhood and Identity

123

Conclusion Bibliography Index

146 150 168

Figures

2.1 2.2

2.3.1 2.3.2 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15

Vytautas Balcˇ ytis (photographer), “Vilnius. From the Series ‘Photographs’”, 1987. ˇ iurlionis: Fairy Tale (Fairy Tale of the Kings). Etude. M. K. C ˇ t 163 Courtesy of 1908/9, Tempera on paper, 15.3 × 18.3, C ˇ iurlionis National Museum of Art. the M. K. C Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “A fragment of a meeting. Vilnius, Summer 1989”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “The first meeting of Sąju-dis in Vilnius Sports Hall. October 2nd 1988”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “The last Soviet military wagons leaving Lithuania August 31st 1993”. Artu-ras Valiauga (photographer), “The Kupiškis hangar”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “You returned to . Lithuania… Kedainiai airport, 1989”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “At the High Council House after the 13th January, 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Placards by the High Council House, 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Goodbye, Lenin! August 23 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Time of rallies. Vilnius, Summer 1989”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “By the Press House. Vilnius, January 11 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “In the street of Vilnius. January 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Soviet tanks by the Press House. Vilnius, after January 13 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “The night of January 13th by the High Council House, 1991”. Lithuanian flag raised in front of Parliament House Square after the night of 12–13 January 1990.

31

34 41 41 41 42 44 47 49 50 51 56 56 56 56 57

List of figures 4.1–2

4.3

4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1–2 6.3–4

Arvydas Grišinas (photographer), Revolutionary Headquarters and different representation of Shevchenko in Maidan, February 2014. Arvydas Grišinas (photographer), Different more or less radical ideological messages on walls around Kyiv in February 2014. Arvydas Grišinas (photographer), Caricatures of Yanukovych in Maidan’s territory. Arvydas Grišinas (photographer), An allegorical representation of Ukraine’s existential condition. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Lithuanian border. Summer 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Time of changing flags and titles. Vilnius, 1991”. Juozas Kazlauskas (photographer), “Time of changing flags and titles. Vilnius, 1991”. Aleksandr Alekseyev, Raduga (A Rainbow) (photos: Arvydas Grišinas). Arvydas Grišinas (photographer), “Political iconostasis” on Maidan’s stage.

vii

86

91 97 99 107 107 107 130 132

Preface

Talking about the influence of human experience, imagination and identity on politics is both difficult and easy. Difficult, because this political reality is hard to capture, to pinpoint, to prove. Easy, because it is at the same time quite evident, even obvious. Either way, without engaging with these themes, without understanding them, we will not fully grasp the post-Soviet epoch. I was born in 1987, and therefore am a part of the first generation that has been raised in the independent Lithuania. This therefore makes me a product, a witness, a participant and a part of the fluid, controversial and heterogeneous, the coloured-but-greyish post-Soviet reality. Since my childhood I have been living in the environment that is a direct result of post-Soviet politics. The experience of ambiguity, uncertainty, “fluidity” and relativity of the factual, the lack of authentic and true merged into the rich experiential and political fabric of the region and the epoch. It was exactly such experience that defined the spirit of my childhood years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a massive wave of Western culture poured into Russia and other post-Soviet countries. I remember slumberous, dusty, grey Soviet bloc buildings of (approximately) 1991–1996, blossoming with satellite antennas, day by day, one by one popping out of neighbours’ balconies. They were catching Western BBC news, MTV, Arnold Schwarzenegger films and erotic channels. I also remember mostly workers’ kids spitting sunflower seeds, sitting on the pavement curb, probably just as their parents had, and waiting for some other kids from another courtyard to step into theirs, so that they could chase them down and beat them up. They did nothing to me, though. I knew them, and I was from their courtyard, I was “svoy” – from them I learned Russian.1 And I saw first hand how the new political and social reality was forming. The multiplicity of various cultural influences from the East that suddenly flooded the post-Soviet world, along with the new strong influx of Western culture, was what was shaping the unstable political situation as well as the everyday lives of people like me. Lithuania was the first post-Soviet country to claim independence. Almost one year after Lithuania’s independence declaration, however, on 13 January 1991, the coercing Soviet regime gave one last push to recapture the newly re-established state. The Soviet tanks faced peaceful resistance, by crowds of

Preface

ix

people, inspired by Gandhi, The Beatles, Lithuanian paganism and Catholicism all at the same time, holding each other’s hands and singing, standing by the television tower and Lithuanian parliament, not letting the Red Army past. To many of them, it was a profound existential experience. One Lithuanian politician wrote down his impression of that day: “And so Lithuanian independence is not only a political issue. It seems that Lithuania is one of those nucleases, where the metaphysical future of the whole world is being solved: either this world continues to bear God’s grace, or it becomes a godless earth, controlled by totalitarian system and fear.”2 To those people, at that time, politics became a real battle of Good against Evil. This was also coupled with binaries between Catholic religion and Soviet atheism, Lithuanian “martyrdom” during massive deportations to Siberia, and Soviet cruelty, etc. Therefore, what happened on 13 January, to those peacefully defending Lithuania, was a miracle: the Soviet “evil” retreated!3 The “Good” won, and the situation stabilised. Lithuania was de jure and de facto defended. I was almost four years old during the mentioned events, so my memory of that time is very vague, but I do remember very vividly how popular it was, a few months afterwards, in my nursery school class, for the children to draw the “Battle of the Television Tower”. We would draw a cross-like tower (the TV tower in Vilnius has a doughnut-shaped circle in the middle of its tall peaking stem), dreadful Soviet tanks with angry soldiers and smiling guerrilla fighters shooting at them, with the support of American jet fighters and superheroes from the television. Along with that, we would draw a green hill, and Gediminas’ Tower with a three-coloured (yellow, green, red) flag of independent Lithuania on top of it.4 This was our perception of “the political”, and of “the Lithuanian”. Very rapidly after the fall of the regime, Lithuania became a transit country – in transition both externally and internally. Massive political, economic, social, cultural and mental changes were taking place within the society, and they all left an imprint in people’s consciousness – mine included. At the same nursery school, I had a friend, Mindaugas, who always had many more toys than anyone else. He even had a Nintendo games console – something that reached the homes of other “mortals” in Lithuania, including myself, only some 3–4 years later. When I visited Mindaugas’ home, we would eat pancakes with sugar and watch Tom and Jerry cartoons. I was a bit jealous; I thought he was the luckiest boy in the world. However, I do remember him saying that he missed his father, who was seldom home. I met his father only once, during one of my visits. The man was serious, tired, and had a pistol. He worked as something called “businessman”. I was not sure what that was, but to me the word associated with America, dollars, bubblegum and Bruce Lee. A few years later, Mindaugas’ father was killed. I believe he was transporting precious metals from Russia to the West, which was an extremely dangerous, often criminal business at the time. I had a neighbour who also became a “businessman”. He would sell pink towels printed with palm trees and other similar “Western” goods, originating

x

Preface

from Turkey, in a huge “Gariu-nai” marketplace at the edge of Vilnius city.5 He bought a large Alsatian, and a new TV set with a remote. He would keep the remote in a plastic bag so that the buttons wouldn’t wear off that fast – a symptomatic misperception (an interesting interpretation?) of the consumables of those times. To have a TV with a remote was a sign of status – some people would even leave the informational stickers on the screen. Later I found out that it was through such “businessmen” as my neighbour that the “Western” material culture first reached Lithuania and other post-Soviet states in the form of cheap consumer goods, sold in massive marketplaces and rows of grey iron kiosks. These goods coloured our greyish world with bright pink and neon green. People craved colours, democracy, bananas, television channels and capitalism – all that was “Western”. And everything “Western” seemed to taste, feel and smell better. Such was the first wave of Lithuanian “Westernisation”. I remember the massive influx of Western music in Lithuanian television channels and cheap cassette players. When we got a little older, me and my friends would listen to rap and rave music, and try dressing in a similar fashion as people from the video clips – in baggy jeans and checked flannel shirts. We would also wear scarves with ornaments, baseball caps and ride cheap Chinese skateboards, and roller skates. My Russian neighbours became suspicious of us, and there would often be conflicts between rappers and ravers on one side, and “urla’s” on the other. An “urla”, or “urlaganas”, was a name for what my Russian “friends” were: aggressive, bald-shaved youth, swearing, wearing tracksuits and eating sunflower seeds. Most importantly, even though they had been born in Lithuania, they were the “occupiers”. Soon after that, when I was nine, we moved from a suburb to the city centre (my mother was protecting me from the dangerous life I only later realised the presence of), and I didn’t hear much from my friends anymore. However, very recently I stumbled upon a couple of articles on the conflicts between the ravers, rappers and urlas taking place at that time, in the suburb where I used to live. Hundreds of teenage boys, and youth, including ten-yearolds, and even girls, were gathering to engage in massive fights that involved cold weapons, even firearms. “Non-formals” (“Neformalai” – this is how the sub-cultures were later labelled in Lithuania) against urlas, good against evil – these two rivalries went hand in hand in mine as well as many others’ childish imagination. In times of uncertainty, this was a very strong identification point. The broader political climate of the decade in Lithuania was particularly ambiguous. In the first elections of Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) in 1992, the vast majority was won by the Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party (LDLP), which generally consisted of former members of the Lithuanian Communist Party. To many this was an absolute surprise, an unperceivable mistake: how, after the successful flight from the grip of the regime, after all the efforts put into defending the idea of free, democratic Lithuania, were the same communists “in sheep’s fur” returning to power? Much of the idealist

Preface xi rhetoric in the public discourse was changed by inner quarrels, accusations and reflections of disappointment. People stopped believing in ideals that led towards independence, as they were presented with the harsh, pragmatic and cynic reality of the contemporary politics. Even those who, during the first couple of years of independence, had declared high ideals, were now indulging in “sinful” pragmatic politics and peculiar political rituals. At least, this was the opinion of the wider public. Apart from that, people were terrified by the ghost of the KGB network and “Russian activities” in the country. These experiences, along with the earlier ones, from the Soviet times, were the main factors in forming the mindset of my parents’ generation. They learned not to trust what is being said, to constantly look for the catch or hidden strings, and to defend themselves using irony, sarcasm, “Aesop’s language” and other arms of the unarmed (ironically, Aesop himself was also a slave). Whereas Perestroika taught them a few lessons about temporality and mutability in politics. I went to a Catholic primary school, and later to a Jesuit gymnasium. Catholic education at that time meant European education. The fact itself indicated my mother’s inclination to educate me as part of Lithuanian cultural tradition that essentially and historically is a part of the Western Catholic tradition, in addition to the religious community. The overall trajectory of my education was European. There, in a liberally interpreted Catholic atmosphere, I was taught the basics of democracy, and citizenship. This resonated with the political climate in the country. In 2004, Lithuania joined NATO, and soon after that the EU. This could be called the second wave of Lithuania’s “Westernisation”. And it was this wave in particular that probably formed, or at least had a great impact on, my generation’s perception of political identity. Being a part of the EU meant quite a few things. First it raised questions connected with emigration. Many Lithuanians left the country, and went mostly to the British Islands, Scandinavia and Spain. This invoked debates about citizenship, patriotism and Lithuanian identity in general, particularly when mostly fair-haired and grey-eyed Lithuanian women started giving birth to children with darker features. These questions were strengthened by another factor – the cosmopolitan, globalist, neo-liberal and other post-modern ideas that reached Lithuania, and, as everywhere, became widely accepted among the younger generation. As the opposition to that, mildly right-wing youth organisations and groups became more active as well. They perceived this European cultural influence as a threat to the perceived Lithuanian cultural identity, and tried to oppose it. Their resistance involved neo-paganism, neo-nationalism, romantic rhetoric, rock and metal music, and other forms. In my late teenage years and early twenties, I myself was inspired by these movements, searching for an authentic identity and belonging. The paradox was that the cultural background that I was leaning upon – metal music, patriotic romanticism, anti-globalism – derived from and had roots in the modern or late modern Western culture that I was consuming, imitating and attacking at the same time.

xii

Preface

On the official level, Lithuanian politics also adopted “quasi-European” rhetoric and began mimicking the Western political trends. Many events that have been taking place in the political arena during the last two decades, such as Lithuania joining the EU, the resulting massive emigration, tense relations with Poland (especially after the Polish Air Force plane crash in Katyn, 2010), and endless political tensions with Russia and Belarus, have raised quite a few questions about what Lithuania actually is, and where it stands in the political context. Who are Lithuanians, what does being a Lithuanian mean, and what should a good or true Lithuanian be like or do? Most importantly – how is it possible to exist politically in a meaningful way after the trauma of Soviet experience? Regardless of the answers, one thing is clear: politics is a human affair. My experience, as well as that of millions of others who have lived through these events, is of real relevance for the politics that is taking place in the region. This book seeks to give credit to these untold and underestimated factors that shape the history of our times.

Notes 1 Svoy means “of our own”, “one of us” in Russian. 2 Darius Kuolys, “Versija” [Version], Sietynas, 10 (1991), 256–261. . . 3 Arvydas Grišinas, “Liminalumas ir schizmogeneze: lietuviškumas kaip šventybe?” [Liminality and schismogenesis: Lithuanian-ness as the sacred?], Naujasis ŽidinysAidai, 12 (2010), 461–468. 4 Gediminas’ Tower stands on a hill near the cathedral, in the centre of Vilnius, and is a very popular symbol of the city. 5 See: Pernille Hohnen, A Market Out of Place? Remaking Economic, Social, and Symbolic Boundaries in Post-Communist Lithuania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this book to the memory of my late grandmother, Aleksandra . Aleksandravicˇ iene (1918–2013), a permanent role model and source of inspiration. The modern Lithuanian history outlined in this book she has lived through and experienced first-hand. It is from her example that I drew the perseverance and optimism that enabled me to successfully complete this work. I would also like to thank my academic teachers, who in various ways guided and supported me throughout the different stages of writing. To Professor Árpád Szakolczai, without whom neither this book nor my academic lifepath would exist: For all the incredible insights, inspirations and support – thank you. To Dr Adrian Pabst, the supervisor of my PhD thesis, which is the basis of this book, made an academic out of a graduate. Your wise guidance, patience, help and support throughout the bittersweet period of my doctorate studies and beyond will always be remembered and appreciated. For relentless help in matters both academic and personal, my sincerest . gratitude goes to Professor Aleksandra Aleksandravicˇ iu-te, my dear mother. Not every academic is lucky enough to have a professor as a mother. Even fewer have one who possesses wisdom enough to allow her children to make their own choices and provide support every time they realise their fallacies. I . . also thank Justina Lizikevicˇ iu-te-Grišine, my beloved wife, who appeared in my life when most needed and made the entire project meaningful. I would further like to thank Doctor Agnes Horvath, Professor Bjorn Thomassen, Doctor Harald Wydra and everyone working at International Political Anthropology journal, also Doctor Iain MacKenzie, Doctor Stefan Rossbach, Professor Richard Sakwa and the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. I was lucky and privileged to study, learn and grow in such an outstanding, brave and creative intellectual environment, all of whose qualities had an impact on this book. My sincere thanks also go to those who helped shape this book into what it . is. I am grateful to Dalia Kazlauskiene, the wife and archive-keeper of the late Juozas Kazlauskas, whose captivating photographs I was generously allowed to use to illustrate my work. For the same reason, I thank photoˇ iurliographers Vytautas Balcˇ ytis, Artu-ras Valiauga and staff at the M. K. C nis Museum in Kaunas. I thank Doctor Ainius Lašas for inviting me to the

xiv Acknowledgements Kaunas University of Technology and providing me with financial and academic backing for the successful completion of this work. I would also like to thank Neil Jordan, Alice Salt and their team at Routledge for their excellent work and professionalism in the preparation of this book. Finally, I thank all my friends and family, and everyone who took the time to read, comment, criticise and support my text. All of your contributions are remembered and greatly appreciated.

Introduction

To many, both in the East and the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union became one of the most important events in the second half of the twentieth century. The string of events in the post-Soviet region that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall, continues to shape its political, cultural and existential reality. The crisis in Ukraine, the re-emergence of nationalisms, and the return of the Cold War rhetoric between Russia and the West in past years, among other events, pose fundamental questions about identity, history and human experience, in relation to politics. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly formed and re-established states embarked on a process of rediscovering themselves and their role in a new, post-bipolar world. They had to perceive, re-establish or even reinvent their political identities and chart their new trajectories. Some of them started their journey “back to Europe”, such as the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. Others embarked on their own identity-based political projects, or isolated themselves, or else maintained strong ties with Russia – or all at once (such as Belarus and to a lesser extent Ukraine until 2014). No matter the diversity of the paths, there are also many commonalities among post-USSR countries, as they all had to deal with same general problems: the rapid political change, their communist past and the human experience of transition, as well as various new challenges posed by late modernity. Some of the common issues that these countries faced were technical, such as transitions from socialism to democracy, from state-regulated market to capitalism, from cultural repression to freedom of speech. All the newly (re-)established countries had to cope with these often very difficult changes. However, what is frequently forgotten in the political discussion, in large part due to the unquantifiable nature of the matter, is the dimension of the human factor in these processes. Indeed, what we call “political” does not only consist of statistics, legal issues and economic variables. It was not the countries per se that had to withstand the transitions. Above all, it was the people who lived through these changes. Perhaps the main commonality among all the post-Soviet countries is the human experience of profound change in the lives of citizens and peoples (including minorities that do not have citizenship). And it is this experiential level of politics, change and selfhood that holds the

2

Introduction

key to a better understanding of political identity formation as well as many paradoxes. The question of human experience in political identity formation transcends clear and singular disciplinary boundaries. A fundamental change in the lives of millions of people is as much a matter for philosophical or cultural debate as it is an economic, legal and political problem. But first and foremost, it is a lived process for those particular people experiencing it. The aim of this book is therefore twofold. The first immodest ambition is to outline an approach that would be capable of inquiring into people’s experience as a source of political practice, identity formation and historical shift. I am interested in that side of politics which slips through the analytical fingers of an economist measuring quality of life, the political scientist analysing power balance, or the legal analyst whose concern it is to determine the political status of the newly self-declared republics or to do justice to the history of Soviet repressions. Things that do not fit, omitting or distorting the numbers, is what I am interested in, because it is there that the experienced political reality lies. In order to achieve the first aim, this book will present and apply some political anthropological tools that can help one tackle these problems. The second aim of this book is humbler. In order to expound the a-rational, pre-reflective and associative side of politics, which nevertheless influences it so profoundly, I will focus on the topic of transition and identity formation in the post-Soviet Eastern and Central Europe. The main case for my inquiry is Lithuania, yet I will also apply and elaborate upon the analytical framework by discussing other cases in the region, including Russia and Ukraine. Temporally, this book will focus on post-Soviet politics, although in order to appreciate the historical dimension of the processes discussed, I will make references to earlier, most significantly Soviet history. This is not a traditional case study, nor is it a comparative analysis, nor a purely theoretical work. It rather seeks a balance between empirical study and theoretical conceptualisation, in pursuit of creating a set of theoretical tools that could sufficiently and efficiently explain the political identity-related processes that are taking place in the postSoviet region and could also be applied to other cases. The central theme, allowing for such an interdisciplinary approach, conjoining inquiries in politics, history, anthropology and philosophy, as mentioned, is political identity. This topic, however, needs to be articulated at much greater depths than just its nominal function. I do not seek to develop, construct or select the appropriate identity of different countries; rather, I try to understand the nature and variation in the process of political identity formation as such. However, because the book focuses on the theme of embedded human experience, identity also entails an existential dimension. As will be shown, this is also true when considering the specificity of the case in our study. In the post-Soviet space, people – both individually and collectively – in many ways had to redefine the answer to a set of fundamental questions about themselves, their affiliations and their origins. This was not a mere rational choice of nationality, flag or other nominal dependency. Post-Soviet political transition was a life-changing experience.

Introduction

3

Drawing upon the Platonic school of thought, as well as the hermeneutic philosophical tradition, I will argue that there are complex ontological links between politics, ethics and aesthetics, between shape and meaning as well as between worth and action. This approach can constitute new ways of thinking not only about the post-Soviet region (even though the scope of this book will limit itself to a European and traditionally Christian part of the region), but also about identity and politics in general. I will relate the issue of identity formation in post-Soviet transition to wider political and philosophical questions of being, truth and authenticity. In doing so, I will address several problematic questions. How can we explain what can be popularly called “irrational behaviour” in politics (for instance an armless defence by Lithuanians against Soviet tanks during the “January Events”)? How does the abovementioned human factor manifest itself in politics and political identity formation? How does it shape post-Soviet politics? What strands of ideas influenced such perceptions and what dangers lurk within this transitory process? Finally, is there a way out of what will be called sovietism in the region? Before we start answering these questions, however, let us first take a closer look at the approach that this book proposes.

1

Politics from the Human Perspective

The intention to rearticulate the post-Soviet topic arises from my personal experience, for the majority of my life having lived in the post-Soviet Europe, where, so it seems, historical issues, as well as symbolism and emotionally associative factors, tend to play a dramatic political role. This political space is ridden with paradoxes and rituals, political thought and action that is sometimes difficult to explain or even capture fully using rational thought in its modern definition.1 The main ambition in this book is to present an argument about the nature of politics and identity that would be positioned on the analysis of issues that are grounded in this “soft” yet profound matter of human imagination, sentiment and experience. This requires a different approach from the mainstream theory in political and social sciences. Paul Ricoeur’s famous phrase about Marx, Freud and Nietzsche being the “masters of school of suspicion” comes to mind when talking about their philosophies and their attempts to unmask the “illusion” in order to reveal the “reality” beyond it.2 This common ground of scepticism and perhaps even nihilism is what unites the dominant intellectual strands of both modernity and even more so – late modernity.3 That, in turn, suggests that late modernity is the intensification and radicalisation of modernity rather than a departure from it.4 In order to tap into the human factor of politics, what we need to do is to seek hermeneutic understanding of lived and experienced reality rather than pursue the safety of mistrust and scepticism towards the real when approaching such ambiguous and subtle topics. In this sense, this book draws on a growing body of work that questions the dominant strand of modernity, without however embracing the prevailing relativist rationale suggested by late modernity either. This middle ground attempts to overcome the logic of rationalist scepticism and nihilism by deploying concepts taken from the Platonist tradition, the hermeneutic philosophy and cultural anthropology, also taking into account the pre-reflected, a-rational human experiential aspect. This is done in an effort to transcend the predominant conceptual dialectics regarding identity. On the one hand, identity is popularly articulated as a fluid “cultural construct”, which is relative, purely epistemic, constantly changing and has no relation to ontology. On the other hand, it is understood as unchanging essence, which can be estimated,

Politics from the human perspective

5

determined and conserved. This either implies a relativist articulation of identity, according to which genuine selfhood is impossible and there is no such thing as authentic being, or renders it unrealistically stagnant and then fails to account for historical process and human agency. This in turn contrasts with a basic nature of lived experience as a presence-forming process.

Conceptualising the human factor In order to rethink the question of political identity formation, it is necessary to have a new set of conceptual “tools” and approaches that enables a different articulation of the question. Some of the concepts, such as narratives and images, are of a more methodological character, used in this book as tools to approach the fluid reality of experience and imagination. Yet others, such as mask-identity and quasi-metaphysics, are of a more assertive character, “diagnosing” the condition of societies in question. However, it is the combination of all of these concepts that allows for the formulation of the new, holistic approach, some serving as means to ask questions and others used to formulate answers. The insights that these concepts capture in the case of post-Soviet Lithuania is later applied to other post-Soviet and post-communist cases. The aim is to understand hermeneutically the cultural meanings in local politics, and to perceive the human experience of the people, participating in these processes of transition and turmoil. From that perspective, without trying to “dissolve the mythologies”, I will nevertheless critically engage with the epistemology about the self and the world that is being employed in those cultural contexts and that shapes their political identities, demonstrating the possible as well as present dangers resulting from the process, and suggesting ways to overcome them. The theoretical approach that this book employs, and at the same time constructs, consists of three parts. First of all, my account of politics and identity shifts the emphasis from the binary pole of essence and construct, which characterises the dominant interpretations of identity, to the notion of human experience. It is argued that this is fundamental for understanding post-Soviet political identity formation. Second, it hermeneutically inquires into the forms of political practice, instead of concentrating on power relations, in an attempt to uncover the source of the emerging post-Soviet epistemology, in which the new political “self” is articulated. Finally, instead of merely describing identity formation, it critically challenges the notion at the epistemological and political level via analysing the real political outcomes and anthropological premises of these identity formation processes. Main accounts of political identity When it comes to discussing political identity, the first two terms that come to mind are ethnicity and nationhood. The predominant anthropological conception of these two terms assumes that ethnicity is an essentialist category,

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an intrinsic characteristic to a collective, at least insofar as modern times are concerned, while nationhood is something artificial and constructed in a particular historical period.5 The essentialism of ethnicity is understood either in cultural primordialist terms (as in the case of Clifford Geertz or Donald Horowitz) or in socio-biological terms (Lev Gumilev, Pierre L. van den Berghe).6 While accepting the position that political identity is a part of human inner presence, this book expands this outlook to incorporate the possibility of transformation of this presence through liminal experiences. Other ways of explaining the origins of ethnicity and nationhood are either through rational choice theory, as in case of Fredrik Barth, Paul Brass and others, or through Marxist theory.7 I argue that, because fundamental shifts in political identity take place in times of crisis, choices related to identity are more often imitative in nature than rational. There are also contestations that not only nationality, but also nationality as a continuation of ethnicity is an imaginary construct, which makes it also artificial, as claimed by Benedict Anderson or Eric Hobsbawm.8 This book will demonstrate, however, how artificial and imaginary elements, these identity “constructs”, become an actual part of political presence and practice. Finally, ethno-symbolists such as Anthony Smith emphasise the embeddedness of ethnicity into nationalism through a historical process.9 The ideas put forward in this book may be most closely linked to the latter, as well as to those of Benedict Anderson, yet they differ significantly. First of all, instead of only inquiring into nationalism and ethnicity, the book is concentrated on political identity in a broad sense, as human experience of political existence. In doing so, it looks into political identity as a part of ontological self, not only as an intellectually perceived notion belonging to a certain constructed collective. It is not claimed here that, by being imaginary, as Benedict Anderson shows, nationhood is less real or, indeed, less authentic. Instead my argument is that imagination, representation, symbolism and mythology are as real a part of politics – at least as important – as power or economic factors. As long as the experience of political “selfhood” exists, it matters to politics. This book will explain how that is possible by concentrating on the moment of transition, of political becoming and, crucially, on the human experience of such a process – with a particular focus on the case of post-Soviet transition. It will inquire into the phenomenology of this transition, into where, as my research shows, these symbols emerge from. Anthony Smith’s theory recognises ethno-symbols that constitute political identity as often counter-factual and inflated as well. However, he claims that they still constitute the sense of bond and collectivity within nations. Even though I will use historical analysis and explore the origins of political identities, this book is not aimed at defining political identity in a nominalist sense (as for Smith). Nor is it its aim to explain the emergence of ethnicity and nationalism as such historically. Instead, it shifts the emphasis to hermeneutic understanding of what meanings, narratives and experiences constitute these self-articulations.

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The third approach In reaction to a large part of modern and late modern theory, this book seeks the disillusionment from the “disillusionment”, in effort to reappraise the value and importance of imagination, myth and belief to human existence, showing that it is not and cannot be contradictory to politics. As analysis of Lithuania and other chosen cases will suggest, myth and belief are fundamental not only to real and tangible politics, but also to human existence and identity. I will argue that the process of becoming and of political identity formation cannot be properly understood and theorised by merely focusing on the two aspects of human existence – either an objective political power play (within a historical process) or the intellectualised articulation of identity (abstracted from any historical context). The third element stems from the appreciation of the finitude of human knowledge and recognition, thus the importance of experience, a-rationality, myth and imagination. Recognition here should not be understood as the act of “figuring out” rationally the actual truth about something inferred, but rather as getting an intuitive glimpse, even if blurred, vague and undefined, into what actually is. Plato’s recognition of “true ideas” in this instance is also understood in this manner. The theory rests on three assumptions about the human condition. I do not hold these to be the only criteria that define humanity. Quite the contrary, I would argue that, just as with all the rest of ontology, humanity is impossible to comprehend (as in “hold within knowledge”) in its entirety. Nevertheless, these three principles are important in our case. The first and the most important premise, which I hold to be self-evident, is that human beings are imperfect, finite and non-absolute. Humans make mistakes, absolute knowledge is inaccessible to a human being, and human beings are mortal. The fact that no one knows exactly what happens after death is just another proof of human imperfection and the finitude of knowledge accessible to the human mind. Such disposition allows one to dissociate from the positivist ontology without delving into relativist nihilism, instead of questioning the reality of the world, questioning one’s ability to comprehend it. The second quite obvious claim is that every human being has an existential focal point and is embedded within his or her own existence. One inevitably relates to one’s surroundings from “here” to “there”. What one sees “there” is interrelated with the “here” not only spatially and temporally, but also experientially. This implies that, at all times, all humans are embedded within their particular being, they experience it and they cannot detach from it entirely. Intellectual abstraction and reflection, as a result, is a partially re-cognitive and partially imaginary act, performed by a finite mind, which may be more or less trained and fit for the task. The latter also implies a normal inequality in human capability to recognise or misrecognise as well as an unequal ability to imagine. In turn, this implies the possibility of some perspective being less true than another, which once again helps avoid relativism.

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The finitude of the human mind, however, is the reason, which allows for the third aspect of human condition – misrecognition, but also for the existence of the illogical and the paradoxical. Because being happens as it does, and we are embedded within the process, we try to make sense of it by creating finite knowledge, forming truth claims, which are necessary for the orientation. Truth, therefore, is understood not as something that is not a lie but something that is not hidden. And this conception allows for the different articulation of mythology. While a modern concept of ideology is based on the notion of truth that is opposed to falsehood, mythology is based on a notion of truth that is not hidden. Therefore, the theoretical starting point here can be called a “veil of naivety”, looking at the phenomenology of beliefs and identities at hand and trying to empathically and hermeneutically understand them and people’s relation to them instead of trying to “dispel” the “false beliefs and myths”, supposedly uncovering the “true” underlying economic or power interests. The book tries to understand the experiences of people participating in the political processes as well as symbolical, mythological narratives used to explain them. It establishes that identity formation cannot be adequately understood through means of purely rationalist self-interest either. Neither is it only a result of objective political, social or economic conditioning, adequately and fully measurable in positivist scientific methods, nor a mere intellectual project, understood purely in constructivist terms. Consequentially, politics and political identity formation is seen here as a partly mythological process of human activity, deriving from human needs, such as the need for stability, certainty and belief, and human finitudes, such as the finitude of knowledge and mortality. At the same time, politics and political identity formation are a partial foundation for an authentic human existence, giving people the purpose and explanation for political action. By political identity I mean being and the perception of oneself or other as a persona or a qualitatively distinct “self” in political interaction. This persona can form and exist at the personal, communal, state or international level. It is historical since it emerges within lived time; it is mutable, as it gradually changes and transforms; it is factual insofar that it is power related; and it is fictional insofar that it is reflected by a human mind. This way it is impossible to define the political or at least the part of it that has to do with identity formation without relating it to humanity. It is a realm of human will, thought and action or participation, relative to the particularity of the situation, yet limited by humanity itself. Therefore, the importance of human experience to the considerations of political identity requires the reconceptualisation of identity itself. It needs to reflect both the artificiality of political identity and the phenomenological embeddedness of those participating in the process of its recognition. In order to emphasise those two aspects, as well as the organic and gradual shift from inauthenticity into adequacy and “selfhood” through collective experience and political participation, an allegory of a ritual mask will be used, as discussed by Alessandro Pizzorno and Árpád Szakolczai.10

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The derivative concept that this book will introduce is mask-identity, which will be used for tackling the question of authenticity of political identity under the post-Soviet conditions. It will signify the a-rational, intellectual construct, a partially articulated (symbolical) product of an imperfect and finite human mind, which, both intentionally and unintentionally, makes factographic mistakes, generalisations, associations and interpretations with regards to the surrounding world and itself. It involves emotionally infused social imaginaries that constantly emerge out of various political events, narratives that we tell about ourselves as well as dreams and ideals that we associate with that which unites us. It is as grounded in factuality as it is fictional.11 It will be argued that actually the second becomes the first through the process of political participation. The concept of authenticity has been mentioned several times here already, and discussed in numerous philosophical works. Apart from appearing in Heidegger’s, Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s, and other classical existentialists’ work, the concept had been used and analysed in the recent times.12 In our context, however, authenticity means an existential situation of being oneself, which includes imperfection, misrecognition and fictional nature of selfarticulation as well as truth. The authentic identity “grows” through history, assimilating new identity masks layer upon layer, actualising the imaginary. An identity mask becomes authentic selfhood when it is no longer reflected upon, when it “comes naturally”, when it is not only part of the reflected, but more importantly – of the experience.13 The Lithuanian language has two translations for the word “identity”. One is identitetas, which is a direct translation from Latin identitas, and the other . is tapatybe, which semantically has a different meaning. The latter term itself is not very old, yet quite important due to its linguistic implication. While identity means a set of qualities by which one is identified by others or identifies . oneself with, tapatybe derives from the words tas, meaning “that”, and pats, meaning “own” or “self”, giving it a slightly different semantic charge. It asks about whom one actually is existentially, rather than what one identifies with. This nuance is crucial, as it implies a personalist rather than nominalist inquiry into the actual, existential selfhood. Theoretically, this dichotomy implies a possibility of having an authentic and inauthentic identity, whether it is intentional or not. The “problem” with the concept of authenticity is that, if understood in a certain way, it implies intrinsic immanence in terms of selfhood, which can be seen as essentialist and thus, when put in a political context, as feeding into nationalist ideas, such as Volkgeist and national purity. Alternatively, it can once again lead to considerations about individualised subjectivity. This is what Adorno criticised in Heidegger’s work.14 This understandable association in the Western imaginary, however, is but one way of thinking about the question. Authenticity can also be understood as a constantly present part of the self: it is the bit that is un-reflected and native to the self. With a society living through history, this authenticity also grows organically and adapts to

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the present, assuming ever new layers of what is taken for granted about the self. Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s use of the “jargon of authenticity” is thus circumvented by the concept of mask-identity. While acknowledging the fabricated-ness, mask-like nature of political identity, it also demonstrates how, through participation in this identity, through “wearing the mask” in human experience, the mask becomes an authentic self. This then merges the rupture between the “true” and “false”, natural and constructed self and introduces the Platonic dialectics of the self that is hidden and revealed, taken for granted and reflected upon instead.

Embedded narrative history In order to reassess the nature of history in a given context, and its role in political identity formation, this book will employ the notion of history as a narrative. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued against the objectivity of history, suggesting that the narrator, the historian, the “subject” of narration is itself inevitably embedded within the history, within a certain particular lived environment.15 This is also what Karl Polanyi suggests in The Great Transformation, when criticising the objectified and over-rationalised vision of a human being, as portrayed by neo-Kantians. He shows how the economic life (which is popularly perceived as objective, rational, interest-based and universal) is embedded in the particularities of culture.16 Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative demonstrated how narrated history does not unfold in a strictly chronological and objective time when reflected upon by the embedded participant.17 Therefore the narrator has particular conditions for reflecting upon, interpreting and talking about their lived reality. It interprets reality, even when appealing to objectivity. In other words, any type of history is inevitably a story. It is very much related to particular people, particular conditions and particular contexts. And every story has a storyteller, who has a focal point, who uses certain personally or culturally pre-established categories, preconceptions and images. It is this immediate relation to the narrative that provides “objective” facts and figures with real, lived meaning, thus also influencing the political reality of the society that shares – partially or fully – this narrative. This is not to put forward a relativist claim that ontology itself is dependent on human cognition. On the contrary, I argue that one could recognise or misrecognise the truth rather than generate it using one’s finite mind. It is only to emphasise the finitude of human capabilities to “have” truth in their grasp. This again ties back to the Platonic notion of truth – as that which is not hidden instead of that which is not lie. Such an approach acknowledges reality within subjective human experience, yet without abandoning the idea that it is only an image of some more profound being beyond immediate human cognition or human grasp in general. Instead of a supposedly nonparticipatory history, what we should speak of are narratives of this or that participant.

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Historical existence In order to illustrate the notion of embedded historical existence, an analogy of a tree would be useful, which is in one sense stable in its form, yet is growing throughout its lifetime. The analogy incorporates both change and stability within being, without counter-posing the static to the dynamic. Instead it integrates them within a lived historical and political process. The same logic is applicable to political identity formation. However, it also reveals another aspect. Not only does a tree have a certain integral core vertical connecting its roots with branches, which substantiates its authentic existence, but the process of its growing, of its persona transforming is slow and gradual. Therefore, a tempo, with which the change in its structure is taking place, has a certain normal pace and can be disrupted invoking liminal conditions (breakage, transformation, etc.). Its authentic existence as a “self” (as a live tree, not a chair, not a plank) is determined by upholding a certain core integrity, but also by gradual growth and transformation. Therefore, a notion of identity that this book employs attains not only a nominal but also an existential value. Politically (and politics here is considered a human affair) this means that authentic existential identity requires both continuity and flexibility. However, the structural change here has to take place at a “human” pace, the approximate reference for measurement of which then could perhaps be human lifetime. This ensures the endurance of authentic existential identity, and the transmission of legacy and cultural inheritance. In short, it ensures a relatively normal and unbroken livelihood of a polity. In turn, if society experiences a breakage, a disaster, war or other trauma, its identity transforms to incorporate this as a new mask-identity, which ontologically changes its political persona. However, although such continuity of identity is characteristic of some polities in the Western Europe (which themselves are not without their issues), the history of political identities in Central and Eastern Europe is often much more complex and liminal. Apart from the two world wars and brutal modernisation in the Soviet Union, which methodically broke the “cores” of most Central and Eastern European “trees”, in many cases (such as the Lithuanian, Polish, etc.) the “core” has also been broken before, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-USSR polities had once again to redefine and often create their political identities anew. And in many cases these efforts entailed not only political, but also existential revival. It is this kind of specific modern existential context in Central and Eastern Europe that the book will develop its theoretical framework in, because a crisis, a situation of the broken core, has, according to many, become the recurrent theme within the present epoch as well. Post-Soviet identity in literature The debates on identity formation in a broader post-Soviet context are wide ranging and interdisciplinary. In political sciences, one can find different types

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of critique and analysis of the post-Soviet identity politics. The demise of the USSR provided new questions for Sovietology.18 Dominique Arel argues that the categories used in the first censuses of some newly independent states had been constructed to satisfy the need for constituting a new national majority and thus consolidating its power.19 The post-Soviet states manipulated categories, such as language and ethnic background, to attribute a person to one or another civic identity. Liberals argue that the form of liberalism that has spread in the newly constituted states resembles the national liberalism of the nineteenth century and lacks the universalist character that is commonly associated with the contemporary liberal tradition. The new nationalisms are therefore seen as anachronistic and a possible threat to liberalism and, consequently, to peace.20 Seemingly, there are also dangers behind the fact that the post-Soviet countries inherited the “institutionalised” perception of nationality that can later cause ethnically based conflicts inside the newly formed states.21 The post-USSR countries can be grouped according to the overall orientation: towards either the East or the West. This depends on several factors, such as the extent to which the nationalists in the countries were supported by the wider society in the early 1990s, and the historical factors, for example the historical influence of Habsburg and Romanov imperialism.22 Alexander Agadjanian touches upon a number of questions about the relations between religion, political doctrine and identity politics. He sees positive aspects of religiously inclined national identity, as it helped avoid the wider, inner conflicts in the post-Soviet Asian states.23 The political literature on the topic, however, usually analyses the institutional level of the problem but fails to inquire into people’s experience of these developments. The arguments are constructed on the socio-economic and political levels, without an anthropological or a philosophical inquiry. The notion of transition is usually encountered in the “transition paradigm”, describing the presumed democratisation and liberalisation processes that have taken place in the non-democratic regimes around the world since the 1970s. The post-Soviet topic has its own cluster in the “paradigm”.24 However, it has been argued that the paradigm lacks realism, as contemporary events show that, unlike the paradigm was predicting, the transition to democracy does not happen smoothly, and not all of the “grey zone” countries went down the path of democratisation in the first place.25 Furthermore, the aforementioned political literature does not inquire into human experience as the source of identity formation. Nor does it treat the transitional state as a qualitatively different experience to “normality”, where social and political life is relatively stable, and not changing in a rapid fashion. The notion of transition used in this book is that of lived change in human experience. And though it still remains closely related to the socio-economic and political processes, it also addresses the existential self-redefinition, which the traditional use of the term did not.

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Beyond post-colonialism Probably the most interesting approach to analysing the transitional processes, which also involves an intention to “understand” the experience in the postSoviet world, is that of post-colonialism. Perhaps one of the most important post-colonialist works that studies the formation of political identity in postSoviet countries is offered by Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr and Edward Allworth in Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities.26 They explain how newly born nation-states reorganise their identity and reinterpret their historical narratives in an effort to establish their new political identities. However, what this book does lack is attention to human experience. Instead, its focus is on the historical, ethno-political and literary aspects. Apart from this book, the post-colonialist literature on the post-Soviet region is limited in number and scope.27 It is possibly the case because this approach is indebted to a Marxist critique of Western capitalism and different forms of imperialism. Paradoxically, it is the anti-Marxist (in its Soviet form) critique that lies at the very heart of the post-Soviet problematic. Traditionally, the critique would be aimed at capitalist colonialism, and it would stem from a neo-Marxist anti-capitalist background. Whereas in this case, the colonialism and imperialism that has to be criticised is that of a communist state. Thus, at some point, the critique would have to criticise its own ideological roots. This therefore might be an explanation, why some more left-leaning thinkers would be reluctant to analyse the instance of post-Soviet countries in terms of postcolonialism.28 Furthermore, even though post-colonialism is closely related to the poststructuralist/late modern subjectivism, which by definition should avoid positivist thinking, through its Marxist origins it inherits the same materialist dialectics, as well as a notion of inherent a priori struggle within the society. I will seek to detach myself from Marxist perceptions of a society, in my search for an alternative. While I recognise the presence of political struggle or conflict within the society, I do not hold this factor foundational. Furthermore, apart from a few studies in social sciences and economics,29 the post-colonialist approach is in many cases dedicated mainly to analysing literature, and less so to inquire into post-Soviet political identity.30 What this book will do, however, is concentrate on the phenomenology of the post-Soviet political reality as well as on the cultural and human factors that predetermine it. Furthermore, instead of imposing strict and pre-made analytical methods and theories to tackle the Central and Eastern European post-Soviet experience, it will empathically assume the point of view of the latter and consequentially develop analytical tools inductively.

Empathic and visual understanding as means of research This book, while directly deriving from my Doctorate dissertation, also owes to the research done for my Bachelor thesis, which focused on Lithuanian

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identity formation during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The thesis covered the personal reflections of contemporary intellectuals, who were the main driving force behind the Lithuanian independence movement “Sa˛ ju-dis“. It analysed the reflections on the ongoing events and meaning of Lithuanian identity in the country’s contemporary cultural press. I studied over a hundred selected articles from four different weekly and monthly cultural journals . . (Šiaures Atenai, Literatu-ra ir menas, Švyturys and Sietynas), published between 1988 and 1992. The thesis concluded that Lithuanian post-Soviet identity has been forming within the liminal period of transition, and that it has been infused with different meanings and images that emerged from the experience. Some of these experiences and articulations led to new forms of political existence while others worked in schismatic fashion, dividing the society from within. My previous research also demonstrated how during this period the political reality was perceived as not only political but also existential. Some elements of this image of political reality were expressed in religious or metaphysical terminology (the “Antichrist level” of KGB, “Christian Europe”, etc.). In this metaphysically infused and polarised world perception, post-USSR Lithuanian identity began to take shape. In my PhD, I continued the inquiry into human experience as the basis for political identity formation. However, I expanded the theme in many different directions. Historically, I discussed the Lithuanian case in a much broader perspective. I traced the history of Lithuanian political identity from the first historical mentioning of Lithuania’s name to the present day. Contextually, I expanded the field of inquiry to other post-USSR cases (Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Estonia, among others). The scope of inquiry, however, was limited mainly to Eastern Europe, in order to be able to better assess the importance of religion and culture to the processes in question. Methodically, I also used visual analysis (of photographs, filmed material, drawings, graffiti, protesters’ banners, etc.), historical analysis in the case of Lithuanian political identity formation, ten unstructured interviews done in Kyiv in February 2014, along with textual analysis of internet articles on the ongoing events in Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, Poland and other post-USSR states. It also used empathic understanding as the means to access human experience, which will be discussed in the next sub-section. For this purpose, the book uses a wide range of abovementioned anthropological and philosophical concepts to conceptualise the matter emphasising human experience, without negating the importance of both political factuality and intellectual reflection. Human experience as a research topic, however, poses several challenges. The first challenge is that experience is often considered entirely subjective and inaccessible for an outsider, as it is impossible fully to imagine or “put oneself into someone else’s shoes”. Second, the specificity of human experience requires that it be captured instantly and with as little mediation as possible, via interviews, live recordings or other media, because the impression of the experience gradually wears off with time. Third, even though it is apparent

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without much deeper analysis that collective experiences are possible (otherwise cultural phenomena such as public commemorations would make no sense), the means of determining that the experience is indeed collective requires some comments as well. Capturing experience: empathy as a method In relation to the first problem, my argument is based on a particular interpretation of what empathy is. Instead of understanding it as an act of imagination, as it is popularly understood in mainstream psychology, when talking about emotional empathy, I employ a conception of empathy that is more similar to cognitive one, interpreted as recognition and understanding. As this book will show, such interpretation proves to be a rather fruitful means of inquiry when addressing the topic. Victor Turner, whose structural analysis of liminality this book draws upon, had been developing an anthropological theory, based both on experience, performance and social drama.31 A lot of his work relates the ritual process, theatre, experience and critical, transformative social/political events. As Turner puts it, “[e]xperience must be linked with performance for there to be transformation. Meaning is generated in transformative process as its main fruit”.32 Therefore political transformation and the human experience of this transformation have meaning, which emerges through performative participation. To empathise with people’s experience is to understand this meaning. Rudolf Makkreel, basing his argument on Dilthey’s hermeneutics, discusses the topic of empathy, criticising the idea that to empathise with someone is a simulative act. Instead, he suggests a Diltheyan notion of Verstehen when addressing the question of inter-subjectivity.33 According to him, to empathise with another means to extend self-understanding to others. Dilthey uses the term Mitfühlen, meaning co-feeling or feeling together with someone else: “[t]o feel with or sympathise with does not demand a loss of self and is therefore more compatible with understanding. […] Dilthey relates the method of understanding less to feelings such as empathy and sympathy than to a process of re-experiencing (Nacherleben) that can structurally exposit what has been understood in temporal terms”.34 Therefore, when we empathise, instead of imitating a mental or emotional state of another in our imagination, we recognise the human condition of another and experience it together. The claim rests on the specificity of the “method” that, according to Dilthey, lies at the core of human sciences. In the introductory chapter of one of his late essays, he writes: The method pervading human sciences is that of understanding and interpretation. All the functions and truths of the human sciences are gathered in understanding. At every point, it is understanding that opens up the world. On the basis of lived experience and self-understanding, and their constant interaction, there emerges the understanding of other persons and their manifestations of life.35

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Hans-Georg Gadamer develops the theme of inter-subjective understanding further, describing the methodical knowledge itself as derivative from the hermeneutic truth.36 This renders empathy re-cognitive, as it implies the recognition of the truth-in-form about human experience of others when observing one’s own human condition. This way, it is an inter-subjective structural transposition instead of inventive/imaginary act that lies at the core of empathising. However, as a means of research method, empathy as it has been explained above is somewhat limited by two issues. First, it requires certain qualities from the observer or the one who empathises. As Gadamer would say, it requires an adequate horizon as the source of reference for understanding. He uses the term in the context of reading a historical text, but a similar demand has to be raised upon the “reader” of human experience as well. For this matter, my own position as an author is useful, as I am personally directly related to some of the events that this book is analysing, which will be discussed below. Another issue with empathising is not only that a reader has to have a certain “experiential horizon”, but also a certain contextual understanding of a particular situation he is interpreting. For example, “[w]hen I see tears in a woman’s eyes I should not just assume that she is sad. Only by understanding the tears in relation to a contextual situation can I hope to determine whether they are tears of sorrow or tears of joyful relief”.37 This is why this book transcends the hermeneutic and empathic method, incorporating it with others mentioned above, such as historical and visual analysis. Visuality and experience With respect to the second question posed above, if it is indeed possible to access the experiences of others through understanding, this book shifts the notion of capturing experiences from representing them in imitative fashion to recognising them. This, in turn, allows for using various different media to transfer recognisable information. One of the strongest and most recognisable human senses is the ability to perceive and to see. Therefore, through looking at contemporary photography and films as well as other visual material, in addition to different narratives offered by the people who participated in the events in question, human experiences become even better recognisable and understandable. In the case of Maidan, long unstructured interviews were performed, inquiring into people’s experiences, thoughts and explanations of the contemporary situation. However, due to the time gap it was not possible to do the same in the case of Sa˛ ju-dis. I therefore used the textual material gathered as part of my bachelor thesis, adding the ever-growing body of literature on the topic in the form of both academic and personal retrospective reflections (which should always be used with some caution, as they can represent mythologised memory instead of live human experience).

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Additionally, and most importantly, I used nearly thirty photography albums as well as several films capturing different layers of the historical events discussed. The latter material was gathered during my internship in Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius in September 2014. In addition to that, I obtained access to a personal photography archive of a Lithuanian photographer, Juozas Kazlauskas, who participated and documented the January Events as well as other important moments in Lithuanian Soviet and postSoviet history, and whose photographs, along with those by other authors, are used to illustrate this book.38 Furthermore, I used various caricatures, pictures and graffiti pieces, seeing them as iconographic representations of the political imagination and human experience of those participating in and/or reflecting on the events. These were found in contemporary literature, on the actual sites of sa˛ ju-dis and Maidan, on the internet and other places. Finally, I use my own photographs for various purposes, such as to illustrate or emphasise the experiential side of political processes discussed. Author’s position in relation to the work The last question that I raised in relation to capturing experience is whether they are truly collective and to what extent. In response, it is important to discuss my own position in relation to the object of study. I am Lithuanian; and although I was very young at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, I experienced the post-Soviet transition in Lithuania first hand. This provided me with direct experience of liminality when the society was (it still is) trying to redefine itself as non-Soviet. My situation in relation to the topic gave important insights into experiential meanings and associative undertones of different cultural forms, such as caricatures, jokes, folklore, certain postSoviet common knowledge, etc. It also provided general knowledge of pertinent debates in the society regarding Lithuanian political identity. This was useful when picking the important images and historical episodes to discuss in the second chapter of this book. Finally, it allowed me better to understand other post-USSR Eastern European cultures and finer nuances in other country’s debates, insofar as they were in some way related to common Soviet history. It was this personal experience that allowed me to recognise patterns in political behaviour across the Lithuanian political culture and internationally, as well as the commonality of some of these patterns (common images, verbal expressions, historical references, attitudes, etc.). However, empirically the visual material also helped to demonstrate this collectivity. Often political claims and images discussed in articles and in public generally appeared in photographs written on political banners, in stickers on walls, in caricatures, etc. They recur in different locations, in different contexts, which indicates a certain continuity of the same images, narratives and experiences. As an insider, it was easier to notice and capture those. And even though it is impossible to strictly demark the “borders”, in which this or that image or this or that

18

Politics from the human perspective

political cosmology is commonly accepted, there is ample evidence that they do exist, that they are being related to and continuously form politics. However, the challenge with being an “insider” arose when I had to communicate the local common knowledge to the Western European audience. A lot of contextual nuances had to be explained in detail for images to start making sense. But the richness and scale of meaning was often partially lost in translation, so these images could never be captured fully in another language and translated to another political cosmology in their entirety. Nevertheless, it was my intention to remain impartial when evaluating the political processes discussed in this book. Therefore, I use foreign historians as my main sources of information when discussing Lithuanian history. In a similar fashion, I try to depict all sides of the international disagreement regarding Ukraine’s Maidan. Even though I had seen it first hand and I had noted the horrible distortions of factuality when events were represented by first of all the Russian but also the Western media, it was extremely challenging to maintain a largely “objective” position. All things considered, it was these particular aspects of political reality that I recognised as being recurrent and common in the actual society that directed me to investigate particular literary and visual sources. As discussed above, human experience is recognisable and it sublimates in different cultural and political forms. When the context is known, it is possible to understand these human experiences and recognise how they influence politics and identity formation. However, it is difficult to verbally capture, translate and explain these experiences entirely, as some meanings are either too abstract or they blur altogether.

Logics of the argument This book consists of seven chapters, in which the overarching argument about the human factor in politics is unpacked in four stages. The first stage, at which the topic is discussed in historical and political context, is tripartite. The Lithuanian history is analysed first in terms of actual historical and political events, second as per intellectual reflection by those embedded in the process, and third from the perspective of how this reflection is shaping and is being shaped by the human experience of the participants. At the second stage of the argument, I concentrate on political images as products of human thought and associative imagination. My intention is to demonstrate how and why these images constitute political identities and influence political action. The book demonstrates the applicability, function and importance of political images to political identity formation and real politics in the region. I argue that, because these images are often abstract yet descriptive, they can be easily associated with various political contexts and used for different ends. They can be employed to mobilise political action, establish new identities, legitimise power and structure ambiguity. This is the reason why they are so prominent in times of turmoil: they provide meaning,

Politics from the human perspective

19

structure and clarity to the surrounding ambiguity and plurality of the political world. At the same time, the way different narratives articulate the situation and the way they use the same images, is very revealing of the political cosmologies producing them. At the third stage, political transition in this book is articulated as a liminal process, in which the person or society transitioning transforms existentially. Such articulation also suggests an inclusive conceptualisation of transition, grounded in human experience, and emphasises the ambiguous nature of such experiences. It argues that Central and Eastern Europe has historically been stuck in between the East and the West, which structures its political reality and identity formation. It is argued that, because of the violent and schismatic human experiences in the Soviet Union and the Marxist intellectual influence, post-Soviet political culture has attained a quasi-metaphysical character. The political culture inherited embedded cynicism as well as the discrepancy between form and practice. This resulted in the formation of sovietism, a certain political ritualism, filled with abstract political imagery on the one hand and cynical corrupt pragmatism on the other. The final stage of the argument in this book tackles another related issue in the post-Soviet politics – the endemic perpetuation of violence. The book uses the work of René Girard, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert on violence and sacrifice in order to gain deeper insight into the anthropological, cultural and social factors of this issue. It continues with the theme while addressing the problem of identity formation under violent circumstances and uncovers the quasi-metaphysical thinking – an induced tendency to imbue political identity with metaphysical qualities. I term the phenomenon self-sacrification. Grasping this problem, however, leads to some possible prospects for transcending the post-Soviet condition through tackling the issues of imitation and violence at the cultural level of politics.

Notes 1 I am using the term “rational” in a modern positivist sense. In the rest of the book I normally use the term “rationalist” to capture this meaning. 2 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 32. 3 Diana Coole demonstrates how the issue of negativity pervades the entire tradition of modern Western philosophy from Kant to Deleuze: Diana H. Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (London: Routledge, 2000). 4 Here one can go further and suggest with Bruno Latour that there was never any absolute, irreversible break in history that gave rise to a coherent system of ideas and institutions that we commonly call “modernity”. See: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique], trans. Catherine Porter (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). See also: Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992); Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity, 1997); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the

20

5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Politics from the human perspective Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir] (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Karlis Racevskis, Modernity’s Pretenses: Making Reality Fit Reason from Candide to the Gulag (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). Nortautas Statkus, Etniškumas Ir Nacionalizmas: Istorinis Ir Teorinis Aspektai [Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Historical and Theoretical Aspects] (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2003), 277. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic, 1973); Lev Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere (Moscow: Progress, 1990); Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985); Pierre L. Van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (London: Wiley, 1967). Statkus, Etniškumas Ir Nacionalizmas, 277 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Alessandro Pizzorno, “The Mask: An Essay”, International Political Anthropology 3, no. 1 (2010), 5–28; Árpád Szakolczai, “Masks and Persons: Identity Formation in Public”, International Political Anthropology 3, no. 2 (2010), 171–191. A good example of a mask-identity becoming an authentic existential identity is the case of Pravyi Sektor, a Ukrainian right-wing organisation that emerged during the Maidan protests in late 2013 and early 2014. Apart from being famous for its members’ literally wearing balaclava masks, it also demonstrates how a man-made, artificial construct, a jargon turns into a kind of selfhood that substantiates both the participant’s existence at the most profound level (members die under the Pravyi Sektor flag) and actual politics locally (the organisation played an important role in defending against former president Yanukovich’s repression) and internationally (it became a “bogeyman”, successfully used by Russian propaganda to discredit the Ukrainian struggle in Maidan). See: Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2004); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Famous Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, in his Face of Another, depicts a similar process, when a protagonist changes existentially through wearing a self-made mask in public. See: Kobo Abe, Face of Another (New York: Random House, 2011). Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 2002). Alasdair MacIntyre, “First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues”, in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 171–201. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944). Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative [Temps et Récit], trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, 1985, 1988). Alexander Motyl, The Post-Soviet Nations: Perspectives on the Demise of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Dominique Arel, “Demography and Politics in the First Post-Soviet Censuses: Mistrusted State, Contested Identities”, Population 57, no. 6 (2002), 801–827. Bear Braumoeller, “Liberal Nationalism and the Democratic Peace in the Soviet Successor States”, International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1997), 375–402. Rogers Brubaker, “Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account”, Theory and Society 23, no. 1 (1994), 47–78.

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22 Rawi Abdelal, “Memories of Nations and States: Institutional History and National Identity in Post-Soviet Eurasia”, Nationalities Paper 30, no. 3 (2002), 459–484. 23 Alexander Agadjanian, “Revising Pandora’s Gifts: Religious and National Identity in the Post-Soviet Societal Fabric”, Europe-Asia Studies 53, no. 3 (2001), 473–488. 24 Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (New Haven, CT, and London; Yale University Press, 1993); Sabrina Petra Ramet, Adaptation and Transformation in Communist and Post-Communist Systems (San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1992); Stephen White, Graeme Gill and Darrell Slider, The Politics of Transition: Shaping a Post-Soviet Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 25 Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm”, Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002), 17–19. 26 Graham Smith et al., Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 27 David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique”, PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001), 111–128. 28 Karl Jirgens, “Fusion of Discourse: Postcolonial/Postmodern Horizon in Baltic Culture”, in Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. Violeta Kelertas (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 46. 29 Aleš Debeljak, The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in the PostCommunist World (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004); Ingo Schröder and Asta Vonderau, Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist Eastern Europe. (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2008). . 30 Rasa Balocˇ kaite, (Post)Kolonializmas Vidurio Ir Rytų Europoje: Mokymo Priemone [(Post)colonialism in Central and Eastern Europe: A Teaching Tool] (Kaunas: Vytauto Didžiojo Universitetas, 2010); Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism. 31 See Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988). 32 Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology of Experience, ed. Edith Turner (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 206. 33 Rudolf Makkreel, “From Simulation to Structural Transposition: A Diltheyan Critique of Empathy and Defense of Verstehen”, in Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, eds Hans Herbert Kögler and Karsten Stueber (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000), 181–193. 34 Ibid., 182–183. 35 Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Understanding of Other Persons and their Manifestations of Life”, in Selected Works. Volume II: The Formation of the Historical World in Human Sciences, eds Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 226–241, at 226. 36 In Truth and Method, besides scientist and naturalist methods of attaining knowledge Gadamer raises the importance of art and play, which are not methodical but rather hermeneutic and experiential in their nature. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edition (London: Continuum, 2006). It also involves inter-subjective recognition of shared experiential truth. 37 Makkreel, “From Simulation to Structural Transposition”, 182. 38 The January Events took place on 13 January 1991 in Vilnius, when crowds of unarmed Lithuanians defended the newly gained independence from the Soviet Army’s effort to regain power.

2

The Face and the Mask: Lithuania

In different ways, the collapse of the Soviet Union influenced and is still influencing the politics, culture and identities of the states that emerged from the ruins of the Red Empire and beyond. This makes it an excellent historical context for discussing the human side of politics and identity formation. Lithuania, being the first to rid itself of the Soviet yoke, is both a characteristic and an exceptional case. It is characteristic because, like the other Baltic post-Soviet states, as well as Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova, and unlike Central and South-Eastern European countries, it was part of the actual USSR.1 At the same time it is exceptional because it is one of only three post-Soviet states (along with Latvia and Estonia), including Russia itself, to have previous historical experience of modern statehood during the interwar years, and therefore historically based national imaginary preceding Soviet times. That is important because this chapter intends to demonstrate how narrative and imaginary “envelop” and shape the perception of the political self. The argument that we will discuss here is that identity emerges from an overarching worldview, a type of Lebenswelt or political cosmology that forms due to particular shared experience and established knowledge in the form of political images and narratives. Due to historically and existentially embedded conditions that every society finds itself in, its political cosmology is also dependent on the limitations of both its knowledge and experience. For instance, Western consumerist goods such as jeans or Marlboro cigarettes became a signifier of wealth and prosperity in the early nineties precisely because of the lack of access to these goods during the Soviet times. This rather mythological identity-formation process makes perceived political reality intrinsically symbolical, archetypical and value laden (not detached, not objective). But paradoxically it is also convincing and immersive – and particularly under liminal or ambiguous circumstances, it constitutes values, political will and actual policy. The fact that politics is “performed” by humans, it is “inhabited” by them, renders it heavily dependent on the a-rational, ethical sphere of life, so to speak – the human factor, not only abstract economic or political interest calculations. In order to understand these a-rational aspects and illustrate

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23

their role in structuring post-Soviet political identity I will discuss the emergence of Lithuanian political cosmology. The chapter will demonstrate how a certain narrative and a set of political images formed over the course of history, and how it influenced the independence movement, liberating the country from the 50-year occupation. In order to suggest an alternative to both the theories that emphasise political and economic processes, and those that focus on discursive ones as the basis for identity formation, I will present the process in three aspects. The first part of the chapter will briefly introduce the reader to the history of Lithuania, emphasising the essential historical periods that formed the post-Soviet narrative and related political images, as well as demonstrating the political identityrelated transitory dynamics over time. Second, I will discuss how political identity was articulated and viewed by the modern Lithuanian society both in terms of intellectual reflection and image creation. Third, I will consider how these images as well as the historical narrative stood at the core of the independence movement, providing it with form and political vector, or telos. The chapter will end with a theoretical comparison of the modern political identity formation with ritual mask making. It will be argued that identity becomes an authentic part of the self through participating in it or, figuratively speaking, wearing the mask. It is this conclusion that will lead us to further investigation of post-Soviet identity formation and away from the duality of nature versus nurture.

Lithuania in history History in Eastern and Central Europe is a complex and politicised topic. It influences both domestic and international politics, and dictates the general political dynamics in the region. Being “stuck” in between the East and the West, the Asiatic and the European, which is an immanent problematic in the region, it has been in a constant flux for centuries.2 Historical narrative is the core element to political and cultural identity not only in Lithuania, but in the entire post-USSR region as well. The history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) is an essential part of not only the modern Lithuanian, but also the Belarusian and to a lesser extent the Ukrainian national historical narratives. A different kind of historical interpretation of the same factual history, therefore, provides newly formed modern political identities with historically grounded existential legitimacy. The contemporary Lithuanian historical narrative unites the modern postSoviet Lithuania with its medieval predecessor, the GDL. Both entities share symbols of power: the coat of arms, Vytis, symbolism of the capital, Vilnius, architectural memorials, etc. It is, however, contested by the Belarusian and Polish narratives, which also claim some of this heritage as their own, occasionally causing greater or lesser disagreements between these countries. In order to indicate how history feeds into the Lithuanian post-Soviet context, I will very briefly introduce the latter narrative. Since it is impossible to do justice to the topic in this book, I will only focus on the historical episodes that are directly linked to my further argument about the Lithuanian post-Soviet identity.

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The face and the mask: Lithuania

Grand Duchy of Lithuania The literary historical sources on Lithuanians are rather late. Most of the prehistoric (up to early eleventh century) knowledge is supplied by archaeological, linguistic and ethnographic studies. Ethnically Lithuanians belong to the Baltic family of tribes in the region, which is one of the three Indo-European cultures. The others, which arrived in the area much later, are Slavic and Germanic. In general, Indo-Europeans arrived in the pre-Baltic region around the third millennium BC. Geographically Balts inhabited the lands between the upper Volga and Oka rivers and Moscow in the east, the Pripyat and Seim rivers in the south, and the Wysla river in the west.3 However, out of many Baltic tribes, only Lithuanians and Latvians have survived until the present day. The Lithuanian language remains the most conservative Indo-European language of all that are still spoken nowadays, containing many words from proto-Indo-European, and being the closest live language to Sanskrit.4 Therefore, language as well as the fact of its archaic origins has become one of the fundamental pillars for developing the modern Lithuanian political and cultural identity. The history of the GDL is relatively vague and open to interpretation, the main reason being that the sources are in ancient Ruthenian rather than Latin. Also, they are relatively scarce and there is ample space for imagination. Most of the pre-historic knowledge is supplied by archaeological, linguistic and ethnographic studies. The name of Lithuania (Lituae) was first mentioned in 1009, in the Quedlinburg annals. However, it was not before 1263 that the state of Lithuania was established, as Duke Mindaugas united Baltic tribes into the GDL, labelling himself the Grand Duke. Both the figure of Mindaugas and the date of 1009 merge into the post-Soviet Lithuanian life, shaping both identity and policy: the (approximate) date of the coronation of Mindaugas is an annual national holiday, and in 2009 Lithuania allocated millions for various projects and initiatives in commemoration of the thousand years’ anniversary of the country’s name. The Baltic population in the GDL and before that, including most of the nobility and grand dukes, but unlike the Slavic Orthodox population, was traditionally pagan.5 Lithuanian polytheistic faith was very deeply embedded in the surrounding natural world. This made nature-centred ethics an important aspect not only of medieval life, but also, and more importantly, of the modern Lithuanian identity, reverberating in the nineteenth century’s historical narratives, Lithuanian political theories in the interwar period, and even into contemporary times.6 The Catholic Christianisation of the land took place only in the latter part of the fourteenth century, making Lithuania the youngest Christian European land, even though there were earlier unsuccessful efforts to adopt the Catholic faith. Christianisation opened the door for the belated spread of Western cultural and political influences.7 In 1401, Jagiełło, the Polish king of Lithuanian origins, bestowed the title of Grand Duke of Lithuania upon his cousin Vytautas, whose symbolic importance I will discuss further in the book. Due to his military as well as

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political victories, Vytautas had become an iconic hero in the Lithuanian . . popular historical narrative. Giedre Micku-naite, however, demonstrated how Vytautas was also consciously engaged in his own image making.8 Nevertheless, as we shall see, he is one of the main figures not only in the post-Soviet- but even more so in the interwar Lithuanian historical narrative. This was in large part due to the symbolism of his military achievements. In 1410, united Polish and Lithuanian forces, both led by cousins, in Grünwald Battle near Tannenberg, broke down the Teutonic Order, which, despite Lithuania’s Christianisation, had been continuing attacks on Lithuanian lands. After the battle, however, the Order failed to recover. There have been numerous debates, between Lithuanians and Poles, as to who exactly – the official leader Jagiełło or the battlefield leader Vytautas – led the actual battle. The debate transcends mere historical realm and reverberates within the national narratives of both modern political identities. In 1413, the Pact of Hrodło re-established Polish–Lithuanian political relations. The pact also marked the rise of some of the most powerful noble families in Lithuania as well as of the decentralisation of power in the GDL, as the gentry, through series of grants and privileges given by several elected future rulers, became more and more influential. This was the formal creation of Lithuanian political nation. From the Hrodło Pact, one can talk about legal citizenship in Lithuania, a republican governmental form with an elected grand duke, and the emergence of Lithuanian gentry, which, along with the nobility, constituted the Lithuanian citizenry (but represented less than 10 per cent of the general population). Rzeczpospolita: the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth In 1569, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish kingdom signed a union. This happened for various reasons, including the ambitions of the Lithuanian gentry to obtain equal rights compared with those enjoyed by the Polish gentry as well as unsuccessful wars with Muscovites. The topic of the union (signed in Lublin, Poland) has also been a matter of various debates both in contemporary Lithuanian and foreign academic discussions. Indeed, after the union, and during the existence of Rzeczpospolita, the changes, both political and cultural, were fairly profound. There was to be […] one invisible body-politic; one king, elected not born; one currency and one Sejm [parliament], whose deputies were to form the state’s most powerful institution. The Lithuanians were to keep their own law, their own administration, their own army, and the titles of their princely families. […] As it was, the grand duchy played a junior role in the Polish–Lithuanian partnership. Yet it possessed a guarantee of internal inviolability, and its representatives could participate in full in both the common Sejm and the royal elections. The so-called Noble Democracy gave the great Lithuanian lords inordinate influence.9

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The face and the mask: Lithuania

In the modern-time Lithuanian nationalist discourse this was controversial, because culturally and linguistically, together with attaining political power, the Lithuanian upper estates became ever more Polonised, which was seen as inducing moral downfall.10 Secondly, starting with the second part of the seventeenth century, the gentry’s estate began abusing their infamous right of veto (liberum veto), which they were enjoying within the Sejms (parliamentary meetings) of the Commonwealth. The right was also often manipulated or patronised by an interested party of the conflicting nobility.11 This political impotency was arguably one of the fundamental factors that paved the way for the weakening of the Commonwealth. It manifested as an internal legislative paralysis, which is often popularly called the “anarchy of the gentry”. The slow withering of the country resulted in its three-staged partition among the neighbouring Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires in the late eighteenth century. The lands of the GDL fell under the Russian Imperial rule.12 The difference in interpretation regarding the historical significance of the Commonwealth remains a recurring theme for debate between the Lithuanian and Polish national narratives. Some versions of the first reflect it in a negative light, as a gradual downfall of Lithuania, while the second praises it and attaches its own political continuity to this historical period. The Russian Empire and the formation of Lithuanian nationalism In the Russian Empire, the previous power structure crumbled. The division of Rzeczpospolita also meant a fundamental breakage in the Lithuanian political identity. [A]ll the historic administrative structures were replaced by centralized gubernias or “governorships”, which took their orders from the tsarist government in St. Petersburg. […] The entire nomenclature has changed. Russian names took the place of Polish names, and map-makers round the world came to terms with “Western Russia” or “the North-western Gubernias”. The old names of “Lithuania” and “Belarus” were banished. “White Ruthenia” was presented as “White Russia”, and an international treaty was signed to suppress the name of Poland forever. [… However,] the existing laws were too extensive and too firmly established to be replaced wholesale or overnight. Russian decrees were introduced gradually, and sections of the old Lithuanian Statutes remained in force for decades. Yet another area where radical change was introduced quickly pertained to the status of the nobility. They had elected the monarch, governed the localities, convened regional assemblies and enjoyed the rights to own land and to bear arms. Such “Golden Freedoms” were unthinkable in the tsarist autocracy, so early in the 1790s the privileges of the grand duchy’s nobility were arbitrarily restricted.13

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27

Polish had already become an official public language by that time, first spoken in the Catholic Church while also being the literary, scientific language, the prestigious one. Lithuanian, on the other hand, was a rustic language, spoken at home, in the fields (one must bear in mind that peasants constituted the vast majority of Lithuanian population, 93 per cent among ethnic Lithuanians by 1897).14 Jewish, Russians and Poles predominantly populated the cities. As Balkelis notes, this also means that, at the time, there was no Lithuanian middle class whatsoever.15 Romanticism, as well as the neo-romanticism in the early twentieth century, played a profound role in motivating two uprisings against the Russian imperial rule in Poland and Lithuania. The gentry uprisings of 1831–1832 and 1863–1864 were motivated by the romantic ambition to restore the lost Commonwealth. However, romanticism was also instrumental for the formation of the modern Lithuanian nationalism that led to the establishment of the Lithuanian Republic in 1918. In the nineteenth century, mainly led by the gentry, these uprisings sought to re-establish the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. They were both quelled and the gentry estate dissolved, as the tsar freed the region’s serfs from feudal dependency in 1861. This situation provided the conditions for the emergence of other motivation for resistance, also encouraged by the Imperial policy of language prohibition. This time, the modern national movement originated from the ethno-linguistically Lithuanian countryside. The modern Lithuanian national movement started during the second part of the nineteenth century and resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Lithuania in 1918. The mixture of Lithuanian nationalism and romanticism proved to be able to formulate a new type of firstly cultural identity. It became predominant, however, only in the last decade of the century, while the city of Vilnius became a cultural hub for the Lithuanian nationalist movement in the early twentieth century.16 After establishing the Lithuanian Republic during the interwar period, it became political and served as a base on which the contemporary, post-Soviet political identity is also formulated. This is how the shift of self-identification from Polish (which was repressed) to Lithuanian encouraged actual change in power politics. The nineteenth century marks a shift in the notion of Lithuanian-ness and a “struggle for the name of a Lithuanian”.17 The Lithuanian intelligentsia, originating from the well-off peasantry, played a profound role in forming the new character (ethno-linguistic, literary, rural) of Lithuanian nationalism. It was also the main driving force behind the movement for Lithuanian independence in the early twentieth century.18 This identity, however, was strong enough to withstand a century of turmoil both in the region and in the world, with substantial changes in all spheres of life as well as fifty years of Soviet repressions. Had this been only an unsubstantiated idealistic construct, it would not have held such historical pressure.

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The face and the mask: Lithuania

Lithuanian state in between the wars The interwar period is exceptionally important, first because, in 1918, the romantic ideas of the enlightened modern Lithuanian intellectuals of agrarian origins materialised. The modern Lithuanian political identity finally took shape as a self-governing state. With no prior experience in the field, the leadership of the state, consisting of a board of intellectuals of many different occupations, began paving a way for a new, modern kind of polity. For the contemporaries, having lived their entire life under imperial conditions, this was an entirely new experience. A broad array of administrative institutions and an entire governmental apparatus as well as a judicial system had to be created. Establishing a modern nation-state, which in terms of geopolitical composition as well as ideological intention resembled rather the ethnic Lithuania of the early thirteenth century than either the multi-national Grand Duchy ruled by Vytautas or Rzeczpospolita, was an important achievement for the Lithuanian intelligentsia. The newly formed state was to be a representative multi-party democracy, with three separate powers, a constitution, equal citizenry and no remnants of feudal social structure. In the contemporary context, it was one of the most democratic Eastern European states.19 However, there was still a lot to be done in establishing the Lithuanian polity, and there were lively discussions on the topic in the contemporary press. Four main traditions of political thought participated in the creation of the interwar Lithuanian political sphere.20 Tautininkai [the Lithuanian nationalist movement] were the main supporters of an authoritarian regime. They congregated around a journal Vairas [The Steering Wheel]. Authors of Catholic inclinations gathered around Židinys [The Hearth], Naujoji Romuva [The New Romuva; Romuva was a religious and cultural centre of ancient Baltic tribes], and XX Amžius [The 20th Century]. Alongside these, there was a popular [vernacular, folksy, demotic] democratic tradition of political thought, congregating around Varpas [The Bell] and the Leftist thinkers, collaborating in Kultu-ra [Culture]. […] It is necessary to distinguish the interwar intellectuals, fascinated by Marxism (Juozas Galvydis), from the functionaries of the Lithuanian Communist Party, which was prohibited by law (Zigmas Angarietis, Vincas Kapsukas). The latter acted as a force that was opposed to Lithuania and representing the interests of the Soviet Union.21 The democratic government in the interwar Lithuania lasted from 1918, when Lithuanian Republic was established, until 1926, when the government of the country was overtaken by a relatively mild authoritarian regime of Antanas Smetona. Smetona’s regime was overall fairly well accepted among the majority of Lithuanians. It is doubtful that, during this rather short interwar period, the general Lithuanian population, which had maintained its

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29

hierarchic agrarian understanding of social order, traditional ethics and autocratic source of government from the Imperial times, could have developed a deeper self-perception as an egalitarian liberal “civic contract” society. In other words, there was no contradiction in terms of legitimisation of sovereign government and the idea of a strong leader. However, “while historians attempted to draw parallels with Hitler or Mussolini, Smetona remained a practicing Catholic, did not pursue anti-Semitic policies and had a number of Jewish friends”.22 Smetona’s regime was not restrictive of intellectual freedom. In fact, high-level debates on political and philosophical, but also social and economic levels were taking place among the well-educated Lithuanian intellectual elite of the time. In opposition to the predominant Smetona’s Tautininkai narrative of Lithuanian political identity, other narratives, such as Catholic personalist and socialist/critical were present as well and often harshly criticised the existing regime. All these strands participated in deliberating on the new identity, forming the new existence of the national Lithuanian project up until the Soviet occupation during the Second World War. Second World War and Soviet occupation The war was devastating to the young Lithuanian state. The Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1938) decided the fate of Lithuania, which even though initially was included in the Nazi German sphere of influence, after the signing of a second secret protocol fell under the Soviet influence. At first (and no one knew about the secret protocols then) this was seen as a positive thing, since in 1939 the historical Lithuanian capital, along with Vilnius region (to which the modern Lithuanian state had historical narrative-motivated claims, and for which the Poles had fought in the aftermath of the First World War), was connected to Lithuania. The reactions to Soviet tanks, driving along the streets, varied. Understanding what this means, but not knowing what to expect, most were simply shocked and worried.23 In June 1940, the state was annexed and the polity destroyed. The occupation resulted in massive repressions and numerous deportations of the Lithuanian economic, cultural and intellectual elite to gulags all over Soviet Russia.24 Therefore, when in 1941 the Nazi occupation began, most people were shocked by this, but the majority took this as a better evil out of the two. Having seen the deportations during the first Soviet occupation, towards the end of the war (in 1944–1945), many Lithuanian intellectuals emigrated to Western Europe and the Americas. A minority of nationalists collaborated with the Nazis: “The Germans’ antisemitic equation of Jews with Soviet rule allowed Lithuanians (and others) to find a scapegoat for their own humiliation and suffering under Soviet rule. It also provided an escape route for many who had collaborated with the prior Soviet regime. The Germans had been sheltering Lithuanian nationalists who had fled Soviet rule, and cooperation between German forces and these Lithuanians allowed for a drastic

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escalation from pogroms to mass shootings”.25 However, on the grand scale, Lithuania refused to form an SS battalion and never collaborated with the Nazis militarily, while collaboration took place on the individual level, being an exception rather than the norm in the predominantly Catholic Lithuanian society. The second Soviet occupation, however, was even more destructive than the first one, and lasted for the next half-century.26 The repressions, in different intensities, continued throughout the entire Soviet period. The brightest, wealthiest and most cultured Lithuanians, those who had survived the first Soviet invasion and had not fled to the West during the Nazi occupation, including some members of my own family, were put into livestock wagons and sent to labour camps all over the Soviet Union. “No fewer than 456 thousand people (every third Lithuanian, or every second male, every eighth woman and every fifteenth child) became victims of the terror and genocide, executed by the Soviet occupants, and experienced violence in one form or another. 332 thousand people were incarcerated, deported to GULAG camps, and 265 thousand more were murdered in Lithuania (no fewer than 10 thousand of those were collaborators of the invaders).”27 However, the real number of those repressed throughout the 50-year occupation is unknown. A local puppet government was established and propaganda of Lithuania wilfully joining the Union was spread, although the occupation was never acknowledged internationally. Anyone denying the official propaganda in Soviet Lithuania was repressed. In opposition to the occupation, many young men and women hid in the Lithuanian forests and became guerrilla fighters, battling the regime up until 1965, when the last two fighters, refusing to surrender, shot themselves. Many people were interrogated, tortured, simply disappeared, were forced to spy on their friends and relatives, or . imprisoned in the KGB prison opposite Lukiškes Square, in Vilnius.28 After Stalin’s death, especially under Khrushchev, the repressions became less evident, even if the atmosphere remained tense. A new generation of Lithuanians grew, with no lived memory of interwar Lithuania. The hope to re-establish the independent modern Lithuanian polity was perhaps only secretly mentioned in the kitchens of communal apartments, among trusted friends.29 Lithuanian identity once again became a cultural phenomenon, despite the Russification in the Soviet Union, remaining alive in Lithuanian language as well as folklore and other cultural forms that were not perceived as a threat to the regime.30 After Brezhnev came to power, however, life in Soviet Union entered a long-lasting stagnation. The official space was harshly censored, and the only information that would reach the public was carefully filtered propaganda. The resistance against the regime remained, however, whether it was against the occupation of Lithuania or simply the absurdity of the contemporary life. In 1971 a young, longhaired Lithuanian, Romas Kalanta, publically poured gasoline over himself and set it on fire. After this act, the repressions strengthened.31 The dissident Catholic Church remained one of the main bastions

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Figure 2.1 Many Lithuanian photographers’ works in the Brezhnev era had similar artistic character, conveying greyness, dullness and apathy. Their works reflected the true emptiness and meaninglessness of the poli. contemporary . tical, social and cultural and simply human life. . Agne Narušyte called the phenomena the aesthetics of boredom (Narušyte, 2008). Photo: Vytautas Balcˇ ytis.

preserving and promoting anti-Soviet Lithuanian identity. The most important underground periodical, written and edited by the church, was Lietuvos katalikų kronika or the Chronicle of Lithuanian Catholics. In it, the repressions of the regime first of all against the church, but against others as well, were documented, in an effort to gather the true information about the acts of Soviets in Lithuania, which would not be accessible officially. It was printed in secret and spread to the West as well as among Lithuanians.32 Following Brezhnev’s and soon after Andropov’s and Chernenko’s deaths, with “young” Gorbachev coming into power, the deterioration of the system was obvious. By then, yet another generation of Lithuanians was growing. News and information from and about the West, mostly from Poland and Finland, reached Lithuanians through radio and television. Stories by those lucky enough to have been allowed to leave for a trip to the West, and to have smuggled items that were of far better quality and much better looking than the Soviet ones, inspired dreams of life behind the Iron Curtain. The West was idealised and fantasised about. Western products were copied and imitated in the Soviet Union industrially and on mass scale. In the later eighties, the deportees, or children of the deportees, started returning from all over the USSR, bringing with them stories of their experience.

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Their stories, having first been withheld, consolidated the independence movement in the late eighties, when it became possible to publicly speak about these deportations. Those who still had illusions about the regime were put to doubt by what they heard. The Perestroika and the loosening of the Soviet grip provided an opportunity for Lithuanians to put forward claims – first for the improvement of life, second for the dissolution of Soviet propaganda that the population had been fed for nearly half a century, and finally for the independence of Lithuania and the withdrawal of the occupiers. The Perestroika in Lithuania also meant the revival of belief in the possibility of Lithuanian national independence. With the emergence of Sa˛ju-dis, the Lithuanian independence movement, the belief became a reality...

Lithuania in thought Having overviewed the Lithuanian historical narrative, let us now concentrate on the period from the second part of the late nineteenth century onwards. It is important because it is here that the genesis of the modern Lithuanian political identity begins. With the annexation of the Rzeczpospolita by the neighbouring empires, the Polish–Lithuanian political nation ceased to exist. Now they were the gentry of the Russian Empire, yet until the January Uprising of 1863–1864 they still perceived themselves as the citizens of a lost republic to be re-established. After the uprising was quelled, a type of meaning vacuum in terms of power justification at the formal level emerged. The titles of the gentry (i.e. the denominators of non-existent citizenry), along with their privileges, remained in place, but there was no sovereign who, by his decrees, legitimised them. The Lithuanian Statute, with some adjustments, remained in power, maintaining its administrative function, but the political institution that established these legislations was no longer existent. In other words, Lithuanian society found itself in a paradoxical condition, where titles, denominating not only social but also existential status lost their meaning; the formerly structured, traditional social organism collapsed and merged into an unarticulated mass. The pre-modern cosmology of the political and social order fell and a new one had to emerge; new explanations for the existence of the political “self” had to be found. The modern Lithuanian nation was first an intellectual product, similarly to many other contemporary cases of nation building, influenced by romanticism and nationalism. However, it also was embedded within the agrarian mindset and ethics, the emphasis on the ancient roots of Lithuanian language and on Catholic faith, as most leading intellectuals originated from better-off Lithuanian farmer families. These components were key for the articulation of the new self-image of the emerging linguistically and culturally based Lithuanian nation. And having established its status quo as a political entity in 1918, it was this self-image that served as a normative paradigm in not only formulating the national narrative and articulating the country’s friends and foes, but also in guiding real factual politics throughout the twentieth

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century. Let us therefore take a closer look at the image itself as well as three different articulations thereof, which also constituted the political cosmology of the Lithuanian nation even after the Soviet Union. Linguistic, cultural and agrarian basis The modern Lithuanian identity, originating in the late nineteenth century, reverberated Herder’s idea of the non-political but rather cultural nature of national selfhood. Simonas Daukantas, an enlightened Lithuanian romantic historian, wrote the first history of Lithuanian culture in 1845.33 His work could be better perceived as a piece of fact-based fictional literature rather than what is nowadays called a factual history. The book, however, had a tremendous impact not only for the formation of the nation, but also for the emergence of the identity-related political imagery. In his book, Daukantas created a historical myth about the “noble primitive”, an idealised, partially fictional description of a morally better, cleaner ancient Lithuanian culture. An episode from prelate Mykolas Krupavicˇ ius’s childhood unveils the general context of nineteenth-century national self-perception. Krupavicˇ ius claims that, in those times, there was no knowledge among the common folk about the prior free Lithuania […]. This episode from the not-sodistant past encourages the thought that the famous painting “Karalių ˇ iurlionis pasaka” [The Tale of Kings] (1909) by Mykolas Konstantinas C was not merely a product of the artist’s elaborate imagination. It is plausible that the picture best expresses the commonly held vision of the Lithuanian history, founding the Lithuanian identity. Powerful kings, unidentifiable with any particular historical character, hold a luminous settlement in their hands and watch over it with their caring eyes. These kings are as if beyond the verge of history, and yet they are historically important metaphysical patrons, not human actors, participating in history.34 It was cultural rather than political conceptualisation of a nation that became the core element in Lithuanian identity. The connection with the mythological and distant past was established via linguistic, traditional and religious links. As such, this kind of self-articulation also shaped the conceptualisation of the political purpose of the Lithuanian state as a protector of this ancient cultural foundation. The knowledge of Lithuanian history at the time was scarce, which provided fine soil for emotionally attractive national imagery to emerge.35 In this . context, a book called Iš krikšcˇ ionijos santykių su senoves lietuvių tikyba ir kultura [On the Relationships between the Christendom and Ancient Lithuanian Faith and Culture] by Jonas Basanavicˇ ius, one of the core figures behind the Act of Independence of Lithuania, is important. It introduces two crucial ideas about the modern Lithuanian identity; these, either in pure form or

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ˇ iurlionis: Fairy Tale (Fairy Tale of the Kings). Etude. 1908/9, Figure 2.2 M. K. C ˇ t 163 Courtesy of the M. K. C ˇ iurlionis tempera on paper, 15.3  18.3, C National Museum of Art.

transformed, for instance in a form of Euro-scepticism, still reverberate in the contemporary Lithuanian identity narrative. The first idea was that, after Christianity (as an institution, not moral faith) reached Lithuanians, their culture and ethics entered a downfall. The partitions the country suffered as well as the internal degradation of a once glorious culture are therefore but symptoms of this process of decay, associated with Polonisation. The second idea was that the remnants of once glorious Lithuanian culture need to be preserved and restored on an ethno-cultural and linguistic basis.36 These ideas influenced not only the structuring rationale of the interwar Lithuanian polity, but also the preservation of the culturally grounded Lithuanian identity during the Soviet period. Next to the cultural side, another important factor in shaping the character of the modern Lithuanian nation was its agrarian origins. Even though sharing the romantic heritage, the modern Lithuanian nation of the nineteenth- and the twentieth century was not born from the egalitarian liberation movement of citizenry and proletariat, as was the case in the instance of, say, France. In the Lithuanian case, instead of common struggle against economic inequality and monarchic sovereignty deriving from the divine source, the connecting factors were, as mentioned, cultural and, in fact, agricultural. As most ethnic

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Lithuanians who were forming the modern Lithuanian identity originated from the countryside, it was this pre-modern agrarian worldview that served as the basis for their articulation of the political “self”. According to Vytautas Kavolis, in the archaic, agrarian, pre-Christian Lithuanian perception (elements of which have remained long after the official Christianisation), there is an analogy between a human being and natural phenomena: human being is the same as the natural elements that surround him. These two separate when soul or rationality is ascribed to human being that are not present in other natural phenomena, then the human being becomes radically different. Such perception can be found both in the Greek and Christian traditions, but in the archaic Lithuanian strata, similarly as in Eastern Asian cultures, a human being is the same as the natural phenomena surrounding him, he experiences the same things, he has the same spiritual foundation.37 The Lithuanian notion of homeland and of the political “self”, therefore, was substantiated by the common ethical (customary and Catholic) and linguistic tradition as well as the territorial affiliation, which derived from the intimate agrarian relation with the working soil. This combination of historical, cultural and socio-economic circumstances shaped the character of the future intellectual articulation as well as the representation of the modern Lithuanian political persona. “Tauta” as the modern Lithuanian self-image One of the most important tasks and topical issues to the interwar debates was the articulation of the new estate-free modern nation. As it was first understood as a cultural entity, the tauta project was rather unique compared with the cultural crisis that the West was undergoing after the First World War.38 The period of Western disappointment with cultural achievements after the First World War in Lithuania coincided with the establishment of the national state. There was no “tiredness” from culture, which was characteristic to the contemporary Western cultural consciousness; it was not possible to radically question the meaning of culture. The most important real mission was not to set loose from culture, but to create it, to overtake and elaborate it. Finally, the very phenomenon of cultural crisis did not manifest itself that clearly in Lithuania; or it manifested in a unique way.39 When discussing the Lithuanian nation, instead of nacija Lithuanian thinkers used and still use tauta. During the interwar period, this concept was understood in teleological terms – as having a purpose, a telos – but also being purposeful itself (romantic influence). This was thus not only a backwardsoriented conceptualisation, concerned with the “revitalisation of the nation”,

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but also a teleological, forward-looking project of self-creation, self-development. While all the rest of Europe was in a pessimistic cultural crisis, Lithuanian intelligentsia as well as that of some other Eastern and Central European countries were concerned with a constructive role and purpose of culture. An important nuance is the fact that the creation of tauta was an effort to “create”, articulate or recognise not a new ethnic identity but a new ethical one. By ethical I mean a cluster of rules, motivations, moral principles and meanings that would unify the people, at the same time oriented towards some greater good, not only (but not excluding) the representation of political interests. Politics was understood as a result, a contingent and natural outcome of an autonomous existence and activity of Lithuanian tauta.40 A part of such autonomous existence was, of course, deliberative self-articulation. This Lithuanian identity is not homogenous or uniform. There were and still are different intellectual strands debating the concept. Despite the ideological differences, however, precisely through participation in the discussion, these intellectual strands participate in the very creation of political and cultural Lithuanian tauta. Three approaches to understanding tauta The varying and different intellectual strands are at the same time separate and connected by the same historical narrative and political cosmology. In this sense, the deliberative plurality of conceptions of what the collective political “self” entails perpetuates the actual existence of the “self”, as the conception is reciprocated and is identified with in new and creative ways. Three main approaches have been commonly defining and articulating the modern Lithuanian project of cultural, ethical and political self. The Lithuanian intellectual tradition was very strongly focused on reflecting upon, articulating, preserving or even constructing the existential problematic of nationhood, “Lithuanian-ness”, selfness and identity. It started during the emerging period of the ethno-linguistic Lithuanian identity back in the Russian Empire and continued being formulated as a modern national identity in between the war and during the Soviet times, in the exile literature. Even after Lithuanians once again regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, this self-reflection remained a fundamental intellectual issue. I will group the debate into three main intellectual strands: the mythological establishment, the modern rationalist and materialist critique, and the culturalist and personalist alternative. These approaches do not correspond to any political groups within the society but rather signify three trajectories of thinking in the common and uncontrolled process of creating the articulation, the definition of what tauta means. Having emerged from different theoretical premises in the early twentieth century, they comprise the core body of thought about Lithuanian identity and have a continuation in the post-Soviet Lithuanian political identity narrative, influencing contemporary ideological programmes of political parties as well as shaping the political debate in general.

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The mythological establishment The oldest and most important organisation that could be associated with the establishment and articulation of the meaning of modern tauta, was called Tautininkai. These were the most prominent and popularly supported in the interwar Lithuania, and also during the anti-Soviet independence movement. Tautininkai promoted collectivist political association and a centralised government. They argued for the historical continuity of Lithuanian tauta, from the mythological, ancient, pre-Christian times to nowadays, manifesting itself mainly through culture and language.41 Identity was understood as culturally given, immanent and constituting the particularity of a nation. The political state was understood as a nation-state that plays a protective role, defending and fostering Lithuanian culture, continuing its ethical tradition. This is the oldest strand of thought, which emerged in the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth century. The most important figure among Tautininkai became Antanas Smetona, who in 1926 took power by military means and established a mild authoritarian regime in a formerly democratic Republic of Lithuania. The main objective of the organisation was the prosperity of the nation-state, which was based on an ethnically, ethically and linguistically perceived tauta. Tautininkai were heavily influenced by the Herderian ideas and tried to express the unique Lithuanian spirit in various intertwining forms – political, ethical, artistic and others. Influenced by the Enlightenment, this was a secular movement. Instead of supporting the Catholic Church, Tautininkai promoted the reconstructed and stylised form of pagan culture as an expression of the national spirit.42 Ironically, it assumed Christian forms of expression, whereas tauta itself was perceived as a type of personified iconographic deity or spirit. In terms of historical narrative, Tautininkai favoured the autonomous times of the pre-Commonwealth, and even pre-Christian, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and emphasising the ethnocultural relations between the pagan Lithuania, interwar Lithuanian Republic and present-day Lithuania. This was done not only to express the particularity and “spirit” of the nation, but also to distinguish it from the neighbouring ones, particularly from the Polish, with whom Lithuanians had bloody conflicts over the Vilnius region, and from the Russians, who were the long-term occupiers. Tautininkai as an organisation was marginalised with the Soviet occupation and never regained its influence in the post-Soviet Lithuania. However, the mythological intellectual position, with which it was mostly associated, is still prevalent in Lithuanian political cosmology. This kind of understanding of the Lithuanian nation is still most often taught in schools. Most historical images have been forming within the spirit of the Tautininkai worldview and still influence the popular narrative. The reasons for the contemporary popularity of this narrative can also be related to a “Lithuanian History” written by Adolfas Šapoka in 1936, which, having been composed in the neo-romantic atmosphere of the interwar Lithuania, was reprinted in 1989 and played a

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role in inspiring the Lithuanian national independence movement in the Soviet Union.43 The rationalist and materialist critique Even though not very popular (possibly because of the scarce working class, as the villagers preferred a more Lithuanian culture-grounded Tautininkai strand), there was a social democratic thought in the interwar Lithuania as well. The main topics this strand was interested in, however, were more economic and legal. They understood the state as a distribution organisation, and emphasised economic issues that had little to do with the cultural notion of Lithuanian identity. The strand therefore did not have much of an impact on the popular image of Lithuanian political identity either. Another “critical” school of historiography, however, was of bigger importance in the post-USSR Lithuania.44 In a Lithuanian context, it can perhaps be called the critical branch of thought. Using thorough historicist analysis, it seeks to “de-mythologise” Lithuanian history, cleansing it from empirically unsupported claims by the nationalist historiography. Nowadays, the articulations of Lithuanian political identity are becoming less “primordialist” and secluded. This is also possibly the case due to a changed political situation. When in the interwar period the main aim for the modern Lithuanians was to foster their own particularity, nowadays, due to a perceived as well as real Russian threat and Euro-integration, the historical narrative is becoming more and more European in character. The main claim is that Lithuanian history and identity is inseparable from the European history. In fact, Lithuania is understood as the last addition to the European community.45 Such an understanding of Lithuanian political identity rehabilitates the role of Christianity, attributing to it a functional role in spreading Western culture, not emphasising the spiritual aspect. It also revises the Polish–Lithuanian Republic historical period, claiming its positive influence on Lithuanian culture and history. Another, more rationalist (in a neo-Kantian sense) branch of this intellectual position towards the nature and contents of tauta is criticising the nonrationalist mythologising character of the established narrative. In a similar way as the more neo-Marxist thought-inspired critical position mentioned previously, they seek to de-mythologise the tauta, emphasising individual human rights, citizenship and the political side of what modern “Lithuanianness” means. Their articulation of political identity is more modernist and “enlightened”. Culturalist and personalist alternative The third branch of thought is perhaps less prevalent within the wider contemporary public, but is influential in the academia as well as the younger generation of intellectuals. In the interwar period, it was concentrated among

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the Christian democrats and was marked by some of the most prominent and original thinkers in Lithuanian intellectual history (Antanas Maceina, Girnius, etc.). Basing its position on the Christian values, the strand emphasised freedom of personality, culture and creativity as most important for the development of the polity. The state was perceived as the means of development for creative human beings, for personalities, and the collective nation was a cultural result of personal creativity. The agrarian experiential world perception in a modern intellectual political culture generated a symbiotic project of the “organic state”. It was an effort to cross the Christian, metaphysical thinking, the agrarian “organic” ethics element, with a modern political system. The Soviet occupation, however, made sure this project never came to pass, as most of the best Lithuanian intellectuals were forced to leave the country. In the exodus, having been influenced by the Western intellectual trends, the strand took a more liberal turn, abandoning the religious aspect and emphasising individuality and liberty. In Lithuania, however, this strand of thought has transformed into the Christian dissident movement, remaining the biggest bastion of intellectual resistance possible in the given circumstances. After the independence, having returned from the exodus, Western-educated children and grandchildren of the refugee Lithuanians were perceived by the post-USSR Lithuanians as pro-Western, pro-European, even though by then it assumed a more American liberal attitude. Nowadays, some Lithuanian academics have made efforts to revive the interwar Christian democratic thought, establishing a conservative narrative, deriving from the same culturalist, personalist and neo-Platonic intellectual position. In early 2013, an anthology of interwar Lithuanian political thought was published, with an emphasis on the mentioned strand of thought.46

“Lithuanian-ness” as experience Having discussed the main Lithuanian identity-forming historical episodes and considered how it was articulated intellectually, let us now see how it was re-established and reciprocated during the Lithuanian independence movement from the Soviet Union. This will illustrate my argument that political identity is formed not only via action and thought, but also via human experience. In other words, identity emerges from a hard, real embedded participation in the political process, while experiencing it in a human way and reflecting upon it intellectually, which involves explaining what is taking place, applying theories and creating myths. The intellectual “product”, a cosmological conception about the political self and the world, is based on the experience of factual, embedded historical processes or events, which constitute the historical narrative. But how does factuality turn into cosmology? How does “objective” reality, that which actually happens, turn into a narrative? The answer lies in the fact that any political process, in order to be reflected upon, has to be approached through the human prism, consisting of both experience and rational reflection, which

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infuses meaning to these events and thus already conveys an imaginary element. Let us observe this in the case of the Lithuanian independence movement, in order to conceptualise this human experiential level of the process. As I was one of the children who grew up under these circumstances, I have a personal relation to the events and experiences discussed, which is useful for the empathic approach this book presents. It is also useful for picking the experientially important episodes and nuances while considering the issue. Lithuanian independence movement The exact date of the Lithuanian independence movement, also popularly called sa˛ ju-dis, is difficult to establish. Various events in the late 1980s can be associated with the initiation of the new line of thinking, living and action within the Soviet Lithuanian society, which later took the shape of an independence and actual organisation called Sa˛ ju-dis.47 The physical beginning of the movement started before the fall of the Berlin Wall, on 23 August 1987, when despite the clear possibility of arrest and repressions, a relatively small group of Lithuanians gathered near a memorial to Adam Mickiewicz in Vilnius to commemorate and condemn the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.48 One year later, on 23 August 1988, the Lithuanian organisation “Sa˛ ju-dis” set up another meeting in Vingis Park in Vilnius. This time, 250 thousand people (myself included) attended. Soon after that, on 20 November 1988, Sa˛ ju-dis declared a moral independence from the Soviet Union.49 The movement attracted a lot of foreign attention; therefore the regime, obliged to follow its rhetoric of “putting on the human face”, was hesitant to physically restrain the movement. Many other meetings and public demonstrations followed during the next two years and events unfolded at a very quick pace. Having started with claims for “historical truth” and “change”, the movement soon became more articulate and declared its struggle for political, legal and economic independence and restitution of the occupied Lithuanian Republic. The regime failed to contain the movement, which much like almost a century ago was led by Lithuanian intelligentsia and had massive public support while the process was observed by foreign press. Many spheres of life, such as music, politics, religion, arts, sports and ecology, among others, all fed into the general political movement that was gradually articulating its own identity.50 Lithuanian independence was declared on 11 March 1990, and the first parliament was elected in 1992. Much to the surprise of many, the majority in the Lithuanian Parliament Seimas was won by the Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party, which consisted of former members of the Lithuanian Communist Party.51 Nevertheless, four years later, it was not re-elected, signifying a functioning democracy in the state. On 10–13 January 1991, the Soviet Army made one last effort to take back the independent Lithuanian state by force, but lost to an unarmed resistance of Lithuanians who would peacefully refuse to let the Soviet tanks and soldiers past to occupy the Lithuanian Parliament. This was not without a cost, however, as 14 innocent and

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41

Figures 2.3.1–3.2 The discontent with the Soviet regime rose throughout the late eighties until it reached a critical point (left). The establishment of Sa˛ ju-dis in Vilnius, 1988: members of the newly born organisation raising their member cards (right). Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

unarmed civilians died and many were injured during the defence. In August 1991, after the putsch in Moscow, the Soviet Army left Lithuania. After defending independence, the young state had to face multiple difficulties, first economic, but also cultural, social and political. Over a very short period of time, the state had to overcome massive changes in all spheres of life. It had to adapt not only to a new economic and political system, but also, most importantly, to a new way of life in freedom and a new set of rules

Figure 2.4 The last Soviet tanks leaving Lithuania. Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

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and values. Despite the challenge, 14 years after the declaration of independence, in 2004, Lithuania was accepted into NATO and the European Union. In 2009 Vilnius was declared a European Capital and in 2013 Lithuania was chosen to lead the European Parliament. Unlike in the case of many other post-Soviet countries, this shows Lithuania’s clear pro-European orientation in terms of political identity. It was proven via continuous support for Ukraine during its Maidan and afterwards, recognising the movement as well as the Russian aggression against it as a human experience that was in many ways like sa˛ ju-dis.

Figure 2.5 With the collapse of the Union and the opening of the borders, the postSoviet world, Lithuania included, was flooded with Western goods, often second hand and massively imported from Turkey. In the picture: an owner of a Soviet hanger-turned-flea market standing among his second-hand merchandise. Old Soviet slogans hang on the walls: “Energy, metal, fuel – protect them as if they were your own”, “In order to live better, one needs to work better”. Photo: Artu-ras Valiauga.

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Experience of resistance The lack of any kind of structure within the crumbling Soviet Union created a surreal liminal “Alice in Wonderland” experience, “a situation where almost anything can happen”.52 It is in this liminal condition, where the old political structures, even though present in form, were dysfunctional and deteriorating content-wise, that the new Lithuanian political cosmology was gradually taking shape. It would be unfair to say, however, that the narrative emerging within the process was an intentional power projection of the elites, as Richard Sakwa sees it in the case of Russia.53 As mentioned earlier, the Establishment Committee of Sa˛ ju-dis was elected spontaneously, out of those who were believed to be best suited for the position (whatever the perceived criteria could have been). It consisted of cultural figures – writers, philosophers, etc., not contemporary nomenclature.54 Furthermore, the claims for independence that resonated through the Lithuanian society were popular, but they were not merely populist. Before independence, the herd instinct would not have been a sufficient motivation to go to meetings and participate in the independence movement. Had the regime tightened its grip once again, the cost of political resistance would have been very clear to anyone living in the Soviet system. The understanding of the danger was reinforced by Gorbachev himself, threatening with “blood and death”.55 Most of those who understood the seriousness of the situation and decided to participate must have made a conscious choice – an act that was a rarity in the Soviet political culture. And it was this determined political choice, as well as faith in the image of independence, among other factors, that led the Lithuanians to the declaration of independence. The real shift was taking place in the minds of the people, most of whom for the first time in their lives could actually call themselves politically free, if not yet independent. This experience was particularly strengthened by the January Events, during which the imaginary of the independence movement actualised and materialised. The real crowd of Lithuanians, defending “the good” (images of freedom, truth, justice, Western and national culture, Christian ideals and respect for individuality/personality), resisted and won against a much stronger enemy – a Soviet army, which at the time symbolised all the possible “evil” (terror, repression, lies, exiles, violence, crude atheism, Russification, defacing/melding collectivism and much more). Therefore, to those participating, sa˛ ju-dis was not only a political struggle, but also an existential, politically eschatological battle of life or death. This was due to at least three factors: 1) the memory and imagery of suffering and victimisation during the Soviet times, 2) the binary differentiation between the West as the “good” and the East as the “evil” within the social imaginary, and 3) a quasi-metaphysical, almost religious perception of politics. Let us elaborate on each of these points. Suffering and victimhood Probably one of the most influential themes in the discussions of 1987 to 1991, which were taking place in the contemporary cultural press, the main

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The face and the mask: Lithuania media for Sa˛ ju-dis-related intellectual exchange, was the experience of suffering and victimhood. In condemnation of Stalinist repressions, Gorbachev’s government publicised formerly secret information about the deportations of Lithuanians during the dictator’s governing years. Many survivors of the deportations, or their descendants, returned to Lithuania and brought back their own shattering stories. On top of that, some facts about the operations by the NKVD and the KGB were revealed as a result of the glasnost policy. This came as a shock to the Lithuanian population, as even though everyone was aware of the repressions taking place in the Soviet Union, especially during Stalin’s reign, the scale of these repressions had been publicly unknown. However, there were also more subtle ways that the Soviet population was victimised. In her psychological analysis of the traumatic experiences of the

Figure 2.6 Coffins of Lithuanian deportees from Siberia returning home, met by relatives, 1989. Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

The face and the mask: Lithuania 45 . . Lithuanian tauta during the Soviet occupation, Danute Gailiene discusses the multi-faceted, indirect destructive effect of communism as social and political experiment in general. Next to public health issues within the Soviet society, such as alcoholism, high suicide rates, and increased rates of premature and violent deaths, she also considers the double-faced existence that the Soviet society had to pursue. First, the Soviets induced great harm to the institution of the family. Because of the constant double-lives that the people of the regime were forced to lead (i.e. publically declaring and living by the official set of values, despite not believing in them privately and in smaller circles), the family lost its very essence. Instead of being the initial place of education and upbringing, as it is in normal societies, it now became a cover for forbidden values and stories, which were later contradicted and denied in public both by family members themselves and by the representatives of wider and especially more official society, like school teachers and superiors at work.56 This discrepancy between the public and private life, between the factual and the formal, had two negative consequences that are endemic to most post-Soviet societies. The first was the cynicism, embedded within the public affairs. This kind of mindset can be directly related to the corruption and formalism in the post-Soviet politics. The second consequence was the escalation of these traumatic experiences and their reciprocation as part of political identity, which is both exalting and self-pitying.57 This centralisation of suffering in public discourse may serve to overcome psychological traumas, as . Gailiene suggests.58 Yet it also may invoke feelings of self-righteousness simply due to the virtue of having been victimised, as described by Arpad Szakolszai.59 Both effects are present in the post-Soviet Lithuanian society and are important for making sense of the post-Soviet Lithuanian identity-related politics. During the sa˛ ju-dis times, this element of self-victimisation had at least three effects. First, it added to the demonised image of the Soviet Union, making the struggle against it more than just political action, but also a personal and existential battle. Parallels between the Nazi and the Soviet regimes were drawn by placing both into the imaginary sphere of “totalitarian evil”. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact became a symbolic signifier of this “evil”.60 Second, the common narrative, human experience and the surrounding imaginary, as well as the struggle against the common enemy united the people if only for the period of resistance. Finally, with the growing realisation within the Lithuanian public itself, of the illegality of the Soviet occupation (these facts had been hidden and Lithuania was depicted by the Soviet propaganda as having wilfully joined the Union), a claim of re-establishing the perceived historical justice emerged. Historical processes as well as the historical image of Lithuanian tauta now once again had a mission, a telos: to oppose the

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image of “evil” in a form of the Soviet Union not only for political reasons, but also for the metaphysical ones, represented by the image of the “good” of independence and the Western way of life.61 The binary imaginary of West and East as “good” and “evil” This leads us to another experiential theme within the post-Soviet Lithuanian transition. Because of the predominant disposition that this was a struggle between not only political but also metaphysical powers, the political images and actions were infused with ontological values. Lithuania is not the only post-Soviet country that embraced the rhetoric of “returning to the West”. The idea was very influential among other post-Soviet and, especially, postWarsaw Pact European states. The expression, however, bears many more meanings to those “returning” than a mere shift in political circumstances or economic system. One of the leaders of Sa˛ ju-dis wrote in 1989: So should we return to what we were running from? I think – yes! There is no other way than back. If we want to save ourselves, if we want to live at all (that counts not only for us!) – let’s get back as soon as possible to what we were persistently denying for so long: back to private property, competition, monetary relations, democracy, decency, faith.62 Next to private property, democracy and competition, concepts of decency and faith were presented as integral parts of the image of the “Western” way of life. The striving for the image of the West, therefore, also implied a quest for certain metaphysical values that were lacking in the existential present. Both images of East (the USSR) and West were value laden and symbolic. This explains, first, the determination and the lack of compromise within the Lithuanian striving for independence, which was often a matter of concern and surprise, even to the Western world.63 Second, it accounts for the motivation behind Lithuania’s interest in joining the Western international organisations as well as pursuing pro-Western politics, which were sometimes at odds with the state’s economic and pragmatic interests. The information about the West was extremely scarce in the Soviet Union, which allowed for imagination to fill the gaps of ignorance. The West was perceived positively not only because of the quality of the goods that were sometimes smuggled into Lithuania and the news (as well as music) that was caught on the radio, but also because it represented everything that the Soviet Union was not. The West was imagined as democratic, liberal and Christian. It was an imaginary space of freedom, choice, high living standards, highquality products and a land of plenty: heaven on Earth, a sphere of ontological “good”.64 The idealised image of the West and its liberal ways was counter-poised to the conditions under the Soviet regime. Indeed, the difference was immense. “The East”, however, was an even more important image in the contemporary Lithuanian political cosmology.

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Figure 2.7 Prof. Vytautas Landsbergis, the leader of Sa˛ ju-dis and the contemporary High Council of Lithuania, walking in between the sandbags prepared for the possible assault by the Soviet army (during the January Events). In the background, a picture of the Statue of Liberty can be seen. This iconography represents an existential claim, because the statue here represents the Western “good”, whereas in the case of the Soviet attack, it was this picture under which the defenders would fight back, and, most likely, die. Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

It was naturally first associated with the USSR. However, it also represented and still represents more than a historical, factual political entity of the Soviet Union. It stands for the image of the eastern “Empire”, a powerful, expansive and brute force, much stronger than Lithuania, which has continuously been threatening the lands and nations surrounding it.65 Furthermore, the image of the East represented a source of lies, oppression and amorality. It was antihuman, corrupt, ungodly, violent, i.e. “evil” in its barest sense. This

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mythologised perception of the political as “evil” was especially well expressed in numerous political drawings that would be hung in public places in Vilnius. The Soviet Union here is depicted using various different figurative images that circulated in the contemporary press as well: a military boot, a spider, a dragon, a grim reaper, bloodthirsty Gorbachev, or other creatures. Of course, the factual reality was different and much more complex. There were many people in Russia itself who supported the Lithuanian striving for independence. Yet this was not evident to Lithuanians at the time, and thus the imaginary was more important than the factuality. The formation of the two images discussed above, that of the Western “good” and Eastern “evil”, created a binary teleological axis to the Lithuanians at the time. This kind of semi-religious imaginary of the political situation provided the ontological explanation for the crisis that was taking place and the motivation for the striving for independence, which would otherwise be seen as irrational, reckless or impossible. Lithuanians were striving for independence perceiving it as an existential act, not only a political struggle. Political quasi-metaphysics Tomas Sodeika and Aru-nas Sverdiolas have drawn attention to the tendency in the post-Soviet Lithuanian culture to quantify, politicise and materialise the metaphysical, thus imposing a claim to possess it. Their claim is that the Marxist materialist thinking forced upon the Soviet population distorts people’s world perception. The authors call it quasi-metaphysics, which manifests itself through an inadequate perception of the metaphysical: “It demands that one fill one’s mind with values and ideals in similar fashion as one fills the shop shelves with groceries. One is supposed to acquire spiritual competence in the same way that a piece of machinery is supposed to be constructed better”.66 This pragmatic interpretation of the metaphysical gave way to ritualisation and scarification of politics. As evidenced by the contemporary press and photographs, religiousness merged with politics, rendering the struggle for independence a sacred quest. This quasi-religiousness manifested in various political forms. Some articles in the contemporary cultural press called for forgiveness of collaborators as a necessary means for a free, integral further life.67 Collaboration here is perceived as a religious sin. In a Christian practice, the society needed to refresh, restart, confess and repent, begin anew.68 Other manifestations of political religiousness manifested in political rituals that were particularly popular at the time. In 1990, Lenin’s statue was overthrown amid great cheers. Ritualistic denouncement of various Soviet imaginary was especially widespread.69 Religious iconography was also used as an integral part of the official politics of the young Lithuanian Republic. One of the images representing Lithuanian “character” that emerged in the interwar . Lithuania was that of Ru-pintojelis, the Ecce Homo, the Schmerzesmann, the 70 Worried Man. The martyrological image of Lithuanian identity became

Figure 2.8 Different iconographic representations of the Soviet “evil” in contemporary drawings hung outside the parliament after the January Events. Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

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. Figure 2.9 Lenin’s statue taken down in Lukiškes Square, Vilnius. Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

particularly important in asserting the moral right to independence. The image of suffering tauta sanctified the cause. Political religiousness expressed itself in formal ways as well. Among the most active and important resistance actors was the Catholic Church.71 Here Catholicism did not only mean a religion – it also symbolised and conveyed Western European cultural values. It was heavily repressed by the Soviet government, but managed to inspire political dissidents as well as the production and sustaining of Lithuanian identity narrative, and was one of the main actors in the movement for Lithuanian independence in the late 1980s.72 In fact, many new-born Lithuanian children at the time, including myself, were baptised with an intention to introduce them not only into the Catholic community, but also, and more importantly, into the “true” Lithuanian community.73 One other important moving power for “Sa˛ju-dis” was the Lithuanian neopagan faith.74 Even though the coherence and actual practicality of the cult could be criticised, it posed a cultural influence, especially to the younger generation, as well as providing inspirational grounds for the formation of a post-Soviet national narrative. It became influential because, in the Soviet Union, while Catholicism was repressed as a form of dissident resistance, the pagan, ethnographic, mythological, folkloristic studies and activities, which did not pose a political threat to the regime, managed to balance on the verge of legitimacy and have not been banned. This way, they maintained and articulated a type of Lithuanian identity, which later popularised in society. It also in many ways re-actualised the traditional Lithuanian naturalist tauta

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Figure 2.10 One of the independence movement meetings in Vilnius. The banner shows, “Europe, show Christian solidarity to the suffering Baltic people!” Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

ethics, revitalising and enacting a live, experienced human connection to nature. Through this medium, it established a link with the tauta tradition, which provided both inspiration and existential foundation of natural authenticity for resisting the technocratic absurdity of the Soviet regime.

Modern identity formation as mask-making We have so far discussed the Lithuanian case and its political identity formation from three perspectives. First, we have viewed it as a historical process, providing the factual material for the identity narrative to form. Second, we have considered it as an intellectual product, merging various historical and political images into three dialectically interlinked narratives, engaging in a collective creation of the political identity through discussion and reflection.

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Third, we have looked at the experiential meaning of Lithuanian political identity narrative to people, engaged in re-establishing the state and polity during the independence movement. Some generalisations can now be drawn. The region between Russia and Germany has always been a liminal space, where dynamic political shifts have been constantly taking place. The development of Lithuanian as well as other regional political identities should therefore be observed within the context of tension between the East and the West. Lithuania, in the forms of the GDL and Rzeczpospolita, has been a Western cultural entity for 300 years, and for most of the last 200 years the region has been under Eastern influence, whether Russian Imperial or Soviet, or else has “returned to the West”. This ambiguity is evident even nowadays, and the problematic remains important. Furthermore, the historical process provided the matter for the modern political identity and imaginary to form. This began in the late nineteenth century, after the political and social heritage of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was destroyed, and bore fruit during the interwar period. Unfortunately for the young Lithuanian state, the political project was halted by the Soviet occupation, only to be re-instigated by the Sa˛ ju-dis independence movement in 1990. When considering the modern Lithuanian political identity, three elements are important. The first one is the agrarian (not proletarian, not bourgeois nor aristocratic) culture that provides fundamental symbols and meanings for Lithuanian identity. This was the basis for the idea of the “organic state” to emerge, anchoring the national narrative in the naturalist rather than rationalist world perception. The second element is the idea that modern “Lithuanian-ness” must be understood first in linguistic, ethnic and cultural terms. This helped maintain the Lithuanian identity during the Soviet occupation. Finally, a religious Catholic element played a profoundly important cultural and political role throughout Lithuanian history. Despite the atheistic Soviet regime, Catholicism and religious behaviour has always been an important factor in Lithuanian political identity, and has influenced the way in which the independence struggle was sacralised. All these influences shaped the human experience during the sa˛ ju-dis independence movement and the formation of the post-Soviet political identity. Other important factors for the process were the political situation Unionwide, the economical downfall and the social changes as well as various cultural initiatives. We also discussed three experiential themes that provided the independence movement with symbolic, emotional and associative content: the sense of victimhood, associative images of the East and the West, and political ritualisation and quasi-metaphysics. The mixture of all these factors proved strong enough to motivate the Lithuanian population to re-establish its political identity as an independent state. Mask-identity Following what has been discussed, I would like to look at the problem of authenticity of modern identity and will argue beyond the duality of

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constructed vs. authentic, introducing the idea of authentication – of the former turning into the latter through political practice. The notion of identity formation that I will articulate is comparable to mask-making, where mask becomes an organic, authentic part of the “wearer” through the process of “wearing” it. A mask is a product of human thought and practice, infusing factual matter (history) with narrative and imagery through engaging in the formative process. However, when worn it should not be interpreted as something falsifying the reality or deceiving the viewer, not as something hiding the actual, but as something man-made, symbolic and transformative. According to Pizzorno, a mask, when worn in a ritual, constitutes the wearer’s actual presence. Instead of someone hiding his face behind the mask, the wearer becomes the mask, the character it represents.75 If we consider a political process to be a type of secular ritual, a symbolic, public and power-infused practice that is yet regulated by legal, strategic, diplomatic and other conventions, then a newly articulated mask-identity constitutes the political presence, the political persona of the participant. Presidents are not presidents “by nature”; they wear a title, a power-infused “construct”, a presidential mask. Accordingly, in the ritual of politics, they function as the mask-identities that they represent rather than their own “natural” personalities. On the other hand, the events that occur in this ritual impact them on both the identity and the personal, experiential level. The same thing happens with participating groups of people or societies. This way, the margin between the mask and the wearer, the nature and the construct, the identity and the participant disappears. In terms of political presence, through political practice, the face and the mask become one and the same. The mask comes to represent, but even more so it comes to constitute the actor. In this way it presents a possibility for an individual, for a group, for a society, to establish itself in a new presence, by identifying with the mask, participating in its identity and engaging politically through the political persona of the mask, be it an official personality, an independence movement or a new nation. In this sense, politically, the mask comes to constitute the authentic being of those who participate in it. Through their external appearance, it establishes their manifest presence. Such a metaphor allows for a different from rationalist articulation of political identity and unfolds its existential, not only nominal implications. It also requires us to understand being not as a uniform, logical “a or b”, “is or is not” expression, but in a mythological way, as transcending, multi-faceted, semi-hidden and paradoxical. The identity mask is at the same time the duplication of the self and authentication, all of which is conducted by participation in the (political) process. Politically, but also existentially, such mythological image-making of the “self” is required for structuring reality, making it humanly conceivable. It introduces a perception of cosmic order, and thus makes participation in the political authentic and sensible to a finite human mind. Regarding the process of authentication, Pizzorno explains: “[i]f the mask is the face of death, stiff, turned into a thing, then it belongs to the

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immutable, to the identifiable; it will be identical to itself, to the being it represents, through time. Whoever stands before the mask will be in the presence of a being that is finally true to itself, that realizes its own self-identity. Such are the beings that belong to myth, or simply to the past, such are the ancestors”.76 Therefore, political identity-constituting symbolic images, such as a grave of the Unknown Soldier, a national flag or a king’s crown, constitute the very legitimacy of memory, identity and power. Once the identity becomes a mythological part of political cosmology in a society, it is authenticated.77 Modern political identity mask, therefore, through being worn, and through the embedded participation in the social or political, becomes an authentic part of the wearer and its signifier. As I have already implied, however, mythology can be ontologically or factually misrecognised, imprecise. The very nature of mythological thinking requires abbreviation, approximation and reduction of the factuality. Just like in Plato’s cave simile, certain sets of beliefs can be partially false or erratic. Political imaginary, just as any other set of gnostic claims, is imperfect in that it does not contain absolute knowledge, only that which is reachable through experience and reflection. It can be interpreted in many ways and it can resonate with different human needs and existential as well as practical questions. Yet fixed knowledge is a refuge to a human experiencing terror of the hidden, of the non-defined, such as a political crisis. It provides the conceivable, cosmological time and space, regarding which a society can establish its political persona, conceive its “interest” and identify its friends and foes.78 Images give meaning to experiences such as victories, suffering and struggle, and unite those sharing the imaginary. They also provide answers to important existential questions about the self as a modern nation, which has no live ancient tradition or mythology to lend answers instead. To illustrate what has been said, let us examine the case of Lithuanian peaceful resistance against the Soviet Army in January 1991. Experience as authentication: the January Events I have been repeating that the contemporary Lithuanian political identity is modern and that it has been forming since the late nineteenth century. It is not based on an ancient feudal or clan tradition. Various tragic historical events tore this tradition apart as well as continuously traumatised people, also affecting the culture. This would thus imply in some sense that the claims of heritage by the modern Lithuanian nation towards the medieval GDL or Rzeczpospolita as a historical source of its “self-ness” is inauthentic, that Lithuanian identity does not or should not have a relation to the medieval Lithuania. This is not at all the case, however. Not only does Lithuanian historical narrative claim ancient historical continuity, but this continuity also exists experientially and functions politically. Even if not factually historical, even if

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the political identity of a Lithuanian or Ruthenian nobleman or of a Polish– Lithuanian member of the gentry of Rzeczpospolita is not factually the same as the citizenship of a modern Lithuanian, the continuity exists through historical narrative that constitutes an existentially important image of the self, the tauta of the present-day Lithuanians. Not only that, but this quasimythological knowledge has political importance. It motivated the resistance against the regime, patriotic feelings, notions of self and the other as well as actual internal and external politics in the post-USSR Lithuania. This claim to heritage is symbolic, but its political effect is very tangible. We therefore need to inquire not into the empirical factuality of the identity narrative, but into its phenomenology. In January 1991, almost a year after the declaration of Lithuanian independence, the collapsing Soviet regime gave its last push to resume control over Lithuania. The Soviet army was still present in the country at the time, and early in the month it started moving towards various strategic objects, forcefully overtaking them. The news spread across Lithuania, and people gathered around various objects, the most significant of which was the TV tower and Seimas (Lithuanian house of parliament). Because there were so many people gathering, and due to international pressure, the ultimate bloodbath did not take place, yet 14 perished under Soviet tanks on the night of 13 January, as a peaceful crowd were simply standing and singing (formerly forbidden) national songs, not letting the Soviets past. There are at least two important elements in this story. First, the resistance was and remained peaceful despite the deadly aggression directed towards them. As mentioned before, sa˛ ju-dis was deeply inspired by Ghandi’s political example. Due to this peaceful attitude, it deserves being seen as absolutely morally superior to the oppressor – a fact that was indeed realised and sometimes used as a means of establishing political agenda in later times. The entire movement was also led by some of the best in the society – the cultural, intellectual and, as it turned out in practice, moral elite, as opposed to the richest, most powerful, most brutal, most convincing or most pragmatic. The second element is that the January Events were perceived in existential, eschatological terms. This is both a result of and a cause for the quasireligious aspect mentioned above. On the one hand, it was not only political, economic and cultural freedom that was defended here, but also the very existence of the Lithuanian tauta that was sublimated, conceptualised in the image of independent Lithuania. On the other hand, speaking in these terms, it was exactly the Christianisation, the successful rite of passage for Lithuanians, whose tauta was now a true, existent political persona that made a political choice and peacefully resisted the Soviet tanks. The post-Soviet Lithuanian identity mask was authenticated that night and manifested as a political and existential motivation for defence of the political self. Previously an intellectual project, then having been just “constructed” on 11 March 1990, it now became a true, existential fact.

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Figures 2.11–14 On 11 January, Soviet tanks arrived in front of the Press House in Vilnius. They were also sent to other strategic buildings in the country (top left). Some Soviet soldiers were sent to Vilnius from outer regions of the Union and had little understanding about the events in Lithuania (top right). People stood in live wall formation against the tanks in peaceful protest, defiant, chanting and singing (bottom left). Although some important objects were taken by the army, the most crucial one, Parliament House, with members of the Lithuanian High Council inside, remained untouched. Crowds of people remained in Parliament House Square day and night, peacefully defending it (bottom right). Photos: Juozas Kazlauskas.

Sa˛ ju-dis was born as a fiction, as a dream, which entailed various moral and political images, expressing things like freedom, victimhood, East and West, “self” and the “other”, as well as historical images that inspired the content of the “self” – those of ancestors, great dukes, pagan gods, ancient heritage, of Žalgiris battle, ancient language, naturalist ethics, Christian affinity to the West, and of tauta as a real, functioning political actor. It created a cosmology, a Lebenswelt for those participating, and in doing so, it created an authentic political identity: those who participated, those embedded, actualised their own political existence using a partially imaginary, partially artificial and partially factual identity mask. This is how, through human experience, through political practice and participation in the hard, real, “objective” political events, the identity mask becomes an authentic, existential reality. On its turn, as it is once again reflected upon, looked at critically, presented with an alternative and is subjected to new political events, it once again starts the (re-)production of new identity masks. It is through lived process of the participants that political identities both change and re-establish, maintaining their authentic existence.

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Figure 2.15 Lithuanian flag raised in front of Parliament House Square after the night of 12–13 January 1990. Photo: Juozas Kazlauskas.

Notes 1 The difference between the Soviet states and the satellite Socialist Bloc was extensive, spanning political and economic to cultural and existential conditions in a broader sense. The Soviet states were under much more thorough control from the Kremlin and people there lived under much harsher conditions of the “socialist paradise”. In fact, the Baltic States were considered the “West” (in terms of high life standards) Union wide and, analogically, the Central European socialist states were seen as “West” by the Baltic people. 2 The significance of being “stuck in between” has been discussed in: Arvydas Grišinas, “Central Marginality: Minorities, Images and Victimhood in Central-Eastern Europe”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 23, no. 1 (2017), 66–80. 3 Adomas Butrimas, Baltų Menas [Art of the Balts] (Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, 2009), 19–29. 4 Zigmas Zinkevicˇ ius, Rytų Lietuva praeityje ir dabar [Lithuanian Language in the Past and Now] (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1993), 9. 5 The fact that Lithuania was the last European pagan country to turn to Christianity remains an important element in a Lithuanian nationalist narrative, and in an indirect way feeds into an overall alternative culture of various contemporary neo-pagan, neo-traditionalist, neo-conservative movements not only in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in Scandinavia, Russia, the Balkans, etc. 6 An interesting use of this anti-logo-centric naturalist conception of being is presented by one of the most important contemporary Lithuanian philosophers, . Arvydas Šliogeris. See: Arvydas Šliogeris, Bulves Metafizika [Potato’s Metaphysics] (Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2010). 7 This is not to say, however, that Lithuanians had no earlier contacts with the outer world. Baltic tribes have been mentioned by Tacitus as early as 98AD, and, possibly, even by Herodotus himself. See Gintaras Beresnevicˇ ius, Lietuvių Religija Ir Mitologia [Lithuanian Religion and Mythology] (Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 2004), 10–22.

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20 21

22 23

The face and the mask: Lithuania Lithuanians had contact with the outer world first of all through military encounters, but also through trade, arriving missionaries and diplomats. They had no writing; therefore, scribes from Kyiv Rus’ would be hired to perform administrative tasks. This was the reason why most of the Lithuanian written sources had been written in Ruthenian. However, Norman Davies argues differently. According to him, because there are no governmental written texts remaining in the Lithuanian language, and because Ruthenian was the language of politics and government, Lithuanian must have been used only by the peasantry and ethnic Lithuanian nobility, but only for domestic, or, starting with the sixteenth century, also for religious purposes. (Norman Davies, Europe: A History (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 228.) The later version, if understood in a shallow manner, may argue heavily in favour of the Belarusian nationalist historical narrative. It is not my aim here to decide who is right. However, this illustrates the point, put forth in the introduction of this chapter, that different interpretations of the same factual history exist, and that they heavily influence . the local .identity politics of post-USSR countries. Giedre Micku-naite, Vytautas Didysis. Valdovo I˛vaizdis [Vytautas Magnus. The Image of the Ruler] (Vilnius: Vilnius Art Academy Press, 2008). Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 272–274. Ibid., 282. Liberum veto allowed each and any member of the gentry to unilaterally stop the law from being passed at any moment of the Sejm assembly. Ibid., 286–293. Ibid., 290–293. Algimantas Valantiejus, “Early Lithuanian Nationalism: Sources of its Legitimate Meanings in an Environment of Shifting Boundaries”, Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 3 (2002), 319. Tomas Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. Ibid., 60. . Vladimiras Laucˇ ius, “Virginijus Savukynas: Net Vincas Kudirka Gedijosi Savo . Lietuviškai Kalbancˇ ių Tevų” [Virginijus Savukynas: Even Vincas Kudirka was Ashamed of His Lithuanian Parents], 15min.lt, http://www.15min.lt/naujiena/ ziniosgyvai/interviu/virginijus-savukynas-net-vincas-kudirka-gedijosi-savo-lietu viskai-kalbanciu-tevu-599-294767 (last accessed: 2 March 2013). Balkelis, Making of Modern Lithuania, 1–2. This was possibly because the de-hierarchised, relatively homogenous and “flat” social matter of Lithuanian peasantry comprised the major part of the society. The mentioned intelligentsia also grew out of this stratum, so there was no hereditary ambition to exclusivity that would contradict this avant-garde political project. Justinas Dementavicˇ ius, “Lithuanian Political Thought in the Twentieth Century and Its Reflections in Sa˛ ju-dis. What Kind of State have Lithuanians been Fighting for?” Contributions to the History of Concepts 6, no. 1 (2011), 110. Algimantas Jankauskas and Alvydas Jokubaitis, “Tarp Individualizmo Ir Kolektyvizmo: Politiškumo Paieškos Tarpukario Lietuvoje” [In between Individualism and Collectivism: The Search for the Political . . in Interwar Lithuania], in Lietuvos Politines Minties Antologija, Lietuvos Politine Mintis 1918–1940 M., vol. 1 (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2012), 16. Richard Mole, The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union: Identity, Discourse and Power in the Post-Communist Transition of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (London: Routledge, 2012), 44. Vidmantas Valiušaitis, “Legendinio Partizano Daumanto Žmona – Apie Okupantus, Lietuvius Ir Žydus [The Wife of the Legendary Partisan Daumantas – About the Occupiers, Lithuanians and Jews]”, Lrytas.lt, http://www.lrytas.lt/print.asp?k= news&id=13769225301375202543 (last accessed: 29 August 2013).

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24 For more information on the Soviet repressions during the first occupation see:. Arvydas Anušauskas, Teroras Ir Nusikaltimai Žmoniškumui: Pirmoji Sovietine Okupacija 1940–1941 m. [Terror and Crimes against Humanity: The First Soviet Occupation 1940–1941] (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006). 25 Timothy Snyder, “Fascism, Russia and Ukraine”, The New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/ (last accessed: 29 January 2015). 26 In our context, it is especially important because it is the direct cause of the victimhood-based identity formation in Lithuania and beyond. In addition, this constant traumatising had influence on the post-Soviet political culture, all of which will be discussed in further chapters. 27 Anušauskas, Teroras 1940–1958 [Terror 1940–1958], 280. . 28 Lukiškes Square, which was then called Lenin’s Square, had a figure of Lenin supposedly pointing to the “brighter tomorrow”, but actually, ironically enough, to the KGB prison. The taking down of the statue after the independence became a sym. bolic act and a joyous occasion for Lithuanians. Lukiškes Square, however, still remains a grey zone in the city, as it brings many painful memories to the elder generation. The new project to refurbish the square by Vilnius municipality generated a controversy in Lithuanian society, debating what should appear instead of Lenin. Nowadays, there is a Genocide Museum in the quarters of the prison, dedicated to the Soviet repressions. A question whether Soviet repressions in Lithuania can be called genocide, however, had been debated, especially by the Jewish community. 29 It was indeed difficult to trust anyone in the regime, even close ones. Children were taught to spy on their parents and people were bribed or blackmailed to spy on their friends, not to talk about the work colleagues. Any critique of the regime or – even worse – any discussions about freedom were to be either kept to oneself or shared in a tongue-in-cheek language, indirectly and secretly. 30 Folk culture, however, was formatted to be politically and ideologically “correct”. Yuri Slezkine discusses how folk culture was transformed, and formatted to fit the political goals of the Communist Party throughout the USSR. See: Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism”, Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994), 414–452. 31 Longhaired youth was being caught in the streets, their hair was being cut and they were then sent to mental hospitals. Some would go there willingly, in order to avoid service in the Soviet Army or fighting in the Afghanistan war, which started in 1978. Others would be sent there if they had publicly said or done something allegedly anti-Soviet. One very interesting and subjective testimony (strong language warning!) about these events has been self-published online, under the title “Kliedesys” [Raving] by a cult underground figure known as Jonas “Zarraza”: Jonas Zarraza, “Kliedesys. Zarraza”, Kliedesys, https://kliedesys.jimdo.com/ (last accessed: 21 August 2017). The explanation was that, since according to Marxist doctrine (which, even though being atheistic, in the Soviet Union could be compared with a grotesque quasi-religious, sect-like cult) communism is the best form of life and the socialist regime was progressing towards it, anyone resisting the so-called “progress” had to be insane. In a worse case, the person could be sent to a gulag or get a “wolf ’s ticket”, which would prevent them from getting any job in the Union and therefore being able to. sustain themselves. 32 Vytautas Ališauskas, Krikšcˇ ionybes Lietuvoje istorija [History of Christianity in Lithuania] (Vilnius: Aidai, 2006), 500–505. . . 33 The entire book, called “Bu-das senoves lietuviųų, kalnenų ir žemaicˇ ių” [The Character of Lithuanians, Highlanders and Samogitians], can be found published online, at http://www.antologija.lt/text/simonas-daukantas-budas-senoves-lietuviu-kalnenuzemaiciu/ (last accessed: 9 July 2013).

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. . . . 34 Nerija Putinaite, Šiaures Atenų Tremtiniai. Lietuviškosios Tapatybe Paieškos Ir Europos Vizijos XXa [Exiles of the Northern Athens: Search for Lithuanian Identity and Visions of Europe in the 20th Century] (Vilnius: Aidai, 2004), 8–9. 35 Ibid., 21–68. 36 Ibid., 22–23. 37 Vytautas Kavolis, Moterys Ir Vyrai Lietuvių Kultu-roje [Women and Men in Lithuanian Culture] (Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Culture, 1992). . ˇ ius et al., Lietuvos Politines Minties Antologija, I Tomas. Lie38 Justinas Dementavic . tuvos Politine Mintis 1918–1940 M. [Anthology of Lithuanian Political Thought, Volume 1. Lithuanian Political Thought in 1918–1940] (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2012). 39 Aru-nas Sverdiolas, Kultu-ra Lietuvių Filosofų Akiratyje [Culture in the Eyesight of Lithuanian Philosophers] (Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2012). . 40 Dementavicˇ ius et al., Lietuvos Politines Minties Antologija, I Tomas [Anthology of Lithuanian Political Thought, Volume 1], 554–555. 41 These factors had massive influence both on the role and importance of language in the Lithuanian nationalist movement of the nineteenth century, and on the formulation of the modern Lithuanian cultural and political identity. Nowadays, the feeling of a certain type of cultural continuity lasting for many thousands of years remains a very important factor in the Lithuanian self-consciousness, influencing not only self-identification but also Lithuanian internal (the proper use of Lithuanian language, i.e. Lithuanian grammar is literally protected by law) and external (the aforementioned tensions with Poland) politics. Language therefore means not only communication but also a part of the identity mask that constitutes the very foundation of the modern Lithuanian nation. See Rytis Bulota, . “The Impact of Language and Culture on Sa˛ ju-dis”, Regional Studies (Regionines Studijos) 2 (2008), 183–192. 42 It also must be mentioned, however, that they did not oppress any of the religions either. . 43 Aru-nas Vyšniauskas, “Rusijos I˛vaizdis Lietuviškuose Istorijos Vadoveliuose”, Politology (Politologija) 26, no. 2 (2002), 4. 44 Edvardas Gudavicˇ ius and Alfredas Bumblauskas can probably be rightly called the main figures within this school of historiography. Its narrative is based on the Annales tradition of historical materialism and civilisational theory. Bumblauskas is also influenced by Jörn Rüsen’s theory of historical didactics, seeking to utilise historical narrative in order to educate people for one pragmatic purpose or the other. This school is located in Vilnius University’s History Faculty, and has been gaining a growing popularity, especially among Lithuanian intelligentsia, specifically the younger generation. 45 It is often illustrated by a fresco called “The March towards the Cross” from Strasbourg’s Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune Protestant Church, in which all European Christian lands are depicted as knights riding to Rome, including Lithuania, which rides the last. See: “Virtual Historical Vilnius”, viv.lt, http://www.viv.lt/nuotykis/ lietuva_pasaulyje/7 (last accessed: 13 January 2015). . 46 Justinas Dementavicˇ ius et al., Lietuvos Politines Minties Antologija [Anthology of Lithuanian Political Thought], parts 1–3 (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2012–2014). 47 The name Sa˛ ju-dis in Lithuanian means “the beginning of a common movement”. . The prefix “su-” in this case signifies the beginning of a collective action and “judeti” means to move, a movement. The word is often used in two senses. In a broad sense it marks the Lithuanian movement for the independence from the Soviet Union in general. In a narrow sense it is the title of an organisation that led this movement and constituted the first High Council of the newly formed Lithuanian Republic. The organisation is still existent, and its headquarters remain opposite Vilnius

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48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59

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Arch-cathedral, in the centre of the capital. The name, however, is taken from the post-occupational Lithuanian guerrilla independence movement, which was part of Lithuanian resistance against .the Soviet .regime. . . Vytautas Raškauskas, “Nijole Sadu-naite: Svarbiausia – tiesa” [Nijole Sadu-naite: Truth is the Most Important]”, Bernardinai.lt, http://www.bernardinai.lt/index. php/straipsnis/2011-05-09-nijole-sadunaite-svarbiausia-tiesa/62424 (last accessed: 28 April 2015). Romas Batu-ra, I˛ Laisve .˛ Baltijos Keliu [Towards Freedom on the Baltic Way] (Vilnius: Seimas Press “Valstybe s žinios”, 2009). . . . . See: Ju-rate Kavaliauskaite and Aine Ramonaite, Sa˛ ju-džio Ištakų Beieškant: Nepaklusniųjų Tinklaveikos Galia [In Search for the Source of Sa˛ ju-dis: the Power of the Non-obedient] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2011). Although it was typical for Soviet nomenclature to come back to power as members of new parties in many post-Soviet states. Arpad Szakolczai, “Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events”, International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009), 141–172, at 148. See the book chapter by Richard Sakwa, “Myth and Democratic Identity in Russia”, in Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds Alexander Wöll and Harald Wydra (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 203–218. Except for Algirdas Brazauskas, who, on the other hand, did not have that much influence in terms of political imaginary formation, except for his own image. Lithuania . and the . Collapse of the USSR, . video, directed by Jonas Mekas, 2008. Danute Gailiene, Ka˛ Jie Mums Padare [What Have They Done to Us] (Vilnius: Tyto Alba, 2008), 226–227. Alvydas Nikžentaitis claims that the emphasis on victimhood in Lithuanian historical narrative leads to various distortions of historical proportionality. See “A. Nikžentaitis: aukos kompleksas apkartina santykius ne tik su Rusija, bet ir su ES [A. Nikžentaitis: The Victim’s Complex Embitters Relationships not only with Russia, but also with the EU]”, delfi.lt, http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/anikzentaitis-aukos-kompleksa s-apkartina-santykius-ne-tik-su-rusija-bet-ir-su-es.d?id=26551981#ixzz37YBJRFjt (last accessed: 16 July 2014). A more important argument is put forward by Edward Said, who explores the moral and political power that a victim attains due to self-victimisation. See: Edward Said, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London and New . . York: Verso Books, 1988). Gailiene, Ka˛ Jie Mums Padare, 217. Árpád Szakólczai, in his critique of egalitarian democratisation, discusses the popular contemporary social processes that position victimhood at the centre of the social process, thus turning it into a “downward spiral”, whereby the only way of climbing up socially is through emphasising one’s own suffering. See: Árpád Szakolczai, “The Non-being of Communism and Myths of Democratisation”, in Democracy and Myth in Russia and in Eastern Europe, eds Wöll and Wydra, 45–59. The same imaginary mechanism is actually still functional in Russia’s own propaganda in contemporary Ukraine, where the motivation of supporting the Eastern Ukrainian separatists was based on representing the Ukrainian military forces as Nazis and fascists. The image of the Soviet “us” fighting fascist “them”, whether or not “they” are Germany, had been prevalent since WW2, and is evidently still so nowadays. Playing the “fascist” card in Kremlin’s propaganda proved to be so effective that it even convinces wide crowds both in the East and in the West. There is indeed clear evidence about the existence of far-right elements both within the Maidan movement and within the government that was elected after the ousting of former president Yanukovych in Ukraine. Just like in every case, images and myths do form on the basis of factuality. However, the theme is inflated and simplified.

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. . 61 Vilija Aleknaite, “Tarp in Ir Jan: Ar Žydeti?” [Between Ying and Yang: . Žaliuoti . To Green or to Bloom?], Šiaures Atenai, 61(14), 10/04/1991, 3. . 62 Romualdas Ozolas, “Kokia Yra Ir Kokia Turetų Bu-ti Komunistų Partija” [What the Communist Party Is Like and What It Should Be Like], Literatu-ra Ir Menas 2242(45), 4/11/1989, 3. 63 It is no secret that the West was looking forward to the changes brought about by Gorbachev’s turn in politics. Hardly anyone expected such a swift fall of the Union; a slow and gradual change within the political system was more broadly anticipated. Therefore, Lithuania’s urge to push for its complete independence as soon as possible, at least in the US, was met with both encouragement and reservation. Lithuania was playing a risky game, and the chances were that either Gorbachev or some other political force within the Union would take up strict and cruel politics that they were capable of, in an effort to revert the processes of transformation that were taking place Union wide (Mekas, Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR). 64 A bit more than a month after the declaration of independence, one of the leaders of the movement, Arvydas Juozaitis, wrote: “Liberalism is not only the higher, but the highest level of social justice. Nowadays it determines international relations, UN activity, human rights and the progress of civilisation. The essence of liberalism is simple: maximum personal freedom for a human being with a maximum social responsibility. If a state accepts liberalism, it inevitably opens up for international relations, technical progress, universalism and social justice. All of these are the followings of the Christian world perception […]. On the other hand it does not hold Christianity absolute; it does not elevate it (even if it is well deserved) above other world perceptions and cultures […]. In this sense, liberalism is a meta-ideology, the highest degree of unity. It could only have been. achieved by the Western civilization.” (Arvydas Juozaitis, Visuomenes Samprata” [The Conception . “Teisingos . of Correct Society], Šiaures Atenai, 21/2/1990, 3.) . . 65 Bronius Genzelis, Tautines Savimones Išlikimas Ir Brendimas Lietuvos Okupacijos Sa˛ lygomis [The Survival and Development of National Consciousness under the Conditions of Lithuanian Occupation] (Vilnius: Center of Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research, 2012), 15–16. 66 Tomas Sodeika and Aru-nas Sverdiolas, “Gyvenimas Kolboje Ir Tuoj Po To” [Life in a Flask and Beyond], Proskyna 17, . . no. 8 (1991), 494–499. 67 “Amnestija” [Amnesty], Šiaures Atenai, 21/3/1990, 2. th 68 “Vasario 16-Ąja˛ Su Šunim Ir Saugumo Agentu” . . [On the 16 of February, together with a Dog and a Security Agent], Šiaures Atenai, 21/3/1990, 3. 69 The most recent occasion was the removal of the four statues from the Soviet era, various proletarian and military professions, which had stood on one of the bridges in Vilnius. “Removal of Soviet Statues from Green Bridge in Vilnius to Begin Next Week”, The Baltic Times, https://www.baltictimes.com/removal_of_ soviet_statues_from_green_bridge_in_vilnius_to_begin_next_week/ (last accessed 30 July 2017). 70 In a traditional medieval iconography it symbolised a meditative, personalist character, an individual prayer. and a mode of survival, of bearing the situation. . (Gabija Surdokaite, “Ru-pintojelis Lietuvių Tautosakoje Ir Liaudies Skulptu-roje: . Pagrindiniai Sampratos Aspektai” [Rupintojelis in Lithuanian Folklore and Folk Sculpture: Essential Aspects of the Notion], Tautosakos Darbai 40 (2010), 139–159.) In 1937 it was chosen as a symbol of Lithuania for the Expo fair in Paris. The image was once again re-enacted during the struggle for independence in the late 1980s. Roughly every third generation of Lithuanians would be “bled down”. Violent events would take place every 30–40 years: the partition of 1794, uprisings in 1831, 1862–1863 and 1905, the battles with Polish, German and Russian armies after the First World War, the Second World War, and the guerrilla resistance

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71 72 73

74

75 76 77 78

63

against the Bolsheviks as well as the ongoing deportations, torture and repressions throughout the period of Soviet occupation. . Ališauskas, Krikšcˇ ionybes Lietuvoje Istorija [History of Christianity in Lithuania], 495–500. . . Kavaliauskaite and Ramonaite, Sa˛ ju-džio Ištakų Beieškant [In Search for the Source of Sa˛ ju-dis], 37–41. Baptism was illegal and dangerous in the USSR. Parents who held leading or public posts, and wished to baptise their children, could lose such posts, which would mean that they would not be admitted to any other position. One has to bear in mind that, at that time, no one realistically believed in the end of the USSR, which came about as a surprise to the Soviet population. During the last two decades of Soviet occupation, slogans claiming that Lithuanians were the last pagans in Europe (which is historically almost true) became popular. This provided a possibility for people to distance themselves in a politically acceptable way (since it did not promote the dissident Catholicism) from the Soviet identity and socialist clichés of multiple “narody”, and promoted the . individuality and particularity of Lithuanian identity. (Aru-nas Streikus, “Ateistines propagandos pobu-dis Lietuvoje 1975–1988 m [The Character of Atheist Propaganda in Lithuania 1975–1988]”, genocid.lt, http://genocid.lt/Leidyba/13/streikus.htm (last accessed: 21 April 2015). Pizzorno, “The Mask: An Essay”, 5–28. Ibid., 10. At the same time it instantly creates a tension that arises from a critical, philosophical inquiry, which the mythological, things believed in, have been invoking in human minds since and before Socrates. The inherent ontological inauthenticity, however, leaves the modern being in a constantly fluid, constantly dynamic, non-defined, heterogeneous existence, as suggested by Bauman – a permanent crisis situation. Indeed, modernity in some sense is a permanent liminality. The latter idea by Árpád Szakolczai will be elaborated on later in this book.

3

Political Images and Identity

As mentioned in the previous chapter, one of the most important factors for modern Lithuanian political identity formation was the emergence of political images, which provided historical episodes with narrative importance. The post-Soviet identity also incorporated some of the images and experiences from the independence movement, continuing the narrative and this way substantiating historical legitimacy and presence. As political images tend to play such a significant role in these processes, let us discuss them in greater detail, also contextualising the Lithuanian case among other post-Soviet narratives. The origins of political images can vary. They can be grounded historically and expressed in symbolical dates, events, places, personalities, etc. They can also be grounded politically and expressed in conceptions of political friends and enemies, ideas such as “more/less civilised countries”, “developing states” and “imperialist states”. Another possible source is social: images can express “class”, “the people”, a sub-culture, an ethnic or religious minority, etc. Yet another source is cultural, or manifest in other spheres of human life – celebrations, heraldic signs, song contests or even sports. All images, however, are at the same time imagined/constructed and factual/material. They are very often (but not necessarily) expressed visually and describe a certain phenomenon in political life, yet they do not capture it in its entirety. They “abbreviate” some aspects of a phenomenon, such as the particularity of each unit of the group that the image entails, while attaching others, such as a certain quality, judgement or symbolic meaning that the image has/represents. And yet, politics relies heavily on these political images. Alexander Wendt mentions the dependability of rational national interests upon constructed assumptions and identities that pervade international society. And domestically, Charles Taylor talks about social imaginaries that constitute the perception of a particular lived social and political environment. According to Taylor, a social imaginary exists as a background for a particular society in contextualising what is imagined as good or bad, desirable or justifiable. In other words, social imaginary is “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy”.1 The social imaginary aspect can thus create images of meaning, worth and authority in

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crisis situations when the established institutions of authority and relations of normality collapse. Social imaginary is largely un-reflected, taken for granted within society. However, it also presupposes how various events, ideas and phenomena are being perceived, thus creating a common understanding of what is reasonable, rational, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, etc. It establishes a certain ethical normativity, justifying political and social behaviour. I will look at several such images in different political cultures, which are also referred to by Roland Barthes and Raoul Girardet as political myths. The intention of this chapter is to demonstrate how they actually function in the history of the post-USSR societies, and how they influence actual politics. I will examine political images from three perspectives. I will discuss their expression, using Roland Barthes’ semiotic analysis of political myths as meta-language. Barthes continued Ferdinand de Saussure’s line of inquiry, understanding myth as speech. For him, political myths were non-factually based or irrational social phenomena that have political significance.2 Barthes presents a critical analysis of his contemporary society, uncovering the factual inadequacies and paradoxes in various modern myths.3 Similarly to Benedict Anderson, he suggests the socially constructed origins of these myths that imply manipulative social mechanisms that thrive on their falsehood. The fact that myths comprise a certain language of images is one thing, but a more important question for our purposes is, what is their significance for political identity formation? I will therefore also use insights by Raoul Girardet and Benedict Anderson. Girardet grouped political myths that are recurrent in French culture, literature and society into four types: conspiracy, the saviour, golden age and unity. Instead of criticising this mythological element in politics, however, he put forward a structuralist effort to understand its pragmatic social function.4 He argued that political mythology is particularly important in moments of turmoil and insecurity, when unifying, flexible images are required in order to provide sense and meaning in otherwise ambiguous situations.5 He called these periods “the crisis of legitimacy”.6 In his words, “[t]hese changes may happen due to various reasons: it could be an institutional turmoil, a removal of the entire governmental personnel after a legal or illegal accusation, a financial crisis, internal disarray, external threat, a military catastrophe”.7 Girardet concludes that the emergence of these modern myths is related to the resurgence of political religiousness in the modern world. He observes that political myths emerge in the place and time when the factuality of that which is represented by the myth is lacking.8 When it comes to discussing political identity in relation to non-rationality in politics, a theory by Benedict Anderson needs to be mentioned. Similarly to the constructivists, Anderson claimed nationalism to be a product of collective imagination. He recognised, however, that what he sees as collectively “imagined” national identity had profound impact upon politics and motivated nationalist clashes in the nineteenth century. However, Anderson’s theory implies the non-reality or lesser reality of what he calls imagined as

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opposed to rational social factors, such as economic, social or educational conditioning. This chapter will consider, however, that this national “imagination” does not only derive from some elite that bestows it upon masses, but rather that the nature of what I will call political cosmology is as embedded in folklore and political life as the material and social factors. Together with Mircea Eliade’s insights into myth as a form of human encounter with the world, I will discuss the purpose of these images. This way I will see not only that political images are present and functional in any modern political narrative, but also how they are expressed, what they do and why they exist as a political form.

Image of a hero in post-Soviet national narratives Probably all national narratives have historical heroes. The French have Charles de Gaulle, the Cubans have Che Guevara, the Irish have Daniel O’Connell, and the Americans have Abraham Lincoln. All of them have not only been historical figures, but have also been granted something like iconic status. Their characters are either adulated or demonised, their biographies distorted and adapted to fit the images and virtues they are supposed to represent. In some ways they are grounded in historical mythology and symbolism, in other ways they are entirely fictional. And yet they shape and influence the politics and identities of the states or other actors involved. They represent the values, aspirations and fears that each political persona holds. In fact, I will argue, it is not the factual personality that is important in the mythological image, but the values that the image represents. I will explore one recurrent image type in probably any identity narrative – an image of a national hero. I will look at four different post-Soviet states as examples: first, the fictional figure of Kalevipoeg in the context of Estonia; second, the medieval figure of Grand Duke Vytautas “the Great” in Lithuania; third, the Romantic figure of Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko in the context of Poland; and finally, the modern figure of Lenin in the context of Russia. Similar images can be found in the political cosmologies of various other post-USSR states as well. I chose these personalities for several reasons. First, I would like to demonstrate that the actual period that the personality represented lived in, bears little importance to the role that the image plays in political cosmology. Therefore, next to a fictional character Kalevipoeg, whose existence is a-temporal, I selected Vytautas, representing the medieval period, Kos´ciuszko, representing the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century romantic epoch, and Lenin, for the history of the twentieth century. Second, these figures are particularly important to their respective identity narratives, to which I relate them here. Kalevipoeg is at the core of the Estonian national narrative, Vytautas is the most prominent monarch in the Lithuanian historical narrative, Kos´ciuszko is a very important figure to Polish nationalism, and Lenin was and is one of the main figures in Russian history.9

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These are four completely unrelated examples, chosen from four completely different post-USSR contexts. Regardless, the aim of this comparison is to demonstrate that, as images of personalities, and in relation to political identity, they all serve common purposes and their popular articulations have a common logic. It is precisely their use as images rather than as factual persons that have shaped modern political identity narratives and the nature of identity politics in the chosen countries and beyond. Estonia: Kalevipoeg Kalevipoeg is a hero from a national Estonian eponymous epic, which was written in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald. It was based on an ancient Estonian oral tradition, and is kindred to the Finnish Kalevala.10 Jüri Talvet calls it a “stem text” of Estonian nation: “it is not simply an epic of a Finno-Ugric people, but the Estonian national epic”.11 According to David Ilmar Lepasaar Beecher, On the whole, 19th-century epics from Lönnrot’s Kalevala to Longfellow’s Hiawatha sought to do for their respective nations what Macpherson’s Ossian had done for Scotland. They were attempts to recover (or imagine) a rich and unified cultural tradition in the distant past that would serve as a basis for a contemporary national identity. But the mere possession of a national epic in the early and middle portions of the 19th century – and having it proclaimed authentic – may have mattered more than its content. The vague, romantic idea of a national identity lurking among the misty folk traditions was enough to affirm a contemporary pride.12 The modern poetic epic recites the adventures of a fictional hero Kalevipoeg (son of Kalev, a mythological character in Estonian folklore).13 He performs numerous deeds that are variously more heroic or more mischievous in character, including the construction of Estonian cities and the creation of Estonian society.14 Unlike the case of Lithuania, where the political cosmology and the modern mask-identity had plenty of material to establish its historical narrative in the nineteenth century, the Estonian modern political persona had no premodern political heritage. Lithuania had the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Poland had Rzeczpospolita, and Russia had imperial history as the basis for the formation of their narratives. Estonian lands, on the other hand, throughout the entire medieval history politically belonged either to the Germans, the Danish, the Swedes, the Polish Rzeczpospolita or the Russians. Therefore, the creation of Estonian political mask-identity had to rely on the poetic and literary tradition. Kalevipoeg is a romantic intellectual project that is symptomatic of its epoch.15 The new modern Estonian identity is primarily based on folk culture, language and literature, and emerged in opposition to the predominant German nobility culture and Russian political sovereignty. Kalevipoeg

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therefore became an epic hero to Estonians, symbolically representing their ethnically based historical narrative. During the struggle for the first political independence in the country’s history, Kalevipoeg was particularly important. The work became, indeed, a tool in the hands of Estonian national politicians, before and after our first political independence (1918–1939), between the two world wars. However, one should not forget that the official anthem of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Estonia (in the wording of the writer Johannes Semper) started with a direct reference to Kalevipoeg. “Go on strong and perdure, valiant people of Kalev.”16 Therefore the role of Kalevipoeg as an image varied. First, it was used as the mythological basis for the creation of interwar Estonian national imaginary. Then, in the Soviet Union, in a similar fashion as had been done in Lithuania, due to its pagan-inspired origins and social symbolism, the epic and the image of the hero were used for replacing the political influence of Christianity. Standardised local folk culture was used to enforce and even create “politically correct” images and to translate them into popular consciousness, representing the so-called “liberation of the working class”.17 On the other hand, however, the same image of Kalevipoeg, akin to the neo-pagan culture in Lithuania, was also used as a means of cultural resistance to the regime: not only the Lutheran Church but also Estonian literature such as the Kalevipoeg (an Estonian epic folk tale), nationalist folk songs, historical monuments such as the Pik Hermann Castle, and art [were used]. These elements combine to provide the symbols, ritual, and beliefs which integrated the society and strengthened it against Soviet cultural onslaughts.18 According to Guntis Šmidchens, over time, the role of Kalevipoeg’s image changed. During the striving for independence from the Soviet Union, he became one of the sources of inspiration for the peaceful struggle against the regime in a manner that was similar to the historical king Mindaugas in Lithuania and the fictional Bearslayer (La-cˇ ple-sis) in Latvia: All three heroes were warriors when they emerged as national symbols in the nineteenth century, but through series of adaptations, they lost many of their violent characteristics. They became more human. Their desacralized versions were closer to the audiences who read the stories or watched the heroes on stage, furthering the sense of mutual responsibility rather than submission to a charismatic leader.19 Thus Kalevipoeg, a fictional character, was established as an embodiment of the Estonian nation itself, also inspiring the first struggle for independence in the interwar period. The associative content of his image that was attained through the reciprocation of his story in the late Soviet Estonian society, later

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helped to shape the peaceful character of Estonian political resistance. Thus, from an epic warrior figure, depending on the political circumstances, the associative and emotional charge of Kalevipoeg’s image changed, as it became an inspiration for the peaceful movement for post-Soviet independence. Lithuania: Grand Duke Vytautas As it might have emerged from the historical overview presented in the previous section, the most prominent hero in the popular Lithuanian historical narrative is the grand duke and the most significant ruler of the GDL, Vytautas. . According to Irena Šutiniene, in terms of popularity, he is followed by Mindaugas, who established the Grand Duchy and made the first unsuccessful . . attempt to Christianise it.20 Giedre Micku-naite presented a sceptical attitude towards the image of Vytautas, however. She revealed not only the pragmatic and not necessarily heroic political practice pursued by the grand duke, but also his own politics of public relations and efforts to model his own image, which was a common practice among the contemporary monarchs. Even more interestingly, grounded on the same facts of his political life, the opposite images could have been constructed by his adversaries: instead of depicting him as a great leader, he could be depicted as a tyrant.21 Regardless, the importance of the figure of Vytautas in Lithuanian narrative is immense. Vytautas was called “Magnus” or “the Great” by possibly the most famous Lithuanian romantic poet and historian of the nineteenth century, Jonas “Maironis” Macˇ iulis. In the interwar period, many monuments were dedicated to this mytho-historical figure, which would sometimes even be represented in quasi-religious form. The title persists in nearly all the Lithuanian historical narratives as well as in the popular culture. There is some grounding for such status, however. During the reign of Vytautas, the GDL reached the peak of its geopolitical power. The popular Lithuanian saying “nuo ju-ros iki ju-ros”, or “from sea to sea”, is still commonly used and refers to the historical period when the territories of the GDL reached from the Baltic Sea in the North to the Black Sea in the South in the third decade of the fifteenth century. It implies the glory and pride in the heritage of the GDL under Vytautas, and expresses the sentiment for the power once possessed and lost. Not only does it symbolise the Lithuanian pride, however; it also embodies the modern, ethno-cultural conception of Lithuanian-ness. The fact can be observed when paying attention to how often the name is used in different instances of public life in Lithuania, from institution titles to products, etc., all of which are named after the grand duke. His torso, along with other national imagery, can also be found on display at the headquarters of the Lithuanian independence movement Sa˛ ju-dis as well as in many other places. The fact that the name of a leader of Sa˛ ju-dis, Vytautas Landsbergis, corresponds to that of the grand duke also resonated strongly within people during the independence movement.

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As such, the image of Vytautas “the Great” has become an identifier of Lithuanian-ness, or a particular articulation of it. As the most significant ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it represents rather the ethnically and linguistically Lithuanian identity narrative, which is closer to the Tautininkai vision, concentrating on the GDL heritage rather than the Commonwealth. It was also convenient for the interwar narrative, which, as mentioned, was essentially concerned with articulating the new modern Lithuanian tauta and grounding it on Lithuanian language and culture. Poland: Kos´ciuszko Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko (1746–1817) was a revolutionary, a general in the American Civil War and the commander of the Polish–Lithuanian uprising of 1794 (also called the Kos´ciuszko uprising) who tried to sustain the collapsing Rzeczpospolita. In all these accounts, he is one of the most significant personalities in Polish national history.22 His image played a particularly important role before the emergence of the modern, interwar Poland, i.e. in the period from the late nineteenth- to the beginning of the twentieth century, when revolutionary ideas were key for articulating the modern Polish political persona, especially during the uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863, and up to the early twentieth century. During the 1830s and 1840s some significant overtones were introduced into the legend. On the one hand, radical thinkers found fault with the uprising of 1794 as a movement that was solely composed of noblemen; its leader was labelled an ineffective politician of “half-measures” who had shirked thoroughly radical reforms. On the other hand, the accomplishments of Kos´ciuszko in the field of reform were emphasised; democrats and romantic poets worshipped him as the first leader in Polish history who had appealed to the whole nation without distinction of estate and who opposed the feudal serfdom of peasants […]. The celebration of the forty-fourth anniversary of his death in 1861 began a series of demonstrations which finally led to the January uprising of 1863 […]. At the turn of the century, the cult of Kos´ciuszko reached its apogee. The real figure was replaced by a disembodied man and a projection of Polish wishes; he became a figure created in order to raise spirits and improve the frame of mind of a subjugated nation. But at the end of the nineteenth century, the nation’s hero also became a model of frequently contradictory attributes and virtues, much like a potluck supper where everyone brings his or her own dish to the meal.23 After the First World War, Kos´ciuszko’s image was overshadowed by another Polish leader, Józef Piłsudsky.24 Nevertheless, he still remained important to the dominant Polish historical narrative up until the present day. Magdalena Micin´ska describes how the image was consciously and

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unconsciously adapted to various political contexts, depending on contemporary conditions and political needs throughout the twentieth century.25 Kos´ciuszko’s heroic image still inspires some Polish academics to write panegyric texts about his personality.26 In the early 1990s, when the public discussions about the format and content of the Polish constitution were taking place, the nationalist part of the society used Kos´ciuszko’s image as a ground for supporting an argument about the uniqueness and importance of Polish ethnicity: The inscription, in the parliamentary constitutional project, of the principle that “the Nation, it is all the citizens of the Republic” will cause that every citizen from the administrative point of view will have the right to decide about Polish national affairs. A foreigner, who not long ago settled in Poland and received Polish citizenship, will have identical rights in the affairs of our Nation, as the descendants of Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko […]. How is it possible, that none of the deputies present at the enactment of the preamble, cried TREASON.27 However, in our context, perhaps the crucial point is the significance of Kos´ciuszko’s image for the formation of Poland’s post-Soviet identity, notably the struggle of Solidarnos´c´: As the Polish cultural mythology of the 1980s worked across the confines of time, it drew on the traumatic inheritance of the national community. The events of 1980–81 were telescoped into yet another lost war of independence, and the imprisoned members of the political opposition were seen as heirs to the nineteenth-century freedom fighters who had been exiled to Siberia. The palpable sign of such time warps was a resurgence of mourning crosses. Polish men and women once again began to wear small crosses made of plain, black-coated metal, with the Polish eagle in place of the Passion. Similar crosses had been popular before and after the failed insurrection of 1863–64.28 This way, Kos´ciuszko’s image encouraged the Polish political identity narrative and inspired political struggle. It connected three historical episodes of Polish independence struggles: the uprising of the 1794, the rebellion of 1863–1864 and the Solidarnos´c´ struggle of 1980–1981 into a single narrative of independence struggle. This way it merged these temporally distant events into a single common experience that constituted what would later develop into an independent Polish post-Soviet political persona. Russia: Lenin If Vytautas, Kalevipoeg and Kos´ciuszko are lesser-known characters internationally, the figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin does not require any introduction.

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Lenin’s image is manifold and diversely interpreted worldwide. To some he represents a great revolutionary leader and founder of the first socialist state. To others Lenin is an initiator of the darkest and deadliest period in the history of their countries and families. Yet others see him as the “good guy” compared with the “bad guy” figure of Josef Stalin. And some simply acknowledge his classical Marxist political theory, seeing him as one of many distant historical figures. Despite the mass killings that Lenin pursued and propagated, his political theory is taught in many Western universities, and he is often venerated for his deadly social experiments with Russian and foreign people. Such paradoxes show the power of an image of a person not only in the post-Soviet but also in the Western world. It is a good example of how ideas associated with the image and the political charge that the image bears overshadow a person’s actual deeds and the terror that his experiments actually brought about.29 When it comes to the various Russian historical narratives that underpin the country’s political identity, the situation remains equally diverse. Lenin’s image had enjoyed the status of a “secular god” in the Soviet Union, but after its collapse that popularity withered. This was due to many factors, including the disillusionment with Gorbachev’s Perestroika (Gorbachev justified his political line by condemning Stalinism and “reviving” Leninism), as well as in many cases – with communism in general.30 “Lenin has rejoined the ranks of mere mortals. [However, r]emnants of Lenin’s cult are still a highly visible part of society.”31 The polls performed in the first decade of the twenty-first century demonstrated a continuous decline of Lenin’s popularity.32 But the most recent survey shows that, next to Stalin, whose popularity has continued to rise, Lenin is also being seen in an increasingly positive light.33 The sense of nostalgia is still felt among the population.34 And despite the suggestions for burial, the mummified Soviet dictator still lies in his mausoleum in the middle of Moscow, visited by millions of tourists, and his birthday is still celebrated there by communists and supporters annually. Nina Tumarkin suggests that the Soviet deification of the image can be traced to the Russian Orthodox peasant culture. The phenomenon that is called “naïve monarchism” was a particular relationship within the Russian narod to their tsar. “To them he remained, at least until 1905, their batiushka (little father), who was kind hearted, connected with God, and through this divine link bound personally to each of them”.35 According to Tumarkin, a secularised version of the phenomenon of naïve monarchism persisted in the cult of Lenin as well as of other Soviet leaders.36 Nowadays there still seems to be a need for a “strong hand” leader figure among the majority of Russians.37 This perfectly corresponds with Russia’s centuries-old monarchic as well as Soviet traditions, but it could also signify the need for rigid stability under formal liminality.38 Interestingly, since it is hard to grasp the borders between the experientially Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, Lenin’s image becomes at least a relative denominator. In particular, I am referring to the statues of Lenin in the political post-Soviet territories. It seems that, in places that have lost or are losing their

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Soviet political cosmology (such as the Baltic States, Central Europe and, quite recently, Western Ukraine among others), Lenin’s statues have been torn down. Olesia Mamchych, a Ukrainian writer, reflects on this experience of the transformation in Maidan, during Western Ukraine’s transition into a postSoviet region, also relating it to the leninopad (the fall of Lenin statues in Ukraine following the Maidan): There is no doubt that we have changed. After these events the percentage of people who are ready to work for Ukraine and treat their civic duties with awareness has considerably increased. Such situations provide a sudden leap. We have experienced it and if we take hold and grow mature, we will stand the chance to break away and finish with this Soviet-type “bog” in ourselves. Every Lenin statue that fell brings us closer to Paris.39 Around 330 (out of approximately 1500) of Lenin’s monuments were torn down in four months between February and June 2014 in Ukraine.40 This signifies the experiential self-liberation from the Soviet existential condition taking place in the country, as it gradually becomes a post-Soviet, Lenin statue-free experiential space.41 It is also closely connected to assuming civic consciousness, as becoming post-Soviet and independent of Russian imperial political cosmology also implies the political condition of Ukrainians as independent citizens, not as vassals to the “tsar” in Moscow.42 However, places where the presence of Lenin’s statues is still widespread (large parts of Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Belarus, among others) remain experientially Soviet, or belonging to the sphere of Russian imperial political cosmology. Here the Soviet Union, not in terms of power structures or even power relations, but in terms of (self-)representation equates to Russia, be it imperial or federal (neo-imperial?). It is true that Lenin’s statues have fallen in Russia itself, yet many of them remain, which signifies two things. First, the Soviet historical narrative is still strong and significant in the Russian society. Second, it is being contested by other historical narratives, for instance the imperial one. This is evidenced via the resurging popularity of the image of Tsar Nicholas II next to Lenin.43 But perhaps it is shown even more so in the extent of support that the claim that, by occupying Crimea (which was once a part of the Russian Empire), Russia restored “historical justice”, has received in Russian society.44 The paradox here in terms of the narrative lies in the fact that the occupation was celebrated by Vladimir Putin on the “Victory Day”, a celebration of Soviet origins, packed with Soviet sentiments (next to the imagery of “fighting Nazism”).45 Yet it was precisely in the Soviet Union that Crimea became an integral part of Ukraine. This demonstrates the merging of two factually contesting narratives, which nevertheless incited phenomenal support for Vladimir Putin’s policy. Next to Stalin, Lenin’s image emerges here as a signifier of the Soviet part of this self-contradicting Russian historical narrative and self-perception. And it is Lenin’s statues that stand as a demarcating

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signifier of the experiential Soviet space, constituting a particular political identity in the region while not necessarily corresponding with actual state borders in some eastern parts of Ukraine.

The anatomy of political images The main characteristics that unite the images of the national heroes mentioned above is their symbolism and their importance for the political identities in their respective contexts. In each case, the factual person behind the image, be it real or fictional, has been pushed to the margins. The central emphasis in each case is put on their symbolism, conveying the ideas, ideals and political cosmology that constitute respective political identities. This also means that the images of these personalities were very tightly connected to the political needs of the forming identities. Whether the need was for encouragement to strive for independence, to represent a particular interpretation of history, to evoke a sense of unity over the centuries or to have a leader figure the nation could relate to, the images of these persons served that purpose. Let us now take a closer look at this symbolical side of these historical personalities, understanding them as political myths and analysing them in terms of expression, function and purpose. How? The expression I chose the term image for expressing this symbolic and mythological side of political presence in order to dissociate the argument from the neo-Marxist interpretation of myths as something false and deceiving. The term “myth” in the contemporary political debates is usually perceived negatively, as something to be dissolved or refuted. This is partially due to the enlightened positivist conception of truth that is engrained in Western thought. Truth here is something that can be conceived rationally and proven factually. Of course, myth does not always satisfy these demands, and thus is ascribed to the sphere of non-truth, along with lies, beliefs, ravings, intuitions, hallucinations and things of similar nature. Mythological thinking, nevertheless, is highly prevalent and functional in contemporary social and political life, and political images, as demonstrated, carry significant power. One of the most famous critiques of modern political images and myths has been presented by Roland Barthes, who deconstructed them semiotically – as a sign. He demonstrated how numerous mythologies, as he called them, had been integrated and consumed within the French bourgeois society of the mid-twentieth century. He points out that these mythologies comprise three elements: the signifier, for instance, a bouquet; a significant, for example love; and the sign – a bouquet that indicates love. He then makes a typical Marxist intellectual move and “unmasks” the mechanisms of consumption, which push one towards buying bouquets as signs of love, and thus perpetuate the capitalist bourgeois status quo. We therefore encounter typical modernist

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scepticism, searching for someone’s ill-willed interest, the masked “truth” to be “unmasked” and mechanisms of exploitation to be exposed. As it is such a taken-for-granted logic in the mainstream discourse to be searching for the truth “somewhere beyond” the present, it itself can be perceived as a kind of modern mythology, secular Gnosticism, or perhaps rationalist transcendentalism. This way, Barthes’ argument turns against itself, as it was aiming precisely to dissolve modern mythology. Yet his analytical framework is useful when analysing the representative meanings of these political and social symbols and images. Our argument, as mentioned above, dissociates itself from these efforts to “unmask” myth, in order to appreciate something that Barthes’ model omits. What is left behind by his approach is the experiential and emotional value of these political images, as well as the actual political power it contains. The importance of this associative and a-rational side is well understood and utilised by those working in advertisement, public relations and mass media. The commercialisation of these “assets” overwhelms the importance of truth in the neo-liberal economised environment. And with the Russian late modern doctrine of “hybrid war”, power itself becomes a relativist play of impressions. This way contemporary politics once again becomes essentially mythological, expressed in a-rational and associative images, which renders the human factor central. With the contemporary information wars in not only Central Eastern Europe, but also Western Europe and the US, the impressions, the beliefs that different narratives form, begin influencing actual politics in a very tangible way. Yet how do they function in contemporary politics? What for? The function From ancient times, political images have been used in politics for many reasons. Raoul Girardet argues that the role of political myths and images becomes particularly important during times of political crisis and an overall loss of orientation.46 Let us take Ukraine’s Maidan as an example; I will discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter. In 2013, Yanukovych’s government, for various reasons, reached a critical point. Millions of people flooded the streets in protest, and when the police began the violent breakdown on the protesters, it abandoned its moral authority and function as a public safeguard. Instead, through murdering and violently repressing the citizens, it became simply a brute-force protector of the political status quo. This way, the power legitimacy of both the police and the government crumbled and was only justified through power itself. On the other hand, Maidan Square in Kyiv began transforming into a political space, and civic power relations were substituted with violent power relations. Eventually, new power structures began to emerge, such as the infamous “Pravyi Sektor”. After the toppling of Yanukovych, these new organisations attained and even began competing for political power and the right to represent the new polity.

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In a political crisis like this, the established social and political norms and limits collapse, and the existing power structure loses its functionality – due to either its ineffectiveness or the external influences. The limits between political entities and structures dissolve. Some social institutions or organisations lose their function, some attain new ones; some shrink, while others expand. Meanwhile, new political forms emerge; new power logics and “rules of the game” form. The same sotnias of volunteers, who fought Berkut in Maidan, later became real military force fighting the war with Russia and the separatists in the East. Epochs change and new hierarchies are established. Political images, therefore, can be said to make fluctuating and ambiguous political realities sensible and intelligible to those participating and experiencing a crisis or transition and shaping their experienced reality at the same time. From the examples of images of persons that we discussed, we can conclude that they function in several ways. They are used for (1) mobilising political movements, (2) substantiating political identity, (3) legitimating power, and (4) structuring ambiguous political reality. I will discuss each method in turn. First, the mobilising function of images manifests in political situations such as democratic elections to nationalist movements. Democracy can only exist if the civic demos imagines itself as such. And it is images instead of candidates as persons that the electorate votes for. The candidates present an image they wish to portray, and the public on its turn also votes for the “firm hand”, the “concern with the working class” (the “class” itself being an image), the “proWestern” or “pro-European” disposition, “change”, “security” or “progressive thinking”. The person itself has very little to do with the associative charge that its image conveys – so much so, that, if we take the case of the fictional Kalevipoeg, its image also managed to mobilise political will and a sentiment of common struggle. Kalevipoeg’s image invoked pride and emotional support for a particular idea that, as mentioned, was equally used by the interwar Estonian national narrative as well as the Soviet one. Political images can also affect foreign policy. In reaction to the Ukrainian crisis, and in increasing fear of the possibility of Russian aggression, some of Ukraine’s neighbours began increasing their military readiness, with NATO also deploying extra forces in the Baltic States and Poland. All of this was induced by a vision or image of a possible war scenario and a tightly related image of Vladimir Putin. And even though the war has not happened (as of 2017), the discussions about the imagined (yet not unsubstantiated) possibility justify the presence of NATO forces on the borderlands with Russia as well as the local population’s acceptance thereof. The image of Russia as an aggressor, in this instance, is made up of historical memory, personal emotions and fears, real facts and contextual as well as associative connotations. Furthermore, this image of the “common adversary” or “common oppressor” also played a role for the emerging solidarity between the Baltic States, Ukraine and Georgia, all of which base it on shared historical experience. Second, probably the most obvious function that political images uphold is substantiating political identity. Benedict Anderson’s ideas regarding the

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imagined nature of modern political identities are probably most well known in this context. National images such as the tombs of Unknown Soldiers, according to him, provide the clearest example of how images dissociated from factual particularity substantiate national identity.47 Yet not only are national symbols, myths, important personalities, historical episodes in a large part imaginary. Due to their rather archetypical nature and structural simplicity, they are also capable of containing and representing shared experiences, expectations, nostalgia, dreams and aspirations. Such is the image of Vytautas in the case of modern Lithuanian identity – it does not feature merely in a historical narrative as a national hero figure. Because Vytautas’ personality is so reduced, his image is also capable of representing Lithuania’s historical greatness, or strength, or invoking national pride. His image connects the modern Lithuanian historical narrative to the Great Duchy of Lithuania, establishing an ethno-centric articulation of Lithuanian history and identity. As a result, when used and reciprocated in the political life, just like previously mentioned ritual masks, images materialise. They begin to form and influence political reality. As mentioned above, there is a university and a gymnasium titled after the grand duke, and some streets and organisations also bear the national hero’s name. Vytautas’ image was also an important source of inspiration for Sa˛ ju-dis, and many monuments were built in his honour, in both the interwar and post-Soviet periods. Therefore, through telling stories and participating in this largely imagined narrative, or, as Alasdair MacIntyre would say, through historically embedded existence, the society actualises these identities. The lived human experience attached to these images puts them into political presence. And eventually images themselves begin to substantiate lived political reality. This way, Anderson’s imagined communities become grounded in real politics and observed factuality. The third function that political images attain is the legitimisation of power. During the revolution in Russia, one of the first things the Bolsheviks did was symbolically execute the Romanov family. They then defaced and destroyed images of the previous order, only to establish their own immediately afterwards. Strength and potency in ruling in a tribal society are proven through trophies, scars, decorations, ritualistic dance, fighting or other representative images. Charismatic leaders, be it Gandhi or Hitler, are also enshrined with images: the national symbolism, particular haircuts, clothing and other attributes. They themselves become embodied images – representations of a certain struggle, emotional charge or ideology. And in hereditary rule, the monarchs receive material images of power – a sceptre, a crown, etc. The ruler, this way, is the one who wears these images of power. In this context, it is no surprise that the Polish Solidarnos´c´ movement also embraced the imagery of Kos´ciuszko as an image of the national struggle. Kos´ciuszko here becomes a vessel for contemporary images and associative connotations instead of being only a historical personality. And through identifying with him, Solidarnos´c´ declared its legitimacy as a social and political movement.

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The fourth and last function of political images that I would like to discuss is their capacity for structuring chaotic reality. Because they have a concrete form, they are structurally clear. At the same time, they are capacious: they invoke associations, they are recognisable, they bear strong emotional charge. Under the circumstances of a crisis, which is constantly fluctuating and hard to articulate, they present a symbolic reference point and they begin to differentiate experientially the good from the bad, an enemy from a friend, a human being from a non-human being, “us” from “them”. In the post-Soviet European context, for instance, Lenin’s figure serves as the denominator of two different narratives: the one that is nostalgic and panegyric towards the Soviet memory and heritage, and the one that seeks to do away with it. This way, the figure of Lenin becomes a touchstone for both types of post-Soviet identity, serving as a structuring element. In the case of Maidan, when the political reality seemed almost surreal, difficult to orientate in, the toppling of Lenin’s statues was a symbolic declaration of self-definition. This way, iconic images, which are easy to conceive and have a capacity to reduce the complexity of reality, become a meta-reality, which determines both political power and the status quo. Why? The purpose The final question that we are going to ask is, “Why do political images function that way?” In one of his works, Mircea Eliade gives an example recorded by a Romanian folklorist of an old rustic Romanian woman who lost a fiancé when she was young. His death became mythologised, put into illo tempore, long ago, and various mythological creatures were related to the story, even though the same woman was still alive and told a different, more “prosaic” story of the event. However, “when the folklorist drew the villagers’ attention to the authentic version, they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind”.48 Such mythological articulation of personalities and events is typical for the popular memory, which, instead of preserving the individual characteristics, converts them into exemplary, iconic ones. However, very similar processes can also be observed in modern political culture. It is enough to mention the printing of Che Guevara’s images on any mass-produced, supposedly anti-capitalist consumables or Abraham Lincoln axe-chopping vampires in Timur Bekmambetov’s 2012 film to understand how historical personalities are represented as icons, not as factual persons, in the West as much as in the East, in the present as much as in the past. The reason that I would like to suggest for this rests on quite an obvious argument stated at the beginning of the book. Not only human cognition, world perception, but also imagination, are all limited. As a demonstration, I invite the reader to imagine a life of an ant. I guarantee that what one will come up with will at best be a set of images and predispositions as to what it should be like rather than what it actually is. The everyday experience of an

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ant will remain a very real yet inconceivable part of reality beyond our true and complete comprehension. The images that one would create when trying to imagine the ant’s life, on the other hand, could provide decent material for a feature film or a documentary. Now suppose such film is indeed released and becomes a popular hit.49 This imaginary narrative would then be considered the real representation of the factuality that is never to be fully comprehended. When applied to politics, this principle of rationalisation can explain the presence of political images because only a world comprising finite, measured and conceivable forms makes rational sense. As such, political images, rather than hard factuality, are constitutive of largely abstract political identity. This is not to say that the irrational does not exist – quite the contrary. This fluid and ambiguous existence can be experienced during every war, turmoil or crisis. It lurks in the abstract nature of political identity as much as in that of human rights, international law or other spheres of imagined political reality. However, it is the sphere of the indescribable, the infinite, the humanly inconceivable. Just like the surface of Jupiter, the reactions at the core of a nuclear power plant, or the life of an ant. We can only approach these spheres of reality through a medium of images, which will never fully describe or represent the factual reality. Political images and archetypes vary through epochs, yet they always return. They create and convey meaning that structures the inhabited world according to the already-existent, archetypical, therefore meaningful and indeed rational order. This way they make political existence itself rational and purposeful, within the given society and political cosmology. And this is why they become so potent and important in times of turmoil and crisis. Of course, through this act of meaning-forming, imagination becomes an operative faculty. Not only do we have to draw a mythological narrative within the chaotic flow of experienced reality; when we imagine or otherwise represent something, we ourselves structure that which we imagine. Paradoxically, instead of creating nonsense at random, this act of image-making repeats a cosmic, mythological action – the creation of concrete forms out of chaos and non-being. This way the image may not be very rational or factually true, but it will entail meaning and a certain kind of rationality, and therefore political power.

Images in politics All four images of persons that we discussed, be it a fictional character, a medieval duke, a nineteenth-century independence fighter or a Soviet dictator, play important symbolical and emotional roles in their respective societies. They add existential value to the political identity they are related to, they represent various associative values, and they justify political choices, struggles and decisions. Most significantly, it is such images that comprise political cosmologies, which consist of emotional and rational, logical and associative,

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factual and imagined networks of meaning. And these networks set a context for the political and existential persona. In the post-Soviet region, these are particularly important precisely due to the historical turmoil and liminal crises in which people in these societies are all too often situated. I have discussed political images in terms of their expression, function and purpose. We saw that political images and myths are used as means to convey abstract ideas, sentiments and human experiences. It is this quality that makes them essential in political identity formation. Instead of trying to dissolve these images or deconstruct myths, I argued that they substantiate and are essential for structuring the political reality, particularly during times of turmoil. Political myths function in at least four main ways. First, they mobilise political movements. As they can convey emotional and symbolic content, they are representative and are easy to associate with. This gives a common ground for people to unite in a political movement or identity. Second, political myths substantiate political identity. Images are like building blocks for political identity narratives. These loci of meaning function as gravity centres for the newly forming identities. Even though many identities are imaginary, the fact that images are being incorporated into actual politics renders them factual. Third, the myths are used for legitimating power. In the political process, a king is he who wears a crown. A policeman is he who wears a uniform. A man with special needs is he who walks with crutches. These images are signals that invoke our attitude and reaction to particular circumstances: we obey, resist, support or otherwise. And finally, political images structure ambiguous political reality. This element is particularly important during times of crisis. Under such circumstances, political images become the only anchors for reasonable assessment. They help identify who is who and what is what. The fact that they attain such power naturally renders political images more than just fairy tales and illusions. I have tried to tackle the question, why do political images have such power? I answered that by referring to a human condition of finitude. As we are unable to comprehend the fullness of reality, we are bound to use abbreviations, reductions and representations. In fact, it is precisely these mental forms that render the surrounding world reasonable, measurable and rational. This does not mean, however, that the forms are fake, not real or less real. Their presence and importance are as real as that of concepts such as national interest, human rights, capital or racism, which are in themselves partially factual and partially imaginary, inferred or constructed. Images can thus be seen as myths that are based on actual events (or other subjects), but through their use and social reciprocation they gain different meanings that are detached from the factuality of the event, and instead relate to the ever-changing context of use. In many cases they are even more influential than the factuality itself, thus rendering the non-factual, factual. Through human experience, through political practice, images become a type of self-fulfilling prophecy. What is said or imagined here substantiates what actually is.

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Notes 1 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 23. 2 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Vintage Classics, 2009), 131–133. 3 Ibid. 4 Raoul Girardet, Politiniai Mitai Ir Mitologijos [Political Myths and Mythologies] (Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2007). 5 This idea has been built upon by several authors when discussing post-Soviet Eastern European politics. See, for example, Wöll and Wydra, eds, Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe. 6 Girardet, Politiniaia Mitai Ir Mitologijos [Political Myths and Mythologies], 117. In order to make this factor of crisis explicit and put it in a broader cultural and anthropological context, I will use the concept of liminality. The idea of an ambiguous, liminal crisis situation being the source of new identities and images in society has been discussed by various authors, such as Arnold van Gennep, Bernhard Giesen and Victor Turner. See: Gennep, Rites of Passage (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1960); Giesen, Intellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (New York: Cornell University Press, 1967). 7 Girardet, Politiniai Mitai Ir Mitologijos [Political Myths and Mythologies], 117. 8 Ibid., 255–257. 9 Kos´ciuszko was chosen instead of another obvious “candidate”, Jósef Piłsudsky (1867–1935), as I am trying to maintain the temporal diversity. 10 The cultural distinction from the Finnish is, however, important to the modern Estonian nationalism. 11 Jüri Talvet, “Constructing a Mythical Future City for a Symbiotic Nation from the European ‘Periphery’”, Interlitteraria 14, no. 1 (2009), 85. 12 David Ilmar Lepasaar Beecher, “Kalevipoeg’s Mistake”, Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences, http://www.lituanus.org/2001/01_3_05.htm (last accessed: 12 September 2014). 13 According to Estonian folklore, a hill in central Tallinn is a tumulus mound piled over Kalev’s grave. Both the governmental building and the parliament of Estonia are located on this hill, which is also very symbolic. 14 This mythological urban genealogy is similar to other cases, such as the establishment of Vilnius by Grand Duke Gediminas and even that of Rome by Romulus and Remus. 15 Talvet, “Constructing a Mythical Future City”, 93–95. 16 Ibid., 86–87. 17 Guntis Šmidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics as a Source for Nonviolent Political Action”, Slavic Review 66, no. 3 (2007), 493. 18 Andrew Hart, “The Role of the Lutheran Church in Estonian Nationalism”, Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, 13, no. 3 (1993), 11. 19 Šmidchens, “National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics”, 485. . . 20 See: Šutiniene, “Tautos Istorijos Mitai Lietuvos Gyventojų Sa˛.moneje”. [Myths of Lithuanian History in Its Inhabitants’ Consciousness], in Istorine Sa˛ mone Ir Istorijos . Didaktika, eds Aru . nas Poviliunas and Vilija Poviliuniene . (Vilnius: Solertija, . 1997), 66–82; Šutiniene, “Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystes Paveldo Reikšmes Populiariosiose Tautinio Naratyvo Interpretacijose” [The Meanings of Lithuanian Grand Duchy Heritage in Popular Interpretations of the National Narrative], Lietuvos Istorijos Studijos 21 (2008), 102–120. . 21 Micku-naite, Vytautas Didysis [Vytautas Magnus]. 22 It is important to remind the reader that Rzeczpospolita consisted of many ethnicities, and several modern nations, including the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine and

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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Political images and identity others, apart from Poland, claim the heritage of the Republic. He is particularly important to Belarusian popular historical narrative and perhaps slightly less so to Lithuanians. Magdalena Micin´ska, “The Myth of Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko in the Polish Mind (1794–1997)”, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire 5, no. 2 (1998), 192–195. Led by the neo-romanticist ideas, he sought to re-establish Poland on the basis of Rzeczpospolita historical heritage, thus rendering modern Polish identity the narrative continuation of the pre-modern Rzeczpospolita one. In Lithuanian historical narrative, Piłsudsky is most often established as a negative figure, an aggressor who illegally occupied the Vilnius region, which to modern Lithuanian narrative was the capital of their own political persona. Micin´ska, “The Myth of Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko in the Polish Mind”, 195–196. See for example: Wojciech Flera, “Does the Life of Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko Provide Lessons for Today?” Polish American Studies 64, no. 1 (2007), 75–78. Wojciech Cejrowski, quoted in: Geneviève Zubrzycki, “‘We, the Polish Nation’: Ethnic and Civic Visions of Nationhood in Post-Communist Constitutional Debates”, Theory and Society 30, no. 5 (2001), 645. Halina Filipowicz, “Textualizing Trauma: From Vale˛ sa to Kos´ciuszko in Polish Theatre of the 1980s”, Theatre Journal 48, no. 4 (1996), 444. Rudolph Rummel presents an account of Lenin’s victims in his Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 1–50. Trevor Smith, “The Collapse of the Lenin Personality Cult in Soviet Russia 1985–1995”, Historian 60, no. 2 (2007), 325–343. Ibid., 343. “Пëпулярнëсть Ленина и Сталина с гëдами падает – ëпрëс [Lenin’s and Stalin’s Popularity Gradually Falls – A Survey]”, RIA.ru, http://ria.ru/society/20081117/ 155348018.html (last accessed: 23 January 2015). “Опрëс: бëльше 50% рëссиян пëддерживает Сталина [Survey: Over 50% Russians Support Stalin]”, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2015/01/150120_ russia_stalin_poll (last accessed: 23 January 2015). “Soviet Nostalgia in Putin’s Russia: New Generation of Pioneers Goes Back to the USSR on Red Square”, YouTube video, 1:09, posted by “Ukraine News Online”, 18 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e88QaosIwaU. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7. A similar phenomenon can even be observed in contemporary Russian politics, with the surprising popularity of Vladimir Putin’s image in recent times as well as his tsar-like treatment by Moscow’s Orthodox Church throughout his terms of office. Geoffrey Hosking, “Putin is Part of a Continuum that Stretches Back to the Tsars”, The Guardian, 4 April 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2017/apr/04/putin-continuum-tsars-russia (last accessed 30 July 2017). In a survey conducted on March 2014, only 15 per cent of respondents said, “under no circumstances should the power in Russia be concentrated in the hands of a single man”. See: “Рëссияне ë сильнëм лидере и единëвластии” [Russians on Strong Leadership and Autocracy], Levada.ru, http://www.levada.ru/08-04-2014/ rossiyane-o-silnom-lidere-i-edinovlastii (last accessed: 26 January 2015). Maria Yuzich, “Every Lenin statue that fell brings us closer to Paris”, day.kiev.ua, http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/article/culture/every-lenin-statue-fell-brings-us-closer-paris (last accessed: 17 September 2014). A list with pictures of the torn-down statues can be found here: “Памятники Ленину, снесённые на Украине с февраля 2014 гëда (списëк, фëтëграфии) [Lenin’s

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42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49

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Memorials, Torn Down in Ukraine since February 2014 (List, Photographs)]”, Leninstatues.ru, http://leninstatues.ru/leninopad (last accessed: 17 September 2014). The process did not happen without resistance. There were demonstrations and violent clashes in several mostly Eastern Ukrainian cities, when some Ukrainian inhabitants were opposing the tearing down of the dictator’s statues. See: Srec´ko Horvat, “Ukraine’s Fallen Statues of Lenin are Not Just a Rejection of Russia”, The Guardian (last accessed: 17 September 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2014/mar/16/ukraine-lenin-statues-rejection-russia-eu#start-of-comments. The symbolic grounding of the war in Eastern Ukraine is also engrained in this imagery. However, there is a risk of delving too much into a self-sanctifying martyrologic national rhetoric, to be discussed later. “Опрëс: бëльше 50% рëссиян пëддерживает Сталина” [Survey: Over 50% Russians Support Stalin]. In the survey on March 2014, one third of the respondents in Russia gave this justification for the occupation. “Прëисхëдящее в Украине, Крыму и реакция Рëссии” [Events in Ukraine, Crimea and the Reaction by Russia], Levada.ru, http://www.levada.ru/26-03-2014/proiskhodyashchee-v-ukraine-krymu-i-reaktsiyarossii (last accessed: 26 January 2015). “Ukraine: Putin hails Crimea’s ‘historic’ return amid deadly violence”, CBC.ca, http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-putin-hails-crimea-s-historic-return-am id-deadly-violence-1.2636814 (last accessed: 26 January 2015). Girardet, Politiniai Mitai Ir Mitologijos [Political Myths and Mythologies], 117. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 44–46. A few Hollywood films do comprise animated representations of such nature.

4

Common Images, Contesting Narratives: Maidan

So far, we have encountered political images mostly in the context of a single, more or less uniform historical narrative and have only briefly considered the possibility of political images serving several narratives. For instance, even though positions on the exact path to independence in Lithuania varied, as discussed, there was a general acceptance of a common political iconography and teleology within the society, which united various narratives. To the majority of Lithuanian people, who were at the time living through the liminal transition and experiencing it first hand, the world seemed clearly divided between the “good West” and the “evil East”. The teleology of the independence movement, therefore, could be clearly described as moving away from the Soviet occupation and towards the free Western world. This in its turn later shaped both the pro-Western post-Soviet Lithuanian identity and its political reality. However, what happens if there are several contesting narratives over a single political image? What if the same image means different things in different political cosmologies, with clashing teleologies? What political implication does this have in the post-Soviet context and (how) does it affect the perception of the political “self” and the “other”? In order to answer these questions, I will discuss the case of Maidan in Kyiv, 2013–2014, which gave rise to a new epoch in the region’s but also in the global history. After these events, Ukraine set itself on a new post-Soviet path, the tensions in the region rose due to the Russian reaction to Maidan, and the relations between Russia and the West (by which I mean Western Europe and the US) consequentially experienced a major downfall. But that is not the only reason why this case is significant for my argument. The narratives circulating in the Ukrainian public sphere during Maidan were more diversified, and the situation overall was more complex than in previous cases. This allows us to observe different articulations of the same images. I will therefore analyse the predominant perceptions of two political images related to the Ukrainian crisis from the perspectives of three different narratives: the Western, the Russian and the Ukrainian. I will have to omit other narratives, such as those of other Eastern and Central European countries as well as those of the rest of the world. The two images were chosen because of their profound importance in the context. These images are of “the West”,

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and of “being right-wing”. I will examine how different perceptions of these images influenced the articulation of the entire political situation surrounding Maidan, and how the identities of the political “self” and “the other” formed in this context. I will base my arguments on my own observations and interviews I made during my fieldwork trip, which coincidentally took place at the time of the most crucial clashes between the protesters and the police, the former Berkut unit in February 2014. I will focus on the images and narratives that emerged from within certain social spaces – meetings, press, etc. – and not necessarily about the political process as it factually happened. It is yet too early, if it will ever be possible, to describe the objective factuality of the events that took place in Kyiv between November 2013 and late February 2014. Most likely, this will remain a matter of contestation among different narratives, just as it happens with so many political dramas, where different political agendas are involved. Ultimately, the narratives that matter to politics most are usually not so much factual as they are symbolic and able to convey political will.

On site: the Maidan’s territory The protests in Kyiv started when the then-president Viktor Yanukovych cancelled the long-lasting negotiations with the European Union regarding the association agreement in favour of closer economic ties with Russia. Crowds of protesters went to the streets in disagreement with this unilateral action, which was but the tip of the iceberg of the government’s corruption. The protesters were met with brutal police force, with the main occasion of significance being the beating of students protesting on Maidan Square early in the morning of 30 November 2013. The conflict escalated further, as the protesters grew in numbers and set up a tent town at Independence Square in central Kyiv, eventually barricading the premises and assuming control of several streets, a few buildings, including the City Administration, and a second square (which, not necessarily incidentally, is called the European Square) nearby. The protest was representative of all the Ukrainian population, ranging from the poorest to the richest, while mostly consisting of the educated middle-aged middle social strata, including populations from all regions of Ukraine, various ethnicities, linguistic identities, gender, age and education.1 This is in opposition to accusations that Maidan was regionally Western based, linguistically Ukrainian and not representative of the entire Ukrainian population. My personal experience in Kyiv confirms this, as I saw the variety of people participating in the protest and interviewed several protesters from different parts of Ukraine. Infrastructure Before my arrival in Kyiv, the information regarding the protests was varied. Some media outlets depicted Maidan as a pro-European democratic

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movement, while others accused it of vandalising and instigating disorder. Pictures of burning tyres and people in balaclavas fighting the riot police were circulating all over the internet, while frightening stories of people being kidnapped and tortured in the forests around the city, and state-hired hooligan gangs beating protesters, attested to the complexity of the situation. When my plane landed in Zhulyany Airport on 13 February 2014, the protesters controlled a large area in the centre of the city, spanning from the Central Department Store in the south, along Khreshchatik Avenue, past Maidan Square, up to European Square in the north. The protesters had established the tent-town and their headquarters in the occupied building of the City Council. The metal tabloid with the council’s title was crossed out and “Revolutionary Headquarters” was written next to it. Along with the new title, Taras Shevchenko’s portrait was hung, probably as a sign of symbolic authority. Shevchenko, a national Ukrainian poet, assumed an image of a super-Ukrainian, in different cases represented as a superhero, a Buddhist guru, an exemplary Cossack or in a romanticised way, like popular representations of Lenin, Che Guevara or Obama. In front of the building stood the famous blue and yellow piano, with a masked Maidan fighter playing an unfamiliar tune. Further up the street, at Maidan Square, on the corner stood the Trade Union House, which was turned into a donated food distribution centre, and a dormitory for protesters. Later, on the tragic night of 18–19 February, the Trade Union House was heavily damaged by fire during the clashes between the protesters and the Berkut. Thanks to my energetic and convincing companion Volodymyr, who had been supporting the movement from the beginning and who acted as my guide around Maidan, I had a chance to look around inside. I took an interview from an unnamed man, who was apparently in a commanding position, responsible for allocating and organising people arriving to protest from the city of Mykolaiv in Southern Ukraine.2

Figures 4.1–2 Revolutionary Headquarters and different representation of Shevchenko in Maidan. Photo: Arvydas Grišinas.

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To my astonishment, inside the building I also found a stationery shop, which had not closed despite the protests. The same can be said about many businesses within the protester-controlled territory. Most of the shops, cafés and even a post office were open and working, unlike what had been reported by some media, depicting the protests as an uncontrolled ravaging of vandals. At the occupied Ukrainian House on European Square, the protesters even opened a “Maidan’s University” with a space for lectures, a library, and a space for artists, decorating fighter’s helmets and shields among other things. There was also a chapel and a surgery room established in the same building. In the West, the Maidan’s territory spanned from St. Michael’s Monastery, where the protesters established their first protest camp in late 2013, along Mykhailivska Street, up to somewhere around October Palace on Institutska Street and the Valeriy Lobanovsky monument on Mykhaila Hrushevskoho Street in the east. October Palace had also become a dormitory, a refectory, a storage and a field hospital all at once. Having visited it and interviewed a few doctors working there, I realised the extent and diversity of the sources of support Maidan was receiving. The storage shelves were filled with medical supplies with titles in various languages, and the volunteer personnel were faced with a challenge sorting through the medicine because of the variety of labels and languages it used. This once again goes against the allegations that the movement was supported by a single political power. The support I saw was global and abundant. Atmosphere Another thing that struck me was the genuinely warm, uplifting and at once surreal atmosphere in the Maidan. People were looking after each other, distributing food among themselves, talking and smiling. Behind the balaclavas and daunting barricades, there was a sense of comradeship, care and slight pathos. Next to piles of dismantled pavement tiles, which were readily smashed into smaller pieces, convenient for throwing, an elderly lady was sweeping the pavement. Volodymyr told me, half-jokingly, that during the clashes with the Berkut, the protesters would throw Molotov cocktails at the police, but their cigarette butts – into a trash bin. I personally witnessed twice how people who had apparently overdosed on alcohol were escorted outside the Maidan’s territory by the masked guards and left behind the barricades to sober up. Most of the people I interviewed agreed that the movement had a self-cleansing quality, restoring human dignity in many ways. Volodymyr told me that, after the systematically corrupt social structure these Ukrainians had lived in since the Soviet Union, the protests gave them a sense of self-ownership and pride. However, not everyone was very satisfied with the calm and peaceful pace that the protests were taking at that time. One young man I interviewed, who served in Maidan as a frontline fighter, was dissatisfied with things turning peaceful.3 He was worried that this would mean the end of Maidan. For him, the aim of the protest was none other than to remove Yanukovych from

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power and start major reforms across the country. It is ironic that the conversation we had took place on 17 February, one day prior to the decisive clashes that ended up with the former president’s flight and the eventual end of Kyiv’s Maidan. Another coincidence is that the major sniper shootings on 20 February took place on Institutska Street, where the said October Palace stands. The part of the street where the fighting took place is now called Heavenly Sotnia Alley, after the Maidan fighters who died during the protests.4 Symbolism Maidan’s territory was thoroughly symbolic. Political, cultural, historical and other imagery was so abundant here that one could try to read and decipher it like an archaeologist does with ancient inscriptions. There were pictures, stickers, graffiti and sculptures, all declaring different ideas, critiques and insults, mostly addressed towards the government and the current political and social situation as well as historical memory. Next to that, there were many flags, mainly the blue–yellow Ukrainian and the red–black anti-Soviet interwar independence flags, which were later associated with the “right-winged” narrative, but also EU and other Western countries’ flags, which were hung as an appeal to and sign of association with the Western world. This image, as we saw in the Lithuanian case, has a strong emotional charge to the post-Soviet narratives. Unsurprisingly, the movement was first labelled as “Maidan”, which to the protesters first had a meaning of “the gathering”. Yet soon it was re-titled the Euromaidan. At the western end, Maidan’s territory also bordered the Valery Lobanovsky monument on Mykhaila Hrushevskoho Street. It is here that the clashes in January resulted in the iconic tyre burning and Molotov cocktail throwing. It was after these clashes that the self-organised sotnias, including the famous Right Sector, drew major attention from the Western media.5 And it was here that simultaneously the popular image of a Maidan fighter as a masked neo-fascist hooligan assumed the archetypical shape, signified by the Right Sector emblem. Regardless of the amount of symbolism in the protester-held territory, the actual meaning of the signs and imagery of Maidan often meant very little to the external narratives interpreting it. As we shall see, the same images, once again due to their capacity of symbolic representation, were capable of accommodating several different interpretations and narratives. Each interested party treated this visual and symbolic material according to their own needs, which is worth analysing in its own right.

Western narrative In the Western media, the protests in Kyiv were perceived through a particular political cosmological lens:

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Most Member States viewed the situation in Ukraine primarily through the prism of relations with Russia. Most often, however, this simply came down to pragmatic economic interests. Here, the equation was simple. Bilateral trade volume with Russia is in most cases much more valuable than with Ukraine, and the latter has in most cases been diminishing further since the onset of the Europe-wide economic crisis. Coupled with a very limited interest and confidence in Ukraine’s democratic and European future, this inclined the majority of Member States to take a permissive position towards Russia […]. It is thus only a small group of European countries, including the UK, the V4 countries, Sweden and non-EU member Norway, that perceived the protests not just as a rejection of a local system of governance, but as a stand for broader democratic norms and European values.6 The protest movement assumed the name of Euromaidan because the protesters were expecting support from the European Union and the Western world in their struggle. However, the attitudes changed as the protesters realised that the support they were expecting would not come so readily. Thus the “Euro-” part eventually lost its political importance and various kinds of national symbolism came to the fore towards the later part of the process. “Right-wingedness” and reduction of complexity One popular image, mentioned above, was what will be called here the image of “being right-wing”. Around January 2014, the protests became particularly violent from the protesters’ side (despite several previous occasions that seemed more like provocations from the government’s side, either by Berkut, or by the hired thugs, popularly called titushky). The use of the iconic Molotov cocktails started then, as did the emergence of various protesters’ self-defence groups among which several, such as the Right Sector, assumed Western “right-wing”-style aesthetics and rhetoric.7 What the Western audiences saw, was crude snow and junk barricades with barbed wire, burning tyres, masked protesters with sticks and Molotov cocktails, and nationaliststyled insignia. Maidan was accused of having a “right-wing” ideology not only through the participation of the Right Sector and other “self-defence groups”, but also through the image of one of the opposition’s Maidansupporting parties, Svoboda, which has in the past voiced openly anti-Semitic sentiments. The specificity of the image of “being right-wing” in the West, however, is twofold. First, due to the historical Second World War experience, and the consequential mythologising of this experience (as well as the sense of victimhood attached to it) in the Western political culture, this image became an extremely powerful and abused scapegoating tool.8 Accusing someone of being “right-wing”, or more strictly of being “far right”, became a very useful and potent way of demonising any political, social or cultural phenomenon.

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Second, the associative applicability of the image of being “right-wing” is also particularly wide. In the Western political cosmology, completely different and often largely unrelated categories and contexts are placed under the same umbrella title, rendering it over-extensive and thus meaningless. Often unrelated ideas like “biological” racism, militarism, Nazism, homophobia, racism (paradoxically, understood as perceiving a difference within others based on other than race factors, such as nationality, culture, habits, name, etc.), nationalism, individualism, chauvinism, libertarianism, traditionalism, fascism, royalism, sexism, national bolshevism, aristocraticism, patriotism, state-centralism, antiegalitarianism and many other “-isms” can all be to different extents and in different forms related to the image of “right wing”. However, all the mentioned associative notions come with their own imagery, symbolism and varying associative, emotional charges. This way, the image of being “right-wing” can demonise or scapegoat almost any political position, while at the same time absolutely disregarding the specificity and the actual meaning as well as the contextual premises of the phenomenon in question. By February 2014, the protest site and central Kyiv in general became a venue for an amalgam of most varied views, political declarations and symbols. One could see walls covered with stylised swastika resembling ancient Slavic symbols (or perhaps swastikas resembling Slavic symbols), romanticised images of Cossacks and Taras Shevchenko, black-and-red “Banderite” interwar independence movement flags, pictures of a young girl in a traditional Ukrainian costume, Pravyi Sektor stickers, neo-Nazi insignia. However, next to those there were “leftist” anarchy signs, peace signs, Lithuanian “Gediminas’ towers”, abundant religious iconography, political caricatures, A.C.A.B. (a 1970s British anarchist slogan “All Coppers Are Bastards”) signs. Ukrainian, European Union, US, Canadian, German, Polish, Lithuanian flags hung on barricades and fences. Ideologically Maidan represented all possible modern political ideologies, or at least their images within Ukrainian political cosmology. If anything, this is representative of the birth of civic society, of the variety of narratives and views, ideas and genuine political positions participating in the improvised agora, where in a liminal political unrest Ukraine was building its post-Soviet political persona.9 However, in a lot of Western media coverage, all these civil voices, dreams and aspirations were compressed into a narrow “right-wing” image, mainly represented by the Pravyi Sektor bogeymen.10 Euromaidan as a pro-European national movement A second way that the protests were perceived in the Western media was primarily based on the notion that the object of Maidan’s dissatisfaction was the wish to join the European Union.11 Instead of emphasising the local political contexts, explaining the post-Soviet political culture of corruption and political nihilism as well as other intricacies of the Ukrainian post-USSR condition, the Western media instantly started discussing the prospects of

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Figure 4.3 Different more or less radical ideological messages on walls around Kyiv in February 2014. These are next to an abundance of pro-European and prodemocratic ones. “Enough suffering EU” (top left); “Pravyi Sektor” for national revolution (top centre); “Glory to Ukraine” with a Ukrainian coat of arms shown as “more” than a Euro sign and Rubble sign (top right); an anarchist sign with a Celtic cross drawn on top, which is widely used by fascists, opposing anarchists (middle left); a defaced anarchy sign (middle centre); an anarchist sign next to Nazi symbols (middle right); Lithuanian Gediminas’ Towers sign with a note: “For your and our freedom” (bottom left); unclear signs and geometrical figures defacing what seem to be Nazi signs (bottom centre and bottom right). Photos: Arvydas Grišinas.

Ukraine’s EU membership, framing the question in a larger geopolitical context and disregarding the very point of Maidan as a result.12 The discussion concentrated on the self-centred narrative, inherent to the dominant transition theories, taking a priori the idea that the main aim of Ukrainian struggle is to become a part of the European political and economic sphere.13 This image, in broad accordance with the Cold War logic, was thus opposed to the image of “USSR-Russia”. Thus, the entire conception of the processes taking place in Ukraine was framed in this binary context and was therefore simplistic: “pro-Western” protesters for EU membership were struggling against the “pro-Eastern” president, who seeks closer ties to Russia.14 From there, Western public opinion itself split between Euro-philes and Euro-critics, with several different “sub-genres”, some siding with the American Cold War narrative, and the others favouring the Russian Cold

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War narrative. Some supported the US narrative about the spread of Western values; others preferred the Russian narrative of US imperialism. Some approved Ukraine’s European political vector, whereas others were Euro-sceptical. The effect of this Western-centric binary perception of the situation spawned considerations about the split of Ukraine into two and consequentially gave birth to the doubts about Ukrainian State integrity, which from a Ukrainian perspective was reasonably seen as betrayal.15 As a result, the debates in Western media on the topic of Ukraine became more representative of the Western political cosmology and political spectre itself rather than the actual political process within the country. The two images that formed in the Western media merged the complexity of the situation into two main “ideological” Western points of view, Maidan being either “pro-European” or “nationalist”. This way, the Western audiences themselves started identifying with one of these sides, either in support of the Maidan’s “pro-European” struggle, or against the “right-wing coup d’état”. This way, once again, the format of images that the Western media constructed in explaining Maidan, became more representative of the West’s own political cosmology than the Ukrainian one. In framing the issue in this binary way, the public discussion created its own image of “Euromaidan”, which was representative of its own cosmological structure and provided a comfortable platform for the typical “left vs. right”, “pro-Russian vs. pro-American”, “anti-nationalist vs. pro-democratic” discussions to evolve. What this framing of the “Euromaidan” image did politically, however, was to provide the grounding for the Western perception of the situation in Ukraine. It provided epistemological tools for all the political positions both in the US and in the EU to structure and make sense of the ongoing crisis, discussing the prospects of the “Westernisation” of Ukraine as well as criticising its “right-wing” character.

Russian narrative Some years have passed since the events in Kyiv discussed here; one can probably easily say that, next to Ukraine, the biggest political impact this crisis had was on Russia. The aggressive (and defensive in the framework of the Russian narrative) foreign policy that the country pursued demonstrated its vulnerability and sensitivity to the topic. Surely it is impossible to do justice to the topic of Russian post-Soviet political identity and political cosmology that gave rise to the rebirth of the neo-imperialist political trajectory we are witnessing today in but a few pages. However, it is worthwhile to take a closer look at the two images I am discussing from a Russian perspective, if only to demonstrate the point that the Ukrainian crisis, in which Russia plays a dramatic role, is not only a matter of economic struggle and geopolitics, but also a ground for the clash of different narratives, political identities and images, formatting both the Ukrainian and indeed Russian post-Soviet political identities.

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Not surprisingly, from the very beginning of the events in Kyiv, the Euromaidan protests and their participants were widely covered in the Russian media, be it the internal one, or the one directed at the external audiences.16 Television was the main source of information on the events in Ukraine (as of August 2014) for 88 per cent of Russians, 73 per cent of whom saw the information as objective.17 Therefore the issue of Russian state-supported media is particularly important in this context. Being used as an actual weapon, it was this tool that shaped the mass attitudes to Maidan not only in the country itself, but also in Ukraine and, indeed, the West.18 Euromaidan and the archetype of fascism Perhaps because it was so complex in its political agenda, Maidan was depicted by the pro-government media in various paradoxical and self-contradicting terms, from anarchists to fascist, to “Banderites”, to vandals, etc. Their political struggle was called a coup d’état, and clips compiled of actual and falsified material of violence were continuously shown on the news.19 This is not difficult to understand, because despite his unsuccessful effort to flirt with the EU just before Maidan started, Viktor Yanukovych was widely known for his proRussian attitudes. At first, the Russian narrative searched for the appropriate image to attach to the protesters and was jumping from that of an anarchist to that of a “Banderite” or a ravaging “khokhol” (a derogatory name for a Ukrainian in Russian). After the surfacing of the fascist-like aesthetics used by some sotnias, it had a particularly strong image to associate with the Maidan movement – that of a “fascist”.20 Although the background for the proliferation of this image dates back to 2004 and the Orange Revolution, when the pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was also framed as a Nazi by the opposing camp, and Yanukovych’s “Party of the Regions” used the anti-fascist imagery in their public relations as well.21 This became the main image that eventually settled down in the Russian media, describing Maidan’s protesters. In our context, it is important because it resonated throughout the entire layer of collective Soviet memory. First of all, the Soviet propaganda used the term “fascist” to label any opposing nationality-based movement. The term “fascist junta” was constantly used by the Soviets, to label any government that opposes the regime. The Prague Spring and Baltic struggles for independence in the early 1980–1990s were also labelled as “fascist”. In the world of Soviet propaganda, the Union was supposedly struggling against Western “fascist and bourgeois forces” long after the Second World War.22 In the context of Ukrainian crisis, all of these factors, as well as the historical experience of actual fighting against Nazi Germany, but most importantly the propaganda in Russian media, gave the image of “fascism” a very powerful secularised representation of “true evil”, against which the “USSR-Russia” image was then opposed.23 This gave the Russian narrative a moral elevation of the political “self” to justify otherwise unjustifiable foreign policy, which is in contradiction to multiple international

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laws and agreements, including the Budapest Memorandum.24 Even more interestingly, the oppositional binary matrix “fascists vs. us” rendered anyone who opposed Russia’s policy into a fascist or a supporter of fascism.25 The “West” as the “evil” The second image that is very tightly connected to the first in the context of Russian political cosmology is that of “the West”. According to Mikhail Shishkin, a famous Russian writer, who in this context could probably be called a “Russian liberal”, and not surprisingly, currently lives in Switzerland: Putin’s television did everything to represent in its propaganda news the defender of Maidan as a fascist and an anecdotal khokhol character: witty, greedy, stubborn, ready to sell his soul to the devil himself – to the West – only so that there was enough lard on his table […]. It is an old custom to look at Ukrainians and Ukrainian language from above. The “younger brother” was loved for his love of life, humour and self-irony. But he always remained the younger one in the family, which meant that he had to listen to the elder one, to learn from him, to try to be like him. And now, in the recent months, Russians saw Ukrainians completely different. The “youngster” turned out to be much more mature than the elder one. Take an example as simple as the national anthem. They have an anthem that unites the generations, and we don’t. During the [Sochi] Olympic Games, to the entire world we performed Stalin’s anthem, uniting the dictator with generations of slaves.26 The image of the “West”, which Shishkin figuratively refers to as “the devil”, plays a particular role in the contemporary Russian political cosmology. Not only does it resonate with the Cold War rhetoric, which the Western world is probably more conscious and fearful of than Russia, but it also both put the imaginary “self” in opposition to the image of “the devil”, and justified its own aggressive stance as being defensive. According to the Russian statistics agency “Levada”, 62 per cent of surveyed Russians saw Russia’s occupation of Crimea as justified by the “necessity to defend the local Russian population” from the “radical Ukrainian nationalists”.27 Due to the merging of different narratives (the Soviet, the imperial, the federal), as we will see, the political cosmology in contemporary Russia is very complex and controversial. Facts, fiction, aspirations, propaganda and emotion, things that are said and those that actually are, intertwine in the local media to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish one from another.28 The anger and hysteria that this liminal experiential condition generated as the result of Maidan in Ukraine paradoxically also invoked a sense of defensive self-righteousness in Russia. This was best expressed by the popularity of St. George’s Ribbon and the eagerness with which the major

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part of Russian population came to support the government and its foreign policy.29 Similarly as in case of Lithuanian sa˛ ju-dis, although under a different context of liminal conditions and political cosmology, the binary opposition between “good” and “evil”, “us” and “the devil” once again becomes very clear and at the same time unrealistic. The “evil” here becomes identified with the image of “the West”.30 Indeed, from the very beginning of the protests in Kyiv, the Russian government seemed not to be able to accept the idea that Maidan was a massive civil movement, motivated by idealist reasons. In mid-December 2013, the Russian foreign minister described the movement as being initiated by “provocateurs with long-prepared script”.31 However, this image of the Western “evil” supporting the fascist Maidan, which, after ousting Yanukovych, supposedly started threatening the local Russian population (also a very difficult thing to define), and which Russia thus had to defend, proved a particularly effective way of coercing power. It created a logical premise to glorify the “self”, embodied in the figure of Putin, the fighter with this “evil”, and that is what could be observed both in Russia and Donbass. Maidan has done damage to this imperial/Soviet self-image in Russian political cosmology, pushing it into yet another existential crisis. Through the post-Soviet struggle, it questioned the status quo of Russia’s own paradoxical image. The “younger brother” was thus labelled as an enemy, and two archetypical “enemy” images have been applied to the situation as an explanation: the “fascist” archetype for the new Ukrainian government and the “West” image to explain the imaginary “evil’s” intentionality. The century-old Soviet formula of “fascists being backed by the evil West” proved to be particularly powerful, as it also provided an alternative maskidentity to the Russian “self”. Through putting this mask-identity into practice and “liberating” the local (ethnic) Russians form the “Western-backed fascists in Kiev”, the Russian narrative both created sense out of the “nonsensical” (ambiguous, unusual) situation in its neighbouring country and provided a response that is logical according to its own, albeit self-contradicting, political cosmology. Paradoxically, this political move managed to merge the two (imperial and Soviet) elements of Russian narrative into one, the best symbolical manifestation of that being St. George’s Ribbon.

Ukrainian narrative The Ukrainian perception of the events that took place during the Autumn/ Winter period of 2013–2014 in Kyiv, and in many other Ukrainian cities, at the time received unreasonably little attention. This is partially so because only a small number of Westerners understand Russian and/or Ukrainian, which let a lot of Ukrainian narrative slide under the radar. It is also accounted for in part because it took time for Maidan’s activists to realise the importance of putting forth their narrative in English. The largest media sources therefore either perpetuated the Western, EU-centric perception of the Ukrainian struggle, or the

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Russian demonising narrative. The inquiry into the complexity of actual Ukrainian motivations and political cosmology has barely been made. In February 2014, I conducted some fieldwork of my own in Kyiv, interviewing ten protesters and taking pictures of the Maidan itself. The people I talked to varied in terms of gender (five male, five female), occupation (ranging from an ex-convict, to a medic, to a piano teacher, to a tourism agent, a biologist, an economist, etc.), ideological perspectives and regions of origins (three respondents were from Eastern or Southern Ukraine). I will base the following arguments on my own findings and the visual material from the site as well as the scholarly and journalistic texts on the topic, which are now gradually appearing.32 National symbolism against the Soviet existence The Maidan movement has been called various “right-wing”-related titles. Indeed, next to the European flags and those of other countries, one could see plenty of national-themed flags, most significantly the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian national flags and the black-and-red Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) flags. From the external point of view, this readily translated into a narrative according to which Maidan was led by the ultra-nationalist “Banderites”. However, such view is very problematic, first because it would be difficult to say that Maidan was “led” at all – it was a self-organised civic movement without clear leadership. Not even the opposition parties (UDAR, Svoboda and Motherland) had a concluding say in the movement. When Yanukovych signed an agreement with these parties on 21 February 2014, the public on Maidan Square, which had the support of approximately a half of the Ukrainian population by 1 February, resisted the negotiation with the “murderous” president and demanded his proper ousting.33 The view is also difficult because, second, ultra-nationalist organisations constituted but a minor part of the movement, next to other establishments, such as democrats, left-wing organisations and the Kyiv Orthodox Church.34 One of the Pravyi Sektor leaders claimed in January 2014 that they did not count their members, but their Facebook page had around 20,000 subscribers. He also claimed, however, that they act as one of Maidan’s sotnia’s (“hundreds” – a traditional Ukrainian military regiment title), where ordinary people, with no affiliation to the nationalist organisations, also participated. After Yanukovych was removed from office, however, a large part of Pravyi Sektor non-radical members left the organisation.35 In other words, at the beginning, this was a logistically, not ideologically formed sotnia. This is in the context of many other sotnia’s and overall millions of protesters from all over Ukraine. These flags as well as other national insignia, if they became a unifying factor for such a varied and diverse crowd, thus seem to have a different meaning from the narrow nationalist imaginary. All the Maidan participants I talked to univocally declared one thing: Maidan is against the banda, the “kleptocratic” clique of oligarchs that had been running the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a mafia-like manner, it was being done

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through a combination of large-scale private capital and a completely corrupt bureaucratic apparatus. In fact, just as often happens, it was easier for the respondents as well as the entire Maidan’s environment, filled with symbolism and rhetorical declarations, to clearly articulate what this struggle was against rather than what it was for. The “for” arguments were as varied as was the crowd in Maidan. And in terms of the adversary, Yanukovych became the factual and symbolic embodiment of the image of “evil”. This became particularly evident after Berkut’s violent repressions against the Maidan protesters, starting with the beating of students on the night of 30 November 2013, after which around a million of Kyiv’s inhabitants flooded the streets protesting. Murders and injuries amounted to hundreds by 20 February 2014. All of this spoke to the protesters of the “evilness” of Russian-supported Yanukovych’s regime. This on its turn called for the defence of the eclectic myriad of values that the Ukrainian and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army flags came to represent.

Figure 4.4 Caricatures of the now-ousted president in Maidan’s territory. Yanukovych is depicted as a clown, with a slogan that says: “Towards Europe without Yanukovich!” (top left); Hitler behind bars (top right); Pilate washing his bloody hands while a soldier spears a crucified Ukrainian coat of arms. Note the quasi-religious self-representation (bottom right); a convict behind bars at a court with a sign, “Yanukovich – killer” (bottom left). Photos: Arvydas Grišinas.

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Looking from this perspective, we may notice significant similarities of Maidan to sa˛ ju-dis and the January Events in Lithuania, where a large part of mostly well-educated upper social strata rose against the quasi-metaphysical image of the political “evil” that resonated in all areas of their lives. Indeed, the religious element was particularly significant in the Maidan movement as well: from the iconostasis-like stage in the middle of Maidan, non-stop prayers spoken during the battle of 18–19 February, to the field hospitals established in churches, to overall support of Kyiv’s patriarchate to the protesters as well as other confessions (Greek Catholics, some Jewish, Muslims, among others), the “Heavenly sotnia”, and so on.36 Just like in case of sa˛ ju-dis, it encouraged the self-perception of the protesters as fighters for the general good, not only the national interest or political/ethnic identity.37 Furthermore, since this also was a political, tangible, physical struggle, with people dying along the way, the national, the historical and also the European imaginary, in a similar fashion as in the case of sa˛ ju-dis, started representing existential categories. They symbolised the opposition to what became associated with “evil” (the corrupt, cruel and humiliating existence – Soviet existence, experientially speaking) rather than nationalist, chauvinistic ideas. And that is why a slogan “glory to Ukraine”, a black-and-red nationalist flag, a romanticised picture of Taras Shevchenko, managed to unite such a massive and diverse crowd: because they first meant other things. “The Western way”: a struggle for human dignity I previously quoted Mikhail Shishkin reacting to Maidan’s events and urging the Russian society to end the “Soviet-type ‘bog’ in ourselves”. To many people in the post-Soviet Central Eastern Europe, the Soviet existential condition is associated not only with repressions, censorship and authoritarian dictatorship, but also with extreme inefficiency, endemic corruption and social issues, most notably alcoholism. In Ukraine, this political culture persevered and, having incorporated the criminal element in the 1990s, was perpetuated both by local oligarchs and political elites, as well as by powers outside the country. This explains why, as a civic movement, Maidan targeted the symbol of this condition, associated with Soviet corruption – Lenin’s sculptures. Ukrainians started tearing down the symbols of our humiliating common past, and Russians in Ukraine, unfortunately, started defending them. […] Kiev’s citizens went to the streets to free themselves from the criminal bandit government. This outburst was not directed towards the revolution. It was not a path towards violence, but rather towards a civilised order, towards Europe. To Ukrainians Europe is not the real European Union with a load of its own problems; it is a myth about life according not to the criminal

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rules but to the laws of justice. Europe is a synonym to a hope of life in a civilised Ukraine.38 The image of “the West”, therefore, symbolised the change in the existential and political condition, which makes it again similar to sa˛ ju-dis. Even though Maidan was often called a revolution by the participants themselves (what was meant by it is a different question), and even though one of ten respondents I interviewed argued in favour of a violent push for the ousting of Yanukovych on 17 February, just before it actually happened, the important message in Shishkin’s quote is the following. The image of Europe, and the “Euro-” at the beginning of Euromaidan, first meant an ethical moral, not a political stance, an urge for existential and political self-cleansing. Some protesters, both whom I interviewed and who were interviewed by others, were talking about standing for their rights.39 However, under more thorough inquiry, the term “human dignity” emerged. “We want to live like humans, the European way”, one respondent said.40 Even though formally the protests started with a reaction to a political decision, the real meaning of Euromaidan was the struggle of the large part of the Ukrainian population against their own existential condition.

Figure 4.5 An allegorical representation of Ukraine’s existential condition. A crossroad (note the liminal aspect) between the clean and orderly existence represented by Europe, and the dirty and decadent existence represented by the Russian flag and a sign, “Welcome to Asia”. Photo: Arvydas Grišinas.

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Maidan as a post-Soviet movement for fundamental change It has appeared that the use of the various political images differed significantly in the cases of the Western, Russian and Ukrainian narratives. They ended up being more revealing of the three narratives themselves than of the political issue at hand. These images were once again used for the political aspirations and needs of each narrative, while not being particularly informative of the reality itself that the terms signified. Additionally, in all cases these images then either helped to establish a premise for intellectual articulation of the experienced and of the ongoing, or adapted it to the existent political cosmology. As my research and interviews suggest, in the Ukrainian political cosmology, the values expressed by nationalist symbolism signified an ethical rather than ethnical or ideological category, the moral “self”, associated with the dignified and proud political subject. And the “European” image signified Maidan’s telos, the dignified, “Western”, non-Soviet life – both existentially and economically. The topping of Lenin’s figures, in this context, meant an existential self-cleansing rather than a right-winged ideological declaration, and the “Soviet” image signified the humiliating and oppressive living conditions that in terms of corruption hadn’t changed much since the collapse of the Union. However, the chapter showed how other cosmologies interpret the same images in their own narrative contexts. The political crisis and absolute lack of successful communication between the sides that could be witnessed during and after the events in Kyiv discussed, are the result of this clash of different political cosmologies. The liminal condition that the violent clash evoked also gave rise to new mask-identities not only in terms of the emergence of the new organisations, such as the Right Sector or so-called “Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics”, but also with regard to the reconfiguration of political cosmologies themselves, where former “brotherly nations” become enemies. At the core of these conflicts and transitions lay various images and associative symbols, revealing themselves in numerous forms, depending on particular contextual narratives.

Notes 1 On this see: Olga Onuch, “Who were the Protesters?” Journal of Democracy 25, no. 3 (2014), 44–51. 2 Respondent #2, interviewed by the author, 17 February 2014, Kyiv, Ukraine, author’s personal archive. 3 Respondent #5, interviewed by the author, 17 February 2014, Kyiv, Ukraine, author’s personal archive. 4 On the topic, see: Uilleam Blacker and Julie Fedor, “Soviet and Post-Soviet Varieties of Martyrdom and Memory”, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 1, no. 2 (2015): 208–209. doi:10.24216/97723645330050102_08. 5 Roland Oliphant, “Ukraine Protests: Uneasy Deadlock in Kiev as Opposition Leaders Attempt Deal”, The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world news/europe/ukraine/10592341/Ukraine-protests-uneasy-deadlock-in-Kiev-as-opp osition-leaders-attempt-deal.html (last accessed: 30 September 2014).

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6 Anita Sobják and Roderick Parkes, “Understanding EU Action during ‘Euromaidan’: Lessons for the Next Phase”, PISM Strategic Files 41 (2014), 3, 6. 7 This imaginary was later particularly strongly and widely used by Russian propaganda (especially the news agency Russia Today) to manipulate Western imaginary into associating these groups with their own historical and political narratives of far right radicalism. 8 A particularly popular rhetorical trick is the “that’s what Hitler did” argument, used by all sides in the Ukrainian crisis, accusing each other of Hitler-like political methods. See: “German minister compares Putin’s Ukraine moves to Hitler in 1938”, Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/31/us-ukraine-russia-germa ny-idUSBREA2U0S420140331 (last accessed: 30 January 2015); “RT Goes Beyond the Pale”, Euromaidan Press, http://euromaidanpress.com/2014/07/15/rt-beyondthe-pale-genocide-nazis-hitler-wmd-junta-hoax/ (last accessed: 30 January 2015); “Ukraine reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany – President Yanukovych”, Voice of Russia, http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_05_12/Ukraine-reminiscent-of-Hitler-s-Germany-Presi dent-Yanukovich-1209/ (last accessed: 30 January 2015). 9 An interesting comparison could be drawn with similar post-Soviet movements in the Baltic States, the former GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. 10 It is important to note that another large part of the media ignored the obvious presence of radical nationalist element in Maidan as well. 11 Some political analysts expressed surprise regarding the EU’s ability to “start a riot”. See: Ian Traynor, “Ukrainian Protests Show the European Union Still Offers Hope to Some”, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/01/ ukrainian-protests-european-union-hope (last accessed: 29 September 2014). 12 See for instance: Joerg Forbrig, “Why Ukraine’s Future Lies with the EU, not Russia”, CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/03/opinion/ukraine-protests-russia -forbrig/ (last accessed: 29 September 2014); “EU Stands By ‘Family Member’ Ukraine”, BBC, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25467738 (last accessed: 29 September 2014); Charles Crawford, “Putin’s Russia is Too Weak to Stop Ukraine Joining Europe. But It Will Try”, The Telegraph, http://blogs.telegraph.co. uk/news/charlescrawford/100248515/putins-russia-is-too-weak-to-stop-ukraine-joi ning-europe-but-it-will-try/ (last accessed: 29 September 2014); “Putin’s Gambit: How the EU Lost Ukraine”, Spiegel Online, http://www.spiegel.de/international/ europe/how-the-eu-lost-to-russia-in-negotiations-over-ukraine-trade-deal-a-935476. html (last accessed: 29 September 2014). 13 It is important to note that there were voices (mostly Ukrainian) calling for a subtler interpretation as well. (See: Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Ukraine Protests are No Longer Just About Europe”, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2014/jan/22/ukraine-protests-europe-far-right-violence (last accessed: 29 September 2014); Taras Ilkiv, “A Ukrainian Journalist Explains 10 Things the West Needs to Know about the Situation in Kiev”, Business Insider, http:// www.businessinsider.com/understanding-euromaidan-2014-1#ixzz3EiyZHOwt (last accessed: 29 September 2014).) 14 The “map” of strategic positions that each Western state took is, of course, much more complex. A clear explanation of the intricacies of various EU states’ foreign policies can be found here: Sobják and Parkes, “Understanding EU Action during ‘Euromaidan’”. 15 See: Brian Whitmore, “Is it Time for Ukraine to Split?”, The Atlantic, http://www. theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/is-it-time-for-ukraine-to-split-up/ 283967/ (last accessed: 29 September 2014); Joshua Keating, “Divorce, Ukrainian Style”, Slate, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/02/27/divorce_ukrainia n_style_would_ukraine_be_better_off_splitting.html (last accessed: 29 September 2014); Alastair Jamieson, “Can Ukraine Avoid an East–West Split and Bloody Civil War?” NBC News, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/can-ukra

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ine-avoid-east-west-split-bloody-civil-war-n38911 (last accessed: 29 September 2014). Snyder, “Fascism, Russia and Ukraine”. “О ситуации на Украине: Из каких истëчникëв рëссияне черпают инфëрмацию ë ситуации на Украине? И верят ли этëй инфëрмации? [On the Situation in Ukraine: What Sources do Russians Draw Information on the Situation in Ukraine from? And Do They Believe This Information?]”, FOM.ru, http://fom.ru/Mir/11511 (last accessed: 29 February 2015); “Party System of Ukraine Before and After Maidan: Changes, Trends, Public Demand”, National Security and Defence, 6–7 (2015), 6. Sam Johnes, “Ukraine: Russia’s New Art of War”, Financial Times, http://www.ft. com/cms/s/2/ea5e82fa-2e0c-11e4-b760-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3QE9TobZi (last accessed: 29 January 2015). Ukrainian websites like StopFake.org, managed by volunteer journalists, are continuously countering the falsified disinformation by Russian media. The title of “Banderite” comes from the name of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist leader from the interwar period. The Banderites fought against the Soviets, and in this sense supported Nazi Germany. “Партия региëнëв прëвела антифашистский марш в Киеве” [The Party of Regions Organised an Anti-Fascist March in Kyiv], ЛIГА.Нëвëсти, 26 October 2013, http:// news.liga.net/photo/politics/914769-partiya_regionov_provela_antifashistskiy_ma rsh_v_kieve.htm#6 (last accessed: 20 August 2017). David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 408–409. Roland Oliphant, “Vigilante Units to Defend Crimea City against ‘Fascist’ Threat from Kiev”, The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ ukraine/10661617/Vigilante-units-to-defend-Crimea-city-against-fascist-threat-from -Kiev.html (last accessed: 29 January 2015). “Crimea: A Breach of International Law”, Deutsche Welle, http://www.dw.de/crim ea-a-breach-of-international-law/a-17483425 (last accessed: 29 January 2015). See for instance: “Пëддержка фашистëв мëжет дëвести США дë ядернëй вëйны” [Support for Fascism May Lead the US to Nuclear War], Politonline.ru, http:// www.politonline.ru/comments/16314.html (last accessed: 29 January 2015). “The democratic revolution in Ukraine started from the struggle with symbols – the leninopad swooped through the country’s squares. And in our Russia, and the [largely] Russian [populated] areas of Ukraine the Lenins remained both in the squares and in the minds. Every nation is a hostage to its symbols. In Russia, the city of St. Petersburg is still within the Leningrad district, and the supermodern train ‘Sapsan’ takes you to the city of Dzerzhinsky, which even nowadays still has the name of the country’s supreme executioner. Such are the symbols that surround the people – such are their lives.” (Source: “Rusų rašytojas Michailas Šiškinas: Ukrainietiška Rusijos ateitis” [Russian Writer Michail Shishkin: The Ukrainian Future of Russia], 15min.lt, http://www.15min.lt/naujiena/aktualu/pasa ulis/rusu-rasytojas-michailas-siskinas-ukrainietiska-rusijos-ateitis-57-416706#ixzz3 EsmnqT5G (last accessed: 30 January 2015).) “Прëисхëдящее в Украине, Крыму и реакция Рëссии” [Events in Ukraine, Crimea and the Reaction by Russia], Levada.ru, http://www.levada.ru/26-03-2014/prois khodyashchee-v-ukraine-krymu-i-reaktsiya-rossii (last accessed: 26 January 2015). “Alan Yuhas, Russian Propaganda over Crimea and the Ukraine: How Does it Work?” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/17/crimea-crisisrussia-propaganda-media (last accessed: 30 January 2015). Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, “Striped Ribbon Becomes Essential Accessory for ProKremlin Crowd”, The Moscow Times, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/a rticle/striped-ribbon-becomes-essential-accessory-for-pro-kremlin-crowd/496762. html (last accessed: 31 January 2015).

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30 Although, according to the survey conducted on 24–25 January 2015, only 3 per cent of Russians claimed their belief that the West is actually involved in the conflict, which might show the diminishing effectiveness of Kremlin’s propaganda. (“Poll: Only 3% of Russians Think West is Meddling in Ukraine”, The Moscow Times, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/poll-only-3-of-russians-thinkwest-is-meddling-in-ukraine/515245.html (last accessed: 1 February 2015).) 31 “Provocations, EU’s Financial Interests behind Ukraine Protests – Lavrov”, Russia Today, http://rt.com/news/lavrov-ukraine-criticism-provocations-243/ (last accessed: 30 January 2015). 32 Jennifer Carroll, “This is Not About Europe: Reflections on Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution”, Perspectives on Europe 44, no. 1 (2014), 8–15; Onuch, “Who were the Protesters?” 44–51; Anastasiya Ryabchuk, “Right Revolution? Hopes and Perils of the Euromaidan Protests in Ukraine”, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 22, no. 1 (2014), 127–134; Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, “Euromaidan: Time to Draw Conclusions”, European View 13, no. 1 (2014), 11–20; Joanna Szostek, “The Media Battles of Ukraine’s EuroMaidan”, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 11 (2014), 1–19; Andrew Wilson, What Does Ukraine Think? (London: ECFR, 2015). 33 “Ukrainians Split in Their Support for Maidan, One in Ten Backs Use of Force – Poll”, Interfax, http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/press-conference/189203.html (last accessed: 28 January 2015). 34 Survey by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (“Maidan-2013”, Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation), http://www.dif.org.ua/en/events/gvkrlgkaeths.htm (last accessed: 28 January 2015). 35 “Правый сектëр. Ктë ëни и чегë дëбиваются” [Pravyi Sektor. Who Are They and What Do They Strive For?], Liga.net, http://news.liga.net/interview/politics/962730pravyy_sektor_kto_oni_i_chego_dobivayutsya.htm (last accessed: 28 January 2015). 36 Maidan was supported by the Kyiv Orthodox patriarchate, but not that much by Moscow’s one. As one of the interviewers told me, when Berkut was chasing the protesters out of Independence Square on the night of 30 November to 1 December 2013, those who sought shelter were cast away by the priests of St. Sophia Church (Moscow’s patriarchate), but were granted shelter by Andryivsky Church (Kyiv’s patriarchate) nearby. However, there were some Moscow patriarchate priests seen in Maidan as well. See: Ekaterina Shchetkina, “Нëчь ëткрытых дверей” [The Night of Open Doors], ZN.ua, 6 December 2013, https://zn.ua/internal/noch-otkry tyh-dverey-_.html (last accessed: 20 August 2017); Bogdana Kostiuk, “Українська церква і Єврëмайдан” [Ukrainian Church and Euromaidan], Радіë Свëбëда, 25 December 2013, https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/25212453.html (last accessed: 20 August 2017). 37 There is a website dedicated to the “Heavenly sotnia”, as those who died in Maidan were called: http://nebesnasotnya.com.ua/en/. 38 “Rusų rašytojas Michailas Šiškinas: Ukrainietiška Rusijos ateitis” [Russian Writer Michail Shishkin: The Ukrainian Future of Russia]. 39 David Stern, “What Europe Means to Ukraine’s Protesters”, The Atlantic, http:// www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/what-europe-means-to-ukrainesprotesters/282327/ (last accessed: 30 January 2015). 40 Respondent #1, interviewed by the author, 16 February 2014, Kyiv, Ukraine, author’s personal archive.

5

Liminality and Sovietism

Throughout our discussion, political crisis seems to be a recurrent theme and thus deserves greater observation. Arguably, the collapse of the Soviet Union was not only and not exactly a mere shift in political regime. Post-Soviet political identity formation is inseparable from the overwhelming and profound human experiences of change and transformation throughout the region and in all spheres of life. Previous social, economic and cultural structures were dissolving and transforming. New products, new ideas and new possibilities were emerging. Along with transitions in political regimes, numerous spiritual and religious movements gained prominence in the previously at least officially secular post-Soviet societies. A new epoch in people’s lives was starting, and inevitably it brought together existential crisis and turmoil. This period of rapid change, therefore, constituted rather surreal circumstances for the populations experiencing it, this having profound impact on political identities and cosmologies in formation. For this reason, in this chapter I will explore the post-Soviet transition, focusing on the human experiences in relation to regional politics and identity formation. First, I will elaborate upon the example from Lithuania, discussing its ambiguous historical condition in between the Eastern and Western world and relating it to Victor Turner’s theory of liminal transition. I will then elaborate on the concept of liminality, arguing for its usefulness in explaining post-Soviet transition due to its appreciation of the role of human experience in the process. I will then further elaborate on the topic by discussing three different modalities of liminal condition: the temporal, formal and spatial. The liminal experience as fluidity of time will be unpacked in the case of Ukraine, arguing that, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet transition there started more than a decade later, and culminated with Maidan. The spatial dimension of liminal transformation will be explored in terms of separation, division and unification, discussing the cases of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Germany, among others. And in terms of formal liminality, the Russian case will be invoked. I will look at how liminal experiences can form a paradoxical yet powerful identity narrative, unifying separate and even ideologically opposed historical episodes into a new political identity mask.

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Finally I will examine what all this liminal experience means to the region, arguing that, due to all the historical turmoil as well as the Soviet and postSoviet experience, Central Eastern Europe has become a space of permanent liminality. It constitutes the region’s identity and self-perception as well as determining post-Soviet political culture. Liminality is, I will argue, key also to understanding political ritualism and the quasi-religious character of the post-Soviet political culture.

Liminal transition The post-Soviet period is often called a transition. In some sense, this was indeed the case, although not necessarily the way it is popularly considered. The concept of transition in political sciences has been most notably conceptualised as a Hegelian teleological shift towards “the end of history”, as prophesised by Fukuyama.1 An entire field of Transition Studies emerged, assuming an eventual and inevitable liberalisation and democratisation of the post-Soviet world. Clearly, not only did the theory prove wrong factually, especially considering the latest political and ideological developments in the region, including the most recent political trends in Russia, Hungary and Poland. It is also quite narrow in its definition of political transition itself, which is only perceived in rationalist economic and political terms. This articulation of the political dynamics taking place in the region omitted perhaps the most important experiential aspect of the transition, which dictated the logics and teleology of the entire process. I have demonstrated how important it is for the emergence of new post-Soviet political identities, and how it influences actual politics. What I have not discussed in any greater detail is the very process of transition as an experience itself. In order to grasp the human factor in post-Soviet politics better, and to step away from the “transition” paradigm, let us employ an anthropological concept of liminality and discuss its applicability to our cause in new terms. “Betwixt and between” the East and West French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep first introduced the concept of liminality in his book Rites of Passage.2 He used this term to describe the rites of transition in pre-modern societies, when a member or a group in a community would leave one social mode of existence and enter another, for example when a boy is initiated into manhood. I use the term “mode of existence” instead of “social role” because in tribal, pre-modern and traditional communities, unlike contemporary “complex” Western societies, one’s social role predetermines an important part of one’s personal existence. “Social role” in the contemporary Western context presupposes a superficial, “mask-like” notion of one’s involvement in the social. However, I have already established that there is more to political and social existence, as there is to a mask itself, than mere play of appearances, qualities and functions.

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There has always been a certain ambiguity related to the situation that the Central Eastern European region was (and still is) in, as it has historical experience of being both in the East and in the West. There is therefore no stagnant, unquestionable consistency within its self-perception, which puts it in a situation that could be called betwixt and between. Victor Turner, in his famous anthropological work The Forest of Symbols, used this title to name the experience of the liminal period of the rite of passage in small-scale African societies. It marks the condition of the “passenger”, where a male has already departed from his prior social (and existential) self, and not yet reached the later.3 Central Eastern Europe in a lot of senses can be said to have been stuck in this situation “in between” throughout its recent history. Since the nineteenth-century Imperial Europe, the region has played a central role in defining identities both of the “East” and of the “West”. It has been a marginal space, paradoxically, at the centre of the most profound events in the European history. It was there that three of the major imperial powers (the Austrian– Hungarian, the Prussian, and the Russian) met and, having split and devoured the vast and in a way even central Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, ended. To each of them respectively, the region was marginal. […] It was here that both the First and the Second World War began and where they left their most traumatic impact. And yet, paradoxically, it was marginal in that it had no role in deciding Europe’s future for the rest of the 20th century. […] And during the Cold War, it was this area again that marked the ambiguous “buffer zone” between the Soviet and the Atlantic areas of influence, with the majority of states being communist yet not Soviet.4 The ambiguity of being neither this nor that, as if stuck in the transition, is pertinent in the human experience throughout the region. For instance, parallels between the events in 1987–2004 Lithuania and the rite of passage that Victor Turner talks about are quite visible. Structurally, Turner talks about three phases of the rite of passage: first, the break with the prior identity; second, the liminal, ambiguous period, the betwixt and between phase; and finally, the phase of re-aggregation, when the new identity is taken up and a new quality of existence is assumed.5 Similarly, the period of 1987 until the declaration of Lithuanian independence on 11 March 1990 could be seen as the first phase of the rite (or, rather, an uncontrolled, spontaneous process) of becoming. The period of March 1990 until approximately August to September 1991, the failed putsch in Moscow, can be seen as the purely liminal situation, as the state was betwixt and between: neither entirely free nor entirely occupied. And then the period of re-aggregation followed. Lithuania began its path “Westwards”, the end of which could probably be marked by the country’s joining NATO and the EU in 2004. The main difference between the rites of passage that Van Gennep talks about and the post-Soviet transition, however, lies within the fact that the

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Figures 5.1–3 Lithuania in the early 1990s: “betwixt and between”. (Left) Lithuanian border, guarded by poorly-equipped volunteers, with Soviet army at the background. (Centre and right) The title of a former revolution museum is taken off. The revolution ended without having taken place. The pathos of the revolutionary imaginary deconstructed in a very mundane way. It is now but an empty shell.

rites of passage take place under strict supervision. They are intentional, ritualised and controlled by strict rules. The liminality and the transition that the people from the post-USSR countries experienced, was more like a war, a revolution, a crisis caused by a natural disaster, a tornado or an earthquake.6 There is no recipe, no ritual for the correct performance of the transition. There are no limits, no rules clearly delimiting right from wrong – whether legally or in terms of power relations. There is no tradition to lean on, nor any grounding for distinction between the profane and the sacred. Therefore, there are plenty of dangers involved in the process, starting with the false imitation of the new existential and political forms, also leading to erratic epistemology and political cosmology (for instance self-sanctification or demonisation of the other), and ending with large-scale acts of violence, as for instance in Serbia and most recently in Ukraine. The uncontrolled nature of modern liminality There is no question that the ritual stages of transcending one mode of existence and entering another that are clear, distinct and ritualised in tribal societies, cannot be directly applied to an uncontrolled large-scale transition in modern societies such as post-USSR countries. However, many scholars, including Agnes Horvath, Richard Sakwa, Arpad Szakolczai, Bjørn Thomassen and Harald Wydra demonstrated that thinking about transition in modern societies in terms of liminal experience can offer some very interesting insights.7 Victor Turner also understood that the notion of liminality is useful not only for explaining “in between periods”, but also human reactions to liminal experiences. Overall, liminality only makes sense in social dramas “as they unfold”.8 In this situation, meanings and phenomena that appear in a society may sometimes only make sense to those participating. On other occasions, they can unfold on their own, without being controlled or perceived by anyone. The

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relation between the rational and the irrational here is the same as that between the sacred and secular, life and death, the real and unreal, good and bad, laughter and terror, idea and ideology: the limit between these things dissolves, it becomes relative and vaguely perceivable. Being “on the verge” is essentially an “Alice in Wonderland” experience – a situation where nearly anything could happen.9 However, at the centre of these transitory events, there is always a human being, experiencing the process, reflecting on it and trying to make sense of it. And this is precisely where the aspect of the pre-articulated, intuitive, emotive, symbolical, a-rational human side of politics becomes particularly important. As discussed before, images, narratives and clichés under such circumstances begin constituting political reality, which explains many aspects of post-Soviet politics, including identity-related violence, tensions related to historical heritage, and the importance of symbolism, among other issues.

Modalities of liminal experience Liminality can be understood in more than just a temporal sense, as a period. As discussed by Bjørn Thomassen, space can be liminal as well, as a participant, an object etc.10 In the post-Soviet context the issue can be approached in at least three ways: the temporal, the spatial and the formal. This discussion will also help us to understand how liminality, which infused the entire culture of sovietism, can structure political culture and praxis. I will examine the temporal dimension of liminality in the case of Ukraine, demonstrating how the spirit of Soviet existence can linger over an extended period of time, even after the factual collapse of the USSR. As a result, “sovietism” as such is contingent not factual time-wise, but human experience-wise. I will then focus on the spatial dimension of liminality, where either formerly uniform spaces, in the form of states split, or previously separate spaces unite, generating the ex-static experiences within the society. This will also show how and why post-Soviet political identities transcend the merely political sphere, also incorporating the existential element. Finally, I will analyse the formal liminality in the case of Russia, arguing that the “in-between-ness” here manifests in its historical narrative. The contradiction in self-perception traps it between different historical narratives and identities of Imperial, Soviet and federal/democratic Russia. Political identity, therefore, which is formed under liminal conditions and incorporating them as an intrinsic part, does not have to be factually, historically or logically adequate to function politically. Temporal liminality In accordance with our chosen analytical framework, political identity formation as a process can be divided into three elements: the historical, the intellectual and the experiential. Historically, the post-Soviet epoch started after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union

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in 1991. New, post-Soviet states appeared (such as Ukraine and Belarus, etc.), or the old ones were re-established (such as the Baltic States, Poland, etc.). However, experientially and to a certain degree intellectually the situation has been quite different. Both the political cosmologies and self-perceptions in some cases remained “Soviet” even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Among other such cases, probably the most interesting example nowadays is contemporary Ukraine, where the sense of political (not national) “self” has been emerging within the popular consciousness only recently. It can be said that the process started in 2004 with the Orange Revolution, reaching the breaking point within the context of the unfolding crisis in 2014. Formally and politically, the Ukrainian state has existed for more than twenty years. However not only has it politically been continuously dependent on Russia, but also intellectually it has previously only vaguely articulated itself as an independent postSoviet state.11 Liminality is experiential, and so is time in this context. As such, time is not as rigid as the version showed by a clock or a calendar. And the experience of life in the Soviet Union, or rather the Soviet way of life, is not conditional on changes in external material factors such as currency, official statehood and institutional structures (while at the same time not being separate from such and similar issues either). Therefore, a sense of time can perhaps be understood in two ways: externally, as a factual change of day and night, calendar years and seasons, and internally, as experienced by the embedded, situated participants in relation to their surroundings. A night spent fighting Berkut may be of epochal significance and experientially last a lifetime, and a decade spent in the thoroughly corrupt state without any prospect of change can disappear into oblivion without much identity-changing significance. The latter is perhaps more evident in the Eastern part of Ukraine. The Donbass region, for instance, emerged as a heavy industry area in the Russian Empire, and reached its peak of production and importance during Soviet times. The disagreements of “ownership” between the Ukrainian and Russian narratives regarding the region date back to as early as the 1980s.12 In terms of intellectual narrative, therefore, the region’s history and articulated selfconsciousness is profoundly intertwined with the Soviet past. Unfortunately for the region, the Union was the main formative factor in its identity and existential teleology, which resonates nowadays as well.13 With the fall of the Soviet Union, the political grounding for said identity was lost. On the other hand, seemingly, the weak post-USSR Ukrainian national narrative was not successful in replacing the Soviet one either. The condition that the region was left with as a result was the liminal state of being stuck between epochs, between political structures, no longer a part of the Soviet Union, but also not completely integrated into the Ukrainian national narrative. The most significant manifestation of this ambiguous state is recent strife in Donbass for separation from Ukraine – initiated and supported by Russia, but also backed by a part of local society. A large proportion of the population in Ukraine, as well as in other post-USSR countries (and beyond),

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demonstrates a sense of Soviet nostalgia and identifies itself with either timedistorted personal memories or an imagined alternative reality much more so than with the political actuality.14 Experientially, the state of war in the region has invoked a heterogeneous “Alice in Wonderland” experience of being inbetween history, imagination and propaganda. Between aspiration, anger, violence, fear and determination. Between competing narratives, all of which bear plausible deniability, encouraging mythological thinking: a condition similar to the one in Emir Kusturica’s film Underground.15 All the ambiguities surrounding the embedded participant leave no space for adequate assessment of political reality, resulting in either political ambivalence or radicalism. The concept of liminality captures the current situation better than old dichotomies such as East vs. West, communism vs. capitalism or pro-Russia vs. pro-EU/ Europe. The reason is that it accounts not only for the extent of information and disinformation that determines the subject’s condition but also for the human experience, which, as demonstrated in previous chapters, influences choices and policies no less than intellectual considerations. In terms of the rest of the country, it is only in 2004–2014 that the majority of Ukraine has been losing its Soviet self-perception, which was linking it to its Imperial and Soviet past, and is becoming a post-Soviet state. Petro Poroshenko’s declaration on 24 October 2014 that Ukraine will no longer celebrate the Defender of the Fatherland Day on 23 February is only one result of decisive changes in Ukraine’s political persona.16 Economically, Ukraine has signed an agreement with Poland regarding gas supply, which will liberate it from complete dependence on its eastern neighbour. Encouraged by Russia’s occupation of Crimea and military actions in the eastern part of the country, the Ukrainians only now, after over twenty years, are establishing a separate and relatively independent political persona. However, the region, whose historical narrative has been much more significantly influenced by the Soviet experience, struggles with the transition much more, lingering in the critical state of temporal liminality. Spatial liminality The process of becoming post-Soviet and especially the experience of liminality in this context does not only entail changes in relation to the “Russia-USSR” image, as was the case for the Baltic States. It may involve other kinds of transformation that influence the emergence of the new political mask-identities. One such change is the experience of spatial transformation. I will distinguish three types of such transformation that can be observed in the post-Soviet space: separation, unification and division. The common element among these experiences is the liminal condition invoked by the process, where the previously established structures collapse in some way or the other, and the new emerge, confirmed by human participation and political practice. In the case of the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary and some others in relation to the Soviet Union, and in the case of Balkan States in relation to

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Yugoslavia, we may talk about the process of separation. In the Lithuanian case, in order for it to become an independent post-Soviet state, it had to break loose, to separate itself from the political body that it previously (first of all experientially) belonged to. It had to oppose the legitimacy of the Soviet government, to articulate itself anew, and both politically and intellectually step up to the new political identity that it now assumed. In doing so, and through defending its choice during the January Events (confirming it experientially), it realised its new authentic presence as both a legitimate formal state and the separate political persona. Ukraine and Ukrainians, by comparison, had not completed this step up (despite the Orange Revolution, which was not successful in fully securing the psychological independence from Russia) until the 2014 crisis and its aftermath. The analogue to the January Events there was the drama at the Maidan, where people supporting the post-Soviet narrative overthrew Yanukovich’s regime. In the more extreme case of Yugoslavia, the multiple separations were particularly violent, resulting in numerous wars and a prolonged state of crisis as well as embedded ethnic tensions within and between some newly formed Balkan nation-states. Another type of liminal transition, which expresses itself spatially, is division. In this case, the division of Czechoslovakia is the most significant example. The crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the triggers for this to happen. The difference from the process of separation discussed previously is that here a uniform political body split into two relatively spatially and morally equal parts. As secessionism was not a decisive political force in Slovakia, the break-up of the CSFR was not the result of a Slovak struggle for independence: it was not a Slovak secession. This fact distinguishes the events in the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic from the break-up of Yugoslavia and partly also the Soviet Union. In the two latter cases the leaders of minorities managed with great efforts to break away from a state dominated by a different group. In the CSFR it was the rejection of the common state by the political leaders of the Czech majority that was the direct cause of the break-up.17 The last type of experience of the political transformation is the unification, which happened in Germany. Timothy Garton Ash described his experience of the event and the liminal condition, both spatially and existentially, which Germans from both sides found themselves in: It is very difficult to describe the quality of this experience because what they actually did was so stunningly ordinary. In effect, they just took a bus from Hackney or Dagenham to Piccadilly Circus, and went shopping in the West End. Berliners walked the streets of Berlin. What could be more normal? And yet, what could be more fantastic! […] Everyone looks the same as they make their way home – except for the tell-tale Western

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Thus the liminal experience, the miraculous normality, of “Berliners walk[ing in] Berlin” was the starting point for the new and difficult self-rearticulating of both the city and the country. The city, however, has remained a liminal and paradoxical space. With a “scar” in the middle, separating the two sides of Berlin, it is a place not only for famous night life, street art culture and the fashion industry (a particularly liminal sphere), but also for some of the most notorious neo-Nazi as well as far-left organisations. Formal liminality At this point another problem emerges: how can all of the above be true if the Soviet Union factually no longer exists? For a long period of time many Western intellectuals wanted to see Russia as a new, “modern” soon-to-be democratic country, the history of which has been interrupted by a “communist experiment”. Factually the latter bit is fairly grounded. Indeed, the Bolsheviks destroyed the political tradition of the Russian Empire in a similar fashion in which the three separations destroyed the Rzeczpospolita. First, they removed the “exoskeleton” of monarchic political legitimacy by overthrowing and murdering the royal family. Then they removed the social “endoskeleton” by destroying the social fabric of the society and murdering millions of inhabitants – a modernising process in all its destructiveness par excellence.19 In a similar way, only less so in terms of the social aspect, the Soviet Union collapsed, which gave way to the new political identity of the Russian Federation. Experientially, however, and in terms of the popular historical narrative, the vast territorial blob to the east of Prussia and Austria–Hungary, later to the east of the Baltics, Poland and Romania, then to the east of central Berlin, and then again to the east of the post-Soviet states, has been continuously represented with an image of Russia not only in the Western world. In postSoviet Eastern Europe as well, despite the popular contemporary slogan declaring the struggle against “the petite-bourgeois nationalism” and “the Great Russian chauvinism” as mentioned previously, the Soviet Union was nevertheless identified with Russia. This is in addition to the fact that paradoxically Russians themselves were among the biggest victims of the Soviet regime.20 The contemporary rehabilitation of some elements of the Soviet legacy as well as the strengthening revival of the Great Russian narrative inherent from

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Imperial times, simply formalised the experientially already-present merging of the three politically separate identity images of Imperial, Soviet and federal Russia. This is only to talk about the images, however, as there are surely many structural differences among these episodes in Russian history, starting with the social structure, the logic of power legitimacy, the extent of personal freedoms, etc. Historically, though, it could also be argued that the emergence of the Revolution in Russia, similarly as the Revolution in France, was the beginning of the modern state. Just as in France, it destroyed Russia’s traditional political structure, desecrated its political legitimacy, levelled the social fabric, and left a permanent and irreversible cultural imprint. This gave birth to a completely different, previously unseen rationalist and pragmatist, economised culture, where the only existential purposes were economic production and the spread of communism.21 Paradoxically, such existential teleology led to profoundly irrational social and economic projects, political ritualism and an overall absurd, permanently liminal existence in everyday life.22 The contemporary Russian Federation, in this case, could be seen as the “postmodern” transformation of this modern project, where the remaining Soviet political culture is mixed with elements of imperialism and attempts of transformation into a Western-styled state.

Post-Soviet liminality As we have seen, the concept of liminality is key to understanding the complex historical and contemporary processes in the region. The experience of transformation and ambiguity temporally, spatially and formally can be taken as the basis for understanding the post-Soviet identity formation. The liminal existence itself, however, is inhuman, i.e. even though it is real, a human being cannot fully live in such a transitory condition – only to exist. Liminality is the space of nulla, the nothingness and infinity.23 It is a condition of transformation, paradox, death, birth and rebirth. It is also where the fundamental existential questions and transformative experiences take place, as well as the biggest illusions that can have one lost in a nihilist and self-destructive cycle. In a normal scenario, however, liminality is a transitory condition, space or time, during which the “passenger” undergoes fundamental transformation. After such experiences, if not destroyed by them, one changes qualitatively. Such experiences include natural disasters, wars, pilgrimages, religious experiences, drug use, etc. This existence “in between”, therefore, while very real, has a different quality, a different meaning for a human being, his or her identity and world perception. However, what happens when such an experience becomes a part of the culture? Permanent liminality Arpad Szakolczai argues that liminal experience can become a permanent condition. Permanent liminality is a kind of existential and political condition

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when liminal ambiguous and transitory experience becomes an integral part of the predominant political structure. He gives an example from the Soviet Union, where the war and socialist revolution never ended.24 The suffering and struggle today, especially during Lenin’s and Stalin’s rule, was justified with the upcoming true existence tomorrow. Liminality expressed itself actively: through grotesque and surreal totalitarian terror, deified dictatorship, multiple genocides and mass murders (for instance, the construction of the White Sea Channel where tens of thousands of gulag prisoners died building a water channel that would connect the Baltic and White seas for cargo transportation). And even though tomorrow never came, such teleology justified grandiose and meaningless, even if pragmatically grounded, projects. The liminal condition was also supported via violent power structure and terror. However, a volatile chaos does not necessarily have to reign during liminal conditions. Liminality is an experience of loss of meaning, loss of form, a nihilistic state. Under Brezhnev, for instance, it expressed itself passively: through total grey, meaningless boredom in everyday life, through absolute emptiness of political rituals, pervasive existential meaninglessness and overall stagnation.25 Therefore, for a vast population, the formation of the Soviet Union, due to the absurdity of its core principles, created abnormal, liminal permanent living conditions, which eventually became taken for granted. And this gave ground for the formation of a political culture where violence, victimhood and cynicism were at . . the very core of the “boring” political reality. Agne Narušyte and Tomas Vaiseta called the period the “period of boredom”, having in mind the existential blankness, the nulla, which was pervading all spheres of life.26 Yet another manifestation of the liminal was the Perestroika period, where the Soviet system began falling apart. And when it eventually did, especially in some areas, such as Eastern Ukraine, parts of Russia, Moldova and elsewhere, as mentioned above, the liminal “sovietism”, the Soviet mode of existence remained a fundamental component of the local political culture and cosmology. However, the important aspect of this process for us is the recurrence of the liminal, transitory or nihilistic experience at all levels of the Soviet and post-Soviet society. It is this experience that in direct and indirect ways constituted the post-Soviet political identity mask. Directly, it dictated the logic and political culture of the newly formed states. The political culture of corruption, the Soviet nostalgia or ideological fanaticism, notable within the region, can all be related to this experiential influence. Indirectly, however, the post-Soviet identity manifested itself as a catalyst for anti-Soviet sentiments as well. Sa˛ ju-dis, next to Maidan and other essentially anti-Soviet movements, would not have formed and would not have had the vigour they demonstrated if not for the demonised image of the Soviet identity mask. Liminality as a norm For most of the Soviet population, however, the surreal political and existential situation came as a norm. People lived their lives, loved, died, cried and

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laughed within the Soviet system, taking the many everyday paradoxes and absurdities for granted. “Someone’s standing in the stage. He’s lying. Everyone is applauding, even though they know that he’s lying. He also knows that they know that he’s lying. Yet he continues talking, enjoying the applause.”27 The liminal condition that the Soviet society was in was eventually normalised, perhaps precisely for this reason producing the boredom society of Brezhnev’s times. Liminality, having become a cultural fact, started producing its own political culture, in which ambiguity was the norm. Tadeusz Konwicki, a Polish novelist, described the human condition in a contemporary Polish society in his 1979 book Little Apocalypse: This contemporary poverty of ours is transparent as glass and invisible as air. Our poverty is the kilometre-long queues, the constant elbowing your way through the crowd; it’s the angry functionary, the train that is late for no reason, the tap water, switched off by the hands of fate, i.e. the lack of water, and a shop that is being closed unexpectedly, it’s the furious neighbour, the lying newspaper, and a several-hour-long speech on television instead of a sports broadcast; it’s being forced to be a party member, a washing machine, bought in a state-owned shop, and already broken down; it’s the special shops where you can buy things for dollars; it’s the monotonous life with no glimpse of hope; it’s the historical cities that are gradually deteriorating, the voivodeships that are gradually deserted, and the rivers that are being poisoned. Our poverty is the grace of a totalitarian state, in which we live.28 This surreal totalitarian liminality, pervading all spheres of life, influenced not only the everyday lived reality, but also the way people think. Aru-nas Sverdiolas and Tomas Sodeika introduced the concept of quasi-metaphysics in the Lithuanian context as early as 1989.29 It is interesting to point out that these two thinkers noticed this phenomenon in the contemporary Lithuanian society even before Lithuania claimed independence. In their article, they demonstrated how Marxism–Leninism influenced Lithuanian society “as a national monopoly doctrine and, what is most important, as the constitutive principle of the whole society”.30 This influence unfolds at two levels of social life: “at the level of social physics, which is predetermined by interest-related causal relations, and at the teleologically ordered level of social metaphysics, which is predetermined by value orientations”.31 However, Marxist materialism denies ontological validity of “social metaphysics”, understanding it as ideology and thus as distortion of reality. As a result, whenever discussing the latter, materialist thought automatically presupposes the “real” pragmatic hidden interests supposedly lurking beyond the ideology.32 This way Marxist materialism in the Soviet Union reduced the “metaphysical” level of social and political action and turned it into what the authors call “quasi-metaphysical” level of interests.33

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Liminality and sovietism Reductive thinking dictates value confusion: no attention is paid any more to their hierarchy; the higher one is subjugated to achieving the lower one. This way the good, the beautiful and the true become tools, which are used in order to protect the society from the asocial behaviour. The ideal of priestly self-denial and serving the other becomes a tool, which helps solving problems related to citizen’s medical support; the peasant’s attachment to his land – a tool to provide food products for the population; a spiritual sense of nature – a tool for solving ecological problems; motherly feelings – a tool for assuring a positive demographic condition. National feelings are applied to when asking not to litter and not to cut trolleybus seats. A goal of spiritual revival is being raised instrumentally. Human consciousness is to be filled with values and ideals in the same fashion as one fills shop shelves with goods. A person has to become spiritual in the same fashion, as products have to be of high quality. Finally, this destructive heritage of social thought – this empty spot left by a reductive ideology – also affects thinking about the contemporary situation. In an effort to grasp the ideals and their functioning in the social consciousness right here and right now, the thought inevitably slides on the plane surfaces of pragmatism and empty desire.34

The interesting thing about the text above is that the claims may be as well applied to the contemporary Western society as to the Soviet or post-Soviet one, which shows potential for inquiring into the problems with modernity more broadly, not only the obvious ones with Marxism. But I would like to go further and talk about non-rational metaphysics, relating the social processes not only to Kantian moral good, but also to religious values and human experience. During liminal periods the political assumes metaphysical, symbolic and religious meanings, which may potentially lead to a false political epistemology and cynicism, so characteristic to post-USSR political culture. The infamous extent of corruption in the region is only one symptomatic issue emanating . from this Soviet political climate. In his book Apie pamekline˛ bu-tį [On Ghostlike Existence], Sverdiolas presents probably the most significant Lithuanian philosophical analysis of the post-Soviet human condition. The main claim that he puts forward is that the Soviet and consequentially postSoviet world is, as he calls it, “flat”, levelled, lacking hierarchical structure between metaphysical ideals and material interests, lacking substance beyond the superficial.35 The two are merged into a cynical mix. Since the ontological category of metaphysics at the intellectual level has been “cut out” from the public life and forcefully substituted by Marxist materialism, all Soviet reality lost its value, its ontological hierarchy. The resulting existential nihilism, the emptiness of cultural and political forms, has been a recurrent theme in various political, literary and social contexts over at least the first two decades of the post-USSR world.36 Cynicism, therefore,

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became a “systematic element” of post-Soviet political rationale that, as mentioned, has roots in the Soviet Union: Elementary formulas, which were being spread and multiplied massively and daily [in the Union] claimed that democracy and rule of law are formal things, under which the rule of real power hides; it is being intentionally or even unintentionally hidden. Therefore, formal automatically meant unreal. This resonates in the Lithuanian language: the Lithuanian word formalus does not have a meaning that an English word formal has. It lacks the notion of “correct”, “corresponding to the rule”, and therefore almost “real”. For us, formal is only formal, therefore not the real one.37 The Russian word фoрмальный has the same meaning as Lithuanian, and that is the Soviet heritage. Here, the reality of a political form, of political legislation, of an agreement, of international convention is lacking.38 It is only a formality. It is only an image. And in a liminal Soviet world, no one expected it to be anything else. The post-Soviet political culture inherited this liminal understanding of political forms. Formality represented fluid reality, something that one can play with, circumvent and cover the truth with. There was a rift between truth and formality, no actual connection between the two, which allowed for pragmatic behaviour while declaring allegiance to any ideals that served the cynical purpose. The important thing, however, is that this kind of political (sur-)reality became taken for granted, normalised. And from the cynic’s point of view, as Sverdiolas argued, everyone is expected to act the same way. Therefore, Russia expects the USA to act in exactly the same fashion and based on the same motivation as it does itself. It expected Maidan to be naturally a conspiracy by the Russian image of the “West”, discussed in the previous chapter. In the Ukrainian’s genuine wish and struggle for dignified, non-Soviet life, Soviet cynicism sees the conspiracy of quasi-metaphysical “evil” that threatens the very cynical foundations on which Soviet-Russian political culture is based. The struggle against this intention becomes a struggle for Russia’s image of “good”. Therefore, the same liminal mechanism that we have witnessed in various other scenarios, repeats itself over and over again, reciprocating the liminal post-Soviet “normality”. The so-called “national republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk are being synthesised within a greater framework of the fictional image of “Novorossiya”. Institutions are being imitated and referenda are being falsified. Nearly none of the world’s states recognises them, yet, from this nihilistic liminal context, almost tangible political forms emerge, mask-identities form. Ritualised politics As mentioned in our discussion on political images, one way of dealing with or controlling liminal experiences is structuring them. The term limen in Latin

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means a limit, a threshold, a distinction between the inside and the outside, one and another. A similar word, limes, was used in ancient Rome as a title for the walls or borders of the empire, separating the civilised, imperial, ergo real cultural space from the barbaric, chaotic and wild non-Imperial territory. A wall, a fence, a clear category, a strict image, a stereotype, taboo, a ritualised norm – they all serve the function of taming, controlling, structuring the infinite, ambiguous, the unknown and thus liminal. Through structuring the liminality, symbolic and ritualistic limits create meaning, infusing the chaotic and ambiguous events with certain rationality. Perhaps this is the reason why the post-Soviet politics is so profoundly infused with symbolism, and political images and narratives play such an important role. Berlin’s wall was not only a physical barrier built for the separation of the Soviet and non-Soviet space. It was a symbolic and ritualised space, marking the end of what was considered the communist paradise and the beginning of the “fascist”, “bourgeois”, “decadent”, “chaotic” capitalist Western world. In a similar way, Crimea’s occupation was also a symbolic act, declaring a particular historical narrative, and in a sense repeating the abovementioned logics of the Berlin Wall. Even the practical reasons, such as ensuring the status quo of the Russian Naval army in the peninsula, derived from the need to structure the liminal uncertainty resulting from the Ukraine’s Maidan, as well as its particular interpretation. Therefore, pragmatic and rationalist policy may be very ritualistic. Ironically, the degrading of the Russia–Western relationships as a result of this occupation was titled by both sides as the return to the Cold War. Therefore, Russia used the same symbolic political ritual that brought the recognisable order in the interwar relations, and plunged it back into the liminal limbo at the same time. Crimea, and later Donbas, became the symbolic imitation of the barrier, similar to the Berlin Wall, differentiating “us” and the “fascist” West, and thus again, albeit schismatically, in a Soviet way, structuring the experienced political reality. This event also brought back the Soviet images and identity masks, starting with the revival of Stalin’s cult in Russia, and continuing with the revision of the Soviet history as well as creating new retrospective historical narratives, images and identity-masks. However, perhaps the most ritualised political area in the region is the one that is related to the experience of violence and sacrifice. Every post-USSR state has a memorial for the Unknown Soldier. Many have Holocaust or Genocide museums. The political culture that surrounds these historical experiences is an extremely sensitive topic. But even more striking is the culture of commemoration following these profoundly influential factors that shape postSoviet identity. The scale of the crowds that gathered to commemorate the victims of the January Events in 1991 or the “Heavenly sotnia” in 2014, and the massive rituals that took place in these commemorations indicate the emotional depth of these experiences and their identity-formative nature. This is not to downplay or degrade these rituals of commemoration, or the sacrifices themselves. On the contrary – I wish to emphasise this aspect of

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violence and victimhood, as well as the ritualistic, quasi-religious nature of related politics. It seems that post-Soviet political rituals are imitative, identity forming and structuring events, which are significant not only in terms of official politics, but also as human experience. The problematic side of this is that it tends to perpetuate the Soviet political and experiential patterns, returning the region to the same violence-related problems.

Sovietism The existential symbolism that Lenin’s image attained in the context of the Ukrainian crisis is, apart from being a powerful historical symbol, also tied to what can be called the phenomenon of sovietism, or the “Soviet condition”. Therefore, the tearing down of Soviet leaders’ (especially Lenin’s) statues is a good indicator of both the post-Soviet transition and the separation from the Russian sphere of influence. I have previously mentioned that the established “USSR-Russia” image, the conception of the continuity between the Imperial and federal Russia, and its modernist transformation – the USSR – is a reference point for understanding the experiential reality of the Soviet and the “post-Soviet” condition. I would like to argue that, experientially, the “postSoviet” can be understood as those countries or rather societies that lost or are losing the dependence ties (not only in terms of power and economy, but also in terms of culture, self-perception, and political sovereignty and cosmology) with the suggested image of USSR-Russia. The political and cultural phenomenon that is called Russia, be it in its Imperial, Soviet or federal form, has played a dramatic role in the nineteenthand twentieth-century history of Central Eastern Europe. It still keeps a strong grip on some politically post-USSR states in the region (most notably, Belarus, Moldova and eastern Ukraine). However, it does so not only in political or economic terms, but also as a monopoliser of the narrative agency in the Soviet history. The term “Soviet Russia” is very often used as a synonym for the Soviet Union in various contexts locally and globally. In the experiential sense, sovietism is in many ways also related to what is considered Russian. Not much has changed since the collapse of the Union in the parts of Europe that remain in this Soviet condition: “The clothes are the same. The cars are the same. The people are the same”.39 But most importantly, the historical narrative, political culture, cosmology and imagery are still profoundly Soviet. From this perspective, the demarcation line between the Soviet and postSoviet lies between the acceptance and refusal of the Soviet/Russian cosmology and political culture as part of an own identity. The opposition to this political cosmology, the claim of or striving for an “own” political persona not being a part of sovietism, are all steps to post-Soviet existence and the post-Soviet political identity, more often so than not ending up being mere imitations of the Western world, which in its own turn is living through the crisis of liberalism.40 In some Eastern and Central European cases, this step was made

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before, during or after the collapse of the actual Soviet Union as a political institution, while in some cases it has not yet happened at all. Therefore, despite the Union’s de facto collapse, the liminal Soviet condition lingers on in symbolism, political cosmology, historical narrative, as well as the overall social and cultural climate, perpetuating the liminal limbo. Paradoxically, while some states remained Soviet after the collapse of the Union, some states were becoming post-Soviet even before the event. It can be said that, in the case of Lithuania, this process of becoming “post-” started in 1987 and took its final shape in August/September 1991, when the last Soviet army units left the newly formed state. In the case of Poland, it started in 1980 with Solidarnos´c´ and ended, as in the case of many other Warsaw Pact countries, with the collapse of the Union. Belarus, in this context, can thus be seen as experientially still Soviet. And in the case of most of Ukraine, having started with the Orange Revolution, the transformation lasted until Spring 2014. Therefore, it is legitimate to talk about the Ukrainian crisis as a postSoviet or anti-Soviet transition, as anachronistic and paradoxical as it may sound in relation to “objective” temporality as well as official political formality.41 This distinction also correlates to the fact that both Lithuania and Poland were independent states before the Soviet occupation and maintained an anti-Soviet resistance throughout its entire period. Moreover, their post-Soviet political identities have been heavily influenced by their pre-Soviet historical experience, providing substantial grounding for selfarticulation. Sovietism, as articulated previously, is a profoundly liminal and problematic condition. In essence, it can be considered the result of a very brutal modernisation project, a radical effort to cut ties with the previous cultural, historical and political traditions and to start building an ideological project on a clean, supposedly better slate. However, the actuality of this sacrificial project, as it could be expected, turned out to be quite different. The incredibly violent policy, the disregard for common sense and the natural order of things (the human need for cultural continuity, the inclination to metaphysics, the plurality of the political, social and cultural landscape throughout the Union, among other factors) in service of erratic ideology, in addition to the mimetic mass reproduction of materiality as a goal in itself, created the permanently liminal, sacrificial and absurd experiential condition and political culture of a vast scale, which the concept of sovietism captures. Unfortunately, Russia happened to be at the centre, the main actor and the main victim of these events, inheriting this difficult mask-identity. And precisely this factor is formative for the abovementioned power dynamics in the region, when some states pursue the Soviet, and others the post-Soviet politics. Both paths are dialectically as well as culturally and historically connected, forming the entire identity-related problematique in the region. In other words, this is what renders the post-USSR region what it currently is, with all its peculiarities and problems.

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Notes 1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2 Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage [Rites de passage] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 3 Turner, The Forest of Symbols, 93–112. 4 Grišinas, “Central Marginality”, 68–69. 5 Agnes Horvath, “Mythology and the Trickster: Interpreting Communism”, in Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe, eds Wöll and Wydra, 27–44, at 38. 6 Bjørn Thomassen, “Uses and Meanings of Liminality”, International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009), 5–27. 7 Agnes Horvath, Modernism and Charisma (London: Palgrave, 2013); Agnes Horvath and Bjørn Thomassen, “Mimetic Errors in Liminal Schismogenesis: On the Political Anthropology of the Trickster”, International Political Anthropology 1, no. 1 (2008), 3–24; Richard Sakwa, “Liminality and Postcommunism: The Twenty-First Century as the Subject of History”, International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009), 110–126; Szakolczai, “Liminality and Experience”; Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014); Thomassen, “Uses and Meanings of Liminality”; Bjørn Thomassen, Agnes Horvath and Harald Wydra, Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (New York: Berghahn, 2015). 8 Thomassen, “Uses and Meanings of Liminality”, 13. 9 Szakolczai, Liminality and Experience. 10 Thomassen presented a systematic description of the various applications of the concept. See: “Uses and Meanings of Liminality”. 11 Visiting a national history museum in Kyiv (in February 2014), one could notice the lack of representation of the rupture between Ukraine’s being a part of the Soviet Union and its being an actual autonomous state. The exposition of the post-USSR epoch in Ukraine is very limited and mostly dedicated to Ukrainian sports victories. 12 Andrew Wilson, “The Donbass between Ukraine and Russia: The Use of History in Political Disputes”, Journal of Contemporary History, 30, no. 2 (1995), 265–289. 13 Luke Harding, “Inside the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’: Balaclavas, Stalin Flags and Razorwire”, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/19/ ukraine-donetsk-pro-russia-militants (last accessed: 2 September 2014). 14 See: Anna Blundy, “Nostalgia for the Soviet Era Sweeps the Internet”, News Week, http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/08/nostalgia-soviet-era-sweeps-internet261963.html (last accessed: 30 January 2015); Andrew A. Kramer, “Rebels in Eastern Ukraine Dream of Reviving Soviet Heyday”, New York Times, http:// www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/world/europe/rebels-in-eastern-ukraine-dream-of-revi ving-soviet-heyday.html?_r=0 (last accessed: 30 January 2015). 15 In Kusturica’s Underground (1995), a group of people live in an underground bunker in Yugoslavia since the Second World War, believing that the war never ended. Ironically, their cosmology affirms itself as they emerge from the bunker to the surface precisely at the time of the regional military conflicts in the 1990s. 16 “Ukraine will never again commemorate this holiday by following a historical battles calendar of a neighbouring country. We will honour the defenders of our Fatherland, not a foreign country’s!” “Пëрëшенкë: Україна вже нікëли не святкуватиме 23 лютëгë”, tvi.ua, http://tvi.ua/new/2014/08/24/poroshenko_poobicyav_scho_ukrayina_ bilshe_nikoly_ne_svyatkuvatyme_23_lyutoho# (last accessed: 30 August 2014). 17 Paal Sigurd Hilde, “Slovak Nationalism and the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia”, Europe-Asia Studies 51 (2010), 649. 18 Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 75.

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19 Just as in the case of Rzeczpospolita, the traditional political legitimacy and the internal structure were the two “skeletons”, providing the Russian Empire with form, a traditional value system and a stable political cosmology. 20 See: Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 21 This kind of existential condition where “growth” and “progress” are the only criteria defining existential teleology is somewhat similar to the contemporary market logics as well as the “character” of cancerous tumours. 22 See for example: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 23 On the topic of the nulla, see: Agnes Horvath, “Pulcinella Or the Metaphysics of the Nulla: In between Politics and Theatre”, History of the Human Sciences 23, no. 2 (2010), 47–67. 24 Szakolczai, Liminality and Experience. 25 Nowadays liminality can be experienced through neo-liberal nihilism and consumer culture, which essentially creates the conditions of living within the void of meaning as well. . 26 See: Narušyte, Nuobodulio Estetika . . [The Aesthetics . of Boredom]; Tomas Vaiseta, Nuobodulio visuomene. Kasdienybe ir ideologija velyvuoju sovietmecˇ iu (1964–1984) [Society of Boredom: Ideology and the Everyday in the Soviet Union (1964–1984)] (Vilnius: Naujasis Židinys-Aidai, 2014). 27 Svetlana Alexievich, Время секëнд хэнд [Second-Hand Time] (Moscow: Litres.ru, 2013), 118. . 28 Tadeusz Konwicki, Mažoji apokalipse [Minor Apocalypse] (Vilnius: Lithuanian Writers Association Press, 2001), 51–52. 29 Sodeika and Sverdiolas, “Gyvenimas Kolboje Ir Tuoj Po To”. 30 Ibid., 494. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 494–495. 33 Ibid., 496. 34 Ibid., 498. . .. . . . . 35 See: Aru-nas Sverdiolas, Lekštutele lekštele: keli dabartines Lietuvos viešosios erdves ypatumai [A Flat Plate: Several Characteristics of Contemporary Lithuanian Public Space] (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2006). 36 Contemporary literature, film, music and visual arts, at least in Lithuania, are heavily infused with nihilist overtones; the first post-USSR decade in Russia was marked by harsh alcoholism nation-wide; and political passivity next to the aforementioned corruption, which is a recurrent motif in most post-USSR countries. . 37 Aru-nas Sverdiolas, Apie pamekline˛ bu-tį [On Ghostlike Existence] (Vilnius: Baltus lankos, 2008), 124. 38 Some title this cynical pragmatism Russian realpolitik. However, it does not explain the fact why Russia, pursuing this realpolitik, imitates legitimate conduct in accordance with international norms. 39 Harrison Jacobs, “These Photos Show How Eastern Ukraine Is Stuck In Its Soviet Past”, Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/eastern-ukraine-daily-lifephotos-2014-9?op=1#ixzz3EDWKjK3G (last accessed: 24 September 2014). 40 See: John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue: Post-liberalism and the Human Future (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016). 41 Sergei Zhuk, “Ukrainian Maidan as the Last Anti-Soviet Revolution, or the Methodological Dangers of Soviet Nostalgia (Notes of the American Ukrainian Historian from Inside the Field of Russian Studies in the United States)”, Ab Imperio 3 (2014), 195–208.

6

Violence, Victimhood and Identity

In the preceding chapters, I sought to show the role of images, narratives, symbolism and other a-rational political elements. They become particularly influential under liminal conditions and often determine the shape of political events in moments of crisis. These moments also provide the context in which new mask-identities and political cosmologies emerge and acquire importance. However, such volatile conditions also imply various dangers, one of them being “permanent liminality”, when the condition of being “in between” becomes a permanent state.1 Due to its revolutionary and absurd character, the Soviet Union could be titled a case of liminality turning permanent. Agnes Horvath discusses a particular type of political leader that emerges under liminal conditions and that is comparable to mythological trickster figures in anthropological and ethnographic works.2 Even though I will not analyse the role of particular politicians in the identity formation processes, Horvath’s analysis uncovers the cynical nature of these liminal characters that is at the core of many post-Soviet political contexts. Bjørn Thomassen asks the following profoundly important questions: In ritual passages, liminality is followed by reintegration rituals that re-establish the order of the new personality as a part of the social order that he or she re-enters with a new role, stamped by the formative experience. This is a critical passage, but without reintegration liminality is pure danger. Hence, relating to crisis periods of larger societies where the social drama has no foregone conclusion, the question becomes: how is the liminal period dealt with, and how (if at all) is it ended? The question can again be posed in Weberian terms: how and when does a “routinization” or an “everydayinization” of the out-of-ordinary situations take place? And who will become the “carriers” of the new world-view that is eventually institutionalized?3 This chapter will briefly discuss the topic of violence, insofar as it relates to questions of political identity. For that purpose, I will use works by René Girard, as well as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss.4 According to the authors, violence and sacrifice are closely related to crisis states. Violence is

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socially contagious and sacrifice is a logical (if not successful) means of purification. I will suggest that under uncontrolled liminal conditions, however, the purification does not function, and the contagion spreads to become a part of the (political) culture. In the post-USSR context, it reveals itself in two main forms: ethnic violence and self-victimisation. The phenomenon is related to political identity in that it establishes narratives, images and entire political cosmologies, based on violent and sacrificial mechanisms. Being contagious in nature, the sacrificial mechanisms that Girard talks about become a part of the post-Soviet political identity mask, either demonising the mythological “other” or sacrificing the “self” as a result. Such an anthropological approach to conflict and identity formation can lead to new explanations for ethnic, religious and other scapegoat-based violence in the region. In an effort to address these issues, the first part of this chapter will examine the theme of scapegoating and sacrifice in liminal politics, the phenomenon of violence, and its social and political implications. It will also analyse the cultural, anthropological and political significance of sacrifice and of the sacred, arguing that a lot of political violence taking place within the Soviet and post-Soviet region can be understood through understanding the violent, “sacrificial” mechanisms at the historical, intellectual and experiential levels. The second part will argue that, because of the powerful experiences and the specificity of liminal crisis as an existential condition, newly formed political mask-identities tend to possess a quasi-sacred character. Here the term “quasi-metaphysics” will be further applied in showing how violence and the sense of victimhood affect societies and their emerging political mask-identities, infusing them with quasi-sacred elements. The establishment of such maskidentities is important for finding existential reference points under fluid conditions, but if over-intensified, they can also tend to deviate towards a chauvinistic character. Another danger with such political identities is that, because of the nature of the Soviet experience, they are most of the time centred on the sense of victimhood and suffering, in a way rendering the emancipation from this condition a betrayal of the sacred.

Violence Soviet history is a fertile soil for identity-related issues, as it is thoroughly marked by an ongoing culture of cruelty, violence and terror, as discussed in the previous chapter. It has been broadly documented, and numerous series of books and articles written as well as films made on the topic.5 Some of the most salient examples include the Russian Revolution, the social cleansing of the economic, cultural, intellectual and political elites, multiple genocides, collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War, in addition to labour camps and the Soviet jail system, spawning the influential criminal strata, the Holodomor, Stalinist repressions, forced exiles, KGB interrogations, the repression of dissidents in the post-Stalinist era, and the events in

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Budapest, Prague and Vilnius. Recent examples of violence that are strongly related to Soviet images and political cosmologies are the Chechen, Balkan, Georgian and Ukrainian wars, as well as the riots in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2007, among very many others.6 Thus the element of violence, victimisation and scapegoating in relation to the Soviet context has been intrinsic to the entire culture in the region for almost a century. Apart from some instances of Stockholm syndrome – resembling Soviet nostalgia, the Soviet Union overall has been a deeply traumatising liminal experience. The fact that the USSR collapsed, and that this was to a large part due to dissident movements and various forms of political resistance all over the Union, however, demonstrates that the totalitarian state has not managed to completely crush the human integrity within the local population. However, it did have and still has serious consequences. As a continuation of Imperial and Soviet ambitions, the Russian aggression towards its neighbouring states has become a normative foreign policy, defended and propagated at the highest levels of the Russian government.7 We can also observe the resurgence of paramilitary and quasi-fascist political groups, to varying extents, in most of the post-USSR countries, despite the growing integration within the liberal European zone.8 Most significantly, the perpetuation of the culture of violence has remained present in the post-Soviet ethnic, religious and frozen territorial conflicts in various parts of the region. In searching for the anthropological explanation for these instances, I will look at the logics of scapegoating, sacrifice and violence, and see how interrelated these social phenomena are. In their book, Hubert and Mauss observe sacrifice as a ritual, revealing the cultural meanings within the violent practice of tribal societies and also discussing their phenomenology. Partially building on their work, but also moving further, Girard puts forward a critical explanation for violence and scapegoating as a founding social process for the emergence of culture in general. For Girard this process is not necessarily a religious practice and it underpins not only tribal but also modern societies. The sacrificial mechanism has its function and purpose under particular social circumstances, and serves particular functional purposes. Underlying all these phenomena, however, are what Girard calls sacrificial mechanisms, which transcend the tribal rituals of sacrifice and instead point to a very profound layer of humanity as well as the contagious character of violence itself via what he calls mimetic desire.9 However, neither Girard, nor Hubert and Mauss analyses the post-Soviet space, or actually any particular political case. Even though revealing the logics and meanings of sacrificial rituals, Hubert and Mauss discuss traditional, tribal societies with overall stiff social and cultural structures, unlike those of modern ones. Girard does look at the cultural fabric in modern societies, yet his work concentrates on constructing a theory primarily based on sources in literature, not actual political cases. I will apply these theories to the post-Soviet cases, however, demonstrating their validity and deriving possible solutions for the problems uncovered by such theoretical inquiry. I will also expand some aspects in these theories, elaborating on the human

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experience of liminality (Girard describes it in Weberian terms as crisis) and its importance to political identity formation. Using these theories, I will discuss the circumstances needed for the sacrificial mechanisms to emerge, the character of a subject to which these violent acts are directed, and the anthropological reasons why these acts take place. Liminal crisis and communism In tribal societies, rituals of sacrifice take place under certain circumstances. There has to be a need for them. First of all, the ritual of sacrifice follows the general loss of order in the society. This is due to the loss of limitations dividing different social units and entities – a liminal condition. It results in the merging and intermingling of social roles and identities along with responsibilities, distinctions and taboos that separate them: “The strongest impression is without question an extreme loss of social order evidenced by the disappearance of the rules and “differences” that define cultural divisions”.10 Plagues, natural catastrophes, wars, revolutions and similar events can be taken as exemplar sources for such unnatural, crisis-like states in the society. Critical situations, which result in common discomfort and loss of reference points, lead to the dissolution of social structure and the formation of what Girard calls a mob. Eventually, this mob becomes a driving power in the society: “[s]uch spontaneous gatherings of people can exert a decisive influence on institutions that have been so weakened, and even replace them entirely.”11 Identity-wise, the creation of Soviet society was the creation of a massivescale mob – of the socialist narod. In many places, especially the Asian part of the Union (since in the Western part they were already on the way), the Sovietisation introduced a crude version of modernising processes, imitating social and political “progress”, but paradoxically leading to degeneration in all spheres of life. On the one hand it created new jobs, yet they were paid for in useless currency, because of the constant deficit of goods to buy, not to mention forms of modern slavery in working camps.12 Sovietisation created new collective housing – mostly either by building crude mass-scale lowquality barracks and block houses or via nationalising private properties, exiling the owners into gulags and dividing the space to accommodate several tightly stuffed families into one collective household.13 Soviet education was established, yet it was done brutally and was strictly controlled, censored and shaped for indoctrination purposes.14 It introduced a healthcare system, yet the doctors had to be bribed to provide healing, which was also of low quality.15 Every part of life in the Soviet Union reverberated with its foundational liminal, surreal ambiguity where form did not correspond to reality. At the same time, traditional local differentiations – be they cultural, material, economical or political – were being purposefully levelled and defaced wherever the Soviets went. Instead, a standardised folksy narodnaya culture was “issued”, which would not pose political threats to the

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totalitarian establishment and would fit the general communist narrative.16 Formally, this faceless, newly created mob was supposed to govern itself, via soviets, boards of “human granules” within the unarticulated mass of Soviet narod. Clearly such a project could never be realised successfully. And, because of various factors – starting with the unthinkable amount of “human granules” involved, and ending with the simple impossibility of a normal life under formless conditions, both functionally and existentially – it never did. A new hierarchy naturally took shape within the mob. Unsurprisingly, it was centred on the soviets and stiffly hierarchised towards a narrow circle of the dictator and the nomenclature. Therefore, paradoxically and contrary to the theoretical intention, dozens of multi-faceted, multi-polar, unique and selfsustaining cultures, polities and political personae were destroyed, and reduced to a limitless and formless mass, only to then be reshaped, in an almost alchemic manner, into a stiff totalitarian structure. If this was merely a power transition from democracy (in terms of destroyed hierarchy) to despotism in a limited and relatively small Greek polis, as Plato would have seen it, I could discuss this no further, if only to express pity for the people involved. The revolutionary teleology of the communist narrative, however, rendered the liminal condition of transition permanent within this despotism. It institutionalised a state of forced transition, a neverending journey towards a sacred state of communism, which positioned the Soviet narod in a condition of permanent liminality.17 After the Union collapsed, and with new political conditions emerging, the liminal experiential conditions of Soviet life gradually and to different extents diminished and changed in many places. In others, however, as discussed in the previous chapter, they still endure. Either way, the experience of “normalised” permanent liminality has influenced the post-Soviet political culture in many ways. The collapse of the Soviet Union has been yet another crisis that has touched upon the entire Soviet world and induced various eruptions of violence in different contexts, from the January Events, to the Balkan Wars, the Chechen Wars, the situation in Ukraine, all discussed previously. In order to grasp the human principle behind these events, we need to understand the anthropological implications of an act of violence as an experience, as well as the reasons behind it. Scapegoat The sacrificial mechanisms that are in play in the post-Soviet context are grounded in practices of scapegoating. During times of crisis, a society begins to search for a scapegoat to be blamed for the situation. The accusation they make is that an impurity or a crime of the scapegoat is actually to be blamed for the occurrence of the crisis. In the context of the Soviet Union, the scapegoats varied from bourgeois capitalists to fascists to the “evil” West to Jewish conspiracies and the USA. In the post-Soviet context, this could have been the “nationalism” of Sa˛ju-dis in Lithuania, the “Muslim-ness” of the

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Kosovars, the “fascism” of Maidan in Kyiv, etc. The most important characteristic of a scapegoat is its innocence and symbolic “otherness”. Such accusations have a mythical character and mark the change of common reasoning from limit-oriented rationality to limitless mystification. As Girard writes, The persecutors’ portrayal of the situation is irrational. It inverts the relationship between the global situation and the individual transgression. If there is a causal or motivational link between the two levels, it can only move from collective to the individual. The persecutor’s mentality moves in the reverse direction. Instead of seeing in the microcosm a reflection or imitation of the global level, it seeks in the individual the origin and cause of all that is harmful.18 This way, a dishonest Jewish merchant becomes an image of “Jewish trickery”; a corrupt politician becomes an image of “government’s corruptness”; a group of neo-Nazi participants in Maidan become an image of “Maidan’s fascism”, etc. The lack of limits and forms disorientates and, in some way, deceives the society. In the words of Girard, “[t]he perspective is inevitably deceptive since the persecutors are convinced that their violence is justified; they consider themselves judges, and therefore they must have guilty victim”.19 This allows society to look for a “proper scapegoat” and also suggests that a scapegoat has not necessarily actually committed the crimes. This coincides with the general chaotic atmosphere and loss of limits in the society mentioned above. In a tribal context, sacrifice is used as a means of purification of either a person or society itself. The victim can be either one or more actual scapegoat person(s) who is/are accused (according to Girard), or it can be some substitute, a scapegoat for a scapegoat (as Hubert and Mauss suggest). In the case of the Maidan, for instance, during the night of 18 February 2014, a Berkut officer was captured by the protesters. He was beaten and fell unconscious; it is not clear what his personal crimes were. He was a Berkut officer, he represented Berkut, Berkut represented the government, and the government represented the image of the corrupt, oppressive “evil” that Maidan was struggling against. Either way, the victim is intentionally to be sacrificed in the ritual of purification and stabilisation, hence the use of “holy violence”. The “evil” and the “impurity” within the scapegoat have to be cleansed. However, in a modern context, where rituals are intellectually disconnected from metaphysics and emerge only as un-reflected praxis, especially under the dominance of revolutionary logics, the purification does not succeed. Requiring new victims, the sacrificial mechanism continues reproducing itself until, like Saturn, it “starts devouring its own children”. Thus, the bourgeois and the royal are sacrificed to cleanse the misery of the deprived until everyone is deprived; the Kosovars are sacrificed for the betterment of Serbia until this becomes a genocide; a statue of Lenin is being sacrificed as a scapegoat for cleansing the

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Ukrainian society of the miserable Soviet condition, until Ukraine’s own people start dying. Girard describes four stereotypes on the basis of which a scapegoat is chosen. If a potential victim has at least some of these qualities, it may be scapegoated.20 The main feature of the scapegoat is its marginality and “otherness”. These features are perceived in the stereotypes mentioned before. The first stereotype is cultural and religious “otherness”, which is why ethnic or religious minorities often become the target for persecution in the society. As Girard remarks, “[i]n this we see one of the criteria by which victims are selected, which, though relative to the individual society, is transcultural in principle”.21 It is the status of minority that bears a notion of both being “inside” and “outside” that makes it marginal. Various ethnically based postSoviet conflicts can be explained by this kind of stereotyping. For instance, the most marginal of all minorities in the region are traditionally the Roma and Jewish. And it is these minorities that are being increasingly blamed for various reasons, from crime to economic difficulties. Whether the accusations are true or false is not the most important issue here. What is the most interesting is that a “2011 survey finds many Hungarians share anti-Roma sentiments with 60 percent believing that criminality was in ‘gypsy’ blood”.22 Therefore the mythologising effect that Girard is talking about when discussing scapegoating is particularly evident here. Another feature or stereotype that determines a scapegoat is physical “otherness”. Girard puts this as follows: “[s]ickness, madness, genetic deformities, accidental injuries, and even disabilities in general tend to polarise persecutors. […] The ‘handicapped’ are subject to discriminatory measures that make them victims, out of all proportion to the extent to which their presence disturbs the ease of social exchange”.23 Race, gender and sexual orientation may also be added to this category when talking about the modern context. The marginality of physical difference is obvious: it separates the individual from “normal” people. Still, however, it does not deny the human nature, making a scapegoat once again marginal, yet not alien. There have been many occasions of attacks against homosexuals in most post-Soviet states.24 These instances, however, bear political significance, not only legal importance or moral meaning. A statue of a rainbow, a scapegoat for a scapegoat (a symbol for homosexuality in many Eastern European countries), was sacrificed to purify Poland in an independence march of 2013 in Warsaw.25 However, the rainbow and homosexuality are also associated with European-ness, liberal values and a European Union-centred power structure, all of which are unfavourable to different elements of post-USSR societies. The third marginality is social. A paradox here is that extreme riches are as marginal as total poverty. In times of crisis the fading of limits and form encompasses all spheres of life, including the social. The power that the rich enjoy under normal circumstances, instead of an actual crime, becomes an incriminating factor. In the words of Girard, “[i]n normal times the rich and powerful enjoy all sorts of protection and privileges which the disinherited

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Figures 6.1–2 A sculpture titled Raduga (A Rainbow) by Aleksandr Alekseyev in Kyiv, Ukraine, which represents Euro-scepticism, combining images related to homosexuality (rainbow) and European-ness (an imitation of Manneken Pis), presenting them in a way that is humiliating to the viewer, who is conditioned into passing under the “rainbow”. Photos: Arvydas Grišinas.

lack. […] The rich and powerful exert an influence over society, which justifies the act of violence to which they are subjected in times of crisis. This is the holy revolt of the oppressed”.26 It is this kind of irrational marginalisation of the rich and powerful that could be observed during the Russian Revolution in 1917, but also even nowadays, for instance in case of the rioting mobs in London in 2011. The important aspect here is that the scapegoating is based on more than just economic basis. It is metaphysical: it is the disinherited mob’s right to demand what is not theirs, based on the fact that they are suffering. This mindset is embedded and taken for granted not only in the post-Soviet context, but in late modern revolutionary thinking in general. The question that remains is why such marginal persons would be chosen as scapegoats. One reason is obvious: it is their “otherness” that makes them suspicious for the society and thus more likely to be accused. Another reason is that it represents the ambiguity, unclear condition, the unknown, which is always a frightening thing to encounter, especially during the crisis. It has to be strongly emphasised here, however, that, unlike in the ritualistic tribal setting, in modern times the process of scapegoating and sacrificing is very largely non-reflected, unconscious and yet very widespread. However, Girard offers yet another answer: “Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality.”27 Therefore the sacrificer and the scapegoat are connected by being part of the same system. What we need to understand now, is why the sacrifice of the scapegoat takes place at all, and why the sacrificer is inclined to perform it. Process of sacrifice – purification According to Huber and Mauss, “[s]acrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who

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accomplishes it or that certain objects which he is concerned”. Through projecting one’s own weakness and mortality on the scapegoat and then destroying it, the sacrificer symbolically purifies itself, thus restoring the structure of things, the limits and existential meaning that was lost due to the overwhelming sense of instability. It relieves or rather is intended to relieve the intense feeling of discomfort. Therefore, it is not the object that is sacrificed that matters but the meaning and social situation in which the sacrifice is performed.29 And the Soviet social existence, as discussed earlier, is a truly miserable one. In tribal rituals, the scapegoat is a mediator between the political, the realm of the lived reality of the sacrificer, and the liminal, the transcendental, the godly, i.e. the space, from which the miraculous, sacred change to the sacrificer’s condition can emerge. Scapegoating the victim and destroying it means provoking the sacred, forcefully initiating the miraculous act of purification. The image that is projected towards the scapegoat the “fascism” of Maidan on the one hand, or is much more representative of the self-image of the one that projects it than of the actual victim. Thus the projection of one’s own negativity on the other allows for a possibility of cleansing.30 Although in our case sacrifice is political, and takes place in the secular world, the meaningful part of it is projected into the metaphysical. For Huber and Mauss, “[s]acrifice is a religious act that can only be carried out in a religious atmosphere and by means of essentially religious agents. But, in general, before the ceremony neither sacrificer nor sacrificer, nor place, instruments or victim, possess this characteristic to a suitable degree.”31 The scapegoat is being “prepared” for the sacrifice by being put in a radical, marginal state. This state is judging and condemning it. In the social context, the marginality reveals itself when “the authorities swell the crowd with their number and are absorbed by them. In understanding the Passion, we come to understanding the temporary removal of any difference not only between the Caiaphas and Pilate, or Judas and Peter, but between those who cry out or allow others to cry out: ‘Crucify him!’”.32 When shouting “Crucify him!”, however, the crowd at the same time shouts “Purify him, and through him – me!” The marginal state that the scapegoat is put in through this action lifts it to another plane, the one that Hubert and Mauss recognise as the “world of gods”. This is the birth of the victimised identity. Therefore, during the ritual of the sacrifice, three words are essential: marginality, representation and purification. Marginality refers to the state of crisis and to the situation in which the scapegoat is put. His state during the ritual is that of “between sacred and profane”. This can only occur when the demarcation between the two is lost. The scapegoat begins to represent the sacrificer. And then the purification can occur. Normally the ritual of sacrifice is designed to restore the limits and order. However, in the modern context, the violence perpetuates and the sense of existential discomfort persists, also spawning various forms of victimhood-based identities, as we may observe in different post-Soviet cases.

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Victimhood A particularly significant element that both sa˛ ju-dis and Maidan, among other post-Soviet independence movements, have in common is the metaphysical or religious character that they were charged with. I covered this topic in some detail when discussing the Lithuanian case. In the case of Maidan, the importance of the Kyiv Orthodox Church and other symbolism was also extremely prominent. Priests were often present on the stage in the middle of the square. The entire Maidan’s territory, just like in the case of Lithuania during the January Events, was filled with symbolic declarations, images, representing “evil” and the “good”, slogans with religious references and caricatures, revealing the deeply symbolic nature of the struggle. The stage itself was garnished in a way that resembled a half-religious, half-political iconostasis in the Orthodox Church. There were constant masses taking place on Maidan’s Square of Independence on Sundays. And during the bloody events of 18–19 February 2014, the prayers told from the stage would not stop until the morning.33 So how does this reality relate to political identity formation? I have already discussed extensively throughout the book the existential and political importance of such critical events to people participating in them. I have argued that, particularly because these experiences touch upon the participants at the most fundamental level, putting their actual existence in danger, they inevitably raise metaphysical questions. Religion in the cases of sa˛ ju-dis and Maidan offered hope and support politically and existentially. Yet at the same time, the political merged with the metaphysical in a very tangible way. Experientially, the struggle against the Soviet or Yanukovych’s regimes was also a struggle for profound human principles and images of dignified life, freedom, justice and “good” in general. Before I continue on the topic, however, it needs to be noted that not all forms of merging the metaphysical with the political produce positive results. Both Nazi and Communist regimes manipulated various quasi-religious formulations for their propaganda as well as incorporating metaphysical imperatives into their doctrines. There is no question that the articulation of

Figures 6.3–4 “Political iconostasis” on Maidan’s stage. Photos: Arvydas Grišinas.

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the political “self” in metaphysical terms may bear very sinister results. Let us observe the ways in which that happens. Quasi-metaphysics and cynicism I would now like to once again come back to the concept of quasimetaphysics. Tomas Sodeika and Aru-nas Sverdiolas offered, as mentioned previously, an insider explanation for the ongoing events in 1989, which can also shed light on the more recent Maidan’s events as well as pointing towards the possible negative side of the process. I will remind the reader briefly of their argument. The authors claim, “social life happens at two levels simultaneously: at the level of social physics, which is predetermined by interest-related causal relations, and at the teleologically ordered level of social metaphysics, which is predetermined by value orientations”.34 However, the dictatorship of Marxist materialism in the Soviet Union reduced the “metaphysical” level of ideas and principles and turned it into what the authors call the “quasi-metaphysical” level of interests.35 Therefore, quasimetaphysics as a phenomenon emerges as a result of an epistemological confusion between the sphere of interest and pragmatism and the sphere of ideal, metaphysical and religious value. This explains the cynicism, but how can it be useful for our current discussion? Over nearly three decades since the article was first published, the political and social conditions have, of course, changed. However, it still responds to the nowadays realities in at least two ways. First, the materialist fundamentalism and pragmatic cynicism persisted within the post-Soviet societies in various forms. In some cases, it remained embedded within the political, administrative and social culture as a relic of the Soviet past. As discussed previously, this kind of cynicism remains a matrix of thought, through which a lot of policies are still being conceived and implemented. In this context, the so-called “Westernisation”, which in some contexts meant profound existential change from the slave-like, non-political Soviet existence to a genuine political persona, in others was also understood mainly in pragmatic, materialist terms – through refurbishing the surroundings, instrumentally mimicking Western policies and political practices. There is a popular term Euro-remont, or Euro-refurbishment, which circulates in a large part of the post-USSR countries and signifies the refurbishment of households and real estate using or imitating Western, not Soviet, materials and styles. The problem with it was that it was still done in a Soviet manner, which was careless, eclectic, often absurdly out of context, but most importantly – very superficial. Analogically, in many contexts, the processes of “Westernisation” of everyday life took on a similar format. People changed their material environment, but the mindset remained. The same levelling and instrumentalising pragmatic way of thinking about human existence and political life can be recognised within neo-liberal thought as well, when talking, for instance, about bio-politics and rational

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choice theories. Political processes are seen here as a purely interest-driven game, where the motivational factors are if not entirely materialist then absolutely pragmatic. Metaphysical and existential questions are either seen as serving the purposes of gain (for instance in marketing or election campaigns), or increase of productivity and performance (for instance in selfdevelopment courses, leadership seminars, couching culture, etc.). However, what interests us now is how this juxtaposition of hierarchy of ontological values influences political identity formation in the post-Soviet context. Political identity of suffering Before discussing self-sacrification, which will lead us to a better understanding of the deeper reasons behind the resurgence of what is popularly called “right-wing ideology” in Eastern Europe, it is important to clarify a number of issues. First of all, it is important to break away from the Marxist conception of “ideology”, which implies a certain logic that does not capture the dynamics of the processes involved in political identity formation. This book is developing an approach that can account for the cultural “construct” at a much deeper level of humanity than the arguments about the oppressive character of ideology and its “interested” engineers. The latter way of thinking leads to the same quasi-metaphysical and therefore cynical assumptions about the pragmatic interests behind or above all the political reality, which Sodeika and Sverdiolas warned against. Unfortunately, this line of thought is without doubt the most popular and mainstream in contemporary Western culture. The most significant manifestations range from various conspiracy theories to films like The Matrix, V for Vendetta and most others where the scenario evolves around the weak, the meek and the downtrodden violently fighting the mythological “oppressive force”, after being “disillusioned” from its “ideology”. The most interesting aspect of this phenomenon of the contemporary culture of storytelling (both visual and verbal) in the West is that it repeats the same scheme of events on and on, basically rendering it into a kind of a myth of modern “justicemaking” on its own. This way, the violent events of the French Revolution, as Eliade would say, become an image that is put in illo tempore, becoming sacrificed and thus normative for the modern ethical teleology. This then is but another proof of the mythological nature of modern politics, spanning outside the context of post-Soviet states. Second, the notion of “right-wing” politics requires careful examination. At the political level, it makes no sense in a context that has little to do with the French Revolution. One of many problems with the “revolutionary” thinking is that epistemologically it monopolises the narrative of resistance to the establishment. It imposes a cliché that resistance happens due to materialist reasons or pragmatic interests, “packaged” into the coating of ideology. And that it is led solely by the lower-most, who are at a moral high ground exclusively due to the fact that they are weak or poor or suffering. Thus, through suffering,

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violence is justified. Empirically, neither in Lithuania, Ukraine nor in any other post-Soviet country that went through a more or less violent overthrow of the establishment, is this the case. Experientially, I have demonstrated that the independence struggles both in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian cases were much more profoundly rooted in the metaphysical and anthropological problematique. Intellectually, there are plenty of other theories originating these processes from different reasons and suggesting their different logics, such as Albert Camus in his book The Rebel, Patocˇ ka in his Heretical Essays in Philosophy of History, Gandhi with his teaching of non-violent resistance, and Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, which I discuss in this chapter.36 The structure of the post-Soviet political reality is profoundly unlike the Western world because of the completely different historical experience of the twentieth century and also because of a different post-USSR power structure. For instance, unlike in most of the Western countries, in the post-USSR context the political establishment (not necessarily in terms of political power, but also in terms of methods, images and political cosmology) is often socialist or reformed communist (under various different titles), while various quasi-liberal and “conservative” or “right-wing” parties represent the political and – most importantly – the intellectual opposition. Therefore, the images of “conservative” and “right wing” assume completely different associative meanings than those in the West. This is why the conservatives in Lithuania often represent the more intellectual and progressive thinking, and why liberal democrats in Russia represent a kind of dystopian totalitarian holocaust, as do the national Bolsheviks, who from a historical point of view are a paradox in their own right. However, there are also so-called liberals, who, even though being in the opposition, are also in opposition both to the national Bolsheviks and liberal democrats. Thus what we call “right-winged sentiments” in Eastern Europe have a different meaning and derive from a different political cosmology than in the Western European context. The traditional “right–left” division cannot be applied to the case without encountering various kinds of epistemological difficulties. However, as mentioned, this is not to say that all forms of identity formation in the post-USSR Eastern Europe are desirable. As will be shown below, one of the possible dangers (among others) that is related to the Soviet-style quasimetaphysical thinking described above, and which also influences political identity formation, is self-sacrification. Here a distinction has to be made between the meanings of the terms “sacred” and “sacrification” on the one hand and “saint” and “sanctification”, as well as “holy”, on the other hand. The “sacred” directly derives from the event of sacrifice, of violent destruction of a victim (guilty or scapegoated). By contrast, the words “saint” and “holy” are very closely linked to each other and refer to being intact, whole (therefore “holy”). Sanctification does not destroy and offering is not violent. These are two very different manifestations of the metaphysical, and in our case the former is important. Rene Girard describes the relation between violence, sacrifice and the sacred. According to him, the ritual of sacrifice in the pre-modern societies

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was a way of forced, violent mediation with the gods, the provoked relation with the metaphysical.37 He writes, “[i]n primitive societies the risk of unleashed violence is so great and the cure so problematic that the emphasis naturally falls on prevention. The preventive measures naturally fall within the domain of religion, where they can on occasion assume a violent nature. Violence and the sacred are inseparable”.38 Even if in the modern world the role of religion has been pushed to the margins of the political life, the experience of the extra-ordinary nature of violent situations persists. Dramatically speaking, it is within the close encounter with death that the value of life and all its aspects comes to the fore, in a sense invoking the ecstatic experience of living in truth that Havel was talking about. The moment of violence is a critical moment, be it in the context of internal affairs, a literary or cinematographic narrative, or within international politics. After these occurrences things are never the same as they were, and the actors are existentially changed within the process. It therefore bears close resemblance to the liminal conditions, existential transition and formation of new identity. Sa˛ ju-dis and Maidan At this juncture, the focus will shift back to the cases of sa˛ ju-dis and Maidan. Among many other elements that connect them (and those that separate them as well), an element of self-sacrifice stands out as particularly striking. In the Lithuanian case, on 13 January 1991, massive crowds of unarmed people were literally pushing Soviet tanks with their bare hands, in efforts to stop them. Fourteen people died and many were injured during the events on that night. In Kyiv, Ukraine, during the tragic events of 18–20 February 2014, well over a hundred people died and several hundred were injured as a result of clashes between the crowd and the riot police and Ukrainian Special Forces. In this case, the protesters were armed, and bearing in mind the contagious and volatile as well as mimetic nature of violence, this might have been one of the reasons (besides intentional provocations by other parties) why it spread into an even bigger crisis. Yet the weapons that Maidan’s fighters were using consisted mainly of sticks, stones, shields, Molotov cocktails and an occasional firearm, and were no match for the officials, who were armed with live ammunition-loaded firearms of various kinds, sniper rifles included, different kinds of grenades, as well as anti-riot and military vehicles. In both cases, though, after literally self-sacrificing struggles, the victory was won by the less advantaged party, and in both cases this meant profound changes in both political conditions and political identities within the states – a profound change in their political personae. In the Lithuanian case, the January Events dispersed any ambiguities about the country’s legitimacy and de facto political existence, and in the Ukrainian case, the victory meant breakage with its experiential Soviet existence. The mentioned sacrifices have been memorialised and embedded in emotionally and associatively charged national symbolism. Those who sacrificed their lives were commemorated

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with massive public ceremonies of mourning and burial, which by nature were both political and religious rites. This way, through these sacrifices, the entire societies have been experientially and factually transformed. They have lost their close ones or those who represent the ideals that they were striving for. In a way, the society has sacrificed them, even if in our case the victims have sacrificed themselves, in exchange for the greater good as it was perceived. According to Hubert and Mauss, “even while continuing to move onward into the world of gods, the victim had to remain in touch with mankind […]. Through this proximity the victim, who already represents the gods [in our case, the ideals], comes to represent the sacrificer also. Indeed, it is not enough to say that it represents him: it is merged within him.”39 Sacrifice is a moment of merging, the interlinking of the sacrificer and the godly, a media for transformative reconciliation. This sacrifice at the same time also began to include and represent the society as a whole. Through this connection, the society “purified” and transformed itself. Because of this connection to the metaphysical, the political persona and the political struggle also became metaphysical. In our cases, these sacrifices became a symbolical manifestation of the existential freedom and dignity that the societies participating in the struggles were striving for. However, if the ideals are different, more sinister if the quasi-metaphysical political ideals are those of ethnic purity, of racial superiority, or indeed of “working-class” righteousness, the destructive quasi-metaphysical narrative is born, and various violent consequences may follow. This explains the anthropological meaning of the commemoration and symbolism of victims of various political struggles. After the violent sacrifice has happened, they no longer represent the actual people who died as much as they represent the sacred, the quasi-metaphysical, the ideal, which now the society can be in touch with and claim as part of its own political persona; hence the “Heavenly sotnia” in Maidan.

Post-Soviet identity We thus see the process of identity formation at its barest. The mask-identity of the ideals that are pursued is perceived as an internal part of the actor, as if it were owned by it. However, where the entire process is violent and uncontrolled, it involves an inevitable sense of victimisation, along with the wish for revenge, a sense of injustice, of suffering and tragedy. The sacrificial rituals were there in order to contain these powerful violent, tragic, unclean energies and provide them with form, to restore harmony.40 They were also there for separating the sacred event of sacrifice from the ordinary, the secular – what we nowadays call political. Therefore, after the ritual had taken place, the society can come back to the political realm “purified”, no longer sullied by the event of violence and the contagious experiences related. Huber and Mauss discuss various ways in which these destructive human impulses were dealt with in pre-modern societies, whether by the means of taboos, religion or strict customary codes.

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Victimised self-perception However, when it comes to the modern taboos, customary codes and secular religiousness (such as scientific atheism, communism, or indeed some forms of liberalism), the traditional boundaries no longer apply. This way, after such violent events, the purification of society does not take place, and the modern mask-identity often becomes infused with a violent or victimised character, while at the same time remaining virtuous, and associated with “godly”, quasi-metaphysical ideals. The sense of victimhood and self-righteousness encourages the ethno-centric, chauvinistic sentiments through violent, sacrificial political events. The best contemporary example here is some of the local population of the Donbass region, which after experiencing war and bombardment from both fighting sides, and having been constantly fed with Russian propaganda, even if previously peaceful, now see Ukraine as a “fascist state” and swear to fight it, sometimes associating their struggle with the sacrificed image of the “Great Patriotic War”.41 The political identity thus assumes a sinister combination of sacred righteousness on one side (because one has suffered), a sense of possessing or representing the ideas that the society has been struggling for, and a whole set of destructive emotions related. Other examples of such reality are abundant: from the Balkans to Israel, from Poland to Russia, from Hungarians in Romania to the emerging mask-identities of “Donetsk and Luhansk republics” and the intentionally fabricated contemporary image of “Novorossyia”. Therefore, there is a strong connection between the popular (non-intellectual) “right-wing” movements and a quasi-metaphysical mask-identity of a victim. The Soviet experience introduced the self-pitying and, at the same time, paradoxically glorifying revolutionary character of victimhood-based political identity. It is the “oppressed people”, who, according to the Marxist narrative, have a quasi-metaphysical right and obligation to violently overthrow the existing “oppressing class” for the sake of “better” economic conditions. Therefore, as I have discussed above, it is the economic interest or a demonised image rather than the ideal or any ethical or spiritual category that motivates this overthrow. The negative, oppressive ideology that blindfolds the un-articulated mob of “the people” prevents them from seeing the “unmasked materialistic truth”. This kind of schismatic narrative dominated the Soviet cosmology. At the same time, it fostered a political culture where the levelling egalitarian principle introduced a quasi-metaphysical “value confusion”. Mixed with chauvinist ideas, it produces a vulgar form of conservative, traditionalist but, at the same time, revolutionary thought and imagery that underlines the populist “right-wing” movements. The image of the mob of people is substituted with an image of a nation, and the oppressing class is substituted by oppressing race, ethnicity or ideology.42 Yet the call for violent destruction, overthrow and de-masking of the “evil”, as well as the sacrificial logics, remains. Thus, while images vary, the scheme is the same. Such political identity narrative is on one hand extremely pragmatic and materialistic while

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at the same time being profoundly self-righteous and paradoxically – unrealistic, dogmatic and mythological. And so, we see the interplay of the three layers of political identity formation in the post-Soviet region, which I discussed at the beginning of this book. The violent Soviet and post-Soviet history created real conditions for a series of fundamental crises in the region, affecting all its inhabitants. The experience of suffering as well as efforts to cope with it through scapegoating and sacrifice created the self-perpetuating political culture of violence and victimhood, incorporating numerous nationalist and populist images and quasi-metaphysical narratives of self-sacrification. This is the reason why so many post-Soviet political identities tend to concentrate on their history of suffering for the purpose of self-reproduction, and this is also the reason why national identity narratives often entail the element of metaphysics. Politics is experienced in completely different intensity here than in many places in Western Europe, because it entails the liminal existential component. Possible prospects I have described the post-USSR European space as a unique region. Its uniqueness lies primarily in the human experience of Sovietism as well as post-Soviet liminal transition. Among the most important existential problems that all of the post-USSR states met, was the problem of coping with this liminal experience, and finding firm existential reference points, an axis of values to create new life on. This was complicated even further by the global contemporary situation of general late modern flux and disarray. A popular and prominent trend in an effort to deal with the “surreality” of the existential condition that I discussed, is the strong-hand politics, which imposes rigid forms of life and belief, thus seemingly “bringing order”, while at the same time again succumbing to violent sacrificial mechanisms through scapegoating and blaming. Violence was supposed to restore the order and purify the sacrificer, but because the conditions are innately liminal and formless, the deliverance never comes, and violence perpetuates both at a physical and a theoretical level.43 In general, post-Soviet politics can be characterised by an all-encompassing sense of fluidity and formlessness. At the existential level, it can be said that the source of the negative post-Soviet “vices” is the sense of weakness emanating from the liminality that Soviet experience invoked. Fear, violence, self-pity and nihilism are all a result of loss of orientation and the miserable Soviet human condition. Just like Alice in Wonderland, in this reality, anything can happen. A small and insignificant country can declare independence and perpetuate the downfall of a global superpower by means of unarmed resistance. A massive country can have a strongly centralised power, pursue aggressive foreign policy, be supported by various radical “right-wing” movements, support various “right-wing” movements itself, and yet be supported by the Western “leftists”. A micro-state can emerge out of thin air, in the middle of

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another country, not be recognised by anyone and yet have a crowd of fanatic followers and supporters globally. In here, anything goes. Such political culture is essentially mimetic. Cynical politics, so widespread among both the Soviet- and West imitators, is based on recreation and representation of accepted political and cultural forms, in the interest of consequential benefits, be they economic gain, political popularity or cultural influence. Violence also spreads like a virus, through revenge, scapegoating and retaliation, which we may observe particularly in the Balkans, Caucasus and Ukraine. Finally, an essential component of victimisation is the quasimetaphysical self-sacrification – the fabricated, imitated relation with the metaphysical, assuming the role of the sacred. To a greater or lesser extent, it is characteristic to the majority of the post-Soviet nationalisms. The main risk with these processes of post-USSR transformation is that, during this period, schismatic imaginaries at both the epistemological and the practical level can develop as a part of the new mask-identity, thus being internalised by the community/society. In his famous essay The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel characterised the Czechoslovakia of his times as a “post-totalitarian state”.44 He meant that the lived condition within this state was not typically and directly totalitarian but rather so in an intensified and indirect manner, via ideological confinement, pervading life’s every aspect, rendering it a conformist lie: “The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies”.45 However, are there any brighter existential pathways for the region? In an effort to answer the question, one should perhaps look at the positive events in the region’s history in the face of violent crisis and its unique intellectual tradition. Perhaps the intellectual source for such a transition could be found in the works by Patocˇ ka, Havel and the interwar Lithuanian Christian thinkers on personalism, among others.46 If only very vaguely and in an abstract manner, I would like to suggest an outline of such a path. The main threats that need to be tackled in order to restore some sort of existential, political and social normality are the two destructive factors mentioned previously: the violent sacrificial mechanisms and the imitative, cynical behaviour. As I understand it, there are two means for realising such a choice. And it has been demonstrated in several historical occasions, including the anti-Soviet activity of Charter 77, Solidarnos´c´, Sa˛ ju-dis, and to an extent (Euro-)Maidan. First of all, there is recognising truthfulness in the human condition in the sense of assuming a dignified, and non-imitative moral stance towards what it is to be human. This involves acknowledging and recognising the metaphysical dimension of the human condition and the abandonment of “routinised” existence (as Patocˇ ka calls it), which is primarily based on a materialistic, economised world perception, imitated from the image of the West.47 Here “routinisation” is understood as commodifying the existential. In opposition to such existence, symptomatic in the post-USSR region, but

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also noticeable in the West, Havel called for a fundamental change in the way of living at a personal level, which he called “living in truth”. This entailed the refusal of pragmatically ordered existential conformity within the regime: “In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence.”48 This is an ecstatic condition, similar to that of Plato’s philosopher who sees the true forms in the famous allegory of the cave. Havel calls for existence within an epiphanic recognition of truth. Even more so, he calls for a polity to be constructed on this existential premise. However, Plato already assessed human imperfection and finitude, which would bring an end to his kallipolis. And still, even if hardly practically feasible because the routinisation of any kind of prolonged existence is a basic human reality, what Havel did offer is a distinction between imitative and participatory political living. Under posttotalitarian conditions it simply meant active political participation and the expression of a personal political position. But in general, it could also be understood as a more human, more truthful, other than routinised and purely calculative or interest-driven existential and political stance. However, Havel’s description of a post-totalitarian condition is using a Marxist binary between truth and ideology, which was very strongly reflecting the power structure of his times where truth was clearly opposed to ideological lies of the socialist regime. Truth and lie here are both parts of logical dialectics, and to be authentic under such circumstances meant not to surrender one’s life to the dominant power of the totalitarian apparatus. But what happens in the ambiguous situation when the post-totalitarian state is gone? How does one live an authentic life without relying on a sceptical and defensive approach towards his immediate surroundings? How does one build and maintain the new identity and what is this identity’s relation to authenticity? It is these questions that are at the core of post-Soviet existence and dictate different political themes in the context. Lithuanian language, in addition to the word tiesa, which literally translates . as truth, also has another word – tikrove – which is closer to true-ness, as in “true existence”. Tiesa is intrinsically connected with language, with truthful . speaking, with (finite) intellectual articulation, and is therefore logical. Tikrove, however, cannot be said and cannot be fully structured logically. It is ontological . truth, a truthful being. Logical tiesa is a part of tikrove as much as is the . paradox or, indeed, lie (the fact that lie exists is tikras, is true). A part of tikrove . is hidden, another part is revealed. Tikrove can be recognisable, mis-recognisable, and can transcend cognition at the same time. It is as much a subject of . knowledge as it is of faith. It is this ontological tikrove, rather than logical tiesa that this book holds at the basis of its articulation of authenticity. It is far beyond our scope to discuss the above notion of truth in greater detail. Yet, a few words can be said in relation to the formation of a political “self” under (late) modern circumstances, in a state of crisis and even more so – within a liminal, transitional context. Let us remember the three aspects

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of the human condition discussed at the beginning of the book: the imperfection of human knowledge, the fact that everyone has a personal perspective, a focal point, from which they articulate reality, and the human capability of fallacy and misrecognition. Thus, the authentic political existence, just like any form of human existence, is somewhat flawed, partially illusional, mythological and not necessarily truthful. Paradoxically, this is the most authentic quality of being human. However, I hold the classical principle of the convertibility of truth, beauty and goodness to be the paramount ontological principle nevertheless. The problem is that it is not a priori human. It can be attained, approached and recognised, through a living process, just the same as it can be misrecognised, lost from “vision” or otherwise negated without disappearing ontologically. An authentic alcoholic can be genuinely such, without having the epiphanic relation to truth (or good, or beauty) as Havel describes it. Yet he can sober up and become a genuine, authentically different person who recognises the truth through a certain process of transformation. It is this imperfection of post-Soviet and modern existence as well as the possibility to convert that paradoxically makes this condition true and actually human. How can such transformation take place? This leads us to another experiential theme that can be used for good, in our context. It is the heightened sense of fatality, of existential “weight” of life, politics and reality. The perpetuation of violence in various forms, as well as the overall liminal condition, has also created a context for the close relation between the political and metaphysical. Politics here is not only concerned with interests of different actors, their economical gain, pragmatism and commodity. It has a much deeper, existential dimension, and this dimension is a perpetuating motif throughout the postSoviet period. It is this dimension that can provide answers to “political paradoxes” that I have been discussing throughout this book and perhaps to the overall political human condition of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the only means to stop sacrificial mechanisms that has at least partially succeeded was resistance through non-participation, through conscious choice, a refusal to perpetuate violence. It is arguably the only wise decision in the situation of imitative spread of violence, most significantly practised by Mahatma Gandhi. Instead of pushing kindergarten-level arguments internationally that, for instance, Russia had a right to invade Crimea because the US broke state sovereignty via its operations in the Middle East, it is necessary to elevate oneself from the imitative violence. Sa˛ju-dis managed to do that in 1991, resisting tanks with bare hands, even losing lives without retaliation, and paradoxically succeeded in defending Lithuanian independence. That means it is indeed possible and has been done. I would like to conclude this book with a quote from Gregory Bateson in an effort to support the hopeful position outlined above: “There seems to be something like Gresham’s law of cultural evolution according to which the oversimplified ideas will always displace the sophisticated and the vulgar and hateful will always displace the beautiful. And yet the beautiful persists”.49

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I discussed the process of identity formation, of existential change and selfaggregation under liminal conditions. Various destructive and debilitating social and political processes prevent the Soviet “ghost” from leaving the lives of the post-Soviet people, partially because it has become an authentic, if not truthful part of their existence. However, many instances in the history of the region have shown that even the most brute force or the most miserable lived condition can be countered through commitment to and practice of truthful and dignified existential disposition. The important task here is to find an adequate starting point and existential and intellectual premise for such a stance. This book is an effort to open the discussion under such terms and to put forth this at the core of the post-Soviet human condition understood in both political and existential terms.

Notes 1 Szakolczai, “Liminality and Experience”. 2 Agnes Horvath, “Tricking into the Position of the Outcast: A Case Study in the Emergence and Effects of Communist Power”, Political Psychology 19, no. 2 (2002), 331–347. 3 Thomassen, “Uses and Meanings of Liminality”. 4 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1977); Rene Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (London: Cohan & West, 1964). 5 See for instance, Stéphane Courtois, ed., Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 6 Even though in our case it is not as important, there were also more subtle and less direct forms of violence. Among these are the communist ideologisation of everyday life, the psychological terror, intellectual censorship and brainwashing, cultural deprivation, and the destruction or crippling of pre-Soviet political cosmologies and forms of life in all member states through disastrous modernist projects of industrialisation, collectivisation and secularisation. This is not to talk about the export of the communist ideology and system outside the Union. At the very core of the communist ideology are the principles of violent struggle, destruction, and economic, social and political “bulldozing” in exchange for the impossible promise of life in the nihilistic state of undifferentiated existential equality (equated with economic equality). 7 In his speech about the occupied Crimea on 18 March 2014, Putin officially condoned the military occupation of the peninsula, hiding the fact behind what he called “a referendum”, which was not acknowledged internationally. See “Full Text of Putin’s Speech on Crimea”, Prague Post, http://praguepost.com/eu-news/ 37854-full-text-of-putin-s-speech-on-crimea (last accessed: 24 February 2015). 8 “The far right in central Europe differs from its western equivalents in its choice of enemies. In the west it thrives on immigrant-bashing. In the east it dwells on more atavistic grievances, such as ethnic minorities, old territorial disputes, homosexuals, international financiers and, naturally, Jews. Hatred of the Roma has become a defining issue.” See ‘The Far Right in Eastern Europe’, The Economist (12 November 2009), http://www.economist.com/node/14859369 (last accessed: 25 February 2015). 9 Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Edinburgh: A&C Black, 2003), 283–299.

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10 Girard, The Scapegoat, 12. 11 Ibid. 12 And thus a “blat” economic system emerged wherein theft and corruption became normalised and appropriated at all social levels and conveyed to post-Soviet political culture as well. See Alena Lebedeva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 13 Patrick Troy, “Housing Policy in the Soviet Union”, Urban Policy and Research 8, no. 1 (1990), 12–17. . 14 Rafał Godon´, Palmira Jucevicˇ iene and Zdenko Kodelja, “Philosophy of Education in Post-Soviet Societies of Eastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania and Slovenia”, Comparative Education 40, no. 4 (2004), 562–565. 15 Diane Rowland and Alexandre Telyukov, “Soviet Healthcare from Two Perspectives”, Health Affairs 10, no. 3 (1991), 71–86. 16 Natalya Sadomskaya and Tamara Dragadze, “Soviet Anthropology and Contemporary Rituals”, Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique 31, no. 2/3 (1990), 245–255. 17 Árpád Szakolczai, “In a Permanent State of Transition: Theorising the East European Condition”, Limen 1 (2001), limen.mi2.hr/limen1-2001/arpad_szakolczai. html (last accessed: 25 October 2017). 18 Girard, The Scapegoat, 20–21. 19 Ibid., 6. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Ibid., 17–18. 22 Sasa Woodruf, “Increased Hostility Against Jews and Roma in Hungary”, NPR, http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/09/287342069/increased-hostility-aga inst-jews-and-roma-in-hungary (last accessed: 2 March 2015). 23 Girard, The Scapegoat, 18. 24 With the most significant instances continuing to take place in Russia, there were occasions in Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Croatia and Serbia, mostly during gay pride events, when homosexuals were either physically or verbally attacked. 25 “Burning the Rainbow”, The Economist (18 November 2013), http://www.econom ist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2013/11/Poland (last accessed: 2 March 2015). 26 Girard, The Scapegoat, 18–19. 27 Ibid., 21 28 Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 13. 29 Ibid., 109. 30 Therefore Russia’s political opposition to Maidan could be understood as its scapegoating in order to purify the feeling of humiliation when Ukraine chose to try to end its Soviet existence, which tied it to Russia more than just economically. 31 Ibid., 19–20. 32 Girard, The Scapegoat, 115. 33 Maidan, directed by Sergey Loznitsa (Hague: Atoms and Void, 2014). 34 Sodeika and Sverdiolas, “Gyvenimas Kolboje Ir Tuoj Po To”, 494. 35 Ibid., 496. 36 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on a Man in Revolt [L’Homme révolté], trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Jan Patocˇ ka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1996); Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satayagraha) (San Diego, CA: Questpath Publishing, 2006); Girard, Violence and the Sacred. 37 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 6–27. 38 Ibid., 19. 39 Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 31–32. 40 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 8.

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41 See, for instance, “Residents at Risk as Ceasefire Crumbles: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 78)”, Vice News, https://news.vice.com/video/russian-roulette-dispa tch-78 (last accessed: 5 March 2015). 42 Alexander Dugin has outlined a political theory that is based on precisely such sentiment in his The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos Media, 2012). 43 See: Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory. 44 Václav Havel, Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 40. 45 Ibid., 41–45. 46 See: Havel, Living in Truth; Antanas Rybelis (ed.), Antanas Maceina. Raštai [Antanas Maceina. Writings], Books I–XIV (Vilnius: Mintis, 1991–2008); Aru-nas Sverdiolas (ed.), Stasys Šalkauskis. Raštai [Stasys Šalkauskis. Writings], Books I–IX (Vilnius: Mintis, 1990–2012). 47 Patocˇ ka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 136. 48 Havel, Living in Truth, 54. 49 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: Hampton Press, 2002), 5.

Conclusion

The main theme at the centre of our inquiry in this book has been the human experience of political transition and identity formation. This process of political and existential becoming emerged as a plural social phenomenon, but at the same time – as a process based on shared human activities, customs, experiences and practices. Some of it is an intentional search for identity and some of it unfolds as one of the outcomes of the overall, super-intentional political processes. The theoretical approach that this book outlined was threefold in structure. It explored the human (not institutional, i.e. not purely rationalist) origins of politics, and did not aim to come to purely rationalist knowledge as a result of this inquiry. This was an interpretivist, not a scientific or a naturalist, project. It was not a factographic description of the post-communist “transition”. Instead, it was an effort to understand the human, experiential meaning of this transition. Therefore, the foundational intention here was not to establish methodological validity or generalisation, but rather to inquire into the veracity, criticism and reformulation of the way we understand identity and political presence. To illustrate the arguments about the a-rational factors at work within these political processes, the book has drawn on an array of diverse material, ranging from theoretical articulations of the historical and political realities, to primary textual sources, to interviews, to photography and film. In terms of the theoretical approach, I used various theories and conceptual tools from across the fields of political and social thought, philosophy, anthropology, history and cultural studies. Most notably, the notions of liminality, social imaginary, historical narrative, sacrifice and scapegoating as well as quasi-metaphysics proved to be particularly useful. In addition, I extended a few less-established concepts such as mask-identities, political persona and others. It is my sincere hope that the theoretical instruments as well as the material gathered will be useful to the reader, in addressing some of the most crucial and epochal topics in politics within the post-Soviet world as well as outside. The first chapter of this book discussed the theoretical approach that I used for understanding political identity formation. It positioned itself in between the positivist and relativist traditions of thought, arguing for the importance of the hermeneutic understanding of human experience in politics and

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identity formation. It also discussed the theme of embedded historical participation, which allows for articulating the human experience as a constitutive factor for political reality. It argued that, in order to grasp this human factor, one needs to approach the narratives, symbols and political cosmologies that constitute political identity from an empathic perspective. Empathy was articulated as a form of inter-subjective understanding, emanating from a shared contextual experience and supported by visual and textual analysis. The case of Lithuania provided the material, allowing for an inductive development and application of the abovementioned theory. I discussed the pre-modern and modern Lithuanian history, emphasising the notion of history as embedded narrative and how the mythological nature of different historical episodes influences the post-Soviet Lithuanian political reality and selfarticulation. I further elaborated on the topic of intellectual conceptualisation of Lithuanian political identity, mainly focusing on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern Lithuanian self-articulation of tauta. I demonstrated how politics, and especially identity-related politics, is infused with symbolism and mythological meanings, which nevertheless become very real and tangible through political participation and reciprocation of the narrative and certain political images. The term used for capturing such embedded existence of a particular society, is political cosmology. Finally, through discussing the case of the Lithuanian post-Soviet independence movement, I analysed the experiential side of the transitory political process. I discussed the external influences for the emergence of the independence movement in terms of political, cultural and other external factors as well as the internal ones, such as human experiences of suffering and victimisation, as well as quasi-metaphysical images of East and West. The analysis showed how, because of these human factors, the political process became representative of more than just the political situation, also attaining existential and quasi-metaphysical meaning. Both this context and the case of the January Events were used to argue that, due to the nature of the contemporary human experiences within the Lithuanian society, a new modern political identity emerged, which was conceptualised by the term mask-identity. The second stage of my inquiry tackled the question of how the human factor manifests in other post-Soviet cases. For that purpose, I concentrated on political images in order to demonstrate how and why they constitute political identities and influence political action. The book demonstrated the applicability, function and importance of political images to political identity formation and real politics in the broader post-Soviet region. It compared four different images of persons in four culturally and historically different cases: Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Russia. It then showed how, in all three cases, personalities become mythologised images and serve similar identityrelated functions within different political cosmologies. Next, I analysed these political images in terms of their expression, function and purpose in order to discover the role that they play in post-Soviet politics. It turned out that they mobilise political movements, substantiate political identity legitimate power

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and structure ambiguous political reality in times of crisis. Due to their concrete and at the same time abstract and inclusive nature, they are capable of capturing various human experiences, complex symbolism and emotional charge, all of which can be used for various purposes. Most importantly, however, political images provide existential purpose in ambiguous political situations and render the political process intelligible to a human mind, structured and determined by its own finitude. I discussed my findings from fieldwork concerning Ukraine’s Maidan movement in 2014. However, the main focus of this work was a situation where several different narratives use the same images for articulating their political cosmologies. I explored the two most prominent images in the context – those of “being right-wing” and “the West” – and revealed how the different ways that these images were articulated by the Western, Russian and Ukrainian media, dramatically influenced both the political process and identities involved. Furthermore, the way all of these narratives articulated the situation, and the way they used the same images, was in fact very revealing of the political cosmologies producing them, allowing for better understanding of the political cosmologies of all three parties. Having discussed the means of capturing human experience and associative meaning in politics in the form of images, myths and narratives, I analysed the context in which the post-Soviet process is taking place. The theme that emerged several times was that of transition, crisis and transformation. I articulated post-Soviet transition as a liminal process, in which the person or society transitioning transforms existentially. Such articulation also suggested an inclusive conceptualisation of political transition, grounded in human experience, and emphasises the ambiguous nature of such experiences. I argued that Central and Eastern Europe has historically been stuck in between the East and the West, which structures its political reality and identity formation. The book also distinguished and provided examples for three modalities of liminal condition: the temporal, the formal and the spatial. Examples were provided from Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Russia and other places in the region. I argued that the liminal nature of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet experience rendered even the categories of time, space and form liquid. Some areas in the region still live under conditions and political cosmology that has barely changed since Soviet times, and in some post-Soviet cases previously uniform states have split while others have formed, producing new political identities. The human experience of this liminal process was called sovietism or Soviet condition. I argued that this form of political culture, self-identification and lived experience is closely related to the deeply problematic role of Russia in the region’s twentieth-century history. Through embracing and reciprocating the Soviet condition as part of its own identity, Russia also perpetuates the cynical, sacrificial and violent experiential mechanisms, inherited from the experience of crude Soviet modernisation. The identification of sovietism as the problematic experiential condition in the region, however, led the argument to the next stage. I tackled the issue of

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endemic perpetuation of violence in the post-Soviet region. The book employed René Girard’s theory of sacrificial mechanisms and scapegoating to explain the logics of violence and victimisation embedded in the post-Soviet political culture. The book argued that, due to its revolutionary and fundamentally violent experiential and ideological character, the Soviet Union established a particular political culture, in which scapegoating, violence and perpetuation of liminal crisis became a normative modus vivendi. These problems, however, also emerge in the post-Soviet politics, in the shape of ethnic and political violence, self-victimisation, quasi-metaphysical identity formation and political cynicism. The book illustrates this process in the cases of Sa˛ ju-dis and Maidan. It also reveals the Marxist origins of such a victimised political mindset with nationalist “coating” and argues that this might be the reason why so many post-Soviet identities emphasise their suffering so much as a form of self-emancipation and gaining moral leverage, which can also be easily linked to various far-right movements. The argument was concluded by my pointing out several final ideas related to what had been said throughout the book. First, there is the trinary nature of political identity formation, once again emphasising the role of human experience in the political process. Processes of political identity formation should be observed from three perspectives: historical/political factuality, intellectual reflection and human experience. All these spheres influence and shape each other in the embedded political process, in which identity takes form. I then elaborated on the mythological character of post-Soviet politics. I argued that, unlike what most mainstream theories in political and social sciences claim, politics cannot be adequately and fully understood in purely rational terms, and that the suggested inquiry into the human side of these processes can provide crucial understanding, particularly of politics during times of crisis. This led me to reappreciate the role of liminal experience for the formation of modern mask-identities, including victimhood-based identities. I asserted that much is to be gained by analysing these liminal aspects of postSoviet politics. And finally, I suggested some possible prospects for transcending the post-Soviet condition through tackling the issues of imitation and violence in the region. I pointed out that the turbulent historical experience of the nineteenth- to twenty-first century in the region also provides fertile soil for more meaningful politics to arise. Due to its ability to appreciate the existential weight of politics, the region can perhaps find ways towards a more truthful and authentic political culture.

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Index

absurd, Soviet 30, 51, 113–115, 120, 123 Adorno, Theodor 9, 10, 20, 142 aesthetics 3, 89, 93 Afghanistan 59 aggression Russian 42, 76, 92, 94, 125 Soviet 55 agrarian ethics 29, 32, 35, 39, 52 origins 28, 33, 34 alcoholism 45, 87, 98 ambiguity experiential 19, 22, 79, 113–115, 130 liminal 79, 80, 104, 106, 113, 114, 118, 126, 130 structural 18, 52, 76, 80, 104, 106, 109, 115 America (see: USA) Anarchy 26, 90, 91 of gentry 26 representations 90, 91, 93 Anderson, Benedict 6, 65, 76, 77 anthropology 123–125, 127 anti-Fascist 92, 93 anti-Marxist 13 antisemitism 29, 89 anti-soviet 31, 37, 59, 88, 120 activity 37, 59, 114, 120 identity 31, 37, 88 a-rationality, political 2, 4, 7, 9, 22, 75, 108, 123 archetype 22, 77, 79, 88, 95 Asia 23, 99 atheism 43, 52, 59 Austria–Hungary 26, 106, 112 authenticity 9, 10, 51–55 existential 8, 9, 11, 23, 51, 53, 54, 56, 111 of identity 6, 9, 20, 52, 56

authoritarianism 29, 37, 98 authority 64, 65, 75, 86 Balkans 110, 111, 125, 127 Baltic Sea 69, 114 States 1, 22, 57, 73, 76, 93, 109, 110 tribes 24, 28, 51 Banderite 90, 93, 96 barricades 85, 87, 89, 90 Barthes, Roland 65, 74, 75 Belarus historical narrative of 23, 26 post-Soviet 1, 22, 73, 109, 119, 120 Berkut 76, 85–87, 89, 97, 109, 128 Berlin 1, 40, 108, 111, 112, 118 bolshevism 77, 90, 112 boredom, the society of 31, 114, 115 Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich 30, 31, 114, 115 Budapest memorandum 94 Spring 125 Camus, Albert 135 capitalism critique of 13, 74, 118 Western 1, 13, 127 caricatures 17, 90, 97, 132 Catholicism church 27, 31, 37, 50 faith 24, 32, 52 politics 28–30, 35 celebrations, political 64, 72, 73, 110 censorship 30, 98, 126 Christianity in Europe 24, 46, 51 in Lithuania 34, 35, 38, 39, 43, 56

Index citizenship Lithuanian 25, 28, 38, 55 of Rzeczpospolita 32, 71 Polish 71 Ukrainian 73, 75, 98 civil identity 12, 29, 76 movement 95, 96, 98 society 29, 73, 75, 90 class image of 64, 68, 76 middle 27 working 38, 68, 76 collaboration with Nazis 29, 30, 124 with Soviets 30, 48 collapse liminal 32, 65, 76, 110 of Rzeczpospolita 70 of Soviet Union 1, 14, 22, 55, 104, 108, 109, 111, 112, 120, 127 collective experience 8, 15, 17, 93 housing 30, 59, 126 identity 6, 36, 39, 51 imagination 65, 128 Commonwealth (see: Rzeczpospolita) communism 45, 59, 72, 110, 113, 126, 127 communist experiment 45, 112 narrative 13, 28, 59, 118, 127 party 28, 40, 59, 62 construct, cultural 6, 9, 27, 53, 134 identity 2, 4–6, 36, 53, 64 constructivist, theories 8, 53, 64, 65 consumption 22, 74, 78 contagion, social 124, 125 corruption, culture of 45, 85, 90, 98, 100, 114, 116, 128 cosmology, political 18, 22, 39, 54, 66, 74 Estonian 67 Lithuanian 32, 33, 36, 37, 43, 46, 56 post-Soviet 23, 95, 107, 119, 120 Russian 73, 94, 95 Soviet 100, 114, 119, 120 Ukrainian 96, 100 Western 66, 90, 92 cossacks, images of 86, 90 Crimea, occupation of 73, 94, 110, 118 crisis

169

cultural 35, 36, 81, 92 liminal 6, 11, 15, 48, 54, 65, 75, 76, 78–80, 104, 107, 110, 123, 124, 126, 129–132 Ukrainian 1, 84, 93, 100, 109, 111, 119, 120 critical theory 9, 10, 13, 15, 29, 38, 74, 125 cult, personality 70, 72, 118 culturalism, Lithuanian 36, 38, 39 culture folk 67–69, 72, 126 Lithuanian 33, 34, 37, 48, 70 political 39, 78, 105, 124 post-Soviet 19, 48, 98, 105, 113, 116–119, 127 Soviet 43, 108, 114, 115, 125 Western 78, 89, 113 Western 10, 35, 38, 65, 112, 134 cultures 17, 24, 35, 65, 127 cynicism 19, 45, 114, 116, 117, 123, 133, 134 Czechoslovakia 104, 111 Daukantas, Simonas 33 declaration 42, 43, 55, 62, 78, 100, 106, 110 of independence 40, 42, 43, 55, 62, 106 political 45, 77, 90, 96, 110, 112, 117 symbolic 78, 88, 100, 118, 132 defacing, of symbols 77, 91, 126 defence Maidan 97, 98 of Lithuanian independence 3, 37, 41, 43, 55, 111 of Russian population 94, 95 democracy 1, 12, 76, 117 Lithuania 25, 28, 37, 38, 40 Ukraine 85, 89, 96 West 46, 89 demonisation, political 45, 66, 89, 90, 96, 107, 124 demonstrations 40, 70 deportations 29–32, 43, 44, 71, 124, 126 Dilthey, Wilhelm 15 dissolution Donbass 95, 100, 109, 117, 118 Donetsk (see: Donbass) East, image of, the 43, 46–48, 84 Eastern Europe 11, 13, 19, 98, 106, 135 Eastern Ukraine 109, 110, 119 Eliade, Mircea 66, 78, 134 elites 29, 43, 55, 66, 98, 124

170

Index

embeddedness, existential 7, 8, 10, 11, 32, 39, 54, 56, 77, 109 emotional charge 9, 33, 69, 75, 77–80, 88, 90 empathic understanding 8, 14, 15 Empire, Russian 26, 27, 32, 36, 52, 73, 109, 112 epistemic 4 epistemology 92, 107, 116, 133, 135 essentialism 5, 6, 9 Estonia 66–68, 125 Estonian 66–68 ethics 3, 22, 36, 65, 99, 100, 134 agrarian 24, 29, 32 organic 39, 51, 56 ethnic conflicts 12, 95, 98, 111, 124, 125, 129 ethnicity 6 Euromaidan (see: Maidan) Europe 36, 42, 85, 89, 99, 110 evil, image of 43, 45–48, 84, 93–95, 97, 98, 117, 127, 128, 132 exiles (see: deportations) existence historical 11, 77 human 7, 134 political 6, 14, 32, 36, 79 Soviet 73, 98, 108, 131, 133, 134 existential identity 2, 11, 36, 53 experience historical 22, 76, 93, 106, 120, 135 human 2, 8, 15–19, 45, 52, 77, 104 liminal 43, 84, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 117 factuality 8, 39, 48, 53, 54, 79, 80 Fascism 61, 90, 91, 93, 94, 127 folklore 17, 30, 67, 68 formality 45, 117 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 16 genocide 30, 114, 118, 124 gentry 25–27, 32, 55 Germany 52, 104, 111, 112 Girard, René 19, 123–126, 128–130, 135 Girardet, Raoul 65, 75 Gnosticism 54, 75 Gorbachev 31, 43, 44, 48, 72 Grand Duchy of Lithuania 23–26, 28, 37, 52, 54, 59, 67, 69, 70 guerrilla 30 Guevara, Che 66, 78, 86 gulag 29, 30, 59, 114, 126

Heidegger, Martin 9, 10 heritage, Soviet 78, 116, 117 hermeneutics 3–6, 8, 15, 16 hero 25, 66–70, 77 hierarchy 76, 116, 127, 134 history 10 Estonian 68 Lithuanian 14, 18, 23, 24, 33, 37–39, 52, 77 Polish 70, 71 Soviet 72, 73, 113, 118, 119, 124 Hitler 29, 77, 97 Horvath, Agnes 107, 123 human condition 7, 8, 15, 16, 80, 115, 116 human experience (see: experience – human) Hungary 105, 110, 129 iconography, political 17, 37, 47–49, 78, 84, 90, 98, 132 identity cultural 23, 24, 27 Lithuanian 24, 27–39, 48, 52, 54, 55, 70, 84 Polish 26, 66, 70, 71 post-Soviet 11, 78, 104, 114, 137, 139, 149 Russian 72, 73, 112 Soviet 63 Ukrainian 23, 96, 109 ideology 8, 100, 134, 138, 140, 141 illo tempore 78, 134 images, political 64–80, 84–86, 90–100 images, political imaginaries, social 9, 22, 43, 48, 52, 54, 64, 68, 98 imitation, political 6, 107, 117, 118, 133, 140, 149 imperialism 12, 13, 92, 106 inauthenticity 8, 9, 54, 63 independence movement, Lithuanian 23, 32, 37–40, 43, 51–53, 69, 84 individualism 9, 38, 39 intelligentsia, Lituanian 14, 27–29, 32, 36, 38–40 interwar Estonia 68, 76 Lithuania 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 37–39, 48, 52, 69 Poland 70 Ukraine 88, 90 Jagiełło 24, 25 Jewish 27, 29, 98, 127–129

Index Kalevala 67 Kalevipoeg 66–69, 76 Kyiv 84, 85, 88, 90–93, 95–98, 100, 130 Lebenswelt 3, 22, 56 legitimacy 23, 29, 50, 54, 65, 75–77, 80, 111–113, 120 Lenin 66, 71–73, 78, 86, 114, 119 statue of 59, 73, 78, 128 leninopad 73 liberalism 12, 29, 39, 46, 94, 129 liberum veto 26 liminal condition 11, 43, 100, 104, 110, 111, 115, 123, 126 experience 94, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112 transition 84, 104, 105, 111 liminality 15, 104–115 formal 72, 104, 108, 112 permanent 105, 113, 120, 123, 127 spatial 110 temporal 108, 110 Lithuania interwar (see: interwar - Lithuania) post-Soviet 5, 42, 47, 48, 50–52, 55, 56, 98, 106, 107, 115, 120 pre-modern (see: Grand Duchy of Lithuania) Soviet 29–33, 44, 45, 62 Luhansk (see: Donbass) Maidan 75, 76, 78, 84–100, 114, 132 marginality 37, 57, 106, 121, 129–131, 145 Martyrdom 48, 83, 100, 143 Marxism 6, 13, 48, 59, 74, 115, 116, 133, 134 mask-identity 9–11, 53–56, 67, 95, 104, 114, 124 materialism 13, 36, 38, 48, 115, 116, 120, 133–135 Mauss, Marcel 19, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131 memorials 23, 40, 118 memory historical 54, 76, 88 personal 16, 30 Soviet 43, 78, 93 metaphysics 14, 39, 46, 116, 128, 130–135 mob 126, 127, 130 modernity 4, 11, 74, 112, 116, 126 late 1, 4, 7, 13, 75, 130 Moldova 22, 114, 119

171

Molotov cocktail 87–89 Molotov–Ribbentrop pact 29, 40, 45 monarchy 26, 34, 66, 69, 72, 77, 112 Moscow 24, 25, 41, 72, 73, 106 myth 7, 54, 66, 134 political 65, 74, 75, 80 mythological thinking 8, 54, 55, 74, 78, 79, 110 mythology 6, 8, 74, 75, 78, 145 Nacherleben 15 narod 72, 126, 127 narrative contesting 73, 84–103 historical 10, 13, 24, 25, 32, 36–38, 50–55, 67–69, 72, 77, 108–112, 118–120 identity 26, 50–52, 55, 70, 71, 80, 104 national 25, 26, 66 nation Estonian 66–68, 76 Lithuanian 32–35, 37, 54 Polish 70, 71 national imagery 33, 54, 66–69, 74, 77, 89, 94, 96 nationalism 5, 6, 9, 65–67, 77, 90 Estonian 68 Lithuanian 26–29, 36 Polish 71 Ukrainian 89, 92, 96, 98, 100 nation-states 6, 13, 28, 37, 47, 67, 111 Nato 42, 76, 106 naturalism 24, 50, 52, 56 Nazism 29, 30, 45, 73, 93, 124, 133 neo-Marxism 13, 38, 74 neo-Nazism 90, 91, 112, 128 neo-pagan 50, 57, 68 nihilism 4, 7, 90, 113, 114, 116, 117 nobility 24–26, 55, 58, 67, 70 nulla 113, 114 occupation, Soviet 23, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 40, 52, 106, 120 Crimea (see: Crimea, occupation of) organic state 39, 52 paganism 24, 37, 50, 56, 68 partitions, Rzeczpospolita 26, 34 peaceful resistance 40, 54–56, 68, 69, 87 peasantry 27, 58, 70, 72, 116 Perestroika 32, 72, 114 persona, political 8, 11, 53–55, 127, 133 personalism 9, 29, 36, 38, 39 phenomenology 3, 6, 8, 13, 55, 125

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Index

Plato 3, 4, 7, 10, 54, 127 Poland 23–27, 70, 71, 77, 120, 129 Polish–Lithuanian (see: Rzeczpospolita) political political (see: political persona) ritual 8, 23, 77 political persona 11, 35, 53–55, 66, 67, 70, 71, 82, 90, 110, 111, 119, 124, 127, 133 positivism 7, 8, 13, 74 Postcolonialism 13 post-modernity (see: modernity - late ) post-soviet political culture 19, 90, 105, 117, 127 pragmatism 19, 48, 113–118, 133–135 Prague Spring 93, 125 propaganda 30, 32, 45, 93, 94, 110, 133 Russian 94, 110 Soviet 30, 32, 45, 93, 133 protests, Maidan (see: Maidan) Prussia 26, 106, 112 Putin, Vladimir 73, 76, 94, 95 putsch, Moscow 41, 106 quasi-metaphysics 19, 43, 48, 59, 69, 98, 105, 115, 117, 124, 133–135 rationalism 4, 8, 53, 75, 105, 113, 118 recognition 7, 8, 10, 15–18 regime, non-democratic Lithuanian, interwar 28, 29, 37 Soviet 30–32, 40, 43, 45, 46, 50–52, 55, 112 relativism 4, 5, 7, 10, 75 religiousness, political 12, 48, 50, 65, 132 repressions, Soviet 2, 27, 29–31, 40, 43, 44, 50, 98, 124 resistance, anti-Soviet 30, 39, 40, 43, 45, 50, 54, 55, 68, 69, 120, 125 revolution 107 French 113, 134 Maidan 91, 98, 99 Orange 93, 109, 111 Russian 77, 113, 114, 124, 130 Ricoeur, Paul 4, 10 right-wing, image of 85, 88–90, 92, 96, 134, 135 ritual of passage 55, 106, 107, 123 political 53, 55, 118 sacrificial 125, 126, 128, 131, 135 ritualism, political 19, 48, 52, 105, 107, 113, 114, 117–119

Romania 78, 112 Romanovs 12, 77 romanticism 27, 28, 32–35, 66, 67, 69, 70, 86, 90, 98 Russia 71–73, 77, 84, 89, 91–95, 112–114, 117–120 Ruthenia 24, 26, 55, 58 Rzeczpospolita 25–28, 32, 52, 54, 55, 67, 70, 81, 82, 106, 112, 122 sacred 48, 107, 108, 124, 127, 131 sacrifice 52, 118, 120, 123–131, 134, 135 scapegoating 29, 89, 90, 124, 125, 127–131, 135 secular religiousness 37, 53, 72, 75, 93, 104 self-sacrification 19, 45, 124, 134, 135 Solidarnośc´ 71, 77, 120 sotnia 76, 88, 93, 96, 98, 118 Soviet 63 sovietism 19, 104–122 Soviet Union 1–3, 11–14, 29–34, 38–41, 44–51, 114–120, 125–127 symbolism 6, 74, 77, 88–90, 96, 97, 100, 118–120 anti-Soviet 43, 45, 77, 78, 96–98, 119, 132 national 23, 25, 54, 55, 66, 68, 69, 77, 88, 90, 95–97, 100, 108, 118 personalities 23, 66, 68, 77, 78, 86, 97 Western 50, 89, 99, 129 Szakólczai 8, 45, 107, 113 tauta 35–38, 45, 50, 51, 55, 56, 70 Tautininkai 28, 29, 37, 38, 70 transition, post-Soviet 1–3, 104–107, 119, 120, 127 tsar 26, 27, 72, 73 Ukraine 14, 22, 23, 42, 73–76, 84–100, 108–111, 117–120 USA 29, 39, 66, 70, 91, 117, 127 USSR (see: Soviet Union) victimhood 30, 43–45, 52, 89, 112, 114, 118–120, 123–125, 128–133 Vilnius 23, 27, 29, 30, 37, 40–42, 48, 50, 51, 56 violence 19, 30, 62, 75, 89, 97–100, 107, 114, 118–120, 123–135 Vytautas, Grand Duke 24, 25, 28, 66, 69, 70, 77

Index wall, Berlin 1, 40, 108, 118 war 11, 75, 79, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 126 Cold War 1, 91, 94, 106, 118 First World War 35, 62, 70 Hybrid War 75 Second World War 29, 62, 89, 93, 106, 124 Ukraine 76, 125

wearing, of mask 10, 23, 53, 54 west, image of 31, 46–48, 52, 84, 88, 91, 94, 95, 98–100, 106, 117–119, 127, 133 worldview 35, 37, 123 Yanukovych, Viktor 75, 85, 87, 93, 95–97, 99, 111, 132 Yugoslavia 111

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