Weaponizing Soviet “Heritage” in Lithuania in the Wake of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Abstract (English)

After socialism’s demise in Lithuania in the early 1990s, visual representations associated with the defunct Party state were promptly reclassified as unwanted “waste” and removed from public view. Countless objects depicting Marx, Lenin, and their followers came to be seen as forgettable refuse. While the iconography reminding of socialism was taken down without delay, statuary commemorating the Second World War was left largely untouched. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the statuary in question became an instant target of iconoclastic campaigns.
Focusing empirically on a group of Soviet-era war statues removed from Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius in the fall of 2022, I ask why such effigies, despite being heavily invested with Soviet military propaganda, were left standing as a kind of “heritage” after the end of Party rule. Otherwise put, I inquire into why the remembrance of the Second World War, which most Lithuanians perceive as a Soviet-Russian and alien military conflict, was deemed to be memorially valuable and seen as deserving of preservation for three decades after socialism collapsed. I also explore why that remembrance was promptly stripped of its social value and reclassified as disposable “waste” after the Ukraine war broke out.
I conceptualize waste as a product of specific geopolitical circumstances. Deliberations as to what constitutes waste at a particular moment in history interest me as political and socio-moral discourses that have much potential to reveal about memory shifts in time and the motivations behind them. I argue that toppled Soviet war statuary was designated “waste” and at once weaponized, suggesting that making waste can be a productive cultural practice. This paper contributes to the ongoing conversation, in anthropology and beyond, regarding the ambiguous memorial value of material relics of socialism and memory politics in contemporary Eastern Europe.