1st Edition
The Unknown War Anti-Soviet armed resistance in Lithuania and its legacies
The armed anti-Soviet resistance movement which arose in the second half of 1944 in Lithuania, as Soviet forces began to reoccupy the Baltic countries and Galicia, sparking a nearly decade-long fierce military conflict, has yet to become established in the common narrative of contemporary European history. However, controversy regarding the nature of this `war after the war' and its legacies constitutes one of the core elements in the contemporary information warfare waged by Russia against its neighbouring countries. The origins of various distortions surrounding the story of the partisan war in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union can even be traced to the final stages of that war, when Soviet propaganda sought to discredit the campaign as a battle waged by criminal elements. In this example of a historical event charged with controversial memories and geopolitical connotations, a thorough academic approach is extraordinarily instrumental.
Responding to the growing need for historical research capable of providing international readers with the latest findings in the thematic field under question, six scholars from Vilnius University address the diverse aspects of this phenomenon as well as its role in the culture and politics of memory. Toward this end, this analysis – among the most comprehensive explorations of this history to date – is being released in both Lithuanian and English.
List of figures and tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Glossary of vernacular terms and abbreviations
Introduction
ARŪNAS STREIKUS
Part One: A Strange Long War
1 Lithuanian Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance in the Context of 20th Century Partisan Wars
KĘSTUTIS GIRNIUS
2 Who Were the Lithuanian Partisans?
DAINIUS NOREIKA
3 Partisan Supporters: The Unseen Participants of the Resistance
ENRIKA KRIPIENĖ
Part Two: From a Memory War to a Heroic Narrative
4 The Memory of the Armed Anti-Soviet Resistance during the Cold War
MINGAILĖ JURKUTĖ
5 The Partisan War in Lithuanian Memory Culture after 1990
AISTĖ PETRAUSKIENĖ
6 Archaeology in the Study of the Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Partisan War
GINTAS VĖLIUS
Index
Biography
Arūnas Streikus is a professor at the Vilnius University Faculty of History and head of its Modern History Department since 2017. His research interests include the contemporary history of Catholicism and the cultural and political history of Lithuania under Soviet rule. He is the author of numerous articles and books on these topics. Most recently, he has co-authored the volumes Churches, Memory and Justice in Post-Communism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); and La Chiesa Cattolica in Europa Centro-Orientale di fronte al Nazionalsocialismo 1933-1945 (Gabrielli Editori 2019).
