Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality

For millions of people, the Soviet experience meant not only living through the torment of Stalinism and the GULAG, the unbelievable destiny of men and women during the 1917 Revolution, civil war, and the Second World War, or those breathtaking, gigantic Socialist construction projects. Many citizens of the former Soviet Union lived “ordinary lives in ordinary times”, where the fate of men and women depended not on armed coercion, but Soviet ideology and propaganda. Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality contains the stories of ten women, talking about their lives in Soviet Lithuania, one of the annexed Baltic republics. The book gives a compelling account of how, in the last years of Stalin’s rule, after 1945, during the so-called “Khrushchev Thaw”, and in the beginning of the “Stagnation Era”, Soviet ideology transfused the everyday life of women and dictated just about every major aspect of their lives. Based on interviews, the journalistic press of that era, as well as other material, the book reveals how propaganda shaped women’s understanding of family and work responsibilities, child care, interpersonal relationships, romantic love, and friendship.

"[Leinarte is] the foremost historian of Lithuanian women … Even though it may be impossible for the reader to feel what the period was like, Leinarte comes close to recreating “what it was really like”. … The lives of these ten women are simply fascinating. … Adopting and Remembering Soviet Realities is an original work of scholarship that one can only hope becomes part of a larger work on Lithuanian women. Dalia Leinarte has prepared herself well to write the grand narrative about Lithuanian women." – in: Lituanus 57/3 (Fall 2011)
"well written and insightful … a compelling work contributing to the disciplines of Baltic History and Eastern European Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and notably the scholarship of Memory and Oral History. Readers will find it solidly researched and well presented. Oral historians will appreciate its focus on personal narratives and life stories capturing the relationship between the individual and society." – in: Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 31 (2011)