Title Memories of discipline in Soviet Lithuania: stories in oral history /
Authors Ulinskaitė, Jogilė
DOI 10.15388/BJPS.2018.7-8.4
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Is Part of Baltic journal of political science.. Vilnius : Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. 2018, no. 7-8, p. 56-72.. ISSN 2335-2337. eISSN 2424-5488
Keywords [eng] discipline ; ideology ; collective
Abstract [eng] Totalitarian regimes attempt to restrict and control virtually every aspect of human life. Interestingly, conscious reflection on disciplinary practises takes up only a small part of the life-stories of interviewed Lithuanians, as far as the memory of the post-Stalin era is concerned. The interviews that form the foundation for this paper were conducted during the summer of 2017 in three different districts in Lithuania. The article aims to answer the following two research questions: 1) Which mechanisms of discipline did people recognize and reflect upon? 2) How were disciplinary actions remembered and described? According to interviews, tangible individuals filled the role of disciplinarians in schools and workplaces. In addition, the responsibility for discipline and control lies within the imperceptible disciplinarian, supplemented by the invisible discipline of the collective. This led to overwhelming uncertainty in the society, where people invoked intuition and interpretations of who is trustworthy to adapt to uncertain situations. The greatest impact of the totalitarian discipline was that people ef-fectively internalized it and consequently became their own most significant disciplinarians.
Published Vilnius : Vilniaus universiteto leidykla
Type Journal article
Language English
Publication date 2018