Historian Violeta Davoliūtė has written one of the most significant recent books on the history of 20th-century Lithuania. Focusing on the construction of the Soviet Lithuanian national identity after World War II, the book offers new ways of understanding the complex interplay between nationalism and Sovietization in the Baltic context and how this dialectic created the particular Baltic anti-Soviet nationalism of the 1980s that eventually contributed to the downfall of the USSR.
Solid scholarly studies of contemporary Baltic history that have as their chronological focus the decades of Soviet domination from the 1940s to the 1980s are few and far between. In academia, interest in researching this period of Lithuanian history is limited. Beyond the wave of publications about the Stalinist repressions, the fate of deportees, and aspects of the anti-Soviet guerrilla “war after the war,” historians have generally been unwilling to dig deeply into Lithuanian society's Soviet past. In...