Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

17 th century, there have been external attempts at transforming Russia
which were all counter-productive. Despite this, they continue.
Of course, someone sitting by the Potomac devising plans to tear
Ukraine away from Russia and to undermine Russian imperialism
may see this differently. One should realise, however, that such
plans are not experiments undertaken under laboratory conditions,
but have an impact on those people who live next to Russia.
The consequences are already being felt acutely in Lithuania, right
on the frontline with Russia. In the public arena in Lithuania, Russia
is presented as the evil empire. The political and moral basis for
presenting Russia in this way is often dubious: after all, Lithuania is
markedly dependent on this apparently ‘evil’ empire for energy and
culture. Russia, in turn, has put in place a strategy of economic and
energy blockades, perhaps even strangulation, with regard to
Lithuania. The key threats resulting from this escalating confrontation,
that I want to stress here, are not so much economic or even
military but rather psychological.
National identity games
Lithuania has become one of the prime movers behind the plan
to separate Ukraine from its ties to Russia. In practice this is an essential
revision of Lithuanian collective memory and a movement
away from the history of the founding of the state, as something of
worth. It is an attempt to resuscitate old imperial traditions. Of
course, the history of the founding of modern Lithuania is not something
we can always be proud of. The painful peasants’ revolt at
the beginning of the 20 th century, the battle for Vilnius between the
wars – infamous throughout the world – the Holocaust and finally
the fifty years spent in the Soviet camp left very deep wounds in our
historical memory. It would, however, be complete nonsense to think
that no new characteristic Lithuanian national identity took shape in
over a century of modernisation.
Lithuanians clearly demonstrated maturity and a powerful sense of
identity in their break for freedom between 1988 and 1991 when
they demanded the right to self-determination. The result was guaranteed
recognition by the international community. But once these
events had taken place, some rather strange things started to hap-
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