The Image of Soviet Lithuania in the Corpus of the Ideological Narrative of the Modern Identity

Abstract

The article looks into the image of soviet Lithuania that can be pieced together from the material printed in the “Tiesa” from 1945 and 1962 and in the “Komjaunimo Tiesa” from 1956–1957, how much truth and how much distorted or even new reality constructed by propaganda artists there is in that image, and how journalist texts from the period (re)construct soviet Lithuania – all that in reliance of the data from the Corpus of the Ideological Narrative of the Modern Identity. Semantic analysis of 798 illustrations that contain mentions of Lithuania has shown that the Soviet press tried to project a highly positive picture of a perfect Lithuania, which covered the following key aspects: denigration of the recent past (Lithuania under Smetona, bourgeois Lithuania) and its actors; emphasis of the bright soviet present; celebration of the country’s economic, cultural, and other achievements; identification of specific friends, interior and exterior enemies. The idealistic press narrative about Lithuania employs standard clichés of soviet propaganda, exultantly portraying the life of ‘happy’ people from a ‘happy’ country in the Soviet system. Semantic analysis of the sentences selected for the study has shown that, just like a distorting mirror, the Soviet ideological press, too, reflected the official simulacrum of an ideal Lithuania, yet the reality was completely different; therefore, we can see a clear gap between what was depicted in the official soviet press and the true image of the glum reality.