Soviet Lithuania: A Failed Conservative Experiment?
As scholars of international relations have noted, the Cold War, which ended with the defeat of the Soviet Union was largely a propaganda war (Halliday), based on conflicting values. Yet it was not a war between the communist and capitalist moral systems; rather, it was a war between the traditionalist conservative values, promoted in the USSR when Stalin came to power and liberal or, so-called ‘progressive’ values. While the capitalist West was able to accommodate the values of the 1968 sexual revolution and the further spread of various rights, the Soviet Union clung to a version of Victorian morals in the USSR. When Stalin came to power, the Soviet Union was oriented not towards the future in terms of morality, (what Marxism is alleged to be all about), but firmly towards the past. In the light of its values the period of Sąjūdis can be characterized, on one hand, as an uneasy alliance between the traditionalists, for whom the Soviet regime was oppressive mainly because of the loss of national sovereignty and the oppression of the Catholic Church, without having any major disagreements about morals, and the West-looking part of Lithuanian society, longing for developments similar to those in the West. To borrow the dichotomy from Isaiah Berlin, the Lithuanian independence movement had one part striving for collective, positive freedom and another, which was strove for negative, personal freedom and the advancement of human rights. This dichotomy is still present in Lithuania and the system of morality, preserved by the Soviet period, is the base on which the traditionalist position stands.