La Transmission inter et trans-gérénationnelle et les mécanismes de l’élaboration de l’expérience de déportation et d’exil en Sibérie: le cas des anciens déportés lituaniens et de leurs descendants

ENMassive population deportations to Siberia was a form of political repression carried out in the USSR under the totalitarian Stalinist regime. Lithuania, which was one of the 15 Soviet Socialist Republics of the former Soviet bloc, witnessed deportations of around 130,000 people within the periods of 1940-1941 and 1945-1953. Families, who survived long unimaginably exhausting journeys to the places of deportation and the first extremely difficult years there, started creating new lives, which was a paradoxical rooting in the land of forced exile. Therefore, it can be stated that parallel to the potentially destructive effects that collective violence has on the individual and group who are under its influence, it also generates new forms of relationships and psychic life. During the exile, couples were created, and a new generation was born into the world carrying a double and potentially conflicting belonging to the families of deportees. The de-Stalinization policy, which began in 1953, started gradually granting these families the right of return. However, having returned to their homeland, the families found that it was a completely different country, fighting against the totalitarian regime whose goal was to deny and falsify their history. In their homeland, these families were persecuted and discriminated, which ceased only with the collapse of the USSR and the event of Restoration of Independence in 1990 and which marked the beginning of creating collective commemorative spaces.Different individual and family destinies unfolded regarding their attempts to escape a traumatic repetition, to subjectivate the history of violence conveyed through family transmissions, and even to engage in a creative process. Some managed to create specific individual and family spaces and rituals that, from one generation to the next, were sometimes revisited and reinvented, which includes (co)-writing their family histories, the (return) journeys to the old places of exile, and different forms of testimony. By doing this, they seek for the creation of symbols, for the creation of meaning and an individual and collective memory of their family history, which has remained long in need of words and place. At the same time, they seek to preserve their memory in History.