Songs from Siberia: the folklore of deported Lithuanians
ENThe deportation of populations in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule was a devious form of political reprisal, combining retribution (punishment for being disloyal to the regime), elements of social engineering (estrangement from the native cultural environment and indoctrination in Soviet ideology), and geopolitical imperatives (relocation of disloyal populations away from vulnerable borders). The deportation operations were accompanied by the “special settlement” of sparsely populated regions in the hinterland. At least six million people of different nationalities were relocated by force in the USSR from the 1930s to the 1950s. This article focuses on the texts of songs, poems, prayers, and jokes created by Lithuanians deported to Eastern Siberia in large-scale relocations from the Lithuanian Soviet Republic in 1948 and 1949. They suffered repression at the hands of Stalin’s regime for alleged active aid to the nationalist Lithuanian resistance known to historians as the “forest brothers”.
