Accepted Panels

Forced migrant generations of the Lithuanian exiles of the 1863 Polish-Lithuanian insurgence against the Czar Russia to trans-Volga Russia (in between Volga-German settlements and Kazakhstani border) experienced long lasting “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008, 2013). It revealed in the turmoil and atrocities of the Russian revolution, followed by famine and Stalin regime deportations to Siberian gulags. All that is echoed in contemporary post-soviet   uncertainties of Lithuanian diaspora lives in the area. Although the aftermath of any imperial politics of assimilation and discrimination of ethnic minorities, which was maintained also throughout the Russian state socialism (Burbank 2007) left some ‘imperial debris’ in the post-communist period, still it allowed the development of new ways of social interaction. It reveals in new relationships to space and time and social interaction of contemporary generations of diaspora descendants becoming focused on the politics of heritage. The time as ‘our past’ and the space as ‘our village’ becomes unified into understanding of ‘Lithuanian roots’ as diasporic memory, heritage, and identity.  It works for authentication of diasporic culture vis-à-vis assimilationist reality of the third, fourth and fifth generation of descendants. It also works for to contrast, to contest and to adjust ‘our past’ vis-à-vis imposed multiculturalism of the Russian state as well as predominant clichés and enactments of the ‘past’ among the majoritarian Russian population and other ethnic groups in the area.

The aim of the presentation is to unpack the strategies and practices of post-diasporic (Mukadam 2006) enactments of the ‘past’ as legacy, genealogy, ethnic culture, and moral imperatives based on the anthropological fieldwork conducted in the area in 2013-14 and additional ethnographic materials gathered in 2021-2022.