Continuity or Change? The Russo-Ukrainian War and Decolonization of Memory in Lithuania

Abstract Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has been described as an “inflection” point, a “post-colonial moment” which has fundamentally reshaped identities and memory politics in Central Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states (Mälksoo 2022; Michta 2022). Is it really so? What was the transformative power of this event, as distinct from that of other epochal turns, such as the collapse of the USSR? How does this event as a “critical situation” compare to the other, relatively recent developments in identity and memory politics? To gain insight into these questions, this paper will analyze the evolution of memory regime in Lithuania (with references to the other two Baltic states) since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, assessing the impact of Soviet collapse, the return of Russian aggression with the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The focus here is on these events as “decolonizing moment(s)” (Maria Mälksoo’s term) with transformative power. Which identities, which agencies became pronounced during these “critical situations”? Which new discourses were articulated? How do the developments in memory regimes during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine compare to the previous “critical situations” (the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the events in 2014)? The paper consists of three structured case studies (1991, 2014 and 2022) that include the developments in Lithuania’s memory landscape, analysis of the debates and tensions surrounding the removal of Soviet-era monuments and other processes associated with “mnemonic decolonization”—attempts to transcend the Soviet colonization of national memory and establish a new memory regime supportive of national resilience and security. The goal of the case studies is to capture processes associated with mnemonic decolonization, understood as breaking away from colonial memory regimes and assertion of new subaltern subjectivities, and explore their relationship with mnemonic securitization.