Shared Discourses: The discussion of Polish-Lithuanian relations within the official and oppositional spheres of the People's Republic of Poland and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic

Finished Research Project of Dr. Rüdiger Ritter
 

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Officially, socialist Poland and Lithuania were two friendly fraternal peoples: the border disputes and the quarrel over ownership of Vilnius had been settled. Socialist leaders declared that they had resolved the bilateral problems of the bourgeois predecessor states from the inter-war period with the superior ideology of socialism. In reality, however, this was not the case: the problems persisted unaltered, and the forced resettlements had left deep scars in both countries. The socialist rulers had simply placed a taboo on these topics, but did not discuss the problems much less solve them. However, the subject was addressed by various opposition groups, for example in ecclesiastical and intellectual circles, but particularly in the Polish Solidarność.

Thus, the official sphere was not the only or even the most import arena for the formation of public opinion, even if the rulers presented it as such. From the 1970s at the latest, opposition groups managed to establish an alternative discourse on this issue. Here and not in the official environment, these questions were discussed and political conceptions developed that could serve as a new basis for bilateral relations between both countries after the collapse of socialism.

The aim of the project is to examine the example of Polish-Lithuanian relations in Poland and Lithuania in order to show how discourse processes developed in the societies of state socialism and reveal what relationships existed between the discourse of the official and oppositional spheres. On the one hand, the official silence about the conflict forced the opposition to deal with the subject. On the other, this oppositional discourse had repercussions for the official sphere, for example after the Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz revealed the contents of the oppositional discourse in socialist Poland in 1980. Official and oppositional milieus turned out to be interconnected rather than strictly separate. The project therefore contributes to an understanding of the discursive constitution of the societies under state socialism that goes beyond a simple "top-down" dichotomy by portraying it as a shared discourse (in both meanings of the phrase).