Petitioning the Regime. (Rhetorical) Strategies of Communication with the Communist Bureaucracy in the Lithuanian Socialist Soviet Republic

Petitions in the Soviet Union were a way of public opinion statement or of private communication with the government. They were pleas, complaints, and other statements of citizens to various instances of the state or the party. The politically-ideological state felt responsible for communicating with its citizens in order to gain insight into their worries and hardships as well as to maintain control in the “Socialist Democracy”.

In Lithuania the socialist system of petition was characterised by Sovietisation. The practice of writing petitions started in 1945 and grew exponentially until the 1980s. The system of petition as a paradigm of communication between state and society lead toward an inverted reality: In the eyes of the party the citizen became an active participant in the construction of the socialist ideal whereas the authors of the petitions often strove to free themselves from the coercions of the former with a last call for help.

The aim of this empirical analysis is to reveal: the conscious as well as the unconscious action within a fragmented public sphere in stately relations and, furthermore, the personal evaluation of the Sovietisation of Lithuania. The communication with the communist elite will be examined from a historical and philological point of view in order to find out whether non-conforming, system-resistant or system-conforming linguistic thinking and acting existed and whether it remained constant or whether it changed.