The Lithuanian Institute of History is starting to implement three projects that have won the Lithuanian Research Council's Researcher Groups Funding Competition.
This competitive research funding measure offers an opportunity for a researcher or a group of researchers to conduct bottom-up research projects. In the field of humanities and social sciences, a total of six projects were funded, including three by the Lithuanian Institute of History.
The three new projects will run from this year until the end of 2028 and will be led by researchers from the Lithuanian Institute of History.
The Chief Researcher of the Lithuanian Institute of History, Donatas Brandišauskas, will lead a project "War Anthropology: Forced Mobilisation and Indigenous Warfare in Siberia ". This project addresses an urgent and underexplored topic: the oral history of warfare of Indigenous communities and integration of Indigenous men from Russia's North and Siberia into military operations, especially following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While existing scholarship has often focused on high-level geopolitical developments, this research shifts attention to local mechanisms of voluntary coercion, material deprivation, propaganda, and symbolic manipulation that lead to Indigenous military participation.
The Senior Researcher Saulius Grybkauskas will lead a project titled "Communist Party Members in Soviet Lithuania and Latvia: A Socio-Cultural Perspective." The project aims to join the academic discussion in the field about the relationship among totalitarian regimes, society, and personality by researching the entry and activity of individuals in the Communist Party during the Soviet era. The purpose of the research project is to look at the act of becoming a member of the Communist Party and activity in the party from the perspective of an individual, revealing it in the broad context of social change and soviet policies.
The Senior Researcher, Valdemaras Klumbys, will lead the third project – "Concepts and perceptions of collaboration in occupied and independent Lithuania ". Collaboration—an unacceptable form of cooperation with occupying regimes—remains one of the most contentious issues in Lithuania's past, still provoking intense debate within society. The clash of differing memories from that period, both in the public sphere and in the everyday lives of Lithuanian citizens, creates tensions that weaken the state and society. This project aims to analyze how concepts of collaboration with Soviet and Nazi occupiers – and attitudes toward it –have evolved from the onset of the occupations in 1940 to the present day.
