The Archive of the (Post)Soviet Memory Studies Center
The archive of (Post)Soviet Memory Studies Center at the IIRPS VU contains more than 600 oral history interviews and consists of 4 main collections:
- The Sąjūdis Project Collection. The collection consists of oral history interviews with the pioneers of the “Sąjūdis“ movement and the activists of a self-subsistent society disobedient to the Soviet system collected for the project “The Phenomenon of ‘Sąjūdis’: Network Analysis of Civic Movement” (2009-2011). The collection contains more than 300 interviews with the most important groups of the disobedient society: ethno-cultural movement, Catholic underground, youth subcultures, unofficial circles and semi-legal discussion clubs of artists and scholars, green movement, and Sąjūdis pioneers in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda, Šiauliai, Šiauliai district, Ukmergė, Pasvalys. You may find a catalog of the collection here.
- Invisible Society Collection. The collection consists of interviews collected for the project “Invisible Society of Soviet-era Lithuania: The Revision of Distinction between Soviet and Non-Soviet Informal Networks” (2012-2015) with catholic undergrounds, and other samizdat periodicals, activists of the ethnocultural movement, representatives of youth life in the so-called Bermuda Triangle of Vilnius old town, intellectuals involved into non-systemic activities of saving the old town heritage, organized by the intelligentsia in 1977-1978, as well as members of the nomenclature. You may find a catalog of the collection here.
- Soviet Life Oral History Collection. The collection consists of interviews collected for the project “Soviet Life as Oral History: Challenges in Memory (Re) Construction” (2016-2018). The collection consists of 102 narrative-biographical interviews with the surviving witnesses of Soviet times, collected in Varėna, Kėdainiai, Naujoji Akmenė and Rokiškis and their surroundings in the summer of 2017.
- Post-Soviet Transformation Collection. The collection consists of 75 biographic in-depth interviews about life during the post-Soviet transformation in Panevėžys, Jonava, and their surroundings, gathered during the project “Postcommunist Transformation as Dismantling of the Soviet Modernity Project” (2021-2022). The interviews were collected in the summer of 2021. You may access interview metadata here.
Under the terms of the informed consent forms signed by the participants and the rules approved by the director of the IIRPS VU, some of the interviews stored in the archive may be opened for re-use to other researchers who agree to abide by the rules on the use of interviews.
Selected interviews are only available on a dedicated IIRPS VU computer, and the data may not be copied, sent, or transferred to a personal computer or external storage device. The computer contains transcripts, audio recordings (in some collections) and metadata tables of the interviews. Please note that the data is in Lithuanian only.
If you wish to access the data, please fill out an application form and email it and other required documents to memory@tspmi.vu.lt. The IIRPS VU Science and Research Department will contact you to inform you about the next steps to access the Archive data.
If you have any questions, please contact memory@tspmi.vu.lt.
