1The last decade has seen a number of studies address the way the communist past is presented in museums and memorial sites in the Baltic states [Pettai and Pettai, 2015; Pettai 2015; Rindzevičiūtė, 2015; Rindzevičiūtė, 2013; Rindzevičiūtė, 2012; Mark, 2011; Velmet, 2011; Williams, 2008; Burch and Zander, 2008; Lankauskas, 2006]. This work is an important addition to the existing studies of cultural and political nationalism in this region, as it introduces a material dimension, a crucially important world of objects, natural and man-made environments. However, this new field challenges researchers in terms of physical access, methods of data-gathering, and theoretical frameworks for interpretation. First, although new work is appearing, there is a lack of research on the development of Baltic museums and cultural policy. This lack creates difficulty for attempts to contextualize recent developments. Second, relevant museums are often spread over considerable distances, posing difficulties for comparative studies; more centrally situated museums tend to attract greater scholarly attention. For instance, comparisons of Lithuanian museums of the Soviet and Nazi occupations have typically focused on the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius and Grūtas Statue Park, which is within an easy drive from the capital, disregarding many other alternatives. Furthermore, museums keep changing and updating their expositions, sometimes in response to academic criticism [Rindzevičiūtė, 2015]. In this context, we need a fully-fledged study of Baltic museums’ role in nation-building, to consolidate the emerging materials, which so far remain fragmented and patchy.

The “boundary objects” perspective

2This article adds to the development of this scholarship by introducing new cases and a new theoretical perspective into the study of museums of the communist past. While many scholars of Baltic museums draw on memory studies to analyze museums as a medium for communicating hegemonic narratives of the past [Assman and Czaplicka, 1995, see Čepaitienė, 2005; Nikžentaitis, 2011], I draw on an organizational theory developed by Susan Lei Star and James Griesemer, which emphasizes that museums are under continuous construction, where meaning-making can be approached as a complex, heterogeneous, collaborative process, which is never settled. According to Star and Griesemer, meanings in museums are generated through “boundary objects.” Boundary objects are material objects the meanings of which social actors articulate differently as they move between different fields of professional expertise, adjusting those meanings to institutional politics. The concept of boundary object affords “interpretive flexibility,” where one and the same object points different social groups in epistemologically and organizationally different directions. Star [2010, 602-603] argues that boundary objects “allow different groups to work together without consensus” as they are “temporal, based in action, subject to reflection and local tailoring”.

3The boundary object perspective is a useful angle from which to approach museums of communism, because it allows for a simultaneous plurality of meanings: different, even quite contradictory meanings can coexist at the same time without cancelling each other out. This insight fits well with long-existing debates among museum scholars, who have argued that interpretation of a museum exposition or a heritage site is never straightforward. According to Kirshchenblatt-Gimblett [1998: 25-28] and Hooper-Greenhill [2000: 1-8] museum expositions are hybrid assemblages of texts, objects, and material settings, which make their interpretation extremely complicated. It is difficult to provide a thick description of a museum: messages in museums can be highly heterogeneous, internally contradictory, meaning different things to different people. Few, if any museums can be regarded as internally consistent discourses; rather, they are hybrid, changing frameworks, shaped through negotiation among different interest groups. That said, many studies of Baltic museums that engage with the difficult past, such as communism and the Holocaust, have tended to disregard the epistemological complexity of the medium of the museum, with critical analysis often focusing on identifying hegemonic narratives that elevate an ethno-nationalist version of history at the expense of alternative narratives. To be sure, such criticisms perform an important service as they capture the many instances when East European museums fail to incorporate more diverse narratives. However, such studies do not offer an explanation of the institutional and social mechanisms through which those narratives are placed in expositions, referring instead to macro processes of nation-building which are assumed to be translated directly into the displays. To gain greater insight into the process of exposition formation, critical analysis should attune its method to the specificity of the museum as a particular medium of communication and the cultural sector as a specific institutional and organizational field.

4I argue that it is in the context of comparative research into musealization and the cultural memory of communism that the concept of the boundary object can open up new vistas, because it enables us to capture the social, organizational and material complexities involved in this process. Many museum expositions, both in East and West, are opaque rather than transparent. For instance, according to Peter Aronsson [2011], in Sweden museum curators privilege objects over words in expositions, because this enables them to avoid addressing controversial themes head-on. In those cases where explicit narrative is missing, only a visitor with sufficient cultural capital can perceive the historical meanings of the exhibited objects. Although Tony Bennett [2004: 2] convincingly argued that history museums evolved as scientific laboratories of the past, museum expositions are not well-argued scholarly texts, furnished with references: expositions hardly ever explicitly acknowledge doubts, lack of data, conflicts, and earlier errors. History museum exhibitions typically fail to present several contrasting points of view. Conflicts remain implicit. However, the opaqueness of object-oriented exhibitions gives the visitor more freedom to seek his or her own narrative and explanation. In spite of the existing practice of framing opaque museum objects with labels or short narratives on displays, leaflets, catalogs, and guided tours, the traditional, professional museum prioritizes objects. According to Keršytė [2012], even today Lithuanian museums continue to regard collection, preservation and storage of objects as their primary task. In this way, professional museum practice is first and foremost centered on objects, with an attributed value of authenticity as well as conferred significance of being either typical or unique examples of historical phenomena.

Three Lithuanian museums

5To understand museum exhibits as boundary objects is to recognize that they are not readily available but are actively forged [Star, 2010]. I illustrate this process by analyzing four different cases of boundary objects of communism in three museums. These museums are selected because of their different origins and strategies of framing the communist past: they were created by amateurs or cultural professionals, owned by the state or private individuals, newly built or refurbished: the Museum for Resistance and Deportations in Kaunas, the Lithuanian National Art Gallery in Vilnius and Grūtas Statue Park near Druskininkai. These museums represent different stages of the making of communist heritage. In the early 1990s many museums began to restructure their World War II exhibitions with support from a community of survivors of the communist terror, the Union of Political Prisoners and Deportees (UPPD), who were particularly active in that period. [1] The uppd initiated creation of many important museums of deportations and resistance, such as the Museum of Victims of Genocide in Vilnius, the yurt from the Laptev Sea in the Open Air Museum near Kaunas, as well as the Museum for Resistance and Deportations in Kaunas. However, this grass-root movement was not the only museum-builder: the other two museums addressed in this article had very different institutional origins and rationales as they were initiated by cultural professionals (the Lithuanian National Art Gallery, a branch of the national Lithuanian Art Museum, established in 2001 and opened in 2010) and business entrepreneurs (Grūtas Statue Park). Not all museums of the communist past are well attended: in 2011, when I did my main fieldwork, the Grūtas Statue Park received 45,496 visitors and the National Art Gallery received 45,452 visitors. However, only 1,200 visited the Section for Resistance and Deportations in Kaunas City Museum (The Ministry of Culture, 2011).

6This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over several visits to these museums from 2010 to 2013, semi-structured interviews with museum workers and cultural policy professionals, as well as published materials in Lithuanian. Several important museums, such as the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius and the Yurt of Deportees to the Laptev Sea, are not included in this article, because I have discussed these museums at length elsewhere [Rindzevičiūtė, 2015; 2013; 2012]. In what follows, I briefly discuss the development of Lithuanian state cultural policy toward communism as heritage; the three case studies are then considered.

De-Sovietization, cultural policy reforms and local translations

7Before we proceed, some contextualization of Lithuanian museums of communism is necessary. Negotiations about the legacy of the communist past in the state cultural policy field took place in the first debates on state heritage policy reforms at the Ninth Culture Congress in Vilnius, May 18-20, 1990. Organized by the Ministry of Culture and Education, the congress assembled shortly after the declaration of Lithuania’s independence. The debates took place in a highly charged political atmosphere. It was attended by some 3,000 cultural professionals, who sought to establish guidelines for a new, post-Soviet state cultural policy. While the congress proceedings condemned the communist regime, they also emphasized the importance of transforming this difficult legacy into cultural heritage. But what was the heritage of communism? The congress proposed cultural policy guidelines which called to preserve “resistance heritage,” such as anti-Soviet songs, poems, stories, memoirs, photographs, the underground press, and “everyday things that became relics” of deportees and political prisoners. The rationale for collecting these different objects was framed in ethno-nationalist terms: the anti-Soviet heritage had to show “the role of national culture and religion in preserving Lithuanianness (in Lithuanian, lietuvybė) under hard and extreme conditions of bondage and oppression” [Simanavičius, 1991: 773].

8That the Soviet past was not to be forgotten, but selectively preserved and used to shape the Lithuanian present and the future, was clear for cultural professionals. However, communist heritage, regardless of its definition, never became a cultural policy priority. The 800-page volume of the congress proceedings mentioned earlier dedicated only a few short paragraphs to the communist past; the rest were taken up by traditional cultural policy concerns with amateur folk culture and professional arts. Indeed, it was not the Ministry of Culture and Education, but grass-root communities and a handful of professional cultural entrepreneurs that initiated the first presentations of the communist past in museums.

9Glavlit, the Soviet censorship body that screened all printed materials, even exposition labels of museum objects, was closed in February 1990, but in fact de-Sovietization of Lithuanian museums had already been taking place since 1988. The uppd took the lead in commemorating the communist past and lobbying the government to support the creation of new museum expositions and museums. The uppd limited its interest to a particular set of themes, concentrating exclusively on Soviet deportations and anti-Soviet resistance, but also to a particular set of materials, mainly oral history, stories narrated by deportation victims, anti-Soviet partisans, and dissidents, and objects donated by them, mainly photographs and textual documents. As a result of these efforts, about forty public, grass-root museums of deportations and resistance were created in the 1990s, some of which eventually anchored themselves in the state-sponsored cultural sector [Rindzevičiūtė, 2015].

10However, it is difficult to estimate the weight of cultural and symbolic capital that these grass-root museums of communism had in relation to the field of professional culture in Lithuania. Given that these museums were not supported by any consistent government program, few of them were organized by heritage professionals. Many of these museums were amateurish, profoundly dependent on grassroots support through volunteer aid, donations to the collections, and research. Although these uppd museums came to occupy an important niche in the public heritage sector, which was internationally noticed and commented upon, in the domestic context they have struggled to gain economic and symbolic capital through recognition from both cultural professionals and politicians [Boltanski et Esquerre, 2016]. The theme of “deportations and resistance” was never acknowledged in a signature monument or museum, something that the uppd deeply regretted [uppd, 2011].

11The 1990s, therefore, revealed a curious duality in dealing with the communist past on the governmental level and in cultural organizations. On the one hand, governmental officials regularly gave speeches and issued declarations about the need to come to terms with the communist past by studying it, particularly naming and shaming perpetrators of communist repressions [Pettai and Pettai, 2015]. New archives and historical research centers were established, and, as a consequence of international effort, a Commission of Historical Truth was formed in 1999 [Pettai, 2015]. On the other hand, cultural heritage was only loosely coupled with the institutionalization of the history of communism. The uppd museums remained rather insular in their cultural niche, disseminating a narrow, ethno-nationalist version of events while struggling to survive, crippled by shortages of funding, storage space, and professional staff. In what follows, I discuss diverse strategies of selecting and framing material objects, settings, and structures in the museums of the communist past, their choice depending on the agendas of the actors involved, and also their cultural and professional capital.

The Kaunas City Museum

12In this section I discuss the case of a uppd-influenced museum to illustrate a uppd-specific strategy of managing boundary objects of the communist past in line with the formula established in the Cultural Congress in 1990. The Department for Resistance and Deportations (DRD), established by the uppd in 1993 and transferred to Kaunas City Museum in 2006, narrates a story of interrupted sovereignty and deportations, with a strong emphasis on the Catholic Church and religious iconography. This museum is situated in a small building on the former territory of the nineteenth-century city cemetery, now a park in central Kaunas. The site features a small memorial cemetery, an expressionist ensemble of crosses by the prominent sculptor Robertas Antinis [1991], and a monument For the Mother of Those Who Died for Lithuania’s Freedom (2010), a brass statue of a mourning female, adorned with wings and a crown of thorns. Initiated and funded by the uppd [Abromavičius, 2010], this monument blends republican and religious iconography. While the wings refer to a prominent public monument in Kaunas, an angel carrying a flag (Freedom by Juozas Zikaras, 1921), the posture and the crown of thorns refer to a grieving Virgin Mary. There is a clear framing of the memorial site through Christian religious iconography, thus excluding the experiences of other confessional groups from the commemoration. It would be plausible to presume that this memorial site is created to appeal to cultural sensibilities of the ethnic majority of Lithuanians; however, as visitor numbers reveal, it does not seem that the ethnic majority actively engages with it.

13While the park is a pleasant green space, used as a shortcut by commuters on the way to bus and railway stations, the museum building is not the center of public attraction. I had to ring a doorbell to be admitted by a friendly member of the museum staff, who serves both as curator and receptionist. The low number of visitors (315 in 2006) is hardly surprising [“Muziejų lankomumas”, 2007: 45]. The exposition space is limited to one ground-floor hall that is partitioned into two parts by a reception desk. The exposition includes stands displaying photographs, both copies and originals, and objects, grouped to represent divisions of the Lithuanian Resistance Army, while other stands are dedicated to Soviet deportations and contains a wooden barrack bed, paintings by deportees, photographs, and material objects. Intentionally or not, the centerpiece above the receptionist’s desk is a dazzling, somewhat kitschy painting, depicting an allegorical figure of suffering Lithuania, which waves the tricolor against a backdrop of stormy skies. As this painting, I was told by the curator, was donated to the museum by an amateur Argentinian artist, it could not be refused. This painting, indeed, is a good entry point to begin decoding this exposition as an assemblage of boundary objects, whose relevance to the museum’s narrative is to be found in the circumstances of their donation rather than their content.

14The uppd largely determined both the conceptual principles of the exposition and the strategies of display at the Department for Resistance and Deportations, but the museum exhibits objects that were not pro-actively collected by museum curators, but were instead donated by survivors. In addition to originals and copies of photographs and documents, which are used to illustrate the historical narrative, there are many examples of amateur art and craft created by deportees. While the documents speak for themselves, the traditional museum objects, material artefacts, emerge as opaque boundary objects, the meaning of which is not readily available without prior knowledge or an additional commentary. The institutional core of the museum is material objects rather than documents, which are institutionally bound to an archive. In this case, the artefacts, which are produced by survivors or, as the above-mentioned painting, by enthusiasts, are primarily sociopolitical and not aesthetic objects. It is impossible to tell if these artefacts are typical of deportees’ creation, or if they are exceptionally skillful, aesthetically valuable pieces: their value has been affirmed by the survivors’ own community and not by cultural professionals. There is no commentary on the selection of these works available in the museum. They emerge as opaque relics of Soviet deportations, striking in their fragile material form, but speechless. Interestingly, this absence of an explicit explanatory discourse is not perceived as problematic by museum curators. The meaning of opaque relics, it seems, is assumed to be self-evident; yet we must ask, for whom?

15Drawing on my earlier work [Rindzevičiūtė, 2015], I propose the hypothesis that communist heritage, in this particular case, emerges through a strategy of the disclosure of Soviet repression, a strategy which is set in motion not so much by professional historians, but by the self-organized survivors’ community. The lack of an explicit interpretative frame of the only authentic objects on display, the survivors’ artefacts, I suggest, is also a clear sign of the loose coupling between history and museum practice: while the uppd draws on the established political history narrative, it has no clear strategy of how select, display and integrate the material objects. Although the uppd commission monuments featuring Christian religious iconography, they do not appear to manage actively the boundaries of everyday objects and amateur art on display. One possible explanation is that the reference frame within which these objects make sense is restricted to internal conversations in this community of survivors. Indeed, this explanation is supported by the following case, which shows that cultural professionals tend to assemble communist heritage as a very different boundary object, one whose boundaries are actively defined and managed.

The National Art Gallery

16A public institution, part of the National Museum of Art, the Lithuanian National Art Gallery engages with several translations of the communist past, being very explicit about the translation strategies undertaken, which form an important part of their institutional identity. Relics of the communist past are not taken for granted here. First of all, the gallery treats its building as a memorial of the communist past. The building was originally constructed to house the Museum of the Revolution of the Lithuanian SSR, a branch of the Central Museum of the Revolution of the Soviet Union, which was established in Moscow in 1924 [Museums in ussr, 1989, 50]. The building was designed in 1966, but finished only in 1980, becoming a showcase of the whole Soviet Union: its image was proudly sported on the front page of an international publication on the best Soviet museums [Museums in the ussr, 1989]. Architecturally, the Museum of Revolution was an excellent example of Soviet modernism [Drėmaitė, Petrulis and Tutlytė, 2012]. The Museum of Revolution was closed down in the early 1990s. More than a decade later it was thoughtfully reconstructed and opened to house the National Art Gallery in 2009. To convert the Museum of Revolution into a gallery of modern art, cultural professionals employed a strategy of defamiliarization: they modernized the building fitting it to the needs of a contemporary museum, with spacious offices and areas for education and audience engagement, but they did not downplay the history of the building, turning it into an asset. Defamiliarization [Rindzevičiūtė, 2009] as de-Sovietization refers to the appropriation of those cultural, social and political institutions which were created in the Soviet period. For instance, an ex-Soviet ministry of culture was defamiliarized: it was reframed not as a particular institution that expresses state socialist values, but as a universal institution that symbolizes modern governance of culture. In this way the ministry as a modern institution was decoupled from the Soviet regime, which, in turn, was reduced to an ideological system. In the case of the gallery, defamiliarization has been applied to the museum building, a boundary object, a material relict of communist past, erected to disseminate key political ideology. The Soviet-ness of the building, however, has been redefined as an expression of Soviet modernity, materialized in the architectural style of international functionalism. Furthermore, the changing external environment of the museum reinforced this re-framing: being situated on the riverside, the building is located at the center of the capital city, surrounded by the growing business skyscrapers that house city administration, banking, shopping, and upmarket apartments.

17In contrast to the Kaunas City Museum, the uppd did not influence the redevelopment of the Museum of Revolution. Members of the art-historical and curatorial community exercised strong autonomy in choosing how to treat the building and the Soviet art collection as boundary objects of communism. The narrative, which the gallery curators used to structure the exhibition, has nothing to do with the uppd narrative of a struggle for sovereignty; instead, it is anchored in the disciplines of art and design history. Indeed, as early as in the late 1980s Lithuanian art history professionals posited the need to reflect on the communist past by organizing a first exhibition of socialist realist art not as a show of canonical artistic achievement, but as documentation of a particular style, at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. From this moment socialist realist art was reinvented as an important boundary object for the professional culture community. Socialist realist art was also defamiliarized: formerly an official idiom, it was translated into a documentation of a lack of freedom of expression, but also, in some cases, as a locally significant artistic innovation.

18This translation of the boundary object of socialist realist art was entrenched in the institutional design of the National Art Gallery. The gallery’s exposition was based on the principle of a “universal survey,” that is, an encyclopedic assembly of typical specimens [Duncan and Wallach, 1980]. The gallery curators selected for exhibition those works which fitted the historicist typology of professional art, created on the territory on Lithuania from the 1920s to the 1990s. The curators included socialist realism neither as an example of “great national art,” nor as a proof of national suffering under communism, but as a representative sample of a particular period of time.

19Now, this is a very different translation of the boundary object of communism. Anticipating controversial readings of the socialist realist works of art on display, the gallery curators have supplied visitors with printed texts that explain the themes of each hall [unlike the uppd museums, which count on the visitor’s own historical knowledge, which also suggests that they primarily address the survivors’ community]. For instance, an accompanying text for the exposition “Art and Ideology”, which shows the first attempts at academic socialist realism in the Lithuanian ssr in the 1940s-50s, emphasizes that Lithuanian artists, schooled in the modernist tradition, were not only not willing, but also professionally quite unable, to implement the visual norms of socialist realism to a high standard. The reader is informed that the modernization of socialist realism in 1959 actually contributed to improving the artistic quality of Soviet Lithuanian art, allowing some room for limited application of a modernist painting style. Here the gallery seeks to provide a more nuanced story about the creation of Soviet art, revealing negotiations between political and professional norms. In this way, this text defamiliarized socialist realist art in Lithuania by placing it in the institutional context of professional art, saturated with its own criteria of quality and historical significance. Another exposition, entitled “The Significant Form” showcases different possibilities available for experiments in modernist painting under the Soviet regime. The accompanying text emphasizes the circulation of ideas and styles from the interwar period (1920s-1930s), but also from Western art beyond the Iron Curtain. While this text emphasized the Soviet artists’ imagination, particularly their will to push the boundaries of official permissibility, it also made it clear that these experiments were in dialogue with the ideological canon.

20In short, the National Art Gallery did not alienate the communist past, embodied in the artworks, by reducing it to a dichotomy between Soviet oppression and local resistance. Curators emphasized not so much confrontation, but the importance of negotiation and mutual adjustment between artists and the communist regime, the official socialist realism and the a-Soviet artistic modernism. Socialist realist art works are displayed in the brightly lit white space as specimens of art history to be explored: the gallery’s texts encourage the visitor to engage in more nuanced intellectual thought, while its paintings and sculptures suggest that the Soviet period was not merely a world of barren gray concrete, but also a world of color and improvisation. For my argument, this is an important example of using professional and cultural capital to define the meaning and value of relics of the Soviet period as artistic heritage by including them into conceptual, institutional and pragmatic framework of professional architecture and art history.

Grūtas Park of Soviet statues

21Established in 2001, the Grūtas Park of Soviet Statues commanded great attention from society, scholars and journalists, and attracted high numbers of visitors (a record 124,000 in 2005) as well as controversial evaluations in the press [Muzieju lankomumas, 2007, 48]. Its links with the professional culture field are complex, as the Park is perceived as an ambivalent and semi-professional engagement with communist heritage, whereas the Park’s link with the uppd is marked with tension and conflict. Starting from 1989 most public monuments to communist party leaders began to be taken down and were kept in warehouses belonging to the Ministry of Culture (some sculptures were stored in a barbed-wire courtyard inside the former KGB building). [2] The ministry eventually began to look for a way to exhibit those statues to the public. In 1998 the company Hesona, owned by a family of entrepreneurs, Birutė Malinauskienė and Viliumas Malinauskas, won a tender to lease these statues, which remained the property of the state, and display them in an open air park on their property near Druskininkai, a popular spa town in Southern Lithuania. [3] Like the case of the National Art Gallery, the uppd had little influence on this project, although they mounted several campaigns of public criticism. The uppd accused Malinauskas’ project of trivializing and commercializing the communist objects, as Grūtas Park was envisioned as a gulag entertainment park, through which a visitor would be transported in cattle trucks. However, the local Druskininkai newspaper Druskonis was enthusiastic about the idea of the park and even the related controversies, seeing them as good publicity for Druskininkai spa. In response to the Grūtas Park project, the members of the national liberation movement Sąjūdis [Ramonaité et Kavaliauskaité, this issue], and several other public associations, published a protest letter and demanded that Parliament ban the Soviet statue park (LR Parliament, July 1999). It was proposed to form an expert group from former members of the anti-Soviet resistance and victims of repression, including the uppd. Even the Genocide Research Center disagreed with the Ministry of Culture regarding what objects could be displayed in the park (LRP, 1999; LRP, 1999).

22Thanks to this controversy, the Grūtas Park became a significant reference point against which other museum builders sought to differentiate themselves, both by selecting objects and interpretative frames. While some adopted the uppd focus on political sovereignty and repressions, [4] others searched for a new museological approach. For instance, a curator at the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius told me that they intentionally used an academic style of presentation to differentiate themselves from the entertaining and ironic style of the Grūtas Park. But the Grūtas Park also adopted some elements of the uppd narrative in their exposition. Their website responds to its critics saying: “The exposition of Grūtas Park reveals the negative content and influence of Soviet ideology. The exposition’s goal is to enable Lithuania’s people, foreign guests, and future generations to see laid bare the Soviet ideology that, for many years, oppressed and harmed the spirit of our nation”. [5] In addition to the statues, which are displayed alongside a path that loops through the pretty pine forest, the Park contains historical expositions housed in three specially constructed timber buildings. These expositions are a far cry from a professional museum display: they consist of a random array of Soviet propaganda artefacts, memorabilia, and some everyday objects, such as smaller furniture, telephones, and books. For example, a timber building contains an information center and an exposition of printed posters that follow the uppd narrative of the communist past [occupations, deportations and resistance]. However, in contrast to the uppd museum analyzed earlier, this narrative is inexplicably illustrated through a chaotic array of Soviet memorabilia, such as kitschy carpet and wooden versions of the Soviet coat of arms, busts of Lenin of various sizes, state decorations, examples of money, crockery and random books. Another building houses a gallery of socialist-realist paintings, but the selection of these works is not explained to the visitor. Moreover, this exhibition is intriguingly interspersed with a huge collection of “Misha” figurines, the Soviet Olympic mascot of 1980. Loaned from a Vilnius-based private collector, this collection of kitsch cohabits with the paintings in a rather obscure way, because socialist realist paintings were meant to be exhibited in public spaces, never at home, while such collections were part of private practice in the Soviet Union.

23Equally opaque are the Soviet statues. Removed from urban settings into the picturesque forest, the monuments look like eccentric park sculptures. The sequence of the statues’ display does not follow any particular chronological or thematic order. That they are not mere decorative fancies is testified by occasionnal plaques carrying brief biographical notes of the communist actors depicted. The statues do not appear to be abandoned as they are carefully placed on neatly mowed lawns, framed by lush trees.

24Although transported to the woods, the Soviet statues did not lose the ability to inhabit multiple worlds: listed as heritage by the Ministry, the statues also entered the creative economy. The commercial success of the Grūtas Park [earning 900,000 Litas of box income in 2012], pushed the Soviet statues into the sphere of copyright (2012 m. muziejų statistika). The park owner found himself entangled in the debate over whether Soviet works of art should be considered as an “authored creation,” entitled to copyright laws, or as propaganda and “evidence of the crimes of communism.” In 2007 law courts banned Grūtas Park from publicly showing several statues, including the famous “The Mother of Kryžkalnis” and “Four Communists,” as well as a painting “Visiting a Pig Maiden Stasė Vitkienė.” The owner of Grūtas Park was obliged to compensate the artists for the use of their works. Grūtas Park was also prohibited from selling chocolate boxes that featured images of the exhibited Soviet statues [Sinkevičius, 2007; 2011].

25In this case Soviet statues emerge as boundary objects par excellence, as they can be treated by different interest groups as propaganda, artistic heritage, intellectual property or scrap metal. In this respect they are similar to the contemporary case of the Green Bridge statues: Soviet public monuments that were controversially removed from public space in central Vilnius in 2016. In 1952 four bronze statues, dedicated to the pillars of Soviet society—soldiers (Guardians of Peace), workers (Industry and Construction), peasants (Agriculture), and students (Academic Youth)—were erected on the Green Bridge in Vilnius. Until recently listed as state-protected heritage, these monuments attracted a good deal of public attention since the collapse of the Soviet Union [Mite, 2010; Žigelytė, 2011]. The fate of these statues became the focus of a struggle between the professional arts community, on one side, and the uppd and local politicians on the other. In 2010 the conservative mayor of Vilnius asked the heritage department to remove the Green Bridge statues from the heritage list so that they could be taken down. However, the heritage department refused on the grounds that the statues were listed as heritage [bns 2010]. No governmental body had the power to modify the heritage list, so as long as the statues were on it, by law they had to be protected and conserved [Citvarienė, 2008]. Ironically, it was following the election of the Liberal Movement to Vilnius Council in 2016 that several meetings of experts were called, the statues were removed from the heritage list, taken down from the bridge and placed into storage waiting for repairs. While the cultural professional community mounted a sustained effort to keep the statues in their original place, a vitriolic public debate ensued and the translation of the statues as an inappropriate manifestation of the Soviet past prevailed in the end [Jankevičiūtė, 2015; Trilupaitytė, 2014].

Boundary objects of communism

26In this article I have analyzed the ways in which three museums used boundary objects to present Lithuania’s communist past. The branch of the Kaunas City museum initiated by the uppd prioritized the themes of anti-Soviet resistance and Soviet repression, particularly deportations of Lithuania’s population. The uppd-style museum could best be defined as an amateur community museum. This museum relies heavily on visual and textual materials in expositions, in this way departing from the traditional focus of the museum institution on material objects. Those few material objects which were included in these expositions did not originate from the scientific interest of the museum’s curators; rather, they were donated by survivors of Soviet repression. These objects are quite opaque. Their meaning is not clear to the outsider. It appears, as a result, that the communist heritage is retained as a medium that bonds the survivors community together rather than as a discursive frame that communicates a story to the audience. Boundaries are not recognized and little explicit management is involved.

27In contrast, those museums which were shaped by cultural professionals and business entrepreneurs, such as the National Art Gallery, or Grūtas Soviet Statue Park, engaged with a different set of stories about the communist past, as well as different materialities, displaying objects rather than documents. Cultural professionals engaged in active management of the boundaries between the aesthetic, political, and commercial spheres that applied to “objects of communism.” For instance, the curators of the National Art Gallery translated the building and the art works that it displayed, created during Soviet period, with the help of the discipline of art history, which emphasized chronological and stylistic changes. In doing so, the National Art Gallery consistently applied the narrative framework of professional art history to integrate socialist realism as a boundary object between the history of art and being a relic of repressive ideological and censorship systems. The Grūtas Park case reveals the liminal nature of Soviet statues, their ability to simultaneously inhabit different conceptual, institutional and pragmatic worlds of art heritage, leisure, entertainment, relics of the difficult past, intellectual property and commerce.

28To conclude, grass-roots survivors’ communities, historians and art historians mobilize different cultural, social and political capitals in the struggle to define the meanings of boundary objects of communism, integrating them in their own pragmatic frameworks. Studies of communist heritage, therefore, should map and analyze these different social groups, assessing their rationales and roles in different contexts. Only by tackling this complexity, assessing the ways in which boundary objects of communism are framed in the wider field of culture, both professional and amateur, can we gain a better understanding of the social mechanisms through which the communist past is presented to the public. Future studies should go beyond the reductionist view of museum expositions as a consensual outcome of the linear, top-down dissemination of the official views endorsed by the governing elites, instead approaching museums and objects of communism as boundary objects and infrastructures, where different social groups compete over their meanings and purpose.