Lithuanian Society in Transition: Social Transformations and Generational Identity

Lithuanian Society in Transition examines the life experiences formed during the process of post-socialist transformation in Lithuania by analysing the peculiarities of the life course of the cohort of young people born between 1980 and 2000.

This book considers how various different components of post-Soviet system transformation and more recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, determine youth experiences and how these experiences are reflected in the generations born between 1980 and 2000. It explores how far these generations see themselves as distinct generations with distinctive identities, how far any sense of a distinctive identity is based on political criteria or on technological changes, demography, and lifestyle and how far recent geopolitical events have had an impact on the identities of these younger generations. Drawing on detailed evidence from a corpus of specially commissioned life history interviews, the individual chapters uncover self-reflexive generational identities and set these in the broader context of both specific local generational identities and more global generation identifiers.

Offering a rich analysis on social change in a key post-Soviet country following the collapse of communism, this book will be useful for researchers in sociology and social policy, history, Russia and Former Soviet Union, European studies and ethnic studies.

Laimute Zilinskiene is Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology and Social Work, Faculty of Philosophy, Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her academic interests focus on Soviet and post-Soviet era memories in life stories and family memory. She is co-editor (with Melanie Ilic) of Soviet and Post-Soviet Lithuania - Generational Experiences (Routledge, 2022).

Sigita Kraniauskiene is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Social Change, Klaipeda University, Lithuania. Her research includes transition to adulthood, generational identity and biographic methodology.

Melanie Ilic is Professor of Soviet History at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has published widely in the area of Soviet women’s history and the history of Soviet repressions. She has served as consultant on a number of international research projects. She is the author of Soviet Women - Everyday Lives (Routledge, 2020) and Women in the Soviet Dissident Movements (Routledge, forthcoming).