oriented towards the individual, focusing on how the Soviet regime treated artists (mainly the leading ones) and controlled art styles. 48 This approach was especially evident in studies of cultural diplomacy. 49 However, Soviet state cultural policy was not only a policy of fine arts consisting of the control of movement and expression of artists. It involved the administration of a very large body of “cultural workers”, who mainly ran clubs and culture houses. Being in charge of the population’s leisure time and combining entertainment and enlightenment, these “cultural workers” constituted a majority of the employees in the cultural sector. Only a few studies have dealt with this aspect in a more systematic way; the most important one is White’s study of cultural enlightenment after World War II. 50 My dissertation aims to fill in this gap in Soviet Lithuanian cultural policy studies by presenting new historical data and offering a different approach to Soviet governance of culture. It demonstrates how the ministry’s administration of culture was shaped by a broader modern mentality regarding technoscientifically assisted governance. Thus, my study looks at state cultural policy at large and not at its special sectors. It investigates the very intention to govern such a large, loosely defined, heterogeneous field. It shows that, to a large extent, cybernetic language contributed to the rationalisation of culture as governable. Finally, I argue that this techno-scientific language and these models contributed to making obvious the failure of the communist regime and served as a vehicle for criticising the very Soviet ambition to govern at that scale, by those means, and for those purposes. This not only opens a wide vista for my research but also sets limits. I focus on a republic ministry and not an all-union one (notably, there was no separate Russian Ministry of Culture, Russia being administered directly by the allunion ministry). The primary reason for this focus is to contribute to Lithuanian (and in general Baltic) scholarship by casting light on a field and period which remains to be systematically explored. Being one of the first books about Soviet cultural policy that would focus on other countries than Russia, it also contributes to Soviet cultural studies. While the Baltic countries were only occupied by the Soviets in 1940, they were the first to break away from the Soviet Union in 1990. Hence, Lithuanian history provides my study of techno-scientific governance of culture with a context of radical political change.
48 See for example Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000); Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000); also John B. Dunlop, “Soviet Cultural Politics,” Problems of Communism November-December (1987), 34-56. 49 Rana Mitter and Patrick Major, eds., Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London, Portland: Frank Cass, 2004); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 50 White.
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