Society of Boredom: Lithuania in the Late Soviet Period (1964-1984)

The vocabulary of "boredom" has been used extensively in the discourse of remembering and reflecting on the late Soviet period (1964-1984). The ambition of this paper was therefore to demonstrate how one can move from a metaphorical description of an historic period to a cultural study of the emergence, change, and confrontation of meanings. By conceptualization of "boredom" and creating the theoretical frames of model it was sought to explane the "destiny" of ideology and the practices of people determined by it. Therefore the object of this paper were ideological situations and people's practices therein. The author analysed situations where people would directly confront ideology, ideological field of action, and with their practices hint at its meaninglessness. The theoretical model was applied to study historical material. It was concluded that the communist ideology in the late Soviet period was acting like a factor of socialization aiming to discipline and mobilize Soviet people. Based on the concept of two dimensions by Alexei Yurchak, it was said that the ideological socialization, i.e. the commitment to ideolocigal norms, attitudes, structures, helped subjects to bind to constative dimension. At the same time there were plenty of practices of performative dimension, that were divided into three types: a-structural, para-structural and anti-structural. These types of practices contributed to the decline of ideology, but also it was shown that these practices in general were determined by the ideological structures and it means that the member of Soviet society could not be free from them