From the big screen to the streets of Kaunas. Youth cultural practices and Communist party discourse in Soviet Lithuania

On May 18, 1972, approximately 2,000 young people participated in a street demonstration in Kaunas, Soviet Lithuania. The mass protest followed the funeral of nineteen‑year‑old Romas Kalanta, who immolated himself on May 14. Official descriptions of the street demonstrations appear to present a stagnant discourse of proper communist values and a condemnation of the influence of Western cultural practices on Soviet youth. This article argues that, instead, they reveal the fault lines of negotiations between authorities and youth over the acceptable boundaries of Soviet youth’s cultural practices and social responsibilities in the late 1960s and early 1970s