“Partisans in a Soviet Base?”: Memory Work at the Former Kopūstėliai Rocket Unit
Articles
Rusnė Marija Poligaitė
Vilnius University image/svg+xml
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7660-0195
Published 2026-04-01
https://doi.org/10.15388/Polit.2026.121.4
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Keywords

Collective memory
legacy
post-Soviet transformation
Kopūstėliai
partisan resistance
ethnographic field reserach
assemblage

How to Cite

Poligaitė, Rusnė Marija. 2026. “‘Partisans in a Soviet Base?’: Memory Work at the Former Kopūstėliai Rocket Unit”. Politologija 121 (1): 122-65. https://doi.org/10.15388/Polit.2026.121.4.

Abstract

 This article analyses an atypical case of Soviet legacy transformation in Kopūstėliai (Ukmergė district), where a former Soviet missile base has become the home of Miško broliai, a historical reenactment club reviving the memory of the 1944–1953 anti-Soviet freedom struggles. The article aims to understand how this legacy is reworked through the memory work performed by the club and draws on material collected during the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in winter 2024-2025, including interviews with Miško broliai members and (non–) participant observation. The club’s activities are enabled by a flexible approach to the site‘s legacy, seen not as a symbolic framework but as a material medium for shaping their own vision of memory, and by disappointment with state-led commemorative policies. Detached from institutional constraints, Miško broliai create a heterogeneous and dynamic assemblage of people, narratives, meanings, and processes – transforming memory into an open-ended and living field.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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