Laima Zilinskiene – författare

This book explores the impact on different generations of Lithuanians of the fifty-year Soviet modernisation project which was implemented in Lithuania from 1940 to 1991. It reveals the specific characteristics of ‘the last Soviet generation’, born in the 1970s, and sets this generation apart from those who were born earlier and later. It analyses changes in attitudes, choices and relationships in a variety of social spheres and contexts and the adaptation skills which were required during the late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation processes. Overall, it presents a great deal of detail on the social experiences of different generations in late Soviet and post-Soviet society.

This book explores the impact on different generations of Lithuanians of the fifty-year Soviet modernisation project which was implemented in Lithuania from 1940 to 1991. It reveals the specific characteristics of ‘the last Soviet generation’, born in the 1970s, and sets this generation apart from those who were born earlier and later. It analyses changes in attitudes, choices and relationships in a variety of social spheres and contexts and the adaptation skills which were required during the late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation processes. Overall, it presents a great deal of detail on the social experiences of different generations in late Soviet and post-Soviet society.

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.