“Not European Enough, To Be Included in the European Conversation”

Ilya Budraitskis: The Russian and Belarusian armies are planning to hold joint military maneuvers, West-2025, in Belarus this September. Although representatives of NATO and the militaries of Lithuania and Latvia believe that a direct escalation threat from Russia is unlikely this year, these exercises represent a new step in turning Belarus into a key springboard for Russian military presence on the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. How are these military threats felt in Lithuania today? And to what extent are they recognized as reality, given the context of deepening disagreements between the US and the EU and the doubtfulness of mutual assistance within NATO in the case of aggression against small countries such as the Baltic states?

Gražina Bielousova: I’m a sociologist, not a security expert, so my reading of the situation is that of an anthropologist and sociologist who tries to understand the region from below rather than by analyzing these macro processes. To the question, “How are these military exercises felt in the bottom of society?,” the short answer will be: acutely. I do not think that anyone underestimates the significance of what is going on. But one of the important things to recognize is that, if we look at the broader context, we are going to see that actions that can be perceived as aggression from Russia and Belarus are repeated at least weekly — from maneuvers in the Baltic sea to airspace violations to jamming GPS signals. It is a sort of string of repeated offences that occur in the public space, in the [media] space. One of the things that I fear is that, because there’s this uninterrupted string of disturbances, shall we call them, that big things such as projected military exercises sometimes get drowned out by the noise of smaller offences. 

I think, for Lithuania, one of the major things changing — it has been changing since the first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014 — is our treatment of Belarus. Before, Belarus was seen as a crazy, inconvenient neighbor that we can do business with. That is, sometimes it used to be seen as one of the exotic destinations for dark tourism, a cringey Soviet nostalgia destination, but also a partner for big businesses, especially for fertilizer, especially potash, transportation and export. An important part is that you kind of gamble [by doing business in Belarus], but the profit from this gamble far outweighs the risks, especially if we think about the port business. There is a staggering amount of Belarusian products that get exported via Klaipėda.

So that is starting to change, I think — the seriousness with which the politicians and the larger public treat Belarus as it is seen more and more as a potential threat.

The military exercises like the one you’re talking about point to precisely the same: we can no longer comfort ourselves by saying that the Belarusian army is all outdated or whatever else, because we know that it’s not just Belarusian forces, not just Belarusian weaponry, not just Belarusian machinery, that are stationed in or that are being moved through Belarus. And, of course, there are conversations about the Suwałki Gap. I think that the threat of Belarus is multiplied by the threat of Kaliningrad because it is precisely that sort of dangerous enclosure that we fear. But that extends beyond Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, [although] it’s primarily Lithuania and Poland. The other thing that they have witnessed, even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is that Belarus can be used as a catapult, for example, during the artificially created migrant crisis on the Lithuanian border in 2021. And I say this with full compassion for the people who were misled to believe that there’s a way for them to get access to the EU, because these people are victimized on multiple sides.

If we look at the macro processes, we see that Belarus was used by the Russian regime to increase tensions and create the kind of conditions which allowed for Lithuania and Poland to be narrated through the familiar tropes of fascism, extreme nationalism, racism, and whatever else. I think in that regard we’re seeing an escalating continuity.

[As for Lithuania’s relationship with NATO and the EU,] that’s complicated. I think what we see now is a hedging of the bets. The narrative before the election of president Trump in 2024 was that Europe’s not such a reliable partner in terms of defence, especially because of the hesitancy of countries such as France, Spain, or Italy to get onboard with even the required threshold of allocating 2% of GDP for defense. And, there was this explicit trust and encouragement of trust in the US as a military partner on whom we could rely in case we need to invoke NATO’s Article 5. In the City Hall in Vilnius, there is even a plaque that commemorates the visit of President George W. Bush in 2002 with this quote: “Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the US.” This quote memorializes the understanding of the US as the guarantor of security in the region. Well, that now is changing: not to say that Lithuania or Latvia are not counting on the US to provide support, but that it is a much more cautious and calculated approach that is shifting to building allegiances and alliances in Europe. 

For example, in the most recent months, in addition to the German weapons factory, we also saw the establishment of a permanent military base for German troops in Lithuania. That is a new development that is not seen as somehow excessive. It is seen as a very welcome and necessary development, even if [issues of] the environment and other things come into the conversation about where precisely the military base should be.

Ilya Budraitskis: At the same time, with all these possible military threats from Russian or Belarusian sides, with this growth of military expenses, you have calls by the leaders of France or Germany to increase military budgets being rebuffed by a large part of their societies, and left-wing forces in these countries (like Die Linke or Melenchon’s La France Insoumise) are strongly opposed to the militarization of the economy and the inevitable cuts in social spending. Is there a need today for a position of solidarity between the left in Eastern and Western Europe? Is such a common position possible in principle, and what do you think it would look like?

Gražina Bielousova: I think that we’re talking about fundamentally different understandings of what the left is in the West and in the East. We need to do a little bridging here. If we take the core conviction of left political parties to be class consciousness, explicitly or implicitly expressed, that is one of the uniting things between East and West. Then the question is, “How do we protect the working class’s interests [in particular] even though the working class itself as a category, as a concept, has sort of gone out of fashion?” But I think that, because the experiences of the left in the East and in the West are very different, there has to be a sort of a dialogue, but it is not an easy dialogue.

I think that opposition to the militarization of society, the economy, and budgets is a perfectly understandable concern. I do not think that it is anybody’s ideal scenario. Increasing military budgets necessarily means social cuts or rising taxes. And, in the end, rising taxes affect consumers, because it is a very rare occurrence for business to absorb the cost of increased taxation. When taxes are increased, it is the final price that the consumer pays that increases. These are shared concerns among the left, East or West.

Now, here is where the key difference comes in. The key difference is this: in the East (even if we do not like the East as a concept — we would like to be Northern Europe — but let’s use those categories as figures of speech for now), in Lithuania, in Latvia, in Poland, and in Estonia, there is an understanding, a felt, existential threat, that we need to have a conversation about where and how we are going to fund those increases in military spending. But there is a consensus that they do need to happen, that we cannot continue our business as usual, and there might need to be negotiations. So, for example, in Lithuania, the current conversation, although not a very well-managed one, is about the newly proposed law that would institute a real estate tax. That proposal was botched by poor communication from the ruling coalition, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen next.

But overall, politically, perhaps the conversation is, “How much do we need to spend on defense? What would it look like? What would we sacrifice?,” not whether or not this needs to happen.

I think, for example, in France or in Germany, or in the Netherlands, or in Belgium, the threat of Russian invasion is not felt as immediate, it is not felt as existential, so there is less of a willingness to engage in the same conversation. The current Western left has historically inherited an anti-military, anti-imperialist stance from their predecessors, because, in the West, militarization usually has meant exporting bloodshed to the developing world. Understandably, there is guilt about that complicity, because, to find examples of that, we do not need to look that far into history. We do not necessarily even need to look as far back as Congo or Algeria — for example, we can look at Afghanistan and Iraq. So it is natural that the Western left is hesitant about increasing military spending.

Ilya Budraitskis: So you can say that discussion on different paths to militarization is really needed between the left from the East and the West of Europe.

Gražina Bielousova: How do we even bridge such radically different experiences? Especially because the left in the West has a very poor track record of listening to and respecting the experiences of the left in the East. There are still political hierarchies that govern our relationship. As much as the Western left believes itself to be anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, or anti-hegemonic when it comes to their own colonies and clearly visible colonial histories, and optically obvious rationalization, that has not transferred to their relationship to Eastern Europe.

The relationship between Europe’s East and West is very hierarchical. There are statements issued even by leftist feminists, such as the ones after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, by Western and global leftist feminists about Ukraine condemning the militarization or whatever else without a single person from Ukraine being included.

And that, unfortunately, has been the experience of the European East: there are conversations about us that don’t include us.

So, we are engaging in these conversations between the lefts of the European East and West in hopes that there will be some recognition of the European hierarchies that preclude mutual understanding.

Ilya Budraitskis: So, could we say that the distinction between Eastern and Western Europe is still here, in the sense that Eastern Europe is not the “real” Europe, that it’s been left out of the discussion, out of the European legacy, and particularly the European left and liberation movements? Like, some bridge needs to be established between those two experiences. 

Gražina Bielousova: Yes, absolutely, because we’re too white to be included into the anti-colonial, anti-imperial conversations, and at the same time we’re too “backwards,” we’re not European enough, to be included in the European conversation. It’s no longer the term that we use, but we are that “second world” that's unnamed and therefore untheorized and unaccounted for.

Ilya Budraitskis: This ties right in with the semicolonial place of Eastern Europe within the EU.

Gražina Bielousova: 100%. 

Ilya Budraitskis: This April, there was a presentation in Kaliningrad of the book History of Lithuania, written by a collective of Russian propagandists and opening with a foreword by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. Its narrative is not much different from the ideological justification of the invasion of Ukraine (in particular, the one Putin used in his keynote article from the summer of 2021). For example, Lithuania is almost explicitly declared an “artificial state” whose “fictitious” independence at various historical periods of the 20th century was supported by the “collective West” solely as a means of pressuring Russia. At the same time, the book argues that it was only under the rule of the Russian Empire and later as part of the USSR that Lithuanians were able to preserve their identity and language from the dominant Polish influence. Can such narratives be said to find support within Lithuanian society, or are they perceived solely as Russian propaganda with no historical evidence? And what can you say about this narrative in general?

Gražina Bielousova: This is rehashing a narrative that we have heard before, because this is in many ways how Lithuanian history has been told since the Stalin era. This is the resurrection of a certain narrative. And I especially think what is significant is the resurrection of this idea of hegemonic Poland that tried to overtake Lithuania so there’s a threat to Lithuanian national identity. I think this is not accidental, because Poland has on multiple occasions reiterated its commitment to use military power to defend Lithuania if we are attacked. Poland has acted as one of Lithuania’s partners in, for example, European and NATO accession negotiations, and so on and so forth. So I think trying to narrate the Lithuanian-Polish relationship as historically antagonistic is not accidental. That narrative was also used in the Vilnius region to incite ethnic hatred throughout the Soviet years. 

The real question is, can this narrative find any audience in Lithuania? I think that there is a small audience in Lithuania that already has implicit or explicit beliefs about Lithuanian inferiority in comparison to Russia. That is the Russian minority that feels disenfranchised since the fall of the Soviet Union. They typically belong to the older generation, but also it is the people who themselves or whose families have lost out in the Lithuanian transitional period. When we transitioned from the Soviet Union to the market economy, to accession to transnational organizations, it was a transition that required high social costs. So the first [potential audience] group would be the Russian minority; the second group would be Russianized borderland people from the eastern part of the country. These people are of mixed Lithuanian-Polish heritage. Maybe [there is] also some sort of group that is ethnically Lithuanian but that holds Russian-centered views, but this is a very small group of people.

I do not think that Lithuania is the intended audience for the book. I think that the fact that it was published in Kaliningrad is not an accident; it wasn’t published in Novosibirsk. That was a very intentional move to have it issued, presented, and discussed in Kaliningrad because it is as proximate as you can get. It’s a veiled threat, a veiled intimidation, but I believe they are selling this narrative to the broader Russian-speaking world. I am especially thinking of Belarus. It is more of a hypothesis that I'm leaning towards. 

Ilya Budraitskis: I would also like to talk about two other narrative lines in this book — one is about the Russian minority, the kind of “Russophobic” attitude of the Lithuanian state and so on, and another is about the legacy of Nazism and collaboration with Nazism — because similar lines have been used as the main historical grounds for military intervention in Ukraine. How can you comment on these two lines with regard to Lithuania?

‍Gražina Bielousova: I think it's very interesting that “Russophobia” is a very common argument that Russia uses all around its borders in countries that the regime perceives to be its sphere of influence, from Moldova to Estonia and most notably in Ukraine. It is positioning itself as the defender of oppressed people, especially the Russian-speaking minorities. The only problem is that the Russian-speaking minority in Lithuania is quite small, and also, there is a part of it that has historical roots here before WWII. These are the Old Believers that escaped the Russian Empire where they were persecuted. They are not necessarily the biggest fans of Russia now either. So yes, that narrative is there, and I think that if it is appealing, probably its audience here is a minority of the minority.

So once again, I think it is a narrative that is meant for the Russian-speaking world more broadly. It's the construction of a certain narrative of this space, because I think for many Russians, especially east of the Ural Mountains, Lithuania is as unfamiliar as Latin America or Southern Africa. They really have very little conception of what Lithuania is.

When it comes to questions about fascism, it is important to note that in contemporary usage of this word in Russia, it has become a generalized term that more or less simply means “anti-Russian.” It has been so widely used that it has become an almost empty signifier. At the same time, what it targets is unresolved historical tensions in Lithuania. I am referring to our hesitancy to take full responsibility for our compliance and participation in the Holocaust. And that is one of the sore spots in the country that is easy to exploit, especially when we are talking about the phenomenon of “pure victimhood.” Lithuanian people were victims of the fascist and Soviet regimes, but our participation in the Holocaust takes away our ability to claim our victimhood, the pure victimhood of the innocents. I think that we see this phenomenon in the Balkans, where participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity takes away the ability to claim victimhood from certain groups, to claim their wounds that still hurt, most notably from Serbia. This is an old narrative, but its resurrection at a politically sensitive period, especially when Lithuania is trying to assert its position as fully European, deserving of defence, deserving of existence, deserving its statehood, is very strategic. 

Ilya Budraitskis: In one of your interviews you state that for Lithuania (and Eastern Europe as a whole) Russia remains a colonial power, and represents classic imperial expansion. It is known that the vast majority of the Western left, on the contrary, presents even Putin's contemporary Russia as a force resisting Western imperialism. In addition, the argument is often made that Soviet rule was exactly the opposite of colonialism because it was not based on unequal exchange, and promoted the modernization of the national republics, including through the development of a distinct version of local national cultures integrated into the supra-national framework of a pluralistic “Soviet people.” What would you argue against this?

‍Gražina Bielousova: To put it very bluntly, only those who do not know Eastern European history can make such claims about the Soviet Union, but then again, not knowing the history of the European East or the global East is quite common. There are multiple locations from which the narrative of Russia, or the Soviet Union, as an anti-colonial power that embodies secular, multi-ethnic modernity comes. And I think I'm willing to be much more sympathetic to the people who were colonized.

The first location is the countries that were colonized by the West and to whom Russia and/or the Soviet Union, depending on the time period, lent support in the anti-colonial struggle. We cannot underestimate that, because when a country or a people group are looking to overthrow oppressive regimes, often they do not have a choice, and anyone who supports their struggle is an ally. And especially if that ally has a lot of geopolitical power such as was the case with the Soviet Union. So I'm thinking about the countries, for example, like Angola, that has some of the most brutal exploitation. I do not want to minimize or diminish the exploitation that other former colonies on the African continent experienced, but in the twentieth century, Angola was one of the most brutal cases. They received support from the Soviet Union in the anti-colonial struggle. It's going to be very clear where the sympathies are going to fall, especially when we consider that, because of the training that Angolan professionals received, due to the humanitarian aid such as vaccines and medications, even in the midst of the civil war, life expectancy in Angola drastically increased.

The other group of people from whom this endorsement comes are people that do not necessarily come from colonies, but that are racialized in the West, and I’ here particularly thinking of Black intellectuals in the US. We can talk about DuBois, who in the early 1960s came to visit the Soviet Union, and now we know that what he was shown was a very well-staged version of the USSR. But for a person who spent all of his life struggling not just for equal rights, but for the basic rights of people against global anti-blackness, what he saw embodied hope. And we have that continuing tradition with Cornel West as another very influential black intellectual for whom I have immense respect. I understand from where this is coming from. I understand — and disagree. And this is why I disagree: because I think it's very easy to dismiss Eastern European claims about what the USSR was like and whether it functioned as a colonial power and all that, and it is easy to dismiss Eastern Europeans, because we are too white. Globally, we still have power, we are still sort of embedded in the power dynamic that is mediated through whiteness. And if we shift to, for example, Central Asia, I think the story is told much more powerfully and much more convincingly.

It is the same story, like, Eastern Europe was subsumed by the same colonial logic of the USSR as Central Asia. However, there were additional dynamics in Central Asia such as explicit racism and explicit suppression of culture. 

Ilya Budraitskis: I just want to clarify: okay, the Russian Empire was unquestionably a force of colonial oppression in its Western part, as well as in the other parts. But it’s impossible to deny that the USSR was different from the Russian Empire in many ways. What are the main features of Soviet colonialism? Can one say that it was still colonialism but in a new form, in new historical circumstances?

Gražina Bielousova: 100%. Well, here’s where I would like to make a distinction between colonialism and coloniality. While there are features of colonialism such as administrative, military, and economic control, possible incorporation into regimes that are not of our own choosing, there is also a domination of intellectual, cultural space that comes with coloniality.

Of course, we can talk about carefully orchestrated and highly controlled expressions of national cultures at certain periods, but these spectacles were a way to bring people with national memory under Soviet control. If the narratives from Eastern Europe are not convincing enough, then we can once again look at Central Asia. There, for example, textbooks, especially university textbooks, were intentionally not published in the local languages, claiming that those languages are unsuitable for artistic or scientific expression. It was the annihilation of local intellectuals via Russification.

But also, we cannot overlook the way that economic exploitation was still at work [just] because it is harder to pinpoint. Yet local resources were used to prop up a Soviet project that was centered on Russia. The Soviet Union was a Russified space, and the Soviet project that was centered on it was a project that demanded resources from local economies and local peoples to hold it up in much the way that imperial projects demanded resources.

And all this conversation of urbanization, electrification, modernization… I mean, the British built the railroads in India; the British also say that they brought culture to India, and sure, they did.

But if we talk about what kind of roads they built, they built railways that connected natural resources to ports, not the kind of infrastructure that connects cities, that connects people to people in response to local needs. In many ways, the projects of modernization that were implemented in the Soviet space were projects that did not always benefit the local population.These were projects that were meant to expand and uphold this notion of Soviet modernity quite regardless of local costs. One of the things that I'm particularly thinking about is the draining of the marshes and swamps in Lithuania to increase agricultural production, which resulted in an incredible loss of local biodiversity and wild habitats. 

Ilya Budraitskis: So you would say that the USSR took a colonial approach towards the national republics and Lithuania in particular, but one that had unique features? 

Gražina Bielousova: Yes. Precisely. It functioned colonially. I think Sovietization is a type of colonization which merits its own category, if that makes sense.

Ilya Budraitskis: In present-day Lithuania, as in most Eastern European countries, the left is being politically marginalized largely because it continues to be perceived as part of the Soviet legacy. On the other hand, each of the countries in the region had its own leftist traditions before the Soviet occupation, which have in many respects been forgotten. How does the contemporary left in the region — and in Lithuania in particular — construct its historical continuity? And how should the left perceive the Soviet period in this context? 

Gražina Bielousova: I think one of the things I wish for particularly the Lithuanian left is to connect and draw the line of continuity to some degree bypassing the USSR, to the pre-WWI and pre-WWII leftist traditions that originated here.

Because we did have leftist traditions, we did have workers’ organizations, we did have workers’ strikes, we did have labor unions, we did have many of the same features you see anywhere where you see left political thought.

Even though Lithuania was, especially before WWI, in many ways agrarian, in the cities we had this leftist tradition that is still waiting to be reclaimed; that history is still waiting to be told. And I think this is a little bit of a missed opportunity by the Lithuanian left.

In some ways [this is] because the main left parties are not interested in building their legitimacy that way. The mainstream, that is, the current Lithuanian social-democratic party, has plenty of support in the regions, and they enjoy that support without having to build that historic legacy or legitimacy. And the political powers that are emerging that represent the new left, they are kind of constructing themselves and still finding where they fit in the local landscape. And I really hope and really wish that some of them would make it happen. I think that it’s an opportunity waiting to be realized because we do have that very rich tradition. And these people were not just workers’ organizations; there were leftist politicians, including Kazys Grinius, who was the last Lithuanian president before the right-wing military coup in the 1920s. He was a leftist. And I think that those are the stories that are still waiting to be told, both by the leftists to themselves and to others in mainstream histories as well. 

Ilya Budraitskis: To what extent has the reaction of the Western left to the war in Ukraine after 2022 changed your perception of their approach? And how much do Eastern Europe and Lithuania in particular need to revise any uncritical acceptance of their intellectual and political legacy?

Gražina Bielousova: As a scholar who works on leftist feminism in the region, I have been learning from the women that I interview about what it means to be engaged, and I would say that what it has meant for me is an intellectual turn. Whether I'm trying to theorize reproductive labor, or I'm trying to theorize the intersection of gender and class, I have been turning more towards the East European intellectual tradition and leftist feminists here. I have been turning towards the Polish, the Ukrainian, the Lithuanian, the Latvian intellectual traditions. [I’ve been] sort of making a very conscious choice of creating bibliographies in the articles that I write and curating readings for the classes that I teach that include this intellectual tradition, that give it voice and visibility, because one of the things that I’m learning is that there are limits to leftist intellectual tradition that originates in the West and the Global South. And we expose those limits when we try to apply it to explain the East European situation. Much the same way as, for example, when white feminism meets its limits when it encounters women of color. So there are things that cannot be theorized with white feminism when we talk about women of color. There are things that we cannot theorize with the Western leftist tradition when we come to East Europe. And so, for me, when the question is “Who can theorize it?,” the answer is, “We can theorize it ourselves.”

Ilya Budraitskis: Can you provide just one interesting example of such a legacy? 

Gražina Bielousova: Certainly. For example, one of the things that I work on is women’s reproductive labor, understood as all the invisible work that women do, including but not limited to raising children. Any kind of labor that makes productive labor possible that mostly women do. We are talking about social reproduction theory, which typically would come from somebody like Cinzia Arruzza or Tithi Bhattacharya.

And one of the things that I'm learning is that it cannot fully theorize our context, because we have a different kind of legacy, because we have inherited, for better or for worse, formal gender equality from our Soviet history.

It has its limits, but its importance cannot be understated: full political rights, full economic rights, all of that. So it has created very different kinds of conditions which have changed the playing field. Some of the things that women struggle with here are not necessarily things that Western feminists can theorize.

At the same time, for example, I discovered somebody like Oksana Dutchak, who is a Ukrainian leftist feminist whose work beautifully illustrates what it means to think with social reproduction theory in this context, about these realities. Or, I have turned to people like Ewa Majewska and Magda Grabowska to think about the gaps that the socialist/communist legacy couldn’t fill in the region. They all help me think about such realities as being exploited by Western enterprises that are parasitic on precarious women’s labor in places like clothing factories and so on and so forth.

There is a very different playing field for women in the West, where, for example, in Switzerland, until the 70s, women were not given full political rights, or where women’s pensions were intentionally not calculated at the full rate the same way that men’s pensions were. That is a very different situation than “What do you do in a context where that formal quality has existed, but there are loopholes and there are realities which have still failed to be addressed?”

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