Culture

Culture, like science, is an important means of ideological indoctrination, that is, dissemination of Soviet values.  The activities of the KGB of the Lithuanian SSR did not pass over culture as a significant means of control and effect on society and the development of the worldview. The KGB of the Lithuanian SSR was extremely vigilant about conformity of works of art to the postulates of the Communist ideology and saw to it that they should exert a positive influence on society, that is, the right impact that was beneficial to the regime. The LSSR KGB devoted special attention to artists – it took special interest in their behaviour, utterances, relations with the young intelligentsia and that of the older generation, especially those people who had been deported. The new generation of the intelligentsia had to be loyal to the Soviet system and if “gone astray” artists refused to get back to the “right” path, their conduct was treated as anti-Soviet.  Ideological control and censorship of information had to block the way to a “negative” dissemination of Western ideas and the lifestyle of Western people. It was unacceptable to the authorities that artists and scientists had a favourable view of the forms of art that prevailed in the West, trends and events in science, achievements, assessed “bourgeois” trends in art and science in the positive and criticised soviet art and science.