Zofia Rohozińska goes in search of Marytė Melnikaitė, a communist Joan of Arc whose legend has waxed and waned amidst conflicting memory regimes.

“And when we recall the courageous women partisans: Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians – Liza Chaikina, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, and hundreds and thousands of others, then we Lithuanians can also share much about our young women who fought in the ranks of the Lithuanian people’s avengers, about the modern-day manifestations of the legendary Gražina. France takes pride in the Joan of Arc. During the Soviet People’s Great Patriotic War, there were many women warriors – ardent patriots, fierce fighters – who will go down in history alongside the Maid of Orleans. Glory – eternal glory – to the mothers of the Soviet homeland who gave birth to such warriors and such fighters!” Petras Cvirka, 1943

Although knowledge of Marytė Melnikaitė’s biography is rather scarce, it has become a battlefield of two opposing memory regimes. This young partisan has become a national Lithuanian icon: a communist heroine, who had a street named after her in every town of Lithuania[1], to become, only several decades later, the villain of the anti-communist paradigm.

Although historians have difficulty unequivocally determining what is true and what has been added to Melnikaitė’s frequently rewritten biography, the basic version of her life could sound something like this: Marija or Marytė Melnikaitė (1923-1943) was born in Zarasai to a working-class family. She started working when she was 14. In 1940, she joined the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) and as a member of the organisation was evacuated to Russia after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Melnikaitė joined the 16th Lithuanian Division of the Red Army in 1942. After receiving training, on 23 May 1943, she was sent back to Zarasai to engage with the Kęstutis Soviet Partisans group. Melnikaitė was captured by Lithuanian police, then handed over to the German army and imprisoned on 8 July. After 5 days of torture, on 13 July, she was shot for divisive activity[2].

Soon after she died in 1943, on 22 March 1944, she was awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union[3]. Very quickly her biography got picked up by Party propagandists. Beginning with a legend-building article published in Tiesa in October 1943[4], followed by almost all the possible artistic media: poems (e.g. by Salomėja Nėris); paintings (e.g. by: Jonas Janulis, Petras Kalpokas, Liuda Vaineikytė, Bronislava Jacevičiūtė-Jėčiūtė); plays (opera by Antanas Račiūnas staged in Moscow in 1954); film (the first ever Soviet Lithuanian film “Marytė”, directed by Vera Stroyeva in 1947); monuments (e.g. by Juozas Mikėnas in Zarasai[5]), she became a heroine of the communist propaganda. “The myth of Melnikaitė is ideologised and purely aesthetic since her portrait was created solely through the use of different artistic media”[6].

A fallen statue of Maryte now in a museum. — Pic 1: Juozas Mikėnas, *Marytė Melnikaitė*, 1950, Copper electrotyping, Lithuanian National Museum of Art

As stressed in the exhibition Unresolved Composition. The Second World War in Soviet Lithuanian Art curated by Indrė Urbelytė at the Lithuanian National Museum, the story which could easily be told as a story of a young girl murdered by Nazis, “was used to establish the idea of <<all-people’s>> or <<universal>> resistance and, through her heroic example, to shape a new Soviet human identity”[7]. The mythologised version of her barely documented biography was very easily subjected to rewriting according to current ideological and political needs, which led to the creation of a saint figure of the war mythology. The limited knowledge of her life became an asset in propagandists’ hands – it was open to any modification that served an ideological purpose.

Once again Marytė Melnikaitė’s biography was to be rewritten – the end of the USSR and the new post-transformation ideology was accompanied by a changed memory regime. The young partisan has once again become a tool in ideological wars. With the anti-communist paradigm, focusing rather on the heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance than the anti-Nazi ones, Melnikaitė has been turned from a hero to a villain – being seen from now on as a tool in the hands of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany[8]. The streets named after her were renamed; her story disappeared from museums and history textbooks[9]; and monuments were dismantled[10]. The spontaneous iconoclasm of 1990-1991 led to the downfall of the majority of war monuments (those that were not marking a gravesite)[11]. Monuments of Marytė Melnikaitė together with tens of other communist heroes were placed in Grūtas Park – a private museum with a collection of post-communist monuments and other artefacts.

Marytė Melnikaitė, with a biography characterised by more unknowns than knowns, has become an ideal canvas for ideological narratives within the memory regimes of both communist and post-communist systems. Initially portrayed as a communist hero and later transformed into a Soviet villain, her story is more a product of interpretation influenced by broader political shifts than a straightforward account of her own history.

Zofia Rohozińska is a sociologist and art historian, PhD student in the Doctoral School of Social Sciences (discipline of sociology), and a member of the Center for Research on Social Memory. Her academic interests revolve around the sociology of art, memory studies, class theory and visual culture. Her doctoral research examines the processes of remembering and forgetting in the Polish art field, focusing on the example of its changing approaches towards Socialist Realism.

[1] Zizas, Sovietiniai partizanai Lietuvoje 1941–1944 m., p. 533 [in:] Budrytė, D. (2016). From Partisan Warfare to Memory Battlefields: Two Women’s Stories about the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Lithuania. Gender & History, 28(3), 754–774.

[2] Davoliūtė, V., & Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė, L. (2016). Sovietization and the Cinema in the Western Borderlands: Insurgency, Narrative, and Identity in the Lithuanian Film Marytė (1947). Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas, 64(3).

Information in the Grūtas Park, Druskininkai, Lithuania.

[3] Davoliūtė, V., & Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė, L. (2016). Sovietization and the Cinema in the Western Borderlands: Insurgency, Narrative, and Identity in the Lithuanian Film Marytė (1947). Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas, 64(3).

[4] Marytė Melnikaitė, in: Tiesa 27 (October 1943), p. 1.

[5] Milerius, N., Narušytė, A., Davoliūtė, V., & Brašiškis, L. (2022). Everyday Representations of War in Late Modernity. Springer International Publishing.

[6] Unresolved Composition. The Second World War in Soviet Lithuanian Art, curator: Indrė Urbelytė, Lithuanian National Museum, 23.08.2023–03.03.2024, Vilnius, Lithuania.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Budrytė, D. (2016). From Partisan Warfare to Memory Battlefields: Two Women’s Stories about the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Lithuania. Gender & History, 28(3).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Unresolved Composition. The Second World War in Soviet Lithuanian Art, curator: Urbelytė I., Lithuanian National Museum, 23.08.2023–03.03.2024, Vilnius, Lithuania.

[11] Gabowitsch, M. (2018). The Limits of Iconoclasm: Soviet War Memorials since the End of Socialism. International Public History, 1(2).

The Rise and Fall of the Myth of Marytė Melnikaitė