How do we fit the Lithuanian childhood of the late Soviet era with all its complexity and contrasts into three floors of the Kaunas Picture Gallery? We will see the result of this difficult task from December 12 to July 2025. We spoke about the exhibition Pasaka. Vaikystė Lietuvoje vėlyvuoju sovietmečiu (Fairy tale. Childhood in Lithuania in the Late Soviet Era) with its curators: Vaiva Mikelionytė ir Auksė Petrulienė.
The original starting point for the exhibition was the legendary stained-glass windows of the children’s café Pasaka on Laisvės Avenue, created by Filomena Ušinskaitė. According to Vaiva, these unique works featuring Salomėja Nėris’ fairy tale motifs that delighted children with their bright colors, were stored in the collections of M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art for a long time after the cafe was closed in 1996.
It was Vaiva who came up with the idea of bringing them to light. After receiving funding from the Lithuanian Council for Culture, restorers Dalia Mulevičienė and Daugis Bumbulis started restoring the stained-glass windows, breathing new life into them. Naturally, this raised the question: how should they be presented to the public once again?
“The initial idea of an exhibition exploring the Pasaka café soon expanded. Auksė joined with her experience in Small Stories, and the concept evolved into a three-story narrative about childhood in the late Soviet period. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to just Kaunas or urban childhood. For nearly two years, we developed a broad portrayal of childhood, moving away from stained glass as the main exhibit. Nevertheless, the stained glass and the café won’t be overlooked on the first floor of the exhibition,” V. Mikelionytė says.
A. Petrulienė adds that children are often underestimated as participants in historical events, and the hope is that the exhibition will encourage more frequent consideration of children’s perspectives and their voices. According to her, the aspect of memory preservation is also important to the exhibition’s creative team.
“The exhibition is not only about childhood but also about the complex memory of the Soviet era. For example, we brought relics destined for disposal from a playground in Vilnius that is being reconstructed: two climbers and a globe. The latter is a clear embodiment of Soviet colonial ideas, the desire to conquer the earth and space.
However, for the children of that time, who spent most of their childhood outdoors and on such climbing frames, the globe is a memory of joyful play and friendships. Aside from a few broken bones due to falling off the top, there’s nothing unpleasant about it. The globe’s metal structure may be propagandistic, but the space around it is filled with the boundless freedom of childhood. Must this relic necessarily be destroyed? Memory is deeply intertwined; we cannot keep only what is pleasant and discard what is not. The most important thing is to learn to take pride in our lives, in our “small stories”, regardless of the historical period in which they took place. Feeling nostalgia for one’s childhood is normal, even if it hangs upside down on a propagandistic globe,” A. Petrulienė thinks.
Only a Potential Person
On the second floor of the gallery, visitors will be invited to join the “March of Discipline,” which shows the “ideal” developmental cycle of a Soviet person: from diapers to becoming a pioneer.
“We’ll start with a “reconstruction” of a Soviet maternity ward, using artistic photography, textual testimonies, and spatial arrangements, and then move forward. This will reveal both the Soviet perspective on the physical body of a child, such as illnesses and development and the social body of a child shaped in kindergartens and schools. In general, children in Soviet times were not considered individuals – they were merely future adults, future people. Projects that were supposed to turn into proper builders of communism. For example, in the Soviet era, if a child in a preschool group couldn’t read 33 words per minute, they would be written off and if they were left-handed, they were forced to retrain,” Auksė explains.
According to her, the Soviet era broke the respect for the child’s individuality and uniqueness that was nurtured beautifully in the Lithuania of the interwar period. “This was also confirmed by one of our exhibition collaborators, Tomas Biržietis, the head of the Pranas Mažylis Maternity Hospital. During the interwar period, the approach to children and childbirth was modern. For example, childbirth was considered a family matter, with clear roles for all family members, including the father. Only during the Soviet era, with the onset of excessive hospitalization, were newborns and mothers separated from their families.”
While working on this exhibition with Vaiva, Auksė realized that phenomena related to childhood change the slowest, “Tomas Biržietis mentioned that the first attempts to bring new approaches to childbirth began only around 1993, and men started participating in childbirth a few years later. Another thing is the toys, which have been preserved for many years and were passed down from generation to generation as an heirloom. For example, we heard about the flashbacks experienced by a 20-year-old girl at the Toy Museum when she saw a toy from the Soviet era.”
Glowing in the dark
On the third floor of the exhibition, fragments of memory will highlight the existence of children as symbols of freedom during the late Soviet period. “Here, we focus on creators, sometimes even those favored and appreciated by the Soviet system, who managed to produce works filled with astonishing imagination, using the Aesopian language. Designers, writers – many people at that time created wonderful worlds for children, detached from propaganda, and found refuge in them themselves,” Auksė explains.
According to V. Mikelionytė, one of the main highlights of this floor will be a large soft toy – a hippopotamus, known only through black-and-white photographs and the memories of the designers who created it.
“It is incredibly exciting to bring to light the artists whose childhood projects were not fully realized during the Soviet era. Thanks to discoveries made by design researcher Karolina Jakaitė, who curated the space for unrealized toy design projects in this exhibition, we learned about a series of toy furniture designs created in the late 1980s by three designers: Natalija Andriuščenko-Jurevičienė, Vita Kašėtaitė-Čaplikienė, and Regina Pakštaitė. The collection was presented at the Pioneers’ Palace in Vilnius but disappeared due to historical changes. The highlight of this collection is a huge hippopotamus, now reconstructed by designer Rasa Balaišė, who has recreated the toy using modern materials and rich colors.”
A. Petrulienė continues by noting that when it comes to Soviet propaganda, everything is relatively clear – the technologies and methods they used, and what they aimed to achieve with us, have been thoroughly analyzed. However, she adds that the greatest miracle, which is much harder to explain, is how we managed to grow up despite it all.
“Not just as children, but how we grew up to embrace freedom overall. The third floor of the exhibition explores how we managed to achieve this, and where the resilience of Lithuanians came from. In truth, very few genuinely believed in propaganda during childhood, and very few were fervent pioneers, especially during the later Soviet years. Often, it was merely a façade,” the exhibition curator marks.
Speaking further about propaganda, Auksė mentions children’s literature, which for a long time was scrutinized by the system, so much so that even fairy tales were pushed aside in the postwar years and replaced by socialist realism. Naturally, this left no room for metaphors or deeper meanings. According to her, a typical critique from the editorial team of the children’s magazine Genys for submissions sent in by children would sound like this, “Your little story is too imaginative and won’t appeal to readers. It would be better if you wrote about how things are going at school!”
According to the exhibition curator, even works that are now well-known, such as Eduardas Mieželaitis’ Zuikis Puikis, only gained popularity during the late Soviet era. When it was first published in 1949, the story was considered to lack political engagement.
“The late Soviet era was more receptive to freer, more creative ideas, which evolved into wonderful fairy tales. A significant contribution to bringing fairy tales back into the daily lives of people of this time was made by the writer and publisher Aldona Liobytė. She initiated the publication of both foreign and Lithuanian fairy tale series. As literary scholars and Audronė Meškauskaitė, who consulted the fairy tale space for the exhibition and traced the fairy tale revival in the late Soviet era, say – fairy tales saved us. They were the ones that brought back authenticity to everyday life, allowing us to speak to children about important things in the Aesopian language,” Auksė says.
Fairy tales will also be found on the third floor of the gallery, the Alphabet Room, where each letter will be assigned a corresponding work or object related to children’s books and fairy tales.
“They weren’t ordinary. For example, in E. Mieželaitis’ “The Forest Fairy Tale”, the little woody is like Pinocchio’s cousin, only there is more mysticism in the story. The hero is not sculpted but born out of the love of a real woman and an oak tree! In general, fairy tales and children’s literature at that time came closer to literature for adults. For example, Sigitas Geda and his Songs of the White Nothing. The poet has said that he did not want to avoid scary words, to sugarcoat everything, to hide real life”, the curators add.
V. Mikelionytė adds that children’s culture was a kind of cover, allowing artists to experiment more, and be more abstract, “The expectations for these works were lower, the censorship mechanisms were weaker, if, for example, we compare them with the standards applied to monuments in the public space.”
To discover and enjoy
Petrulienė stresses the importance of the memory of the late Soviet era: it is the only way to appreciate how far we have come and to rejoice.
“Take the education system, for example – today we are angry that textbooks have not been printed in time. But this is due to constant updates and changing situations. You only have to remember that in Soviet times there were no such problems – the same textbooks were published for decades. It’s really nice to see such a contrast,” Auksė emphasizes.
She says that it is just as interesting to discover details of one’s own past in the exhibition, even if they are related to Soviet propaganda, “I remember very well being shamed at school for being an only child and not understanding why. And it is only now that the author of the book Fosterlings and historian Ieva Balčiūnė, who is consulting the exhibition, revealed that these were the guidelines of the party’s propaganda – more builders of communism were needed, so families with one child were belittled while medals were given to large families. Interestingly, it was not the adults but the children who made fun of me being the only child. This shows how pervasive propaganda can be.”
Vaiva agrees, “Our exhibition is a great opportunity to reconsider our personal relationship with Soviet history, look at our identity, and discover elements of it that we have not yet explored.”
Ultimately, the curators say that although the exhibition is aimed at adults, they encourage the youngest children and teenagers to visit as well. “It can become a great space to “meet” with the older generation of your family while simultaneously getting to know the Soviet era better, starting from experiences that often contain more nuances than a textbook,” Auksė and Vaiva conclude the conversation.
