Discourses on rurality in post-socialist news media: The case of Lithuania's leading daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (1991–2004)

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Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 238–253 www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Discourses on rurality in post-socialist news media: The case of Lithuania’s leading daily ‘‘Lietuvos Rytas’’ (1991–2004) Arunas Juska Department of Sociology, East Carolina University, 410-A Brewster, 10th Street, Greenville, NC 27858, USA

Abstract The Soviet regime defined rurality as a collective-farm or kolkhoz-based society. Since the late 1980s such a state-imposed definition of rurality was rapidly unraveling under the tensions and conflicts produced by perestroika and post-socialist reforms. In the new politics of the rural, the role that the news media was playing in shaping public opinion on rural matters was of growing importance. The paper analyzes 3827 articles on rural issues published during the post-independence period (1991–2004) in the leading Lithuanian daily ‘‘Lietuvos Rytas’’ (LR). Two types of discourses in rural coverage are discerned. During the 1990s rural coverage in LR was reflective of conflicts and tensions between relatively prosperous urban classes which benefited from post-socialist reforms and pauperized rural population. Rurality was increasingly associated with the failure of ‘‘the moral modernization’’ of the rural population. Rural population was stigmatized as deficient in values and character, remaining in the grips of the Soviet mentality and state dependency and, therefore, unable to take advantage of opportunities created by the reforms. Since the early 2000s when economic situation in the country improved significantly and Lithuania started negotiations on European Union membership, rurality in LR coverage was gradually re-defined in EU terms as a socio-spacial entity shaped by regional, national, and local policies promoting multifunctionality of rural areas, well-being of rural communities, and active citizenship. Factors that influenced changes in rural discourses are analyzed. Impacts of changing discourses on rural identities, rural politics and policies are discussed. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Lithuania; News media; Discourse analysis; Discourses of rurality; Rural poverty; Lithuanian agriculture

1. Introduction During Soviet times, the state directly controlled, censored, and punished any deviations from the official discourse on rurality. Therefore, there was little, if any, differentiation between the state, academic, and news media discourses on rurality. Up until the perestroika period of the late 1980s, only during Krushchev’s period in the early 1960s were some expressions critical to the official portrayal of rural affairs tolerated, but these were mostly limited to literary fiction and movies. Since the late 1980s, the monolithic version of rurality as ‘‘kolkhoz-based society’’, imposed and tightly controlled by the Soviet state, was rapidly unraveling under the tensions and conflicts produced by reforms. Privatization of kolkhoz property and land restitution to its pre-WWII owners and Tel.: +1 252 328 6386; fax: +1 252 328 4837.

E-mail address: [email protected]. 0743-0167/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.11.003

their descendants altered property relationships in the country-side and led to the formation of new forms of stratification. Under the impact of reforms the rural economy was undergoing profound changes. As agriculture in Lithuania was rapidly declining, the age-old identification of rurality with agriculture was also unraveling and new non-agriculturalist, non-productivist definitions of rurality were being advanced in its place. New rural and non-rural actors and institutions emerged, each with their own particular sets of interests struggling to define, impose, or negotiate their definitions of rurality. What gave especial urgency and intensity to rural debates in post-Soviet Lithuania was a failure of postsocialist reforms to modernize agriculture. Neo-liberal reforms enacted in the early 1990s led to a large-scale displacement of the rural population from commodity agriculture, excessive land fragmentation, decline in productivity, and growth in subsistence farming. In Lithuania, out of 450,000 rural families, only 300,000 had

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legal rights to kolkhoz land. In total, one third of rural families were allowed to privatize only 2–3 ha of land (Guoda, 1993). In just 2 years of privatization and land restitution reforms agricultural productivity declined to 1952–1953 levels. By 1993, only one in three newly created farms had a tractor, and one in five—a horse (Pekauskate, 1993). By the mid 1990s, the newly created class of farmers became one of the most impoverished groups in Lithuania with poverty levels exceeding 30% (Katsiaouni et al., 2000, p. 64). The growing reliance of the rural population on selfsubsistence farming indicated a re-emergence of the features of pre-capitalist agriculture in the region: the peasant was back in Lithuania. The rural question, which the Communists claimed had been ‘‘finally’’ solved by collectivization of agriculture, was again at the center of post-Soviet politics. Unlike during the Soviet times, when rural policies were decided upon in the cabinets of the Party nomenclature, debates on rurality in post-Soviet Lithuania were increasingly conducted in, as well as disseminated through, the newly independent and vigorous news media. Especially important in shaping public opinion on rural matters were national newspapers such as ‘‘Lietuvos Rytas’’ that had relatively large circulation and were able to attract and publish contributions of the nationally renowned journalists, politicians, government officials, intellectuals, writers, artists, and activists. The role of leading newspapers in debates on rural issues was significant, in part, because the public’s trust in news media in Lithuania remains high. For example, in a public opinion poll conducted in July 2002, 61% of the respondents claimed that they trusted news media, while only 11% were distrustful (a representative survey conducted by the Public Opinion Research Company Vilmorus, N ¼ 1045). In a different public opinion survey conducted in September 2001, answers to the question ‘‘To what extent do you trust newspapers to look after your interests?’’ were as following: 62% of respondents in Lithuania trusted the newspapers, yet only 27% in Estonia, 34% in Poland, and 22% in Hungary shared this trust (Rose, 2002, p. 41). High levels of confidence in news media in Lithuania can be explained by the trust newspapers gained through their support of Lithuania’s independence during the late Soviet period, as well as for critical reporting on privatization scandals and political crises of the late 1990s (Matulionis, 2004, p. 35). In this paper, the content of 3827 articles on rural affairs published in Lietuvos Rytas (LR) in 1991–2004 is analyzed in order to characterize prevalent rural discourses. Rural discourses can be defined as systems of meanings that describe rural areas. Because discourse reveals and emphasizes some aspects, while concealing and making invisible other aspects of social phenomenon, it comprises a constitutive part of power relations in society. Depending on which definition of rurality prevails, some groups might gain dominance over the socio-spacial relations in the

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countryside, while others might be relegated to a subordinate position with their interests neglected or ignored (Lind and Svendsen, 2004, pp. 80–81). Rurality, in general, and peasants in particular, had been a prominent object of public discourses in Russia and Eastern Europe since the early 19th century. The ‘‘discovery’’ of rurality by the educated classes was closely related with the development of national consciousness in the region. The emerging rural discourses were based on an ‘‘urban–rural’’ dichotomy in which rural societies represented native countries, symbolizing virtue and cultural integrity, while cities tended to be associated with Westernized, tainted and alien culture. Thus, from its very beginning discourses on rurality in the region contained an inherent contradiction between romanticized representations of rural societies as ethnically and culturally distinct ‘‘nations’’ and simultaneous representations of the peasants as ‘‘the other.’’ Characteristic in this respect were debates between so called ‘‘Slavophiles’’ and ‘‘Westernizes’’ in the middle of the 19th century Russia (Stein, 1976). Which particular feature of the dichotomous discourse on rurality was emphasized was dependent on a socioeconomic situation, and political, and cultural dynamics in the country and the region. For example, Frierson in her study ‘‘Peasant icons’’ (1993) traced the rise and evolution of a discourse on rurality in the late 19th century Russia. Frieson had demonstrated that in the immediate post-Emancipation period definition of the former serfs as narod (or folk) symbolizing untainted and unadulterated Russia was prevalent in the public discourse. However, by the 1890s, the romanticized version of rurality declined and was replaced by bitterness, disappointment and disillusionment with the ‘‘peasant soul.’’ Failure to modernize agriculture, resistance of peasant societies to rationalization and ‘‘enlightenment,’’ as well as accumulating research and personal encounters of the reformers and commentators with the bleak and brutal day-to-day realities of rural life led to the rise of disparaging discourses on the ‘‘serii muzhik’’—the dreary peasant; kulak—the village strongman; and baba—a female equivalent of the gray peasant and kulak. This late 19th century binary ‘‘the nation vis-a`-vis the ‘other’’’ template of the discourse on rurality in the region survived well into the 20th century. Its latest reiteration can be traced in the growing interest of political culture studies in the region. Such interests of the region’s specialists are reflective in part of the ‘‘cultural turn’’ in rural studies in general (Cloke, 1997; Pratt, 1996). However, regional rural studies are also drawing on a long tradition of rural representations dating back for more than a century. Stephen Wegren (1994) was the first to attribute failures of post-socialist rural restructuring in Russia to egalitarianism and collectivism specific to its rural culture. Wegren’s claims had initiated a lively debate among area scholars criticizing rural essentialism and calling for a more nuanced analysis of the impacts that the culture in general, and rural

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culture in particular, were having on post-communist transformations in the region (Fleron, 1996; Kochin, 1996; Miller et al., 1998; Pollack et al., 2003; Reisinger et al., 1995; Wegren, 1996). Significantly, growing academic interest in impacts that the rural culture had on reforms was paralleled by similar concerns in rural affairs coverage in the region’s mass media. As it will be illustrated in this paper, the most prominent feature of rural coverage in LR was a moral critique of rural culture as the cause of failure of rural restructuring in Lithuania. Moreover, the subject matter, tone and metaphors used in rural coverage in LR closely resembled what Frierson called ‘‘pathological pessimism of [the educated classes] over the muzhik’’ that was prevalent in the late 19th century Russia (Frierson, 1993, p. 189). Pratt (1996) differentiates between two types of approaches to discourse studies in rural studies: poststructuralism and critical realism. Both approaches can be considered as ‘‘ideal type’’ explanations. Although empirical discourse analyses usually rely on one of the approaches, they also tend to include elements of the alternative explanation. The post-structuralist approach, derived from the works of Foucault and Bourdieu focuses on studies of language and meaning, or more specifically, on cultural politics of signification and difference. It investigates how discourses construct particular versions of rurality. For example, in her study of a German faming paper, McHenry attempts ‘‘to uncover some of the latent meaning within the discourses in the /farming paperS and to consider some of the taken-for-granted assumptions in regard to environment (McHenry, 1996, p. 376). A number of studies had been conducted on the role of rurality and landscapes in the construction of group identities and ideologies (Jones, 1995; Mackenzie, 2004; Phillips et al., 2001; Schama, 1995). Of special interest in post-structuralist analyses are investigations of the role that discourses play in the process of marginalization of individuals or groups due to their ‘‘otherness’’ (Cloke and Little, 1997; Milbourne, 1997). Critical realism in discourse analysis is derived primarily from Gramsci’s writings on ideology and hegemony. This approach emphasizes the material nature of a discourse, i.e., relations among language, ideology and class position and ‘‘highlights /yS understanding of discourse and

language as the key to an interpretation and understanding of social struggle’’ (see Hall, 1988 as cited in Pratt, 1996, p. 74). The cited above Frierson’s study (1993) falls within Gramscian framework of analysis as its author focuses on the process by which educated classes in the late 19th century Russia—writers, journalists, ethnographers, legal scholars, rural doctors, and schoolteachers—attempted to define who is the Russian peasant. Lind and Svendsen (2004) use content analysis of a journal published by the National Confederation of Village Communities to trace the rise of non-agriculturalist discourse of rurality in Denmark since the 1970s. They associate the increase in prominence of non-agriculturalist discourse with the growing political and economic power of service class newcomers to Danish villages, who tended to promote recreational, environmental, and local interests at the expense of the interests of farmers. In his analysis of local politics in a rural county in England, Woods (1997) uses discourse analysis to examine the relationship between the construction of rurality and power. He examines how cultural struggles are indicative of, as well as directly implicated in, the construction and legitimizing of local power structure in a rural county. Wood discerns the succession of three types of local elites in rural Somerest in the 20th century, each with its specific discourse of rurality: landowning elite with the discourse on country gentlemen and stewardship; broader elite of landowners and farmers espousing discourse on agriculture and community; and non-agricultural political actors acting within the environmentalist discourse. In this paper, discourse analysis based on a critical realism perspective is extended and applied to a study of rural coverage in LR. It is argued that discourses on rurality in LR during the post-Soviet period were indicative of social struggles among various rural and non-rural actors, as well as implicated in construction of social groups and identities. Two types of discourses on rurality in LR are discerned: rural moral modernization and rural development (Table 1). Discourses differed in regard to their definition of who constituted the rural population; what types of reforms were advocated to advance socioeconomic modernization of rurality; what were the causes of rural poverty and deprivation; and the types of relationships that existed between rurality and agriculture.

Table 1 Typology of discourses on rurality in Lietuvos Rytas, (1991–2004) Discourse Elements

Rural moral modernization (1991–2000)

Rural development (2001–2004)

Rural population Rural reforms

Communities of farmers Moral modernization of the rural poor; competitive agriculture ‘‘Losers,’’ ‘‘the other,’’ ‘‘undeserving poor,’’ stigmatization; Rurality subsumed by agriculture

Rural communities Well-being of rural communities; multifunctionality of rural areas Disempowerment, lack of citizenship

Rural deprivation/poverty Relationship between rurality and agriculture

Rurality decoupled from agriculture

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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and implementation of radical agricultural reforms during the early 1990s led to an increase in salience of rural coverage in LR. Rural reporting became increasingly dominated by an individualized discourse on the character deficiencies of the rural population. Throughout the 1990s, LR engaged in the relentless and grossly exaggerated coverage of ‘‘rural idiocy’’ that was presumably prevalent in the countryside. If character deficiencies were the cause of precipitous economic decline and pauperization of rural areas, then its solutions were sought in moral modernization of the rural population, i.e., the break down of its inbred Soviet mentality and welfare dependency and the embracement of initiative, entrepreneurship, and willingness to change. It is argued that the anti-rural rhetoric prevalent in LR during the 1990s was reflective of a reaction of successful urban classes to (a) neo-Communist and populist-statist political views and voting patterns of the majority of the rural population in Lithuania, and (b) state attempts to manage rural crisis by increasing taxation and budgetary transfers from urban areas and urban sectors of economy to depressed rural areas. The depiction of the rural population in LR as undeserving poor and welfare dependents financed at the urban expense sought to deligitimize rural political preferences and challenge state redistributive policies. Since the early 2000s, the coverage of rural ‘‘moral decay’’ on LR pages began to decline. Such change in rural reporting is associated with the decline of urban/rural conflicts and tensions that were mitigated by rapid economic development that Lithuania had experienced since the late 1990s, changes in country’s rural policies associated with the pending EU membership, and largescale transfer of EU rural development funds to Lithuania. LR significantly curtailed rural reporting as rural underdevelopment in Lithuania was increasingly recast as an EU-wide problem financed by Brussels and only indirectly affecting interests of the urban classes. The decline of ‘‘moral modernization’’ discourse was also hastened by the rise of indigenous rural grass roots activism in Lithuania which vigorously challenged the ‘‘rural moral decay’’ thesis. The emerging new rural development discourse emphasized the well-being of rural communities and the multifunctionality of rural areas. 2. Methodology LR is the largest and, arguably, the most influential daily in the country with a daily circulation of 76,000 copies. The newspaper can be characterized as being liberally (centerright) oriented and is considered to be close to the Liberal party. Before perestroika reforms of the mid 1980s, LR was published under the name Komjaunimo Tiesa (‘‘The Truth of the Communist Youth’’). During the perestroika period, Komjaunimo Tiesa was one of the most popular newspapers in the country. Its editors were among the first to test the boundaries of

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permissible political reporting by criticizing the Soviet regime. During the late 1980s, the newspaper adopted moderately nationalistic and pro-autonomy stance and, in the last years of the former Soviet Union, advocated Lithuania’s independence from the USSR. In 1989, the editors privatized the state-owned Komjaunimo Tiesa by creating a joint-stock company. The new owners dissociated themselves from the discredited Communist party and changed the newspaper’s name into politically neutral Lietuvos Rytas (Lithuanian Morning). Lietuvos Rytas attempts to project itself as a solid and objective newspaper, and was supportive of Lithuania’s key aims (e.g., accession into the EU and NATO). As one of the most expensive newspapers in the country, LR’s is of limited accessibility to the low-income audiences. A limited free edition of the newspaper is available online at www.lrytas.lt. LR’s readership tends to be affluent, educated, and resides mostly in the capital and largest cities of the country. Bibliographic data on LR rural reporting was collected from two sources. A computerized data base was utilized, as were hard copies of the newspaper. Full texts of all articles published in the newspaper between 1998 and 2005 were available on-line at the newspaper’s website. The electronic data base was searched for the presence of the keyword ‘‘kaim*’’ (the root of the word ‘‘rural’’ in Lithuanian) anywhere in the text of an article. Truncated spelling was used to identify all conjugated forms of the noun ‘‘kaimas.’’ Retrieved records with the keyword ‘‘kaim*’’ contained the following information: the title of the article, name of the author(s), date of publishing, and first 200 characters of the text. Articles varied in length from short descriptions, containing just a paragraph, to extensive and in depth coverage of rural affairs. Records of articles retrieved were copied and pasted into EndNote, a bibliographic data management program that has the capability to code and sort bibliographic records. A total of 1801 references were identified and entered into the EndNote datebase. The content analysis began by developing an exhaustive list of topics based on publication titles and information contained in the first 200 characters of the text. An on-line full text database was consulted when the subject of the report could not be identified from the extended bibliographic record. The initial list of 20 topics present in bibliographic references was identified. These then were re-grouped into six mutually exclusive categories: (1) extraordinary events (rural traffic accidents involving car crashes, injuries and deaths; house/forest fires; hunting, fishing and mushroom picking accidents; drowning; lightning strikes, hails, storms, floods and other nature events); (2) the new (nonagricultural) rural economy (rural tourism, retail, restaurants, commercialization of the rural culture [rural cuisine, crafts]; nursing and retirement facilities located in rural areas; and rural industrial manufacturing; (3) communal affairs (cultural events such as folk festivals, book

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presentations, theater performances, concerts; rural history [collectivization, resistance to Soviet occupation, deportations]; rural demography [health, impacts of environmental pollution, education, migration, counterurbanization, poverty, aging, social welfare]; rural NGOs and their activities); (4) agriculture (reports on farms, cooperatives and agricultural companies; agricultural economy, i.e. agricultural commodity prices; crops, farm animals and their pests and diseases; farming practices, agricultural chemicals and machinery); (5) rural politics/policies (voting and political campaigns in rural areas; rural legislature in Seimas; national and EU rural polices and regulations; EU rural structural funds [requirements, application process, money distribution, complaints of rural constituencies]; court trials involving rural matters [privatization, land restitution]); (6) reporting on rural ‘‘moral decline’’ includes articles on bizarre, illegal, criminal, and (self)destructive behavior of rural population, such as rural crimes, alcohol abuse, scuffles and fights, violence against women, children, and farm animals, acts of vandalism, suicide, and drugs. Articles that could not be classified under six listed above categories (less than 1 percent of the total) were coded as ‘‘other’’. Four percent of the articles were coded under two or more categories. Reports were sorted, tallied by year and category, and entered into an Excel spreadsheet. LR rural reports published from 1991 to 1997 were coded by browsing hard copies of the newspaper by hand. A total of 2026 reports on rurality were identified, coded by year and category and totals were entered into Excel spreadsheet. Content analysis results are presented in Fig. 1, which depicts the number of articles on rural issues in LR by year. Fig. 2 describes the change in thematic coverage of rural issues by year. For analytical purposes two periods in rural coverage were discerned (Fig. 1). Periods were designated by the most important socio-political and economic developments that led to changes in rural policies since Lithuania regained independence following the failed coup-de tat in Moscow in August 1991. The most important development that affected the discourse on rurality during the first period was the 25th of July 1991 Law on the Land Reform that abolished the kolkhoz system in Lithuania, and initiated processes of land restitution to the pre-WWII owners and their descendants. In addition, in 1991 the privatization of the kolkhoz property began, while the state support for agriculture was dramatically reduced, the national economy was opened to foreign competition, and taxes, instead of subsidies, were levied on the newly created family farms (Davis, 1997; Maddock, 1995). Among the other events that shaped discourses on rurality during the 1990s was the 1992 electoral victory neo-communists when they were able to soundly defeat the nationalists in parliamentary elections. Overwhelming support of rural voters was of crucial importance in

securing the return of the reformed communists to power. Neo-communists reversed the neo-liberal policies of the previous government and reinstated state interventionist policies, in order to deal with the severe crisis of the agricultural economy and the large-scale pauperization of the rural population. The protectionist measures and active role of the state in rural management continued to expand throughout the 1990s, despite the fact the neo-communists were voted out of office in the 1996 elections. Two factors account for the continuation of the state interventionist and management policies institutionalized by neo-communists. Preparation for accession to EU required an urgent modernization of Lithuanian agriculture. In addition, the government was confronted with the severe agricultural recession, caused by the collapse of the Russian ruble in 1998, as well as the loss of agricultural export markets in the Russian Federation. Period II starts in 2000 and continues to the present day. In 2000, EU-funded rural programs (SAPARD, PHARE, LEADER+) were enacted to facilitate Lithuania’s accession to the European Union. Rural community movement was gaining strength and becoming an influential force in Lithuania’s rural politics. Since 2004, when Lithuania became an EU member, Common Agricultural Policy provisions became the determinant factor in shaping country’s rural policies. In the following section, the situation as it evolved in the rural areas under the impact of land reforms of 1990–1991 is described. Its purpose is to set a broader socio-economic and political context within which LR reporting on rural affairs was occurring. In the remaining two analytical sections of the paper, quantitative and qualitative dimensions of rural reporting for each of the two periods are analyzed. In addition, the factors that influenced changes in rural discourses during these periods are described and their impacts on rural identities, rural politics and policies are discussed. 2.1. Agricultural and land reforms of 1990–1991 The agricultural and land reforms were placed at the center of political debates in the country by rising to prominence Sa˛ judis movement which led the struggle for % Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (Lieven, 1993). In its electoral platform for 1990 elections to the Supreme Council (the legislature) of the Soviet Lithuania, Sa˛ judis proclaimed as % one of its ultimate goals re-establishment of the pre-World War II farming structure which existed before Lithuania’s annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940. In the late 1930s, there were more than 287,000 family farms in Lithuania with an average size of about 15 ha (Meyers and Kazlauskiene, 1998, p. 88). Private farms were violently liquidated by land nationalization and collectivization of the late 1940s following occupation by and incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR. Collectivization was especially brutal and involved

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800

Number of Publications on Rurality

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 1991

1993

1992

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

Fig. 1. Publications on rurality and rural discourses in a daily newspaper Lietuvos Rytas, 1991–2004 (N ¼ 3827).

Period I: "Moral Modernization" of Rurality

Period II: Rural Development

100% 90%

Percent Publications on Rurality

80%

18

5

16 2 4

14

14

4

2

9

17

8

70% 60%

12

8 16

2

20

1

7

13

16

16

33

9

8

40%

10

10

8

20

13

6

23

17

13

9 6

13

11

18

9

9

16

13

7

16

12

21

9

8

8

12 12 9

13

12

11

14

21

12

9

16 9

50%

17

2

8 30

20

15

16

30% 49

20%

42

13

47

47

46

32

49

44

48

43

37

31

27

10% 13

0% 1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

Extraordinary events

New rural economy/lifestyles

Communal affairs

Agriculture

Rural politics/policies

Rural moral decay

2004

Fig. 2. Publications on rurality in a daily Lietuvos Rytas, 1991–2004 (N ¼ 3827).

deportation from the Baltic region to Siberia of some 300,000 more successful farmers (Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993, p. 96). By the early 1960s, there were more than 1100 kolkhoz and sovkhoz in Lithuania, specializing mostly in

livestock and dairy production for large urban centers of the former USSR. Agriculture in Soviet Lithuania was of relatively higher productivity and efficiency than in the rest of the USSR, although highly subsidized by Moscow.

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Upon winning an absolute majority in the 1990 elections, Sa˛ judis representatives declared the land reform to be one % of its top priorities for a number of reasons. Lithuania through its history was mostly an agricultural land, and Lithuanian ethnic identity was to a significant degree based on rural worldviews. As one of the members of the Seimas Commission on Rural Affairs had stated in an interview for this project, ‘‘Throughout the history of Lithuania radical political reforms tended to begin from land reform’’ (Interview 18 July 2006). In 1990 agriculture played a significant role in Lithuania’s economy accounting for 22.8% of the republic’s GDP (Lietuvos Statistikos Departamentas, 1991, p. 24). Agriculture was also more amenable to the local reforms, because unlike energy, transportation, or military industries which were directly administered by Moscow, it was controlled by the national government in Vilnius. Finally, agriculture in Lithuania was relatively well developed and it was thought that its privatization would quickly bring in positive results (Brazauskas, 2000, pp. 90–91). While there was consensus on the need of agriculture privatization, significant differences among the Sa˛ judis % coalition members soon emerged in regard to strategy, scope, and speed of privatization. The disagreements over the land reforms were reflective of the broader differences among Sa˛ judis members in regard to how to deal with the % severe political and economic crisis which the direct confrontation with Moscow had produced. Political divisions within Sa˛ judis coalition were also % exasperated by the introduction of electoral politics and intense personal rivalry among politicians. As rudimentary political parties began to consolidate, each of them sought and competed for their constituencies. By the early 1990s, two political parties became most prominent. Te’ vyne’ s Sa˛ junga (TS) or the Homeland Union was led by radicalized, nationalistic, and anti-communist intellectuals among whom Vytautas Landsbergis, a former musicology professor, was the most important. The Lietuvos Demokratine’ Darbo Partija (LDDP) or the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party united reformed Communists and was led by Mykolas Algirdas Brazauskas, a former First Secretary of the Communist party of Lithuania. Land reform projects proposed by both parties were driven as much or more by political than economic objectives. The TS, under the leadership of V. Landsbergis, argued for a reform based on restitution of the property rights and ownership to the land which were in force before annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union in 1940. Landsbergis saw the land restitution not only as an act of a historical justice establishing a principle of private property and assuring continuation of pre-WWII Lithuania. Restitution also represented a means of radical de-Sovietization of the countryside since it was to abolish the kolkhoz system on behalf of pre-World War II land owners and their descendents. More specifically, Landsbergis saw the kolkhoz system as a ‘‘backward collective mode of farming which served as a

political power base for the Communist nomenclature’’ (Landsbergis, 1995, p. 342). He argued that the kolkhoz system had ‘‘transformed the rural population into serfs’’ (Landsbergis, 1995, p. 306); /yS ‘‘until they [rural population] are being fed by the hands of kolkhoz nomenclature, they will continue to vote as needed’’ (Landsbergis, 1995, p. 356). Therefore the land reforms were to emancipate the rural population from the rule of kolkhoz chairmen, party secretaries, and leading kolkhoz specialists, and convert them into a loyal to TS constituency. Brazauskas-led LDDP argued for a more pragmatic approach towards the agricultural reform, which appealed primarily to the interests of kolkhoz members and their leadership. He argued that ‘‘we [LDDP leadership] were urging an introduction of a free market system in a way that were to allow us to sustain as much as possible of a significant agricultural capacities developed during the Soviet times’’ (Brazauskas, 2000, p. 10). He criticized Landsbergis’ program of land restitution because it (a) disregarded a danger of increasing social tensions in a country as conflicts were to escalate between those claiming the land ownership but residing in the areas beyond kolkhoz boundaries and those currently living on and working the kolkhoz land; and (b) paid little attention to the agricultural economy or the need to significantly increase efficiency and competitiveness of the Lithuanian agriculture. Instead of a reform Landsbergis proposed ‘‘a chaotic process of land return based on political considerations and reckless destruction of existing economic structures’’ (Brazauskas, 2000, p. 10). In heated and highly ideologically charged land reform debates in the Supreme Council Landsbergis’ position prevailed (see the transcripts of the debates in Aleknavicius, 2001, pp. 10–30). On 26 July 1990, a resolution ‘‘On enlargement of household plots owned by rural population’’ was passed. It made all rural families eligible for up to 3 ha of kolkhoz land. The resolution produced three consequences. First, it began a chaotic process of kolkhoz dissolution as the intent of the directive was to enable rural population to provide for themselves by working their plots instead of relying on employment in kolkhoz. Second, since most of the rural population lived in centralized rural townships built by the Soviets, the absolute majority of enlarged household plots were noncontiguous. Thus, the uncontrolled process of land fragmentation began. Lithuania was heading back to the 19th century patterns of the land ownership when peasants were working noncontiguous land plots within large estates. Finally, conflicts between those who were working the kolkhoz land and those whom had pre-WWII ownership rights to the kolkhoz land began to escalate. Property owners formed a vocal and influential organization to lobby for their rights, while kolkhozniki mobilized by kolkhoz leadership vigorously protested the course of the reforms in Farmers’ congress in fall 1990 and in a mass rally in spring 1991 in Vilnius (Vilpisauskas and Nakrosis, 2003, pp. 109–136).

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On July 25th 1991, the Law on the Land Reform was passed by the Supreme Council which initiated the land restitution process. On July 30th 1991, the Law on Privatization of Agricultural Enterprises reorganized kolkhoz and sovkhoz into private holding companies. Governing kolkhoz and sovkhoz institutions, such as the council of directors, supervisory council, and a kolkhoz assembly, were abolished. For the duration of kolkhoz property privatization, a temporary administrative ‘‘troika’’ of the chairman of the kolkhoz, his assistant and the senior accountant were appointed by the Ministry of Agriculture. These allowed the Ministry to arbitrarily fire and hire the transitional management charged with privatization of kolkhoz property. Such a situation was prone to produce large-scale abuses as it was left mainly to the transitional management to decide what was being privatized, by whom, and for what price. As a result, the second part of 1991 was dominated by an increasingly uncontrollable and unaccountable plundering of kolkhoz property, while confusion and abuse in land restitution process prevailed, generating widespread resentment and discontent not only among the rural population, but also among the general public (for more on land reform in Lithuania also see Lietuvos Respublikos Seimas, 1996; Meyers and Kazlauskiene, 1998; Revenga, 2002). 2.2. Period I: the discourse on rural moral modernization (1991–2000) Content analysis had shown that implementation of the land reforms of the early 1990s was concomitant with the rise of overwhelmingly negative reporting on the countryside. If in 1991, only 13% of rural publications in LR were on rural moral decline, then by 1992 a proportion of stigmatizing reports in rural coverage increased to 49%. Overwhelming prevalence of reports on rural moral decay continued to dominate rural coverage up to 2000 (Fig. 2). This suggests that by 1992, radical shift within the framework of rurality was occurring, i.e., rural reporting was increasingly recast into individualistic discourse on pauperized, backward, and shiftless rural population which because of its own morals faults was failing to take advantage of opportunities created by reforms to improve their conditions. During this period LR published numerous articles stigmatizing and demonizing the rural population. What was an LR reader left to think about the situation in rural areas while reading what seemed to be an endless stream of such reports as: ‘‘People are being killed even in the fields of carrots’’ (7 June 1993); ‘‘Father is drinking, mother is in prison, while children are living in a doghouse.’’ (8 July 1993); ‘‘The echoes of the mortal blows by scythe’’ (27 January 1993); ‘‘Villagers and their dogs in Birzai county got infested with lice’’ (15 August 1994); ‘‘In the morning [the villager] slaughtered a pig, in the evening [he] stabbed his wife’’ (3 January 1995); ‘‘Village teacher was stealing together with his teenage pupils’’ (24 April 1997); ‘‘Alco-

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holics are attempting to commit suicide by hanging and burning themselves’’ (10 September 1997); ‘‘A husband had strangled his disabled wife’’ (18 October 1998) ‘‘After giving a beating to his wife, a drunken villager continued his debauchery’’ (24 February 1999) ‘‘Everything that gets into a way [of the villagers] is stolen’’ (20 August 1999)? Besides radical change in content of rural reports, the volume of publications on rural affairs in LR also grew rapidly. In 1992, number of rural reports almost tripled to 160 from the previous year; in 1993, rural coverage doubled to 316 reports, and by 1999, it more then doubled again— to 715 reports (Fig. 1). This suggests that during the 1990s ‘‘the rural question’’ figured at the very center of postsocialist transformation of the country. The only notable exception to this trend was in 1998, the year of Russia’s financial crisis, when the Russian government defaulted on its international loans, which led to a crash in the value of the ruble. Crisis in Russia produced an economic recession in Lithuania—the 7.3% growth of the economy in 1998 was followed by a 1.7% contraction in 1999. Especially hard hit was agriculture, highly dependent on exports to Russia. The almost instantaneous loss of the Russian agricultural markets plunged Lithuanian agriculture into recession, which could hardly be blamed on the character deficiencies of the rural population. Therefore, in 1998 there was an increase in discussion of alternatives to agriculture in the rural economy (from single digits in 1991–1995 to 13% in 1998) as well as in the coverage of the impact of the Russian crisis on rural communities (up to 18% of all reports published in 1998). 2.2.1. Surge of lawlessness in the countryside and rural reporting Why did rural reporting by 1992 turn turned so swiftly to stigmatization of the rural population? It would be too simplistic to attribute the sudden rise in negative rural coverage exclusively to LR’s ideological biases. The rapid change in rural reporting can, in part, be accounted for by a dramatic deterioration of conditions in rural areas. The decollectivization of the early 1990s, similar to collectivization of the late 1940s, plunged rural areas into spiraling and anarchic decline. Especially negatively affected by the reforms were former low skill and education kolkhoz workers. They were not only displaced from commodity agriculture because of the decollectivization and restructuring of the rural economy, but many of them also lacked legal claims to the property and land previously owned by the kolkhoz. Furthermore, reforms of the early 1990s ignored the fact that kolkhoz and sovkhoz were not only economic enterprises, but also constituted the social infrastructure of the villages. As kolkhoz were liquidated, the whole rural social infrastructure—administration of villages, libraries, cultural houses, kindergartens, and medical aid posts collapsed. The local municipalities that were supposed to

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take up institutional control and provide for social needs of the population were too weak and under funded. The weakening of formal institutions regulating relationships in the villages and insufficient legal regulations governing privatization led to numerous conflicts pitting neighbor against neighbor in a process of distribution of kolkhoz property. The rural population perceived agricultural reforms as illegitimate and arbitrary because they were imposed by the government with little input from, and against the wishes of, the dominant majority of the rural population (Alanen, 1999; Davis, 1997). By 1993 rural areas experienced a dramatic surge in crime as former kolkhozniki, disaffected by privatization, resorted to a large-scale chaotic and illegal stripping off of the kolkhoz property. Vast amounts of technological equipment, machinery and instruments in animal pens, processing and storing facilities were either stolen or ruined, as their parts were dissembled and often sold for metal scrap; bricks and roofs of kolkhoz facilities were stripped; everything containing metals was ripped, producing widespread and crippling damage to the rural infrastructure. The contrast with the crimogenic situation of the Soviet period could not be more stark. Overall crime rates in postindependence Lithuania grew dramatically and by 1995–1996 they were (depending on a crime category) 3–3.5 times higher than in 1990. Growth in rural crime was especially significant. If during the Soviet period the rural crime rate was 1.5–2 times lower than in the cities, by 1993 the rates of crimes in rural areas (172 per 10,000 population) became higher than the rates in the cities (156 per 10,000) (Statistikos Departamentas, 1996, p. 82). Content analysis shows that LR adopted a highly individualized approach in its rural coverage, interpreting the surge in lawlessness and disorganization of rural communities as produced by a collapse of moral constraints and regulations among the villagers. Role of the rural poor as the source of moral degradation in rural areas was especially emphasized. Thus, the predominant majority of those reported on were the new rural poor who lost their kolkhoz jobs and could not adjust to post-socialist changes. The rural poor were stigmatized as well as demonized as perpetually drunk and engaging in bizarre and, very often, illegal or criminal behavior. Furthermore, the tendency of LR to stigmatize the rural population was strengthened by the unexpected return of the neo-communists to power in the 1992 elections. Rural voters overwhelmingly supported reformed ex-communists who promised a more pragmatic approach to rural restructuring and active state intervention in mitigating the fallout from the radical reforms in the countryside. On LR pages such political sympathies of the rural population and its unwillingness to embrace radical reforms were often interpreted not as pragmatic responses of the rural population to adverse changes being imposed on them from the ‘‘top,’’ but as signs of rural ‘‘moral decay,’’ and a confirmation of the urban intellectuals’ deep suspicion that

the Soviet regime had succeeded in transforming the rural population into ‘‘homo Sovieticus’’—individuals dependent on the state, unwilling to act on their own and take advantage of opportunities. However, by the mid 1990s rural crime and other indicators of rural social disorganization had stabilized and were beginning to decline. Rates of urban crimes during the late 1990s became 25–30% higher than rates of crimes in rural areas; rates of alcoholism, drug consumption, and divorce were and still remain higher among the urban than rural population. Nevertheless, negative rural reporting on LR pages continued unabated throughout the mid and the late 1990s. Some commentators, among which most prominent was TS chairman V. Landsbergis, suggested that commercialization of the press is to blame for the prevalence of scandalized and negative reporting on the national, including rural, affairs.1 Therefore in the following section the impact of commodification of news on rural coverage will be briefly considered. 2.2.2. Commercialization of the press, urban bias and rural stigmatization The dramatic increase in rural reporting that was negative, biased, and saturated with grotesquely exaggerated stereotypes can be explained, in part, by changes and reorganization in the news media business of postindependent Lithuania. Urban bias, expressed in paternalistic and condescending attitudes of ‘‘sophisticated’’ urbanites towards the ‘‘simple rural folk’’, also existed during Soviet times. However, during the 1990s, the growing commercialization and competitiveness of the mass media market in Lithuania significantly exasperated the attempts of the mass media to pander to the worst of urban prejudices. As the mass media was deregulated and privatized, a slew of new publications appeared, fiercely competing for a declining and increasingly a-political readership. ‘‘Screaming’’ headlines with an emphasis on sex and crimes, and reports on unusual and freakish occurrences were each part of the same strategy adopted by all independent publications in Lithuania as a means of competing with their rivals. Stories that were sensationalist and affirmed negative rural stereotypes were supposed to sell better than more professionalized coverage of the rural affairs. Furthermore, in terms of cost and time effectiveness, stories on rural ‘‘moral decline’’ had significant advantages over investigative reporting, which costs more, requires professional expertise, and involves more overall production time. There was also close correlation between the growing number of such stories and the increase in the length of the newspaper—from 8 pages in 1991 to 24 pages in 1992 and 32 pages in 1993 (controlling for space 1 In the interviews given to journalists in the early 1990s Landsbergis argued that mass media in the country had turned itself into purvasklaida, or ‘‘mudslinging media.’’ Since then this term gained popularity and is often used by journalists and TV commentators.

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allocated to advertisements). This increase in the newspaper’s length most likely generated pressure to fill in the expanding space, as limited staff and resources worked to create additional incentives to expand ‘‘the dark chronicles’’ coverage. The commercialization of news media also contributed to the growth in reporting on extraordinary rural events. Thus, from 8% to 20% of rural reports during the late 1990s were devoted to horrific traffic accidents, fires, lighting strikes, floods, drowning and, of course, heroic rescues. In other words, during the 1990s, LR presented the rurality as a setting where the freakish behavior of rural ‘‘folk’’ was mixed with spectacular, breathtaking, and catastrophic events. However, the drift towards commodification of the news reporting alone could not explain the prevalence of biased and stigmatizing coverage of the rural affairs in LR during the late 1990s. According to content analysis, from 2000 to 2004, coverage of the ‘‘rural decay’’ declined from 49% to 27%, although competitive pressures in the national mass media market had hardly weakened. Therefore, it will be argued that the trend towards rural stigmatization in the news media was also indicative of the broader socioeconomic and cultural changes that were occurring in Lithuania by the mid 1990s. 2.2.3. Growing urban/rural inequalities and construction of the ‘‘rural other’’ Defining the rural as ‘‘the other’’ can also be associated, in part, with the rapidly growing urban/rural inequalities in post-independent Lithuania. In Soviet times urban/rural inequalities were a fact of life. During the 1990s, however, the urban/rural inequalities in Lithuania increased manifold, leading the majority of academicians to begin using the term ‘‘rural marginalization’’ (Maniokas, 2000; Zvinkliene, 1995). Echoing the use of ‘‘rural marginalization’’ term in academic studies, the news media developed a corresponding notion of ‘‘two Lithuanias’’ (Kubilius, 2002; Sarafinas, 2001). According to the ‘‘two Lithuanias’’ interpretation, one Lithuania referred to the capital, Vilnius, and the seaport of Klaipeda, both of which were experiencing rapid growth and modernization. This Lithuania was becoming increasingly prosperous and sophisticated as its population was adopting the lifestyles and consumption patterns of Western Europe’s middle classes. The ‘‘other Lithuania’’ consisted of areas beyond the prosperous urban centers which were failing to modernize and, as a result, experienced a continual social and economic decline. Provinces were drained by the out migration of young people and were increasingly engulfed by crime and other forms of social degradation (heavy drinking, suicide, etc.). It was claimed that within ‘‘the second’’ Lithuania, rural areas were becoming the epiphany of poverty and failure and the epicenter of the dormant backwardness and individual deficiencies, expressed in lack of motivation, initiative and sophistication.

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Growing urban/rural differences became especially visible by the mid 1990s when the economy following five consecutive years of contraction finally began to expand. By 1996, GDP per capita produced in the capital Vilnius was three times as much as GDP per capita produced in the declining rural areas. Since then urban/rural differences increased even further and by 2001 Vilnius’ per capita GDP contribution was 5 times higher then in poor rural areas (Burneika, 2004, p. 45). Besides the growing socio-economic gap, urban/rural status differences were also becoming more pronounced. Most indicative of these changes was the transformation in views towards poverty. In the early 1990s, deep economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet economy led to the emergence of various forms of extreme poverty in the country. Some of them, such as homelessness, street children, vagabonds, and beggars have not been seen in Lithuania since the end of WWII. Initially, the presence of extremely poor, especially in the streets of the big cities, was treated as a temporary setback produced by events far beyond the control of unfortunate individuals. It was assumed that extreme poverty will wither away as soon as restructuring and reforms will lead to resumption of the economic growth. However, by the mid-1990s, the press, including LR, were growing considerably more hostile towards the poor, and especially towards rural poor, in their coverage. First, rapid growth of the economy from 1995 on decreased the poverty levels in the cities, while in rural areas poverty continued to grow. Between 1996 and 1999, poverty in the five largest cities decreased from 11.9% to 7.2%, while in rural areas poverty increased from 26% to 28.2% (Baziniene, 2001, p. 45; Statistikos Departamentas, 2004a). Continuous growth in rural poverty was especially suspicious to the urban population majority of which since Soviet times held an opinion that the rural poor were not really poor as they had their land allotments to live on.2 By the early 2000s, 53% of the poor lived in rural areas, while the rural population comprised one third of the population of the country (Ratkeviciene, 2004, p. 79). Thus, from the urban point of view, poverty was increasingly understood as a rural problem. Second, broad cultural changes that were developing in the country since the late 1980s were also contributing to the growing stigmatization of the rural poor. As discredited socialist equalitarianism and communitarianism were declining, they were replaced with rhetoric of aggressive individualism, competitiveness, and consumerism.3 Such 2 I am grateful for pointing out this peculiarity of Soviet urban views toward rural poverty to one of the anonymous reviewers. 3 Numerous public opinion surveys in post-independence Lithuania had registered such a shift in values. It was especially pronounced among the younger generation of Lithuanians who came of age in the postindependence era. Already in 1994, surveys were reporting that unlike in Soviet times, young people valued money and position in society more than friends (Degutis, 1994). According to representative surveys of Lithuanian high shool students conducted in 1995 and 2005, in the last 10

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cultural changes not only legitimized stigmatization and the exclusion of the ‘‘losers’’, but also redefined the raison d’eˆtre of the Lithuanian rural population—their role as the nation’s breadwinners. Thus, during the middle 1990s, the first American-style supermarkets began operating in Lithuania, offering a seemingly endless array of goods and wares for sale to the public which was comprised of individuals who spent most of their lives in an economy plagued by shortages of basic consumer goods. As food shortages typical to Soviet times were fading into memory, the role of the rural population as the providers of food and food security to the nation was also questioned. Instead of contributors to society, the impoverished rural population was increasingly perceived to be a ‘‘burden’’ to a society as social welfare dependents. One of the expressions of growing social inequality in the country was the increasing assertiveness of the Lithuanian nouveau riche in flaunting their newly acquired wealth from the slew of glossy, slick magazines depicting the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In 1997, LR spearheaded this development by establishing its very popular weekly magazine Stilius (The Style). Other daily publications soon followed the LR lead. Simultaneously, with the depictions of the lives of the new rich, reports on the growing postsocialist underclass also began to appear. In urban areas, such individuals were called, among other things,— ’’paribio zˇmone’ s’’—marginal people; ‘‘sˇ iuksˇ lynu˛ zˇmone’ s’’—dumpster people; ‘‘bomzˇai’’ or hobos. The depiction of society as consisting of ‘‘the winners’’— successful, motivated, and ambitious individuals—and ‘‘the losers’’—undeserving poor, welfare dependent, morally deficient, and apathetic individuals—had an equivalent in rural areas. From LR pages, the rural population emerged as increasingly divided. There was a small group of smart, capable, driven, and therefore, successful, farmers. On the other hand, there were individuals who held onto the Soviet mentality, were apathetic, lacking initiative, unwilling to change, and therefore living in a miserable poverty. While cities had their hobos or dumpster people, the rural poor were given their derogatory designation as ‘‘the beats,’’ (i.e. shiftless, witless, and dependent on welfare). 2.2.4. Family farm fundamentalism and the ‘‘moral modernization’’ of the rural poor Stigmatization of the rural poor was only one element of the changing rural discourse. Two other important features of the discourse on rurality in LR in this period of time were individualism and productivism. The object of the (footnote continued) years Lithuanian students became more individualistic, as there was an especially noticeable increase in importance attributed to wealth and money. In comparison with the young people in other European Union countries, Lithuanians are at the very top of the list in attributing the most importance to wealth and money and at the very bottom of the list in identification and solidarity with the poor and less fortunate (OMNI News, 2005).

national rural policy advocated in LR was to be supportive of individual farmers and their interest in enhancing farm commodity production. There was little, if any, need for a social and economic policy to address rural communal interests. It was assumed that the re-emergence of vigorous private farms typical of pre-WWII Lithuania would almost automatically solve the social problems affecting the rural areas. When communal affairs were discussed (from 8% to 16% of publications during the late 1990s), the coverage consisted mostly of reports on the cultural activities of the rural population (folk art and religious festivals; county fairs; presentations of literature and art, as well as works of writers who were born in rural areas; reports on rural artists, etc.) In other words, on LR pages the ‘‘rural community’’ existed mostly as a cultural entity, emptied of its political and socio-economic dimensions. As with any other discourse, LR’s presentation of rurality also had its internal contradictions. In LR pages, solutions to high levels of rural unemployment and poverty were predominantly sought through modernization and diversification of private farm-based agriculture. Agricultural modernization was advocated, despite the fact that the creation of large, highly industrialized farms would, on the contrary, lead to a decline of family farming and agricultural employment in general, as bigger corporate entities and more productive and efficient machines were to replace labor. In the coverage of rural ‘‘moral decay’’, little was said about the general trend towards rapid decline of agriculture in the restructured and increasingly servicebased Lithuanian economy. In Western Europe and North America agriculture employees only 2–4% of population, not 18% as was the case in Lithuania. LR coverage mostly ignored the fact that the proportion of the rural poor displaced by commodity agriculture increased exponentially since the early 1990s. The subdivision of 1100 kolkhoz during the early 1990s into small holdings, averaging 7.3 ha, produced a class of small farmers that soon became the most impoverished group in the country. According to the 2003 agriculture census, out of 272.1 thousand farms in Lithuania, 54.5% had land holdings up to 5 ha (Statistikos Departamentas, 2004b, p. 366). In other words, more than half of all farms in Lithuania currently have little or no connection to agricultural commodity production and are representative of rural households engaged in either a petty commodity production, or self-subsistence farming. Certainly, LR coverage also included a discussion of adverse structural conditions contributing to rural decline (underdeveloped rural infrastructure, lack of access to fiscal and other resources, declining agricultural employment, growing out migration to the cities, declining rural birth rates, and aging). However, it was argued that urban areas also suffered from adverse structural impacts, but were able to overcome them mostly through entrepreneurship and ingenuity. If urban areas were making it, it could also be done in rural areas. Therefore the key was the

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‘‘moral modernization’’ of the rural population—first, breaking down passivity, the Soviet mentality and dependence, and choosing entrepreneurship initiatives which would lead to agricultural modernization and the solution to rural problems. 2.2.5. Urban ‘‘elites’’ vis-a`-vis the rural ‘‘beats’’ Stigmatizing the rural poor reporting especially increased in 1998–2000 accounting for almost half of all LR publications on rural affairs. In addition, the overall number of publications on rural affairs also rose dramatically. In 1998, the number of rural publications in LR doubled to 372, as compared to the previous year. In 1999, it doubled again, climbing to a total of 715 rural reports. This suggests that in the late 1990s, ‘‘the rural question’’ was at the very center of the post-socialist transformation of the country. What warranted the centrality of the rural question in the nation’s politics at that time? I would like to suggest that rural policies became the focal point of the escalating class tensions and conflicts in the country. On one side of this conflict were increasingly affluent urban classes who successfully adapted to the new service and knowledgebased economy and whose lifestyles and consumption patterns closely resembled those of the middle classes in Western Europe. On the opposite side were the ‘‘losers’’, who failed to adapt to the new post-socialist socioeconomic realities and who experienced rapid downward social mobility alongside dramatic deterioration of their standards of living. A predominant majority of the socalled ‘‘losers’’ were among the rural population. Escalation of the class-based tensions was closely related to changes in state policies. From the mid 1990s on, the state abandoned its ultra-liberal economic policies and began to actively intervene in the management of rural crisis. The change in the rural policies of the state occurred for a variety of reasons. In part, the change was reflective of electoral strategies adopted by neo-communist and center-left parties in Lithuania which lobbied actively for rural votes. There was also a growing awareness among the political classes and state bureaucrats that despite significant growth of the national economy, rural crisis will not be alleviated without active state intervention. Finally, there was an urgent need to reform and restructure agriculture in preparation for pending EU membership. As a result, the state began to change taxation policies and initiated the transfer of resources from prosperous sectors in the new urban economy to rural areas. Thus, in 1994 the government established minimum farmgate prices and intervention purchases for specified quantities of the main agricultural products. The protection of local production from highly subsidized foreign imports was enacted by raising tariffs 20–30%. In addition, a farm credit subsidy scheme was established to stimulate investment in agriculture (Frohberg and Hartman, 2000, pp. 36–37). After the 1998 Russian fiscal crisis, social welfare spending in rural areas also significantly increased.

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If, in 1996, social transfers accounted for 21.7% of a rural household income, by 1999, social transfers made up 32.1% of rural income (Katsiaouni et al., 2000, p. 11). The transfer of wealth from prosperous urban areas to poor rural provinces was increasingly resented in the cities. Therefore the prevalence of reporting on rural ‘‘moral decay’’ in LR pages can be considered as one of the expressions of urban discontent with the state’s redistributive policies. The rhetoric of urban/rural clashes became especially heated when, in the March of 2000, Lithuanian sugar beat growers, following the example of French and Polish farmers, organized a series of protests and marches that culminated in a blockade of Lithuania’s major highways. The blockades were repeated again in the Fall of 2000 leading to a significant increase in subsidies paid to sugar beats producers. The government was widely accused of giving in to farmers’ ‘‘agro-terrorism’’ and ‘‘blackmail’’; this concession was perceived to result in socially vulnerable groups such as pensioners, librarians, and teachers being ‘‘ripped off’’. It is the conflict over sugar beat farm subsidies that popularized the derogatory term used to denote impoverished farmers as ‘‘the beats,’’ (i.e. lazy, conservative, unwilling to change, and capable only of lobbying for more welfare payments and subsidies). In response to being stigmatized, rural activists threw back equally derisive label—‘‘the elites’’. This label implied that the accusers were snooty, distant, arrogant urban classes leading pampered lives, running the state in their own and big business interests, living off cushy state jobs, and remaining disconnected from the lives and the problems of the people they claimed to rule. The emergence of ‘‘the beats’’ versus ‘‘the elites’’ discourse during the late 1990s signified the beginning of a fundamental political reconfiguration among the actors engaged in the construction of rurality in Lithuania. Rurality was increasingly contested along class lines between the mostly urban socio-economic and professional groups that benefited from post-Soviet transformation and those who failed to adapt to the changes, suffered from downward mobility, and were relegated to poverty. 2.3. Period II: the EU and the rise of the discourse on rural development (2001–2004) Two developments seem to be the most important in rural LR coverage during this period of time. First, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of publications from 715 in 1999 to about 200 a year during 2001–2003. By 2004, rural coverage declined even further to only 45 reports. The trend towards diminishing rural affairs coverage in LR also continued in 2005. In January through June 2005, LR published only 23 reports on rural affairs. This suggests that by 2004, rurality ceased to be one of the main areas of interest in LR. The increasing irrelevance of rural coverage in the news media signaled that the entire

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period of post-socialist transformation, which had, at its center, ‘‘the rural question’’, was coming to an end. In addition to the decline in frequency of coverage, rural reporting was also undergoing a transformation in its content. Since 2000, the proportion of reports on ‘‘rural decay’’ declined from 49% in 2000 to 27% in 2004. Such changes in LR’s rural discourse were occurring, despite the fact that ‘‘the beats versus the elites’’ rhetoric confrontation was to reach its peak only in 2003. In May 2003, the country’s dairy farmers blocked the country’s major highways and custom posts for a few days, demanding that the government protect the domestic agricultural market and increase price supports for dairy products. Farmers’ protests coincided with the May 2003 referendum on whether Lithuania would join the EU. The government was apprehensive about the rural population voting against EU membership because of fears that cheap agricultural products from EU countries would flood the Lithuanian market, leaving the rural population without any income. Finally, in October 2003, political scandal involving President Paksas’ alleged ties to organized crime broke out, leading to political polarization of the country, mostly along the rural/urban divide (Juska and Johnstone, 2004). In my opinion, dramatic decrease of rural coverage as well as stigmatizing reports in LR during the early 2000s suggests a decline in class-based rural/urban tensions and antagonisms in the country. This decline was produced by a combination of factors. The most important among them were the rapid growth of Lithuania’s economy since 1999 and the reorientation of a whole country (i.e., its politics and institutions) for pending EU membership. In 1999, the economic growth of the country resumed, following the Russian crisis, as the Lithuanian economy was reoriented from Russian to the EU markets. By early 2000, Lithuania was among the fastest growing economies in Europe, averaging more than 6% annual growth. The population also experienced income growth, increasing from 987 Lt in 1999 to 1158 LT in 2004. Likewise, unemployment declined from 17.4% in 2001 to 11.4% in 2004. By 2005, when EU regulations allowed Lithuanian citizens limited labor force mobility within the Union, the rate of unemployment declined to 4.5%, creating labor shortages in the country. Rapid economic improvement decreased social tensions in the country. According to Eurobarometer surveys of public opinion in Lithuania, the proportion of those satisfied with their lives in the country increased from 40% in 2001 to 54% in 2004 (European Commission, 2004, p. 3). According to the representative polling data by Vilmorus (N ¼ 891, sampling error 75%) by 2004 there was a significant increase in the percentage of respondents (up to 62%) who reported that they were living better than during the late Soviet period. The percentage of those who reported that they were living worse than during Soviet times decreased to 20%. There were especially significant changes in the public’s evaluation of the Lithuanian economy. In 2000, only 25%

of respondents positively evaluated the status of Lithuanian economy, while 70% offered a negative evaluation. By 2004, public opinion on this matter was opposite to what it had been 4 years before—73% had positive opinion of the Lithuanian economic situation, while 21% had a negative opinion. Of particular symbolic importance was the fact that in 2004 Lithuania’s GDP per capita had finally reached and exceeded the country’s GDP per capita of the late Soviet period. A significant boost to economic growth was provided by pending EU membership, which made Lithuania attractive to foreign investment. In 2000 Lithuania with a group of the other candidate countries began negotiations on joining the EU. In order to ease the transition to the single EU agricultural markets, Brussels established rural support programs for prospective members. Through the SAPARD program Lithuania received h28.9 million a year in 2000–2006. PHARE provided additional h38.3 million in 2000 and h43.7 million in 2001. Furthermore, EU agreed in 2004–2006 to disperse h564 million in various forms of rural development aid (Anonymous, 2005). The money and expertise provided by these programs blunted class antagonisms in the country. Structural funds allowed to recast country’s rural underdevelopment from being a welfare burden paid by urban classes, to EU-wide problem managed and financed by the Brussels. Positive impact of EU support was already felt by 2003 when poverty levels in the rural areas declined from 39.9% in 1999 to 28.8% in 2003 (Statistikos Departamentas, 2004a). Under EU directives, the national rural policy of Lithuania was also restructured to correspond to the European Union’s rural development priorities. Thus, the Lithuania’s Rural Development Plan for 2004–2006 emphasized the multi-functionality of rural areas. Besides agriculture, this plan also supported non-agricultural sectors of the rural economy, ecology and socio-cultural development of rural communities (Lietuvos Respublikos Zemes Ukio Ministerija, 2004). Indicative of the growing emphasis on rural (as opposed to agricultural) development was an increase in LR coverage of new rural (nonagricultural) economy from 13% in 2000 to 23% in 2003 (Fig. 2). As the EU was providing support for uses of rurality that included alternatives to agriculture, rural grassroots activism in the country was also increasing in scope. In 1995, the first rural community groups were established in Lithuania. These groups attempted to self-organize displaced from the commercial agriculture population (Juska et al., 2005, 2006). By 2004, the number of active rural communal groups exceeded 500 (Geguziene and Ziliukaite, 2004, p. 3). The rise of an increasingly well-organized and sophisticated rural community movement had a noticeable impact on rural discourse in the news media, as rural activists vigorously challenged the rural ‘‘moral decline’’ thesis. This was also reflected in LR’s rural coverage. By 2003, almost a quarter (23%) of LR rural reporting was on

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communal affairs. Furthermore, community reporting paid less attention to rural material deprivation. Instead, issues of separation, non-participation, disempowerment, invisibility, and lack of citizenship of rural population were emphasized. 3. Conclusions In this paper, it was argued that during the postindependence period two distinct discourses of rurality were prevalent in the leading Lithuanian daily Lietuvos Rytas. During the 1990s, rural reporting was dominated by an individualized discourse on the character deficiencies of the rural population. The rise of overwhelmingly negative and stigmatizing reporting was associated with the radical reforms of the early 1990s which led to large-scale displacement of former kolkhozniki and formation of a post-socialist rural underclass which had little, if any, connection to the labor market or commodity agriculture, was plagued by high levels of poverty and social disorganization, and was dependent on the state welfare for its survival. In response to failures of reforms to produce a class of prosperous Lithuanian farmers, LR unleashed a scathed coverage of rural idiocy, presumably characteristic of the new rural poor. The failures of former kolkhozniki to transform themselves into a class of competitive farmers were attributed to failures of their ‘‘moral modernization’’—inability to escape the grips of the inbred Soviet mentality and to partake in hard work, initiative, creative thinking, and entrepreneurship. It was argued that stigmatization of the new rural poor in LR coverage reflected an ideology of the rising and successful in the new economy urban classes. Demonization of the rural poor legitimized rapidly growing socioeconomic urban/rural inequalities by attributing them to the character deficiencies of the rural population. Urban classes used rural stigmatization discourse to protect their interests against poorer provinces and more disadvantaged groups in a struggle over taxation and redistributive state policies. By the early 2000s, rural discourse on LR pages was changing under the impact of two closely related developments. Since the late 1990s, Lithuanian economy was experiencing a significant growth leading to rising standards of living and a moderate reduction in poverty. These positive economic and social changes were facilitated by institutional and policy reforms, associated with Lithuania’s preparation for pending EU membership, and increasing transference of EU resources to rural areas. This produced a marked decline of class-based tensions in the country. Lithuanian rurality, instead of being defined as a welfare problem financed by urban classes, was increasingly reframed as an EU-wide problem. As rurality was having merely an indirect effect on the core LR readers, rural coverage and the tendency to stigmatize the rural poor were also declining. Instead, alternative, non-

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agricultural discourses of rurality were advanced. These discourses were supported, in part, by the voices of rural community activists who vigorously contested rural moral decay interpretations. The decline of rural/urban tensions associated with rapid economic development and EU membership does not mean the end of rural politics, but signals the beginnings of its reconfiguration. Future debates on rurality in Lithuania will be depended on the interaction of a variety of factors, such as UK efforts to drastically reform Common Agricultural Policy, lobbying by the big contributor countries—Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain to reduce their contributions to the EU budget, as well as the effectiveness of national rural development policies in Lithuania, including the capacity of the rural population to self-organize and effectively engage in national and regional politics. Already the signs are visible indicating new developments in debates on post-EU rurality in Lithuania. Under the impact of EU policies, Lithuanian countryside is being rapidly transformed by the corporatization of agriculture. Corporatization is driven by national, as well as international capital, generating various local responses. Recently, LR reported on plans of a large Dutch-based multinational corporation to develop concentrated hog-feeding operations in Lithuania capable producing 1.3 million hogs a year. The announcement of these plans was followed by protest actions of environmentalists, rural community activists, hog farmers, bee keepers and others (Dubauskas, 2005). National agro-firms are also aggressively pursuing policies of concentration and monopolization of the Lithuanian agro-food sector. By 2005, 0.6% of farms that owned 100 ha of land or more occupied 37% of arable land in Lithuania; farms of 500 ha or more accounted for 12% of arable land in the country. In comparison, 78% of farmers owned up to 10 ha of land and accounted for 35% of all arable land in Lithuania (Stancevicius, 2005). This suggests that income inequalities among the rural population are as greatly or even more pronounced than urban/ rural inequalities, which could potentially lead to increasing class tensions in rural areas. There are also indications of a growing counterurbanization in Lithuania, when well-off urbanites are moving to live in rural areas (especially in close proximity to large metropolitan areas) to take advantage of the rural environment (Tumalaviciene, 2005). If the early reports of conflicts and tensions between relatively affluent urban new comers and the villagers are an indication, this is also bound to have an impact on discourses of rurality in Lithuania.

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