Explaining Latent Authoritarian Nostalgia: Distrust of Progressive Policies, Social Resentment, and the Trauma of Post-Soviet Transformation

The Baltic states were the first to secede from the Soviet Union and establish independent democratic states in 1990–1991. The Soviet regime, which caused significant economic and human losses in these countries due to post-war resistance struggles and mass deportations, is regarded as an occupation. In Lithuania, independence was achieved during the mass Singing Revolution and solidified through free elections, which brought pro-democratic forces to power. Over the three decades of independence, Lithuania has managed to eliminate almost all traces of the occupation regime. Virtually no mainstream political party romanticizes the Soviet past or fosters Soviet nostalgia. Despite this, Soviet nostalgia remains a prominent factor in Lithuanian society and is the best predictor of voting behavior. Paradoxically, it explains not preferences for the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, a partial successor to the Lithuanian Communist Party, but rather support for new populist parties. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, it accounted for the success of the newly emerged right-wing populist party Nemuno Aušra ("Nemunas Dawn"). The paper aims to uncover what explains latent Soviet nostalgia in a country where there is no open politicization of the past. From research on nostalgia and reactionism (a backward looking and revisionist political orientation) we know that longing of the past is related not only to specific past experiences but to current dissatisfaction with democratic institutions and social resentment. Social resentment is a complex affective mechanism related to the perception that others have undeserved advantage which the person feeling it cannot overturn due to the social status insecurity and lack of political power. Some theorists claim that past nostalgia (not necessarily authoritarian past) is related to distrust of progressive policies (Steenvoorden & Harteveld 2018). In what circumstances, however, distrust of progressive policies and/or social resentment might lead to authoritarian nostalgia? We hypothesize that Soviet nostalgia in Lithuania is caused by distrust of progressive policies and current social resentment, but this relationship is moderated by the painful memories of the post-soviet transformation that had rather devastating social outcomes in Lithuania as well as in other post-socialist countries (Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021). We test the hypothesis using data from a 2024 post-election face-to-face survey in Lithuania.