ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergent discourses of labor protest that have accompanied the transition process from socialism to the market economies of the former Soviet Union. It is a fi rst preliminary attempt, based on admittedly fragmentary samples of discourse, to provide a basis for future more extensive analysis. Even these limited snatches of discourse, however, provide a condensed telegraphy of protest revealing the potential emergence of more challenging “emancipatory” discourses (Huspek 1991). The discourses are comprised of spoken utterances of participants in labor protests captured in news reports, slogans on banners and placards, protest manifestos, and declarations. These are “dialogic” statements of discontent “from below,” addressed to new ruling authorities and posing uncomfortable, even potentially incompatible questions about the new social order of postcommunism. Very often such dialog takes a moralistic accusatory tone, addressing issues of fairness in society, more particularly, of the perceived betrayal of expectations and promises in what a “free” democratic postSoviet Lithuania should offer to its citizens.
