ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the correspondence between Lithuanian communities occasioned by Soviet regime-inflicted involuntary migration to the West and deportations to Siberia. Drawing from the Siberian letter archive, relevant qualitative interviews, and secondary material, the discussion features the phenomenon of postal exchanges and parcel-sending practices as significant forms of otherwise impossible communication between relatives who landed on two socially, politically, and economically very different sides of the Iron Curtain. The analysis emphasizes the importance of the exchanges as a platform to voice experience amidst an otherwise silencing political climate, while also speculating on what implications it had for representation, identities, broader discursive practices, and narratives around Lithuanian displacements, as well as for the stereotypes that the transnational space of displaced Lithuanian populations’ correspondence facilitated.
