First lines: Knowledge about the Soviet deportations of people from Lithuania, to use the expression of Bruno Latour, was produced in public and used to shape a new public around it. 1 In 1987, former political prisoners and deportees from Lithuania organised the first public meetings to commemorate the victims of deportations. To be sure, this was not the first time that knowledge about the deportations and the labour camps had entered Soviet public discourse. Originally published in Russian in 1961, leksander Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was translated and published in Lithuanian in 196 j. 1 A story about the return of Latvian deportees, dramatized by Latvian television in the popular television rama series A Long Journey through the Dunes (1980), also had a broad appeal.