Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

I explore the state’s presence by looking at people’s understanding/experience of authority and power. I argue that ‘cynicism’ is the common structure of feeling embedded in perceptions and experiences of the state. It entails negativity, distance, and irony, rather than resistance towards the state. Cynicism has an effect on the lives people live and the communication they carry out with the ‘state’ whether in everyday conversations or at elections. Cynicism encapsulates criticism of the state officials, seeing them as self-interested, immoral, and unjust. It also manifests distrust of authorities and difference between the people and the power elites. Cynicism derives from various contexts: the experience of power as omnipresent, immutable, and threatening prevalent in the socialist period, beliefs in equality and loyalty to a collective which no longer inform social relations, mysterious post-socialist circulations of wealth from which people feel completely or partly excluded, experience of destatization and subalternity. This article rests on the research conducted in three village communities and the cities of Vilnius and Kaunas in 2003–2004.