Lietuvos istorijos metraštis /The Yearbook of Lithuanian History

effect of land reclamation and its impact on the countryside. The leadership of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party managed to use the implementation of the all-Union large-scale land reclamation programme quite effectively for Lithuania’s economic interest, industrial development, and modernisation of the agricultural sector. The destruction of the farmstead settlement structure during total land reclamation accelerated the internal and social urbanisation of the countryside, which contributed to the formation of a homogeneous Soviet society and eliminated socio-cultural and material-lifestyle disparities between the city and the country. The radical

Soviet reconstruction (modernisation) of the countryside, which continued for over two decades, was mainly coercive, revolutionary, and therefore painful for the rural society; it deformed the evolutionary processes in the countryside.