Three times as many people died in Lithuania under the Nazis than the Soviets,
but the state is myopic about the past
Follow the English signs to this elegant baroque city's Museum of Genocide Victims
and you reach a massive building resembling a respectable
prewar bank. Every granite block on the facade's lower section
now bears an engraved Lithuanian name, plus a year of birth
and, judging from the dates, a premature death.
During almost 50 years of Soviet occupation this was where Stalin's secret police,
the NKVD, and its successor until 1990, the KGB, held sway.
The high-ceiling rooms tell a terrible story of executions
and deportations to Siberia. A recording of a steam train
chuffs softly beside photos of prisoners wrapped in felt
jackets and children sitting bleakly outside wooden huts.
Corpses caught by a ghoulish camera lie in the woods.
But as I moved from room to dismal
room, I had a growing sense something was missing. Vilnius
was once known as the Jerusalem of the North. What about
the Jews? Did their fate not merit remembrance? In a corridor
I eventually found a placard with a brief, though telling,
mention. It gave estimates for the victims of Lithuania's
Soviet occupation and of the Nazi one as well. The number
summarily shot, or who died in prison and during deportation
in the Soviet period, reached 74,500. During three years
of Nazi rule from June 1941, those killed amounted to 240,000, "including about 200,000 Jews".
Three times as many deaths, but the
museum contains no exhibits on them. A guide assured me Vilnius
also had a "museum of the holocaust". Well, not exactly. There is a state-supported "Jewish museum", with three sections in different buildings, but no prominent signs to help
you find them. "Ah well, the other genocide was more important," a woman at one of the Jewish exhibition centres told me with an ironic shrug.
I asked Arvydas Anusauskas, the director
of Lithuania's Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, whether
it wouldn't be more accurate to call the former KGB building
the "museum of Soviet repression". Nodding in agreement, he said that after the Soviet collapse, historians originally
proposed creating a combined "museum of terror" to record Lithuania's fate under both totalitarian regimes. If it could not
be housed in a single location, there would at least be a
common management for branches in separate buildings.
The state finances Dr Anusauskas's
centre to research both regimes, and it has produced three
volumes on Soviet and three on Nazi repression. There is
also a subsidised International Commission for the Evaluation
of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. But
even-handedness disappears when it comes to museums. They
have a higher profile, so politicians put in their oar.
The fact that anti-Communist emotions
are still so raw in Lithuania was also visible during a down-memory-lane
conference in the parliament building the other day. Western
Europe has been bombarded this year with 1968 anniversary
reflections. Next year comes a central European extravaganza
of 1989 memoirs. The equally momentous events of 1988 have
been almost overlooked, though there is a strong case for
claiming them as the key to the later revolutions: without
the peaceful Baltic uprisings of 88, would protesters have
flocked to vote Poland's communists out of power in 89, or
to call for regime change in Leipzig, Berlin and Prague?
As this paper's Moscow correspondent
I watched a huge throng outside Vilnius cathedral in October
1988, celebrating mass and singing nationalist songs the
day after the building was handed back to the church. Describing
themselves as movements in support of Mikhail Gorbachev's
perestroika, each of the three Baltic republics set up "popular fronts" to push for "autonomy" and "economic sovereignty". They played their cards carefully at first - independence was not mentioned
in public and, in the first few weeks, it was not even discussed
behind closed doors.
The 36 founders of Lithuania's popular
front, known as Sajudis, included several communists and,
in order not to provoke Moscow, excluded anyone who had been
deported to Siberia. Within weeks, Sajudis had a membership
of several hundred thousand. Its increasingly euphoric rallies
raised demands for dignity and freedom that Lithuania's Communist
party soon adopted. By chance I was the only foreign reporter
in Vilnius on June 24 1989, when the Communist leader, Algirdas
Brazauskas, recommended to his central committee that they
break with the Soviet party. No other Communist party in
the Soviet Union's 15 republics had gone so far. Arguably,
this was the moment when the USSR's collapse became irreversible.
Until then, amid the rebellions going on below, Gorbachev
expected the Soviet party to hold things together. Once the
Lithuanian communists split away, everything was doomed.
Brazauskas later became Lithuania's
president, and now lives in a villa outside the capital.
His study is dotted with photos of him standing beside, or
shaking hands with, world leaders. Pointedly, there are none
of him and Gorbachev. Brazauskas recalled his clashes with
the Soviet leader, which sometimes culminated in threats
of force. "In November 1989 I was summoned to the Politburo. For five or six hours they
harangued me," he told me. He gave no ground.
In spite of his record, bitterness
among Lithuania's independence veterans is still so sharp,
almost 20 years later, that Brazauskas was advised by the
Sajudis conference organisers not to address the anniversary
meeting. I listened in amazement as a professor who praised
the Lithuanian Communist party's role was barracked and prevented
from finishing his speech.
Now a member of the EU and Nato, Lithuania
tends to be a tougher critic of Russia than its Baltic neighbours,
Latvia and Estonia. It insisted on a strong mandate for the
EU's negotiations with Russia and demanded changes before
accepting the other 26 EU members' draft a few weeks ago.
But however clear-eyed Lithuania's
decison-makers claim to be about today's Russia, many seem
myopic about their own country's past. Anger over 48 years
of Soviet occupation clouds their judgment about the Communists'
recent role. Worse, it blocks discussion of Nazi mass murder
and the fact that too many Lithuanians eagerly supported
it.
Next year will bring yet another big
European anniversary, the 70th since the Molotov-Ribbentrop
pact that "gave" the Baltic states to Stalin. It should be a time to remember two tyrannies,
not just one. And for the Baltics, the longer one was not
the more brutal.
guardian.co.uk
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