To continue the Soviet-style thinking, is to lose Lithuania as a country

Opinion: Valdas Samonis

Around the time of Lithuania's declaration of independence in 1990, I decided to use my extensive global contacts in the West to give totally unprecedented opportunities for learning/experience in the West for the prospective Lithuanian leaders. I thought that in this way I now should continue my earlier struggle for LT freedom that started when I was just 14 years old: arrested, thrown out of high school, further persecuted by the joint KGB/SB forces in the Seinai region, then communist Poland; that was 15 years before the Solidarity! Then, with my US Fulbright Scholarship (only 10 students selected from all disciplines in the whole of Poland) my life and opportunities changed dramatically forever. Glory to God! 

While in North America, for 5 years, out of my University of Toronto professorial office, at my own cost and on my unpaid time, I was regularly sending the Samonis Opportunities List (SOL) to practically all the LT universities and many government institutions, even businesses; I have tons of letters thanking me for that volunteer activity. I know for a fact, that a number of good young Lithuanian students and older professionals went to the West to obtain additional formal education and experience, many of them returned to LT to work there. Examples: former Prime Minister A. Abisala and former leading LT parliamentarian Prof. K. Antanavicius, many other leaders from LT and other postcommunist countries.

Based on my SOL work, I also developed a database of prospective LT future leaders that were working either in LT or abroad; I used to update the database and regularly talked to many capable people on it.

Nothing came out of it.

With no anti-Soviet lustration, the former Soviet communist nomenklatura returned to power in LT in 1992. They started running a "tight Soviet ship" (LT needs experience in government, they argued; and we know what kind of "experience" communists had) and no Western "contaminated" professionals needed to apply for government, academia or even business positions. For just one example of the communist purge: with no notice or explanation, I was thrown out of a scholarly reviewer function at LT Science Fund (Mokslo ir studiju fondas) when a Brazauskas comrade found out that I had such a "bad" anti-Soviet past. At one international conference at Vilnius University, a former communist party first secretary Mr. A. Brazauskas lectured the international body of economists and management specialists that the Soviet system was an equally good alternative to any Western market economy and the Soviet system brought obviously great achievements to the LT people. I left that conference early not being able to cope with my shame (as a Lithuanian) before my distinguished international colleagues!

Under the unrelenting nomenklatura propaganda, that is how Western Lithuanians started being shunned by LT people. I personally know most of those in diaspora who tried to do something good for LT in LT in the last over 20 years; almost all of them (except President Adamkus) left LT in disgust and returned to their Western countries!  

Don't Come Back to LT! You will Steal my Job!

As a Soviet legacy, most LT people subscribe to the "lump of labor" fallacy, as the economic jargon has it: allegedly there is a limited and unchangeable number of jobs in the economy and you have to fight others to get your job in this zero sum game. 

If you, a Lithuanian from the West, come from abroad (either in physical or digital way or both), you will steal at least part of my job, so I will do everything that you do not come from abroad to work for LT. Stretching this "Soviet logic" to the very end, the last man to leave LT is in the best situation: all jobs are available to him/her. The trouble is that this job is very specialized: turning off all the lights in LT:)

As a Soviet legacy, most LT people do not yet understand that most jobs are created not via the communist party or other official agency decree but via the interaction of people in innovative processes in both the private and public sectors, the more diverse and intensive the interaction, the better the job creation, in LT for LT people!

To continue the Soviet-style thinking, is to loose LT as a country. Nobody will wait for change much longer.

Tertium non datur.

 
Valdas Samonis