LITHUANIAN SSR
COAT OF ARMS

Returning ‘home’ to
Lithuania from Siberia

The Last Summer. Zarasai 1968.
PHOTO: ANTANAS SUTKUS.

It must have been quite a shock for the deportees to return ‘home’ from Siberia to Lithuania in the 1950s and 1960s. The country they had loved and cared so much about was now ruled, mismanaged, by Moscow-believing Communists.

Since 1941 more than 300.000 persons had been deported to Siberia, with tens of thousands dying en route to or on the permafrost. Tens of thousands of the country's leading women and men had fled to America and other nations in the west.

The 1950s was the decade when Lithuania's 10-year guerrilla war against the superior Soviet forces had finally come to an end, with the result that 22.000 Lithuanian forest brothers and about 70.000 Soviet soldiers had lost their lives, thus the longest and bloodiest guerrilla war of modern Europe.

Lithuanian daily life during the 1950s and 1960s was characterized by terrifying KGB activities, denunciations, imprisonments and executions without trial, widespread corruption and mismanagement in which most of the good, democratic principles many fine people had fought so hard for during the interwar period were totally forgotten and disregarded.

People felt despair, discouragement, fear ... But also a vain hope - that Western countries would come to liberate their dear homeland from the Soviet tyranny...

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Village Street, Dzūkija 1969

To see more Antanas Sutkus photos, go to:
http://www.ananasamiami.com/2011/04/photography-by-antanas-sutkus.html

The collectivization of Lithuanian agriculture (1940 -1952)

Until World War II Lithuania was an agricultural country. The sovietization of Lithuania introduced great changes in the economic structure of the country, as well as in agriculture. From the commencement of sovietization, the soviet regime sought to industrialize the country. Nevertheless, despite notable progress in industrialization, agriculture is still of principal importance in the economy of the country.

Until the soviet take-over in 1940, Lithuania was a land of small and medium farmers; 90.2% of all farms had land areas ranging from 2.5 to 75 acres and cultivated 66.2% of all arable land.

The next five photos are from: http://www.retronaut.co/2010/05/soviet-lithuania-1960s-1970s/

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Description: Glass

Description: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Snow.jpg

Description: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Huddle.jpg

Description: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Flats.jpg

"Elfa-7", an electric gramophone model 1958, manufactured by
the company "Elfa" Electro Works in Vilnius.

The story of President Alexander Stulginskis

Description: http://www.genocid.lt/Leidyba/11/knygos5.jpg
“President of Lithuania: Prisoner of the gulag. A biography of Alexander Stulginskis,” by Dr. Alfonsas Eidintas.

Aleksandras Stulginskis, was the first constitutional president after Lithuania had declared its renewed independence on 16 February 1918. He was president for the period 1920-1926, traditionally referred to as Lithuania’s second president.

He was kidnapped at his home by Stalinist forces in June 1941 and deported to a Siberian Gulag. After he was released from the inhuman captivity, he was still for years forced to live in Siberia’s deep forests, until 1956. One can ask how it could be that a former head of state of a free and independent country could be kidnapped in his own home and taken around half the globe to imprisonment in a labour camp where cruelty and inhumanity were the principal characteristics?

How could it be that the rest of the world chose to ignore such an assault against a splendid leader who proudly had been fighting for democracy and independence in a nation that before the Second World War was fully on par with its neighbours in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, both economically and as an independent state?

Just think of what would have been the reactions from the international community if one of the other state leaders from the 1920s had become victims of such a cruel abuse?

One can perhaps understand that the war made it difficult to stand up and condemn the atrocities that happened in Stalin's mighty Soviet Union, but why were there no reactions after the war?

President Stulginskis’ sad fate as a prisoner in Siberia through 15 long years, until 1956, is still too little known, and it’s high time we start spreading the story of Stulginskis throughout the world. Then his sufferings would not have been in vain, after all!

The same applies for the 13 years he lived after he had come back to Lithuania, a period when the once proud president was subjected to increasingly humiliating abuse from the Lithuanian SSR.

Stulginskis passed away in Kaunas in 1969, after having experienced nearly 30 years of humiliating and unjust assaults in Siberia and in his once proud homeland Lithuania.

It is now soon 94 years since Stulginskis, together with the other brave leaders of those days, signed Lithuania's declaration of independence, on the 16^th of February 1918.

President Aleksandras Stulginskis should not be forgotten.

Lithuania’s President Aleksandras Stulginskis built this Siberian log cabin by his
own hands, living here with his wife Ona until 1956.