THE VOICE OF INTERNATIONAL LITHUANIA
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Lithuania’s postwar face of cruelty
Antanas Sniečkus, leader of Lithuania’s Communist Party for the period 1940-1974 sent tens of thousands of his own countrymen to inhuman suffering and death in Siberian labour camps.
See:
https://vilnews.com/?p=6598
https://vilnews.com/?p=16983
Evaldas Žvinys
Wikipedia has a very good description of A.Sniečkus. A. Štromas - who was raised by Sniečkus' family - provides a very good assessment of Sniečkus in his book "Laisvės Horizontai", and he puts it in a broader context in his "Totalitarianism and the Prospects for World Order: Closing the Door on the Twentieth Century". All in all - Sniečkus was quite brutal in suppressing the mass discontent after the Soviets took over, but he was the person who prevented the mass influx of Russian speaking population into Lithuania. Also, some argue that due to his policies Lithuania developed a network of medium-sized cities while limiting the growth of one or two biggest cities - which apparently makes Lithuania different from Latvia and Estonia.
Petras Griškevičius is a leader who in my mind fits the Brezhnev era well. Nothing was happening, and I think he just was rubber-stamping the orders from Moscow, no?
Now, A.M. Brazauskas had his own ideas about what is good for Lithuania - the Lithuanian Communist Party was the first party to seceed from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. If that was not a big gamble for this Communist bureaucrat, I do not know what is - had the Soviet Union not fallen apart, this would have been an equivalent to a political suicide - with the loss of all privileges that come with it. He wanted to do a gradual transition to a market economy, and in my mind this is his greatest shortcoming. When doing it gradually, he allowed the former comrades and buddies to stay on top - and thus the old power structures were not fully taken apart. IMHO his political instinct and the ability to maneuver is unmatched to this day.
Tautietis
Category : Opinions
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