Historical Lithuania

NEW VIDEOS:

Cold War eyewitnesses
come forward

Eyewitnesses at the Lithuanian Parliament in Janaury 1991.
Photo by Albinas Kentra.

The main objective of the new BALTIC INITIATIVE and NETWORK is to strengthen mutual understanding between the countries around the Baltic Sea through an exchange of information on the Cold War period. The idea is that history should be told from the historically valuable sites at which events took place. Relevant sites include, for example: military installations and towns, prisons and prison camps, partisan bunkers, execution sites, secret police offices, sculptures and architecture or simple squares or buildings where memorable events took place.

While this information is normally handled by museums, they believe that recent history can be told effectively from these sites from the prospective of  – it happened here - with the significant help of eye witnesses. Their main task up until now has been to initiate and participate in concrete, international activities and co-operation projects that can improve this mutual understanding. Their main activity thus far has been to support and participate in international cooperation projects that strengthen these activities.

“LISTEN TO THE EYE WITNESSES”

A part of the Baltic Initiative and Network’s sharing of information process is to publish videos based on eyewitness accounts. One special feature of recent history is that many eye witnesses are still alive and can provide important information on the history of events and on valuable historical sites. These are people who were present at the sites as prisoners, partisans, participants in demonstrations, dissidents, military staff etc.

Dear readers, we would like to share with you some of their very informative videos about Lithuania during the Soviet Russian occupation. All of these videos were produced by Algis Kuzmickas of Lithuania in 2011 for the Baltic Initiative and Network.

Jonas Kadzionis - The Partisan in the Forest.
Restored and reconstructed partisan Bunkers, Lithuania.

Jonas Kadzionis was a former partisan, GULAG prisoner and deportee. He has reconstructed the former underground bunker in which he hid throughout his partisan life.

http://vimeo.com/31478972

Juozas Aleksiejunas -  Prisoner in the KGB prison
The KGB prison
The Museum of Genocide Victims, Aukų gatvė. 2A, Vilnius.

Juozas Aleksiejunas is a former partisan who was arrested by the Soviet occupation forces in 1945. He was interrogated in the KGB prison in Vilnius.

http://vimeo.com/31489560

Tomas Sernas -  Survivor of the Border Massacre.
The Medininkai Memorial. Lithuania

At 4 o’clock in the morning on July 31, 1991, eight Lithuanian policemen and customs officers were executed in Medininkai, on the Lithuanian border with Belarus. They were killed by shots to the back of the head. The executers were Soviet OMON forces from Riga (Special armed police units). One of the border officers, Tomas Sernas, miraculously survived, albeit disabled. He had been working as a biologist in Kaunas Zoo at the time and felt that he had to do something for his newly independent country so he volunteered as a customs officer.

http://vimeo.com/31512821

Vytautis Andziulis -  Underground Printer
The secret Printing House. Kaunas, Lithuania

The secret “ab” Printing House was set up in 1979 by Vytautis Andziulis, a professional printer, and Juozas Bacevičius. The printing activities took place in the home of the Andziulis family, north of Kaunas. The printing house produced 138,000 copies of 23 different books, covering Lithuanian history, religion, philosophy and poetry. The printing house was never found by the secret police although there were some close calls.

http://vimeo.com/31639961

Albinas Kentra -  The camera as a weapon
The Sites of the Freedom Demonstrations. Vilnius. Lithuania

Albinas Kentra was a former partisan, GULAG prisoner and deportee. He is mostly known for his unique video footage of the bloody January events of 1991 in Vilnius when hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian people took to the streets in their newly independent country to protect key institutions from the Soviet military forces.

http://vimeo.com/31450002

Gintautas Kazlauskas - Deported twice to Siberia.
Druskininkai Museum of Resistance and Deportations.

Gintautas Kazlauskas was deported to Siberia with his mother and little sister. His sister died because of the hard living conditions. Gintautas and his mother fled back to Lithuania but were arrested and deported once more. Following Lithuania’s independence, he returned to his fatherland after 42 years in exile. He is the founder and current director of and guide at the Druskininkai Museum of Resistance and Deportations.

http://vimeo.com/34609040

Irene Spakauskiene -  Deported children of the ice
Reconstructed Siberian Yurt. Rumsiskes, Lithuania

Irene Spakauskiene was deported to the Laptev Sea region with her family when she was a little girl. It was a region with permafrost and a temperature of up to minus 50 degrees. The stay was marked by cold, hunger, disease and death, which hit the old and the children first and foremost. The deportees lived in peat huts, so-called yurts. The windows were made of pieces of ice and the inside temperature never rose above freezing.

http://vimeo.com/31477922

We would highly recommend you visit their web site http://coldwarsites.net/
It has a wealth of information about not only Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Latvia but also Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden. This is a very informative site about a very worthwhile project.

Su pagarbe
Vincas Karnila
Associate editor

French Army in the Town Hall Square of Vilnius, Lithuania, 1812
By Jonas Damelis (1780—1840), a neoclassicist artist
associated with the School of Art at Vilnius University

By Vytautas J. Šliūpas

Two hundred years ago – on June 24, 1812, the French Grande Armée, led by Emperor Napoleon Boneparte, crossed the Nemunas River near Kaunas and invaded Czar Alexander I's Russia. I will not attempt to delineate the historical facts that are well known, but will present several episodes which deal with Lithuania and Lithuanians. Readers may be interested to know these facts, because Napoleon's first and last steps of the Russian campaign were taken in Lithuania.

War was inevitable

In April of 1812 thousands of orders were dispatched to various corners of the French Empire and Napoleon's Grande Armee was formed.  200.000 men were left in Germany and in the Duchy of Warsaw.  The main body , consisting of nine Army Corps – 450,000 soldiers – marched toward the Russian frontier.  Among the French, Dutch, Belgian, German, Italian and other not so very loyal mobilized allies (29,000 Prussians and 34,000 Austrians), was a Spanish regiment and 130 battalions of reservists scattered in the vastness of the Empire.

...Ignoring the approaching war, extravagant parties and banquets were held at the Tulleries.

                        ***********

Czar Alexander I was already in Vilnius anticipating Napoleon's attack, which from April 8 was unavoidable.  At that date the Russian government sent an ultimatum to the French Emperor demanding withdrawal of his Army from Prussia and other occupied locations east of the Elbe River.  The Emperor thus had no other choice but to fight a war.

...In Vilnius, magnificent daily banquets were also in full swing in honor of the Czar.  Preparations for war were all but forgotten.

                        ************

On June 23, the Grande Armee – 400,000 strong and speaking some ten different languages - „a Tower of Babel on the march“ - was preparing to ford the Nemunas River near Kaunas.  The river was hidden from view by steep valleys and the Pilviskiai forest.  On that day, Major Count Roman Soltys, commander of the Polish cavalry squadron stationed near the Nemunas, noticed a large carriage pulled by six horses galloping towards him.  When it halted nearby, Napoleon himself emerged, in deep thought and quite tired after a long journey.

Napoleon's Army Crossing the Nemunas in Kaunas.  June 24, 1812
Wood carving. Artist: Dž. Bagetti. Carver: I. Klauberis

The Emperor and his retinue, not wanting to be recognized by the Russian scouts, donned Polish officer's uniforms and walked toward the Nemunas to reconnoiter... That same night, closer to midnight, Napoleon galloped his horse again toward the Nemunas.  In the darkness it was difficult to see the other bank of the river.  Suddenly his horse reared – frightened by a hare – and the Emperor fell down.  Rapidly jumping up he remounted his horse.  One of his staff remarked:”This is a very bad omen!  A true Roman would withdraw!”

But Napoleon was not one to believe in bad omens...

Next day, June 24, Napoleon was greeted by a marvelous view, all the surrounding hills and valleys were full of troops and horses.  When the sun rose and lit the entire moving mass and their shining weapons, an order was given to march.  Soldiers, formed in three columns, started toward three bridges, which materialized at night as if by magic...

There was no resistance.  The Russians had already retreated.

Suddenly the skies darkened.  Thunder and lightning roared like the enemy's artillery.  The rain came down in torrents and flooded the entire area.  Many horses were lost.  Some saw in this violent outburst of nature another bad omen of impending doom.

On the heels of the fleeing Czar Alexander I, Napoleon entered Vilnius on June 28 and remained there for twenty days. Then he resumed his march to Moscow...

The die was cast! 

The retreat from Russia started on October 19, 1812 when Napoleon and his Grand Armee, now only 100,000 strong, abandoned the Kremlin.  About this exit the Russian commanding general Kutuzov learned only on October 23.  However, during the 32 days of Napoleon's stay in Moscow, Kutuzov was able to deploy against him 85,000 infantry, 35,000 cavalry and some 200,000 reservists.  Kutuzov had already cut the retreat route near Jaroslavets which was reached by Napoleon on October 24.  After a battle at Kaluga, where the French lost some 700 men, Napoleon decided to retreat toward Smolensk.  The bitter Russian winter, which started with a snowstorm on November 6, was having its effect on the – even though not yet defeated – French Grande Armee.  General Platov's Cossack cavalry was harassing its flanks without respite.  When Napoleon reached Smolensk on November 10, his Grande Armee had shrunk to 12,000 men and 40,000 camp followers.  In Smolensk they only stayed 4 days.  Then on November 25 they reached the Berezina River, where bridges were already blown up by the Russians.  The French retreat was cut off!  But luck was with Napoleon.  Here he met with 20,000 of Marshal Victor's soldiers who were kept behind in reserve.

Napoleon rested on a farm in the mansion of Baron Korsach, the caretaker of the Radvilas family estates.

Napoleon's withdrawal from Russia,
a painting by Adolph Northen.

The Berezina River was half frozen, all bridges had been destroyed.  The French troops had to get across it at all costs. They had to find a ford nearby, because at Borisovo, directly across from where they were camping, the Russians had assembled 120,000 soldiers... They had to find that ford very quickly.  Time and the Russians were relentlessly pressing without mercy.  While the Russian Admiral Chichakov was happy just watching the French movements from across the river, General Wittgenstein could attack Marshal Victor's Corps at any time.  Kutuzov itself was in a position to attack Napoleon's rear guard and the left flank of his Grande Armee, or whatever was left of it.

At this crucial moment a real miracle or luck happened for the French.  General J. B. Corbineau, finding the river crossing at the Borisovo village blocked by the Russians, led his decimated brigade up the river through overgrown bushes and very dense forest.  Suddenly, he came upon a Lithuanian villager, whose horse was wet up to the breast.  That meat the villager and his horse had come across, and a ford had to be nearby.  The Lithuanian agreed to take the General to a point some five leagues upstream from Borisovo – to the Studyanka village whose log houses were on the river bank just across from the Bychi hamlet.  At this location the river divided into several branches dotted with swampy islands, and was flowing between low wooded hills.

Napoleon's crossing of the Berezina
an 1866 painting by January Suchodolski
oil on canvas, National Museum in Poznań

Everyone realized that this was the place one could wade across, as the water reached only to the armpits.  General Corbineau and his soldiers jumped without hesitation into the icy water, which drowned and swept away 70 of the men downstream.  But the majority of his soldiers reached the right bank.  It was proven that a temporary bridge could be built at this location.

Napoleon ordered his engineers to start working on the bridge immediately, while the remainder of his Grande Armee continued to face the Russians at Borisovo.

During the night of November 25, 400 French engineers came to the location and completely naked, standing in the water up to their armpits, started building a wooden trestle bridge.  They drove logs into the muddy Berezina ignoring the floating ice sheets all around them.  “Some of them” - remembers grenadier Pils - “died on the spot from exposure and were carried downstream frozen into ice blocks.  But the tragic end of their comrades did not stop others from their urgent task.”

Across the river one could see the campfires of a Russian Army unit.  It was General Chuplitz's division, some 6,000 strong.  When the dawn broke, the French were surprised to find that the Russians had abandoned their camp.  At a distance they saw30 Russian cannons being towed toward Borisovo.  Segur, who saw this with his own eyes, noted: “It required only one cannon shot to destroy this bridge of our salvation, which we had built during the night from river bank to river bank.  But the Russian artillery retreated at the moment when we ourselves were just bringing up our own guns into position”.

To the great amazement of the French soldiers, the Russians retreated at the most critical moment,believing that the French were coming over to trap them.  They were concentrating all their forces at Borisovo.

The first bridge was completed in the morning of November 26 and 9,300 men of the Oudinot's Corps crossed the Berezina.

Napoleon's life in the hands of a Lithuanian

After suffering great losses but nevertheless successfully crossing the Berezina River, Napoleon divided its forces into several groups, so they all would not be retreating through the same previously depleted areas.  The surviving Lithuanian and Polish units were ordered to separate themselves from the Grande Armee at Molodecno.  They were to retreat toward Warsaw via Alytus and Gardinas.  The cavalry units were to cross the Namunas River at Merkine.

The main French column continued to retreat toward Vilnius.  However, because of the continuous extreme winter cold, with temperatures down to -20 degrees below zero, and the collapse of discipline, Napoleon decided to abandon his demoralized troops at Smurgonys.  After turning the command to King Murat, on December 5, 1812, Napoleon turned his carriage toward Paris.  At first, Napoleon was escorted by his own light cavalry, but after a few leagues he continued his flight alone accompanied only by his trusted Lithuanian aide-de-campe Count Dunin-Vancevičius (Wonsowiczius).

It is known that, right at the start of his flight, Napoleon handed to Count Vancevičius two loaded pistols and ordered to shoot him whenever there was danger of Napoleon falling into the enemy's hands.  Napoleons life at the crucial moments of his flight to Paris was entrusted to a Lithuanian officer.

Before Napoleon reached Paris on December 18, 1812, he was overtaken by a military dispatcher from Lithuania telling him some very grim news...

After leaving Vilnius for Kaunas, the French Guards artillery and the surviving Imperial field wagons with boxes of collected loot were unable to negotiate the steep icy slopes of a narrow road at Paneriai.  Soldiers threw down their guns, abandoned their cannons, and started emptying the supply wagons.  The looting frenzy was so great that the French soldiers failed to notice flying bullets of the encircling Cossack cavalry shooting at them.  The rout of what was left of the Grande Armee was complete – the final blow was delivered just outside Vilnius at Paneriai.

From that moment on there was no longer any French artillery left.  Marshal Ney, who desperately tried to save the last units of his artillery, rapidly gave up the effort.  Marshall Victor was last seen walking on foot toward Kaunas.  He was alone because his once loyal soldiers of the rear guard abandoned him.

The last report to Napoleon by Marshal Berthier vividly describes these final hours: “I have to report to Your Imperial Highness, that there is no more any discipline left in the regular army, or in the Guard units, which at this moment consist of 400, perhaps 500 men.  Generals and other officers have lost everything they had: many of them have frozen limbs.  Many corpses litter the roadways, and houses are full with dying men. At this moment the Army consists of a column only a few leagues long.  Receiving no orders, this column starts walking in the morning and stops at night.  The Marshals are walking on foot along with all other commoners.  The Army has ceased to exist.”

Thus ended Napoleon's dream of conquering the Czarist Russian Empire.

Napoléon and General Lauriston — Peace at all costs!
By Vasily Vereshchagin (1899-1900). Oil on canvas. Historical Museum, Moscow, Russia.

References: Philippe Segur “History of Napoleon's Russian Campaign”,  Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1958, presented by Henry L. Gaidys in “Lituanus”, Spring 1984, p. 30-31;  Lietuvių Enciklopedija, vol XIX, p.520, Boston, 1959;  and Andre Castelot “Napoleon”, The Easton Press, Norwalk, CT, 1991.

PICTURE: The castles and the town of Kernave (R. Sidrys). Kernavė is a unique 5 mounds complex, honoured as being the first capital of Lithuania. The first settlers appeared here as early as in 9th-8th millennium BC, in the Epipaleolithic period. Since then until the very Early Middle Ages, the territory was continuously settled by people who left their traces. In written sources Kernavė was first mentioned in 1279 in the Livonian Chronicle and the Herman Vartberg Chronicle, where it was described as Traidenis’, the Great Duke’s of Lithuania, estate (1269-1282). At that time Kernavė was the most significant economic-political centre of Lithuania. In 1390 Kernavė was burnt in an attack by Crusaders. After the fire the wooden town and castles have never been rebuilt.

The first people settled in the territory of Lithuania after the last glacial period in the 10th millennium BC. Over a millennium, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who arrived in the 3rd – 2nd millennium BC, mixed with the local population and formed various Baltic tribes. The first written mention of Lithuania is found in a medieval German manuscript, the Annals of Quedlinburg, on 14 February 1009.

Initially inhabited by fragmented Baltic tribes, in the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, who was crowned as King of Lithuania on 6 July 1253. After his assassination in 1263, pagan Lithuania was a target of the Christian crusades of the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order. Despite the devastating century-long struggle with the Orders, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded rapidly overtaking former Slavic principalities of Kievan Rus’.

By the end of the 14th century, Lithuania was the largest country in Europe and included present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia. The geopolitical situation between the west and the east determined the multi-cultural and multi-confessional character of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Lithuanian ruling elite practiced religious tolerance and borrowed Slavic state traditions, such as using the Chancery Slavonic language for official documents.

In 1385, the Grand Duke Jogaila accepted Poland's offer to become its king. He converted Lithuania to Christianity and established a personal union between Poland and Lithuania. After two civil wars Vytautas the Great became the Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1392. During his reign Lithuania reached the peak of its territorial expansion, centralization of the state was begun, and the Lithuanian nobility became increasingly prominent in state politics. Thanks to close cooperation, the armies of Poland and Lithuania achieved a great victory over the Teutonic Knights in 1410 at the Battle of Grunwald, one of the largest battles of medieval Europe.

After the deaths of Jogaila and Vytautas, the Lithuanian nobility attempted to break the union between Poland and Lithuania, independently selecting Grand Dukes from the Jagiellon dynasty. However, Lithuania was forced to seek a closer alliance with Poland when, at the end of the 15th century, the growing power of the Grand Duchy of Moscow threatened Lithuania's Russian principalities and sparked the Muscovite–Lithuanian Wars and the Livonian War.

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was created in 1569. As a member of the Commonwealth, Lithuania retained its institutions, including a separate army, currency, and statutory laws. However, eventually Polonization affected all aspects of Lithuanian life: politics, language, culture, even national identity. From the mid-16th to the mid-17th centuries culture, arts, and education flourished, fueled by the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. From 1573, Kings of Poland and Grand Dukes of Lithuania were elected by the nobility, who were granted ever increasing Golden Liberties. These liberties, especially the liberum veto (Latin for "I freely forbid"), led to anarchy and the eventual dissolution of the state.

During the Northern Wars (1655–1661), the Lithuanian territory and economy were devastated by the Swedish army. Before it could fully recover, Lithuania was again ravaged during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The war, plague, and famine resulted in the loss of approximately 40% of the country's inhabitants. Foreign powers, especially Russia, became dominant players in the domestic politics of the Commonwealth. Numerous factions among the nobility used the Golden Liberties to prevent any reforms. Eventually, the Commonwealth was partitioned in 1772, 1792, and 1795 by the Russian Empire, Prussia, and Habsburg Austria.

The largest area of Lithuanian territory came under the control of Russia. After unsuccessful uprisings in 1831 and 1863, the Tsarist authorities implemented a number of Russification policies, including a ban on the Lithuanian press and the closing of cultural and educational institutions, and Lithuania became part of a new administrative region called Northwestern Krai. After the Russian – Turkey war in 1877–1878, when intervention of the German diplomacy withdrew from Russia fair winnings for the benefit of Turkey, the relationship between Russia and the German Empire became complicated. The Russian Empire resumed the construction of fortresses at its western borders for defenses against a potential invasion from Germany in the West. On 7 July 1879 the Russian Emperor Alexander II approved of a proposal from the Russian military leadership to build the largest 65 km2 (25 sq mi) "first-class" defensive structure in the entire state – Kaunas Fortress. Between 1868 and 1914, approximately 635,000 people, almost 20% of the population, left Lithuania. Large numbers of Lithuanians went to the United States first in 1867–1868 after a famine in Lithuania. Nevertheless, a Lithuanian National Revival laid the foundations of the modern Lithuanian nation and independent Lithuania.

LITHUANIA in the 20th century

The original 20 members of the Council of Lithuania after signing the Act of Independent Lithuania, 16 February 1918.

During World War I, the Council of Lithuania (Lietuvos Taryba) declared the independence of Lithuania on 16 February 1918, and the re-establishment of the Lithuanian State. During 1918-20 Lithuania successfully fought a war with newly independent Poland to defend its independence. At the end of 1920, however, Poland annexed Lithuania's capital city and province of Vilnius, which it held until World War II. For 19 years Kaunas became the temporary capital of Lithuania. Lithuania refused to have diplomatic relations with Poland until 1938 on the grounds that Poland illegally held the Vilnius region. After declaring independence, Lithuania also fought against the Bermondt-Avalov army, a German-sponsored group of military adventurers that sought to preserve German influence in the Baltic region, and against Russia. In November 1918, the Red Army invaded the country but ultimately was repulsed by the forces of the young Lithuanian government. On July 9, 1920, Soviet leader Vladimir I. Lenin signed a peace treaty with Lithuania, "forever" denouncing Russia's claims to the territory and recognizing the Lithuanian state.

From 1920 to 1940, independent Lithuania made great strides in nation building and development. A progressive land reform program was introduced in 1922, a cooperative movement was organized, and a strong currency and conservative fiscal management were maintained. Schools and universities were established (there had been no institutions of higher education and very few secondary schools under Russian rule), and illiteracy was substantially reduced. Artists and writers of the period produced works that have become classics.

In the early 1920s, Lithuania had a border dispute with Germany. The city and region of Klaipeda (Memel in German) had been under German rule for 700 years. Originally inhabited by Lithuanians, it was detached from Germany in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles and placed under French administration. In 1923 Lithuanians organized an insurrection and took over the Klaipeda region. This region was ceded back to Germany after a German ultimatum in March 1939 stated that Germany would invade and take the region back by force if their demands were not met.

On August 23, 1939, Joseph V. Stalin and Adolf Hitler concluded the notorious Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). The agreement had a secret protocol that divided Poland, much of Central Europe, and the Baltic states between Germany and the Soviet Union. Lithuania, at first assigned to the German sphere of influence, in September was transferred to the Soviet Union. In October 1939, the Soviet Union forced on Lithuania a nonaggression pact that allowed Moscow to garrison 20,000 troops in the country. In return, the city of Vilnius, now occupied by Soviet troops, was granted to Lithuania. On June 15, 1940, Lithuania was overrun by the Red Army. At first a procommunist, so-called people's government was installed, and elections to a new parliament were organized. The elections were noncompetitive; a single approved list of candidates was presented to the voters. The parliament met on July 21, declared Soviet rule, and "joined" the Soviet Union as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic on August 6, 1940. The United States and many other countries refused to recognize the Soviet occupation.

Soviet rule brought about radical political and economic changes and Stalinist terror, which culminated in deportations to Siberia of more than 30,000 people on the night of June 14-15, 1941. Germany interrupted the Stalinist terror by attacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

The Lithuanian leadership went underground. An anti-Nazi resistance movement developed, publishing underground newspapers, organizing economic boycotts, and gathering arms. The resistance hoped that after victory the Western allies would insist on the restoration of Lithuanian statehood.

The nationalist Lithuanian resistance was supported by many Lithuanian political parties and resistance groups, including the Social Democrats and a coalition known as the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania, which continued its activities many years after Lithuania was retaken by the Red Army. In 1943 this resistance frustrated German efforts at organizing a Lithuanian Schutz-Staffel (SS) legion. The Nazis responded by arresting Lithuanian nationalists and by closing universities. Moreover, occupation authorities succeeded, in the period 1941-44, in conscripting or capturing tens of thousands of people to work in Germany or to serve in the German military. Many perished in prisons or concentration camps. The main victims, however, were members of Lithuania's Jewish community. More than 200.000 Jews or almost 95 percent of the community's population, were massacred by Nazi squads.

Forcing the Germans out of Lithuania by 1944 the Red Army reestablished control and re-established the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Sovietization continued with the arrival of Communist party leaders to create a local party administration. The mass deportation campaigns of 1941-52 exiled 29 923 families to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union. Official statistics state that over 120 000 people were deported from Lithuania during this period while Lithuanian sources estimate the number of political prisoners and deportees at 300 000. In response to these events an estimated 100,000 Lithuanian partisans fought a guerrilla war against the Soviet system. An estimated 30,000 partisans and their supporters were killed and many more were arrested and deported to Siberian gulags. It is estimated that Lithuania lost 780,000 people during 1940 – 1952. As a measure for Sovietization, Russification and industrial development Soviet authorities encouraged immigration of other Soviet workers especially Russians to Lithuania.

Soviet rule in Lithuania displayed well-known features of communist rule. The party had a monopoly on power, and the management of the economy was centralized. The regime collectivized agriculture from 1947 to 1951. Secret police terrorized the society and attempted to transfer Lithuanian nationalist loyalties to the communists. Deportations to Siberia were resumed. Religion was brutally suppressed. One Roman Catholic bishop was shot, one perished in prison, two died shortly after release, and two were banished for more than thirty years, leaving only one in office. Almost one-third of the clergy was deported, although survivors were allowed to return after Stalin's death in 1953. Eventually, the training of new priests was essentially stopped.

Underground resistance never disappeared, although the armed underground was destroyed. As a movement, resistance was first sparked by efforts to defend the Roman Catholic Church. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which led to increased repression in the Soviet Union, the dissident movement spread. In the 1970s, Lithuania had numerous underground publications. The most significant and regularly published among them was The Chronicle of the Catholic Church of Lithuania . It was never uncovered by the Soviet secret police, the Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti--KGB), and was published for twenty years. In 1972 a young student, Romas Kalanta, immolated himself in protest against Soviet rule. Army units had to be sent in to quell a street rebellion by students that followed the self-immolation. The Committee for the Defense of Religious Rights and the Helsinki Watch Committee were established in the underground. Dissident work brought arrests and imprisonment. At the same time, the Lithuanian intelligentsia, especially writers and artists, demanded greater freedom of creative expression and protection of the Lithuanian language, traditions, and cultural values from the pressure of Russification that intensified during the administration of Leonid I. Brezhnev (1964-82).

The political and economic crisis that began in the U.S.S.R. in the mid-1980s also affected Lithuania and Lithuanians as well as other Balts offered active support to Gorbachev's program of social and political reforms. Under the leadership of intellectuals the Lithuanian reform movement Sajudis was formed in mid-1988 and declared a program of democratic and national rights winning nation-wide popularity. On Sajudis' demand the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet passed constitutional amendments on the supremacy of Lithuanian laws over Soviet legislation annulled the 1940 decisions on proclaiming Lithuania a part of the U.S.S.R. legalized a multi-party system and adopted a number of other important decisions. A large number of LCP members also supported the ideas of Sajudis and with Sajudis support Algirdas Brazauskas was elected First Secretary of the Central Committee of the LCP in 1988. In December 1989 the Brazauskas-led LCP split from the CPSU and became an independent party renaming itself in 1990 the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party.

In 1990 Sajudis-backed candidates won the elections to the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet. On March 11 1990 its chairman Vytautas Landsbergis proclaimed the restoration of Lithuanian independence formed a new Cabinet of Ministers headed by Kazimiera Prunskiene and adopted the Provisional Fundamental Law of the state and a number of by-laws. The U.S.S.R. demanded to revoke the act and began employing political and economic sanctions against Lithuania as well as demonstrating military force. On January 10 1991 U.S.S.R. authorities seized the central publishing house and other premises in Vilnius and unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the elected government by sponsoring a local "National Salvation Committee." Three days later the Soviet Army forcibly took over the TV tower killing 14 civilians and injuring 700. During the national plebiscite on February 9, 91% of those who took part in the voting (76% of all eligible voters) voted in favor of an independent democratic Lithuania. Led by the tenacious Landsbergis Lithuania's leadership continued to seek Western diplomatic recognition of its independence. Soviet military-security forces continued forced conscription occasional seizure of buildings attacking customs posts and sometimes killing customs and police officials.

On 4 February 1991, Iceland became the first country to recognize Lithuanian independence. After the Soviet August Coup, independent Lithuania received wide official recognition and joined the United Nations on 17 September 1991. The last Soviet troops left Lithuania on 31 August 1993 – even earlier than they departed from East Germany, which had not seen repression in recent times on the same level as the 1991 Vilnius massacre.

Lithuania became a member of the United Nations in 1991 and a full member of NATO and the European Union in spring 2004.

Dalia Kuodyte.

This article is based on a speech manuscript by Dalia Kuodyte, Member of the Parliament, former Director General of the Centre of Genocide and Resistance (LGGRTC).

“In the trains’ cattle cars the passengers were hardly given any food except from a little water and some inedible soup. There was scarcely any air to breathe as everyone was jammed together and the cars had only a few small windows covered with bars. A hole in the floor served as a toilet. Some of the people, especially the infants became sick immediately and died. The bodies of those who died on the journey were left on the side of the tracks.”

The string of tragedies began in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin concluded a cynical agreement that divided up Central Europe between the two totalitarian countries. According to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Lithuania was to fall into the Soviet zone of influence.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Lithuania was occupied three times: first by the USSR in 1940, then by Nazi Germany in 1941, and finally by the USSR again in 1944. 

Pre-war Lithuania’s position of neutrality on the eve of WWII did not protect the country from its sad fate. According to Lithuanian state institutions, the damage caused by the USSR‘s occupation to the Republic of Lithuania in financial terms is $278 billion. During Nazi and Soviet occupations, including 200,000 Holocaust victims, the losses of the population of Lithuania amounted to 33 percent of the total number of the country's population in 1940. Lithuania lost 1 million people to deportations, executions, incarceration, the murder of the political opposition and forced emigration.

The total number of persons registered as “anti-Soviet elements” reached 320,000 entries. There were teachers and professors, school and college students, farmers, industry workers and craftsmen among them.

A cargo of 16.246 people were crammed into cattle cars
June 14-18, 1941 were the dark days of the first massive arrest and deportation of the Lithuanian population. A cargo of 16,246 people were crammed into cattle cars. Moscow’s instruction required separate men from their families. So, 3,915 men were separated and transported to concentration camps in the Krasnoyarsk territory while 12,331 women, children and elderly people were transported to the Altai Mountains territory, the Komi republic and to the Tomsk region. 

Forty percent these deportees were children below 16 years old. More than half of the deported died quickly. Pregnant women and babies born in the cattle cars were the first victims – they died in the trains. The deportation process was interrupted by the German-Soviet war.

The Soviets resumed mass deportations to Siberia and other eastern regions of the USSR after recapturing Lithuania from Nazi Germany in 1944. The partisan anti-Soviet war for democratic and independent Lithuania began in 1944. Some 22,000 Lithuanian partisans lost their lives in unequal war against the Soviet regular army and NKVD units. From 1949 the armed resistance started to wane. This guerilla war continued until 1953. The last resistance fighter refused to surrender and shot himself in 1965.

Partisans, their supporters and non-armed opposition made up a big group among those who were deported in 1945 – 1947. Another big group of deportees was those who tried to escape service in the Red Army. Ethnic Germans and members of their families, who did not leave Lithuania, were deported as well. 

22-23 May 1948: 41.000 Lithuanians seized in their homes and deported
The situation changed in 1948. The most extensive deportation from Lithuania was held on May 22 and 23, 1948. Over these two days 12,100 families, numbering over 41,000 people, were seized from their homes and exiled. In 1948, 50 percent of deportees were accused not of their relations with the armed guerillas. Their official guilt was their social class – they were owners of private farms. In 1949, already two-thirds of the deportees belonged to this category while in 1951 they absolutely dominated the Soviet secret police‘s statistics. 

Such change was due to the collectivization campaign in the Lithuania’s countryside. In 1948, the Soviets started to implement mass collectivization, appropriating land and livestock. This resulted in establishment of kolkhozes. In 1950, some 90 percent of land was given to kolkhozes. Mass deportations continued until the death of Josef Stalin in 1953.
How did the typical deportation look? The NKVD broke into an apartment or house and arrested all the family members. The NKVD marched them onto the back of a truck. In the railway station as far as the eye could see there were men and women clutching suitcases and bundles of hastily gathered clothing, the elderly and the disabled searching for places to sit and mothers holding their children, all surrounded by Red Army soldiers brandishing weapons. 

Usually, the men were put on separate trains. They usually were transported to prisons and the Gulags (concentration camps) while females, kids and the elderly were deported to live in God-forsaken settlements in Siberia. 

In the cattle cars the passengers were given hardly any food except a little water and some inedible soup. There was scarcely any air to breathe as everyone was jammed together and the cars had only a few small windows covered with bars. A hole in the floor served as a toilet. Some of the people, especially the infants became sick immediately and died. The bodies of those who died on the journey were left on the side of the tracks.

After one month the train reached some Siberian center - for example, Novosibirsk. In this case, scores of wagons were transferred onto enormous barges and sent up the River Ob to some remote settlement to live in a bug-infested hut.

The Soviets forced all to work, even as temperatures plunged to -45°C (-49°F)
The Soviets immediately put their prisoners to work. They forced women and teenage girls to march into the forest to cut trees. They worked in deep snow, even as temperatures plunged to minus 45 degrees Celsius. Prisoners cut up trees and later lived in huts made from those tree branches. Sometimes it was so cold they awoke frozen to the ground.

Some deportees collapsed while the guards pushed the others along to another day of work. The collapsed prisoners were then left for dead somewhere behind in the wilderness.

In exchange for their efforts, prisoners received a small amount of hard bread. They were working for food. A full day of hard work was equal to 500 grams of bread. Physically weaker prisoners could only earn 100 grams of bread.

Working prisoners shared their meager rations with those who could not work – the little children, the old and the infirm. Much of the time people had virtually nothing to eat and everyone suffered from constant hunger. Their bodies were swollen and covered with boils caused by malnutrition. Their skin was inflamed by mosquito bites. 

The youngest children were affected the most by the harsh conditions and almost all of them were sick. Many of them died from starvation and disease. The elderly followed the children. Those who remained could only struggle to dig graves in the frozen earth. 

Gradually, the survivors tried to adjust to life in Siberia. Deportees were permitted to use a patch of ground on which to grow potatoes.

In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided that deportees should be released. In late 1950s, the survivors started to return to Lithuania.

Deaths of the deportees began to make headlines only in late the 1980s
There is an old and cynical saying that one death is a tragedy, but a thousand are just a front-page headline. Well, of course, deaths of thousands of deportees began to make headlines only in late the 1980s. Let’s look to personal tragedies. 

The Šiauliai Aušros Museum has 234 letters of political prisoners, deportees and partisans addressed to their family members and loved ones who managed to escape the Soviet terror in Lithuania. 

Lawyer Ignas Urbaitis from town of Šiauliai was arrested on October 6, 1944. He was sentenced for 15 years of slavery work in concentration camps. He died in the Taishet concentration camp in the Irkutsk region in 1952. 

He wrote letters to his wife Elena Urbaitienė. In 1947, he wrote, “I’m always walking in the room. Sometimes there is very little room left for it. Sometimes I can make just one step or even less because the room is covered by sleeping or lying bodies. I walk anyway. Other people find it strange. If you can imagine me, imagine me walking backwards and forwards like an animal in the zoo cage. Walking gives comfort to my nerves and heart.”

Urbaitis, like all prisoners of concentration camps, was allowed to write only two letters per year. These letters should be written in Russian because all letters were read by the censors. So, prisoners avoided to write about their sufferings directly because of this censorship.

They found out later that they were eating a friend of theirs who had just died
The survivors of the Gulags and deportations can speak openly now. Former deportee Janė Meškauskaitė says that she and her family was kidnapped by the NKVD one night because her father was member of the ruling Tautininkų Party in the pre-war Lithuania. Her family was put on a train and dropped off at a remote village in the Tomsk region many days later. 

They were among the more fortunate deportees, as Russian farmers from Kazakhstan who were exiled in the early 1930s for being to wealthy inhabited the village. They understood her family‘s plight and welcomed them into society. Nevertheless, food was scarce.

“My father once bought some meat from a local crook. He and a friend hid in the woods to cook and eat it so that thugs wouldn’t steal it. They found out later that they were eating a friend of theirs who had just died,” said Meškauskaitė.

Bread was also strictly rationed. “People in our village were allotted 300 grams of flour a day. One time the flourmill broke down so we were simply given whole grains. People were so hungry that they would just eat them uncooked. Of course, most had bad teeth and couldn’t chew them so they would end up undigested in the latrines. Many people would go and collect them, wash them, and make porridge,” she said.

Vytautas Stašaitis was a son of an air force major in pre-World War II independent Lithuania. The family’s spacious house was commandeered by Soviets troops in 1945. His family was exiled to Siberia but he managed to go underground as part of the resistance movement.

Shortly thereafter a supposed friend lured him into a trap. He was asked to supply ammunition for an assassination attempt on the head of the local NKVD. His “friend” gave him up and he was mercilessly beaten during his interrogation. 

“I wanted to hang myself in my cell but they prevented me. They gave me 10 years forced labor for sedition and shipped me to Krasnoyarsk to cut trees. They marched us for six days with barely any food and water. Those who couldn’t keep up were shot. When we got to the labor camp they clothed us in the uniforms of dead soldiers. They still had bullet holes and blood stains,” Stašaitis said adding that political prisoners were forced to live together with aggressive Russian criminals who were sentenced for murders and robbery. 

We killed the dog with our axes...The dog meat meals were some of the best of my life
Life in Stalin-era labor camps was a dehumanizing experience. The diet allocated to prisoners was less than that required for survival. “As inmates we were chained in pairs. Once my partner and I thought a wolf was attacking us. It turned out to be a guard dog that had broken loose from its chain. We killed it with our axes and buried it in the snow. We returned many times to cook and eat it. Those were some of the best meals of my life,” he said.

Life was not easy for those who survived and returned to Lithuania. Meškauskaitė returned to Lithuania in 1958. “We were placed in an impossible situation. The government required us to register with the local municipality or face renewed deportation. In order to register, we needed an employer, but no one would have courage to give a work to former deportee. I lived and worked illegally for many years with the help of relatives,” she said.

Now former political prisoners, deportees and partisans receive an additional pension, which Lithuanian state finances can manage. Russia, which officially proclaimed inheritance of all international rights and obligations of the USSR, shows no will to pay compensation to them. The Russian state has never said a word asking for forgiveness for the Soviet terror in the occupied Baltic states. However, it was done by Russian dissidents. 

Russian Duma MP Sergey Kovalev did it in the Lithuanian parliament in June, 2000. By the way, it is symbolic that in 1974-1975, Kovalev was jailed in the Vilnius KGB prison, which is the Museum of Genocide Victims now, for cooperation with the underground magazine The Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church.

Kovalev said in his address to the Lithuanian parliament, “It is not true that nations do not commit crimes. The Germans and we should understand it. If we don’t understand our guilt, we can’t expect victory over cannibalistic ideologies. We went to demonstrations in the 1930s supporting mass killings. We are guilty, our Western neighbors. It is my nation that occupied the Baltic countries. Please, forgive us.” 

Felix Krasavin, a former Soviet-time political prisoner now living in Israel, spoke to the forum of some 5,000 former Lithuanian political prisoners and deportees in the Vilnius Sport Arena in June, 2000. “Soviet fascism killed many more people than its German brother. The lies of Soviet fascism were much bigger than those of German fascism,” he said.

During their nearly five decades of occupation, the Soviets killed or deported hundreds of thousands Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian men, women and children. However, this was only a fraction of the tens of millions of people in the USSR and Central Europe whom communists subjected to the midnight knock on the door, arrest, intentionally created famine and starvation, torture, slave labor, or execution.

Communists killed at least 100 million people
Nicolas Werth, French historian and one of the authors of “Livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism)” say the communists killed at least 100 million people in the world. During his lecture in Vilnius University in 2000, he said communism was born in Russia because this country had no democratic experience. During 80 years, one-third of the planet’s population lived under communist regimes. "The closer the country was to the center of repression [Moscow], the more the models of repression were similar to the Soviet ones: public trials, tortures, killings, deportations,” he said.

Virtually no one has been called to account for what was done. The West has chosen to forget these horrors. Nothing of these horrors is taught in their schools. There is no grand museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to those whose lives were destroyed by the communists.

No Communist Party bosses in Russia have ever been made to pay for their transgressions. Not one labor camp commandant has been forced to answer for his inhumanity. There is no talk of reparations. The Kremlin objects whenever anyone raises questions about the injustice of the past. 

The great crimes of Soviet communism are mostly just remembered in the hearts and souls of the victims.

Lithuanians are considering the Soviet terror corresponded to genocide. Most of those deported were doomed - a third of them to a speedy death and the rest to a life of misery in Siberia. One only had to be an honest Lithuanian citizen to face deportation. A lot of work has to be done to clarify world opinion.

CHRISTMAS IN SIBERIA
A story about a Lithuanian family
deported to the Lena River delta.
North Siberia, year 1942

Text: Leona T. Gustaff

“The tents were freezing cold, harsh, and distressing; so, the adults decided to build better living conditions.  "We can build barracks," said one Lithuanian, "We can catch the logs in the Lena River." The men waded barefoot into the icy water, caught floating logs, brought them to shore, and built the barracks. They covered the outside walls with snow and ice which they learned would help keep out the frigid temperature. They also found a large iron stove, which they placed in the middle of the building.”

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The face of cruelty –

Lithuania’s quisling

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.

Antanas Sniečkus, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania (from 15 August 1940 until his death in 1974), is said to have been the initiator of the first mass deportations of Lithuanians in June 1941. He even had his own brother, with his ​family, deported to Siberia, where his brother died.

Antanas Sniečkus was born in 1903, in the village of Būbleliai, 60 km west of Kaunas. During the First World War, his family fled to Russia where he observed the Russian revolution of 1917. In 1919, his family returned to Lithuania; by 1920 he was already a member of the Bolshevik Party. In the same year, he was arrested for anti-governmental activities. He was released from prison on bail, but fled to Moscow, and became an agent of the Comintern. In Moscow, he earned the trust of Zigmas Angarietis, and Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas, and became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania. In 1926, the Comintern sent Sniečkus to Lithuania to replace the recently-executed Karolis Požėla as head of the banned and underground Communist Party of Lithuania.

From 1926 to 1930, he engaged in subversive activities in Lithuania, and was again arrested and imprisoned for them in the Kaunas Prison in 1930. In 1933, Sniečkus was released in exchange for Lithuanian political prisoners held in the USSR. In 1936, he returned to Lithuania. In 1939, he was arrested again, and sentenced to eight years in prison.

After the Soviets invaded and occupied Lithuania, Sniečkus was released from prison on 18 June 1940, and became the head of the Department of National Security. Foreign Affairs Commissar Vladimir Dekanozov, arrived in Lithuania a few days earlier on June 15, 1940, to organize the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union. As party secretary, Sniečkus issued Vladimir Dekanozov’s orders in the party’s name.

Sniečkus helped create an atmosphere of terror prior to the elections of the newly established, by the Soviet authorities, People's Seimas in July 1940. Only the Communist Party of Lithuania and its collaborators could nominate candidates. People were threatened in various ways to participate in the elections, but the results were falsified anyway. 21 July 1940 the People's Parliament, declared that the Lithuanian "people" wanted to join the Soviet Union, and 3 August 3 1940, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR incorporated Lithuania into the Soviet Union.

The process of annexation was formally over and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was created. From 15 August 1940, until his death in 1974, Sniečkus remained the First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party.

34 years of terror and atrocities against his own people had finally come to an end.