crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
of believers’ families: “Well, children, it is for you to decide, because now you can see the reason for
your future problems.” Encouraged, the children beat Kristina Žiurkevičiūtė during the break for being
“an outsider” and for her failure to submit to the key condition entailed by Soviet system: hypocrisy and
lying. Consequently, two weeks later she was sent to another school to prevent her “from poisoning the
atmosphere in the class”. Those were the good years of the Brezhnev period in Kaunas, the city of my
childhood.
I recently met an elderly man in Washington, who shared with me his recollections about the
mid 1970’s, when he was involved with the smuggling of Beatles music through the ports of the
Soviet Union. Some of the honourable guests present are well aware of the times, when we used to
retype the works of George Orwell and perhaps American Kremlinologists, while listening if there
was anyone at our door from the plainclothes unit to make a search of our flat.
We cannot afford to leave the previous epoch without assessment, since unidentified, it tries to
repeat itself in new and, occasionally, monstrous forms. On the old European continent, Lithuania has
a 700 km long border with the State of Belarus, ruled by Lukashenko, the last European dictator, who
tries to maintain the features of the former Soviet regime. That border, by the way, is longer than the one
between France and Spain. And it is only 30 kilometres away from Vilnius. Behind it, new monuments
to the old Chekka Chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky are being erected and political opponents disappear in
broad daylight. After a brief period of freedom, the society in Minsk is filled again with fear. All mass
media is controlled by state. Gifted young people studying at law universities are lured with work for
repressive KGB (the name is also intact) structures. This takes place in 2008. This is Europe too. So,
while learning about this in Lithuania, we sometimes feel roughly the way people felt in Switzerland
during the Second World War.
The Lisbon Treaty, which, I hope, we will soon ratify, commits us to live in the new Solidarity of
Europe. Upon my coming here, I stopped at the Lithuanian-Polish border to cross it back and forth, which
I did with interest, driving among abandoned checkpoints, which were the tremendous fortifications in
the Soviet times only 18 years ago. Now I watched the farmers serenely pasturing their cattle on the
field there.
The Republic of Lithuania initiated this first debate, since we believe the new European solidarity
could make the old European States aware about what happened to us in the second half of the 20 th
century.
The civil society of the European Union cannot be civil, if it is unable to recognise the signs
which led to the isolation of that part of the continent. Truly, I have to think how I shall explain to my
daughter Ester, why she, a girl from Vilnius, is less important to the EU than say, some Ester from
Paris, her same age. And my son Dovydas, a graduate from Vilnius University, will he not take up a
window cleaner’s job in London as a second-class labourer? After all, before the Molotov-Ribbentrop
conspiracy, the potential of Estonian society, for example, was higher than that of Finnish, while the
level of development of the Czech society outstripped that of Spanish and a number of its other Western
neighbours.
For 50 years, Central Europe and the Baltic States have been forced to lead a daily struggle against
the reality imposed on them by the might of the Soviet army, instead of creating or competing with the
English, French and Germans who remained in the success zone on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
We were forbidden even to know what had been going on in our independent states before the war. As
a student, I could not search, in the sealed archives, with which parties my relatives were affiliated in
inter-war Lithuania. We just whispered about that within the family. All books published before 1944
were taken out of library use when the Soviet army entered the Baltic States. We were isolated not only
from the free world of the second half of the 20 th century, but also from our free past. We used to say:
“This neighbour graduated from the Technical University in Brussels before the war; that artist was
staying in Montmartre before the war.” They seemed to be the surviving ambassadors of the free world.
WE ARE FREE now.
The Republic of Lithuania initiated this process and expresses gratitude to the European Commission
for the support given to this matter in order to ultimately find out how it could have happened that half
of Europe’s nations had been surrendered to an unprecedented regime denying human dignity and
individuality, enforced by Soviet Moscow through local collaborators.
In my capacity of Chairman of the Subcommittee on Cultural Heritage of the Council of Europe,
I travelled to many capitals and I have learned about an upsurge in the cultural communities of writers,
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