crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
artists and architects in Central Europe before the Nazi and Stalin regime got hold of the region. In
the 1920s, the spread of stylistic influences in arts in Central Europe was nearly concurrent with the
spread of these styles in the West, and the cultural exchange between the Central Europe and Baltic
States on the one hand, and Berlin, London, and Amsterdam on the other was thriving. There was a
regular exchange of intellectuals, scholars and specialists. A host of knowledge-thirsty people travelled
to and fro between these countries. The exchange of European visionary parties was in place. In 1920
my grandmother, owner of the “Komercija” hotel in Kaunas, the provisional capital of Lithuania, used
to go to Berlin, Paris, and the then European Königsberg once in three weeks. There were adventurers
too: two renowned artists from Kaunas hired a carriage with two horses in harness and went on tour
to Vienna and Paris. Equipped with Lithuanian passports and European souls they felt quite at home
in the all-encompassing and thrilling European vision that was very similar among people in the great
European capitals.
The first attempt to build Europe has failed of course. My recent investigation into the records of
interrogations by the KGB in Vilnius led me to documents attesting to repressions truly extraordinary,
including some facts which sound like a sheer stretch of imagination. Just a little example: residents of
independent Lithuania, who subscribed to Paris and London publications in the pre-war period, were
sentenced by the Soviets to long years of imprisonment, which means an act, which was punishable
in USSR where censorship ruled, was made also punishable for the citizens of another state – pre-war
Lithuania – and those people were tried as if they had been the subjects formerly of the Communist
Soviet Union. Pre-war membership of the Lithuanian Christian People’s or Social Democratic Parties
was found punishable after the war, in the period of the Soviet occupation. In other words, the state that
occupied us did not recognise the free life we had formerly enjoyed. So, building upon the message left
to us by the pre-war Europeans, whose free will the Nazi and Soviet camps had so violently attempted
to extinguish, we state that Europe is free again. It is Europe where we will find out what was going on,
how British and American diplomatic services during the Potsdam Conference could be noting down
in their reports that the area of bloody dictatorship would extend from Bulgaria to Warsaw. Western
governments must have been well informed what Moscow intended to do with the Central Europeans.
Part of the Western elite knew only too well that half of Europe, which had been an essential part of
Western civilisation for centuries, would now be coerced to form a part of the Gulag Empire. Therefore,
we now have to be more and more involved in the process of coming together and learning more about
each other, a process where both the old and the new EU Member States should participate. Apart from
creating more room in English and French minds to feel for the past hardships and specific conditions of
their new neighbours, this will also aid us in the process of establishing a new EU security construction;
armed with this new tool we will be able to immediately recognise manifestations of threat given by the
totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, regardless of whether they come from China or Belarus. There should
be joint efforts of Europeans to recognise these dangers to Europe. We need to make sure the new European
generations have the tools making them aware of apparitions of the old Communist dictatorships.
Proposals by the Lithuanian delegation to the conclusions of the European hearing on
Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
The Berlin Declaration, the compromise agreement on the Framework Decision on Racism and
Xenophobia and the Statement by the Council of 19 April 2007, which deplores crimes committed by
totalitarian regimes, as well as the reflection of the overall agreement on racism and xenophobia in the
June 2007 European Council Conclusions underline a political commitment by the EU to appraise the
crimes committed by all the totalitarian regimes at the European level.
Therefore, the first European hearing on crimes committed by totalitarian regimes, otalitarian regimes,
the Nazi and the Soviet, which brought violations of human rights and freedoms, genocide, war crimes
and crimes against humanity, recognizing the need to increase awareness about the second, often forgotten
part of Europe’s history, and to ensure its evaluation and recognition on equal footing with the history
of Western Europe, recognizing the need to develop a common approach towards crimes committed by
totalitarian regimes, whereby an anti-totalitarian stance would become a part of common European identity
and common system of values, invites the Member States and the respective EU institutions:
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