by Robert van Voren
In the summer of 2015 Vilnius municipality removed four Soviet statutes on the Green Bridge linking the suburb Šnipiskes with the city center. The statutes represented farmers, students, industrial workers and “defenders of peace”, depicting Soviet soldiers who liberated the city from the Nazis in 1944 and subsequently imposed the second Soviet occupation. The statutes were a prime example of Soviet realism and for Soviet standards quite innocent: there was little heroism to be seen, no images of political leaders like Lenin or Stalin, just examples of four classes of Soviet citizens being part of Soviet life. Yet for Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius they depicted a lie and for that reason should not be retained: “The statues represent a lie. Their heroic portrayal of the Soviet people – that is all a lie … The statues are a mockery of the real people who had to live during the Soviet period.”
I remember some 6-7 years ago an exhibition of Soviet design was held in one of Vilnius’ museums. My stepson was then a young adolescent, and walked around in a world that had ceased to be and images of which had almost disappeared from every day life. A brand new Moskvich was standing in one of the halls, household tools that were dysfunctional yet in a strange way beautiful, and in one corner a television screen showed a clip of residents receiving their brand new flats in Fabioniškės. People were smiling, dancing, happily receiving their key and entering the flat for the first time. “That is all fake, right?” my son asked, “of course they were not happy, they are acting.”
The fact is that people were happy, very happy even, finally being able to move in a brand new flat, often coming from a noisy crammed kommunalka, and have their own private environment. What is a lie is to pretend that people were not happy. Soviet life was maybe much more grey than life in an open society based on the rule of law, but millions of Lithuanians led happy lives, even if alone because they knew no other.
I do not deny Lithuania was occupied by the Soviets, but the overwhelming majority of Lithuanians became part of the Soviet regime, either in compliance or in collaboration, and the number of Lithuanians who dared to stand up before glasnost and perestroika started is extremely small. As German historian Wolgang Thierse writes, “There are real perpetrators and real victims, guilty ones and innocent ones and then in between the many others, we – who lived there, busy getting by, more or less decent, more or less clever, more or less cowardly or brave.”
Most of the Soviet statutes in Vilnius were removed immediately following the reinstatement of independence, one of the first to go the big ugly Lenin standing on Lukiškės square, a Soviet phallus in front of the KGB headquarters. The statutes were collected and put in Grutas Parkas, so that future generations can go see them, imagining a bit what life was like, and see who the leaders were that held a nation captive and imposed a totalitarian regime. I think it is a good idea: rather than destroy and erase, use these elements of the totalitarian past as educational instruments. They have become a means to help people remember, and hopefully think twice before endangering freedom and democracy again. I was against the removal of the statues on the Green Bridge, because they were much more an element of normal Soviet life, both happy and sad, a past that cannot be undone and should not be erased from Lithuanian history.
What I don’t understand, however, is the fact that while Soviet elements are removed from public life so easily, it seems to be impossible to remove monuments to Lithuanian nationalists who during the difficult years of war became perpetrators and participated in the annihilation of virtually all of Lithuanian Jewry. They are still revered as heroes of Lithuanian independent statehood, defenders of the Lithuanian nation, but in fact they became war criminals when facilitating or participating in the largest mass murder ever on Lithuanian soil. In my view their crime is much more than the killing of innocent men, women and children alone. They erased one of the brightest parts of Lithuanian heritage; they rid the country of countless industrialists, scientists, artists and other members of the intelligentsia, a crime that not only affected Lithuanian Jews but Lithuania as a whole.
Full story here.
