The Lithuanian parliament Thursday held a secret vote to appoint Arūnas Bubnys to a five-year term as head of the country’s Orwellian-named Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania. Seventy-six MPs voted for him, 34 against, 8 abstained and 2 MPs ruined their ballots in apparent protest.

Bubnys had been director of the Center’s Research Department. When he was nominated for the new position by the speaker of parliament, he told the assembly if he were appointed he would seek to restore the institution’s “recently damaged prestige” and to normalize the work atmosphere there.

He also pledged “to disperse and negate the artificial opposition between Center researchers and public organizations, to restore an atmosphere of confidence and exemplary cooperation with political prisoner, deportee and partisan institutions, and other organizations of those who suffered under the occupational regimes.”

Bubnys has worked at the Center since 2009 and was part of the successful push to have the last general director, Adas Jakubauskas, removed from the post by parliament for alleged mismanagement. In 2020 Bubnys ran for parliament on the ticket of the little-known political party Nacionalinis susivienijimas, or National Unification. According to his personal statement, he was graduated from the History Faculty of Vilnius University in 1985 and defended his doctoral dissertation in 1994.

Full story in Lithuanian here.