From Communist Kitsch, Back to Baltic Baroque
By Vladimir Socor
Vilnius, Lithuania -- Lenin stares from all directions and all possible angles at the visitor to the sprawling forest at Grutas Park, in what is the world's only museum of communist statuary. Statue after statue of the Russian Bolshevik leader dots the lawns and alleys. And row upon row of busts and bas-reliefs lie stacked in vast barracks nearby. There are Stalins here, too, along with likenesses of KGB founding father Feliks Dzerzhinsky and many of the lesser luminaries who brought into this European country the "Light from the East. "
The same cattle wagons that carried Lithuanians to concentration camps in Siberia now stand at the entrance to the museum. Inside, on the barracks' walls, the smug countenances of Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders -- along with their local satraps -- gaze out of official oil portraits, propaganda posters and the pages of newspapers arranged in floor-to-ceiling displays. Giant inscriptions in big white letters on red cloth hang overhead. Strung from the museum walls now, they once disfigured Lithuania's towns, exhorting the locals to work harder for their overlords. Soviet Russian patriotic and military songs provide the muzak here. Vodka is on offer from army tumblers, standard issue.
The nightmare that ended in 1991 for Lithuania and her Baltic sisters is being reconstituted in painstaking, painful detail here at Grutas Park. Visiting adults recognize it all. To their youngsters in tow it is scarcely comprehensible. Westerners gasp. And just a few kilometers away is Belarus, where the past is the present, and the East still holds sway.
A capitalist entrepreneur, the "mushroom magnate" Viliumas Malinauskas, provided the concept and the funding for this reservation-museum. Once the Soviet occupation ended, Mr. Malinauskas introduced modern agribusiness to this depressed, thickly forested area in southern Lithuania. His mushroom- and berry-growing, canning and exporting conglomerate is the area's largest employer. He set about collecting and displaying the occupation's vestiges for the edification of posterity.
After experiencing the "East" at Grutas, to see the old town of Vilnius -- a two-hour drive away -- is to realize the depth of Lithuania's European identity. Here is an apotheosis of Italian baroque architecture on the north-eastern edge of old Europe. As many as 20 monumental churches, built and decorated mainly by Italian craftsmen during the Jesuit-led counterreformation, stand witness to this country's involvement in the main currents of European history. At one point, the Protestant Reformation seemed to win over Lithuania. But eventually Rome prevailed, thanks in part to the efforts of Catholic Poland, with which Lithuania formed during four centuries a common state.
It was through that common state, with its Western-style court, Roman connections and German burghers, that Lithuania became so closely enmeshed with Europe. And it was the Transylvanian Hungarian prince, Stefan Batory, elected king of Poland, who founded more than four centuries ago the University of Vilnius, in a magnificent italianate Renaissance building complex in the old town.
At a summer musical festival in Vilnius this year, Scarlatti's baroque opera "Casimiro, Re di Polonia" [Casimir, King of Poland] gets the top billing. Casimir, a Lithuanian prince and patron saint of the country, rests in a dazzlingly ornate chapel of the Vilnius Cathedral. Mediaeval Lithuania was the last European state officially to adopt Christianity; but when it did, it chose Western Christianity over the Eastern. That choice enabled the nation later on to resist Orthodoxization, Russification and Sovietization during almost two centuries of rule by Tsars and Commissars.
Inconspicuous amid the baroque churches and below a bustling street is the former KGB prison, in the basement of what is now the only museum of its kind in the post-Soviet Union world. The jailkeepeers fled to Moscow 11 years ago, leaving behind a huge pile of shredded documents, but also plenty of intact objects. Bones and belongings of political prisoners who were executed or perished, and were secretly buried in the jail's courtyard, have now been unearthed and some can now be seen in the former execution chamber.
Several rows of cells with their gloomy furnishings are on view. In one of them, sleep-deprived political detainees were forced to sit on a steeply inclined ledge, high above a basin dug into the cell's floor; this was calculated to make the victims fall into the icy water that filled the basin. Another cell is totally padded in order to muffle the cries of those beaten or being injected with drugs. Thousands of Lithuanians passed through this remand prison on the way to long-term detention places in Russia. Many of their names -- resistance fighters, ordinary farmers, clergy, members of the intelligentsia -- are now immortalized on the building's wall.
The big killing field just outside the city is called Paneriai, and it is there that the Jewish Vilnius, the "Jerusalem of the North," met its doom at Nazi hands. Nearly half of the city's population was Jewish, before the Holocaust destroyed the entire community, along with its renowned institutions of Hebrew and Yiddish culture. Thousands were trapped inside a Nazi-created Ghetto, before being sent to extermination camps. A little later, Soviet rule wiped out the last traces of Jewish Vilnius, such as the then-standing remnants of the Great Synagogue and other monuments.
It was not until after Lithuania regained her independence that the Jewish Holocaust was officially acknowledged and properly researched in the country, and the victims' memory honored by the state. This is a public-education work-in-progress. A commission to investigate Nazi and Soviet crimes in Lithuania, with members drawn from the country and from abroad, is steadily publishing its findings. Today, the tiny local community works on a project to restore representative fragments of the historic Jewish Quarter and infuse it with modern life.
When Lithuania regained its freedom in 1991, it was almost 200 years since the first revolt -- jointly with the Poles -- against Russian rule. Tadeusz Koszciuszko, Lithuanian-born hero of the American Revolutionary War, led the Poles and Lithuanians in the 1794 fight for independence. Both nations revolted against Russian rule again in 1831 and again in 1863. The insurgents defined their struggle in clear terms of East versus West. But it was not until 1918 -- thanks to the Tsarist empire's collapse -- that the two nations became independent, this time as nation-states. Sadly, Poles and Lithuanians quarreled over possession of Vilnius; it was the height of the age of modern nationalism. When Nazi Germany and, ultimately, Soviet Russia struck, Poles and Lithuanians stood separately and fell separately.
In Lithuania, armed resistance against Soviet rule continued until the mid-1950s. Well-organized guerrilla groups long controlled parts of the countryside. But, ignored by the outside world, the resistance finally died out. It was not until 1988 that another generation rose, this time through political mass movements, peacefully to restore the freedom and statehood of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Indeed, the three small Baltic peoples started the avalanche that ultimately tore the Soviet Union apart.
At the end of a 200-year struggle, it fell to Lithuania and her Baltic neighbors to determine for themselves the outcome of the historic contest between East and West in this part of Europe. Their Western choice now needs to be secured irreversibly in the framework of Euro-Atlantic institutions.
Mr. Socor is a senior fellow of the Jamestown Foundation in Washington.
This article originally appeared in the Wall Street
Journal Europe on July 19th, 2002.
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