We went to a funeral in Marijampolė yesterday. It is about a two-hour drive from Vilnius, heading west toward Kaunas and then south toward the Polish border. The small city lies in the Suwalki Gap between Belarus and Kaliningrad. The deceased was the father of a friend of ours. He was born before WWII, not quite a teenager when Lithuania was absorbed into the Soviet Union. Arūnas led the procession to a little town near Kalvarija, which is even closer to the Kaliningrad border. He said his father never gave up hope throughout that long Soviet winter that Lithuania would be independent again. His father was one of the last of a generation who can recall Lithuania's first independence.
However, remembrances took on a more personal tone. Arūnas and his sister prepared a slide show that poignantly captured their father. The pictures focused on their father's love for the outdoors. I particularly liked one where he stood in waders in the shallows of a lake with his canvas tent pitched on the bank across from him. I suppose to some degree it allowed him to escape the Soviet reality so many Lithuanians were confronted with for 45 years. Nature was the great escape, which is why it is so revered in Lithuanian culture.
I was reading in Thomas Lane's section on Lithuania, from the The Baltic States, that preserving natural sites was a way of preserving Lithuanian identity during the Soviet era. It was relatively safe, as no monuments were erected, and those putting forward the legislation in the Soviet state legislature did so with no reference to the previous Lithuanian state. So, Moscow didn't bat an eyelash. Little did the Soviet censors know that many of these wilderness refuges contained piliakalniai, or earth forts, from the Grand Duchy period and even earlier Lithuanian settlements. Kernavė is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Of course, its designation came after Lithuania's restoration of independence in 1990.
I say this because one of Putin's many absurd claims is that Ukraine has no heritage of its own. He believes that Ukraine was always a part of Russia and that everything that exists today is a product of Russian culture. He ignores not only Ukraine's previous life before Ivan the Terrible annexed Kievan Rus in the late fifteenth century, but that Ukrainians also preserved their heritage throughout the long winter of Russian and Soviet occupation. Kievan Rus was no more dead than was the Kingdom of Israel or any other "lost kingdom."
After the funeral service, Daina and I returned to Marijampolė, where we cleaned the graves of her grandparents. They had been deported to Siberia along with their children in the early 1950s, Her grandmother died in Siberia. Her mother assumed her grandmother's duties as the eldest child. It was only after the Thaw in the 1960s that her family was able to get the body returned to Lithuania and laid to rest in her home town. Many Lithuanians have similar stories.
Others still have their relatives buried in remote parts of Russia, often in poorly marked graves, with no one to look after them. An attempt was made some years ago to redress this by sending a mission to Siberia to repair these grave sites. Mission Siberia (pictured above) lasted for 15 years until Russia refused to issue visas in 2019, apparently no longer wanting to be reminded of the Lithuanian deportations that took place in the 1940s and early 50s. The last three years this mission has been going to Kazakhstan, where many Lithuanians were also deported, to clean these graves.
These deportations occurred throughout the Soviet Union. They were part of Stalin's plan to eradicate national identities and create what has derisively been labeled "Homo Sovieticus." About the only place this succeeded was in Kaliningrad, which the Soviet Union could make no historic claim to, as it was never part of the Russian empire. The former Konigsberg was the capital of Prussia, the home city of Kant, with a German history that stretched back to the 13th century with the invasion of the Teutonic Knights. Yet, the Kremlin was able to transform the Prussian rump state into a Soviet oblast thanks to a naval base that continues to house its nuclear submarine fleet, as well as a nuclear weapons storage site that was upgraded in 2018.
Everywhere else this relocation program failed. These Soviet states were able to retain their cultural identity, with much of their languages, song books and literature in tact. This was in large part due to these states retaining their school systems in their native languages. I suppose if Stalin hadn't suddenly died in 1953 that might not have been the case. Khrushchev ushered in a new era of the Soviet Union in 1954, the so-called Thaw, where these states were allowed to more openly express their cultural identity. Although there was a limit. Nikita didn't want any Hungary uprising within the Soviet Union, and used similar severe measures to quell unrest.
Nevertheless, Lithuanians staged their own uprising in 1972. The Kaunas Spring didn't get much international press, but was telling in its own right. Arūnas' sister said that her father's friend hung a Lithuanian flag from a balcony in Kaunas, after a 19-year-old student set himself on fire in a square adjoining Laisvės alėja, protesting Soviet occupation. The events leading to the uprising were depicted in a wonderful 1990 film, The Children from the American Hotel, made the same year Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union.
You can find similar events throughout the Soviet Union. No one had willingly accepted Soviet annexation. In fact, Ukraine had fought a bitter war between 1917-1921, very similar to the one we see now. It was part of a broader Russian Civil War. Fortunately for Lithuania, the Red Army was so preoccupied with all these battle fronts that it and its Baltic neighbors, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, were able to successfully secede. The Soviet Union was largely determined to retain its Slavic possessions.
Adding insult to injury, Ukraine suffered through the Holdomor between 1932-33 when Stalin tried to starve the rebellious Soviet republic to death by withholding badly needed food supplies to the mutinous Ukrainians who refused to accept collective farming. The Kremlin has refused to acknowledge this event to this day.
The Soviet Union was never a monolithic state. Nor has been Russia. These countries were forged by conquest. In both cases, previous cultural identities were repressed and in some cases eradicated entirely, as was the case with Kaliningrad. While there was much cross-cultural assimilation, often forced, during the Soviet Union, former national identities remained. Sasha Filipenko writes eloquently about this in his Guardian opinion piece, "No one wants to be a little brother."
Whereas Putin saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy, the former Soviet states saw it as the long overdue outcome of 70+ years of repression and attempted cultural genocide. The Soviet Union was doomed from its inception, and it appears that Russia will also have a hard time holding itself together in the wake of its latest attempt at imperial overreach. You simply cannot deny the past. It will always come back to haunt you.
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