PEMC praises a nominee for preserving historical truth. The state institution he led for a full five-year term has repeatedly moved non-exonerating records toward exonerating conclusions.

I do not use “Soviet” as an insult. I was born in Riga under Soviet rule. I use the word to describe an institutional method I know from the inside.

Four candidates have been nominated for the 2026 Prize of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience. One is Arūnas Bubnys. His five-year term as Director General of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) expired in April 2026, but LRT reports that he remains in office until a successor is appointed. The winner has not yet been selected. LRT also reports that a candidate overview prepared by the Platform praises more than forty years of his scholarly, archival and state-service work and says his research helps society recognize distortions of historical truth.

That description creates a test. It should not end one.

LGGRTC is a statutory state institution. Western organizations see historians, archives, reports, footnotes and international partnerships and assume they are looking at a Western scholarly model. The furniture is Western. In the disputed national-memory files, the method is Soviet: a preferred conclusion acquires institutional protection, and contrary evidence is narrowed, reclassified or absorbed without forcing the conclusion to fall.

Bubnys accepted a repair mandate

The credibility problem was public before Bubnys took the job. In February 2021, the Lithuanian Institute of History and history units at Vilnius University, Vytautas Magnus University and Klaipėda University said they could no longer cooperate with LGGRTC under its then leadership. They called for academic confidence to be restored. Their statement accused the leadership of allowing a politicized approach that ignored elementary source criticism and of weakening professional competence.

Bubnys was not outside that revolt. He was one of the Centre historians who had protested politicization. A contemporary scholarly account records that the petition complained of ideologized research, biased memoranda issued in the Centre’s name and devaluation of professional competence, and identifies Bubnys as one of its signatories. He then replaced the dismissed director.

Before his appointment, Bubnys promised Parliament that LGGRTC would restore its “recently damaged reputation” and again become an authority for Lithuanian society and “foreign colleagues and partners.” Soon afterward he spoke of restoring cooperation with academic institutions.

Some relationships were restored. The historical record was not repaired to the same standard. The Centre’s 18 December 2019 Noreika statement still says that Noreika “organized a Jewish rescue network in Šiauliai” and still presents categorical rescue conclusions. The underlying memorandum and the 2019 archive listing remained publicly accessible when checked on 3 September 2026.[1]

Brazaitis is a cleaner measure of the repair promise. On 12 May 2026, Lithuania’s own Foreign Ministry told Representative Brad Sherman that the Centre’s “complete exoneration” formulation was legally imprecise and that administrative discontinuation was not formal judicial exoneration under American law. The Ministry also told Sherman that the 2018 “complete exoneration” formulation “has since been corrected.” Page 3058, a 2019 LGGRTC defense of the same Brazaitis narrative, itself records an in-place correction dated 26 August 2026 – more than three months after the Ministry’s letter. The edit changed one formulation to say that Brazaitis and Jonas Šlepetys were removed from the list of suspects. But the same page still defends the larger vindication narrative and still characterizes the objection that Brazaitis was not rehabilitated as false.[2]

The correction mechanism exists. Bubnys had years of authority, then a Lithuanian government concession, and then an opportunity to repair the public text. One phrase changed. The broader exculpatory narrative survived.

The institution’s own........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)