Lithuania calls itself a free-speech democracy. Its Holocaust-memory law runs in one direction only.

Lithuania did not begin by prosecuting Artur Fridman. It began by warning me.

On July 18, 2018, the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre answered my submission about Jonas Noreika with a document that read less like history than a caution. The Centre refused to change its conclusion that Noreika bore no responsibility for crimes against Jews. Then it wrote that the conclusions I demanded “possibly violate” the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania and other legal acts. In the same response it placed the historians Andrius Kulikauskas and Evaldas Balčiūnas in quotation marks, questioned their standing, and suggested their public views produced a preconceived lack of objectivity.

It did not stay private. The Centre published a page on its own website describing the exchange. There it told the public that I was attempting to prove the Holocaust was begun “not by the Nazis, but by Lithuanians,” and that, without solid evidence and “possibly violating” the Constitution and the Criminal Code, I had accused named Lithuanian figures. A state memory institution had told a citizen, in writing and then in public, that his historical conclusions might be a crime.

Hold that sentence next to what Lithuania did six years later.

On October 30, 2025, Lithuanian authorities assembled a 220-page pre-trial file against Artur Fridman, Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2 of the Criminal Code. Fridman is presumed innocent, and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. He wrote about his grandfather’s wartime memory and became a defendant. The article numbers charged against him are not identical to the ones the Centre waved at me in 2018. The mechanism is.

Lithuania presents itself abroad as a free-speech democracy: a member of the European Union and NATO, a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, with a free press and independent courts. Inside the field of Holocaust memory that guarantee is a fraud. The state’s speech law does not protect speech. It protects one version of history and punishes the other. It shields the distortion the state itself produces and treats correction by the........

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