At the UN, Gitanas Nausėda made falsification of history a question of trust, human rights and democracy. Lithuania has spent years applying that standard outward. Its own state memory institution supplies the domestic test.

On September 21, 2026, the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre formally abandoned part of its own published victim classification — and scheduled the correction for 2027. In response No. 55R-920, answering my August 31 requests, registered by the Centre as 7R-1064 and 7R-1065, it concluded that Kazys Braželis and Jonas Bakanavičius should not be treated as repressed persons and said their biographies will be removed from the next corrected digital edition of Volume VI of Lietuvos gyventojų genocidas. It also separated Bonifacas Jonas Kukuška’s earlier Soviet repression from his later punishment arising from alleged Holocaust-era conduct and said his biography will be removed from the digital Volume II now being prepared. The next day, President Gitanas Nausėda told the United Nations General Assembly that falsification of history erodes trust and damages democracy.

Based on the record I have documented over decades, I do not regard the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) as a presumptively reliable historical authority. In my assessment, its publications have repeatedly functioned as instruments of national historical advocacy and, in material instances, as vehicles for distorted or fictionalized history.

Accordingly, I assign no independent evidentiary weight to a historical claim merely because it has been published by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Any material proposition originating with the LGGRTC must be independently verified against primary documentation or credible external historical scholarship before it is relied upon.

Until such verification is obtained, the LGGRTC’s assertion is treated as unverified and presumptively unreliable, with particular scrutiny for omission, selective quotation, exculpatory reframing, or factual distortion.

According to the contemporaneous LRT/BNS report of Nausėda’s September 22 address, he said that falsification of history, together with disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference, erodes trust, restricts civic space, targets journalists and human-rights defenders, and thereby harms human rights, democracy and security. The report renders an English-language address in Lithuanian; until the official delivered English text appears, I rely on BNS’s reported substance rather than present its Lithuanian wording as Nausėda’s verbatim English.

Nothing in the report suggests Nausėda was speaking about LGGRTC. He did not need to be. Lithuania had already supplied a domestic test of the principle he was announcing internationally.

The rule Lithuania applies abroad

Four days before Nausėda’s UN speech, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers in Washington that Lithuania had lived for five decades without freedom of speech and had experienced censorship, propaganda and “the systematic falsification of history.” He connected that experience to the value of free information and democratic debate.

In his 2022 UN General Assembly address, Nausėda described Russia as an imperial power searching for reasons to justify annexation, “rewriting history,” and spreading disinformation and propaganda. In the same address he condemned the banishment of independent media and non-governmental organizations in Russia and systematic attacks on civil society and human-rights defenders in Belarus.

Russia does falsify history. Lithuania is right to condemn it. The evidentiary problem begins when the same rule reaches Lithuania’s own institutions.

The Centre does not get a Lithuanian exemption

My judgment of the Centre does not rest on one quarrel over one national hero.

In a 2016 article in the Centre’s own journal, Alfredas Rukšėnas, now its chief........

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