Lithuania’s foreign minister condemns manipulated history abroad. The post-independence record shows that the same argument has been fought inside Lithuania since restored independence.

On September 18 in Washington, Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys described what Soviet rule had taught Lithuania: censorship, propaganda and the “systematic falsification of history.” He said that experience helps Lithuania recognize the methods of authoritarian regimes. In the same statement he said Lithuania strengthens information resilience “not through restrictions, but through democratic tools.”

Four months earlier, his ministry told Congress that the Genocide Centre’s “complete exoneration” of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis was legally imprecise: administrative discontinuation is not judicial exoneration. As of September 13, the Centre still published that he had been “rehabilitated by the United States Department of Justice.”

From September 20 to 24 Budrys will be in New York for UN General Assembly High-Level Week. His ministry says he will meet U.S. Jewish organizations. It has not publicly identified them.

Budrys has supplied a standard. Soviet crimes do not become less criminal because Lithuania has its own unresolved record. I reject Russian and Lithuanian historical falsification for the same reason: neither becomes legitimate by serving a state. My work concentrates on Lithuania because that is where I have standing, evidence, family history and continuing doctoral research.

The memory war began with restored independence

On May 2, 1990, less than two months after restoration of independence, Lithuania adopted Law No. I-180 restoring the rights of people repressed for resistance to occupation regimes. Reversing Soviet injustice was necessary. The problem appeared almost immediately: the rehabilitation process also reached people implicated in crimes committed during the Nazi occupation.

Helsinki Watch reported in its 1992 World Report that the law prohibited exonerating war criminals, yet people convicted by Soviet courts of crimes against humanity, including participation in Nazi crimes against Jews, had nevertheless been rehabilitated.

The issue reached Washington within weeks. Helsinki Watch reported that President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker raised the rehabilitation issue in separate mid-September 1991 meetings with President Vytautas Landsbergis, and that the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations provided access to its archives to help Lithuania review questionable rehabilitations.

By October 1991 Lithuania’s own Supreme Court was conceding error. The New York Times quoted Lithuanian Supreme Court justice Genadijus Slauta, as JTA reported, saying: “We were trying to rehabilitate everybody as quickly as possible.” He added: “Now we are sorry we acted so rapidly. We see serious errors were made.”

In the same report, President Vytautas Landsbergis denied that anyone had been pardoned in error and suggested that evidence supplied by the Simon Wiesenthal Center had been planted by the KGB. The Supreme Court was simultaneously reversing exonerations. In December 1992, JTA reported that Lithuania had reversed the rehabilitation of six people who collaborated with the Nazis after the Wiesenthal Center and other Jewish groups submitted their names.

The record dates Lithuania’s modern Memory War to the first years of restored independence, decades before today’s Russian information war.

A 2007........

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