by Arkadijus Vinokuras

Why? Because, first of all, the word “collaborator” does not carry a negative charge for people who lived under Soviet occupation for 50 years. During that time everyone got by as well as they could. Some of the defenders of the tainted heroes are too young to have experienced the Nazi occupation, while some feel good about themselves for having made a career in Soviet bureaucracy during the Soviet occupation. Some didn’t get involved, while others actively participated in the Soviet occupational bureaucracy as politruks, journalists, teachers of “scientific Communism,” as agents of the KGB. They never took part in partisan or dissident activities.

I am not talking about those who were deported, about partisans or their families, and I am not talking about those who refused to become cogs in their machine of repression. None, including the oldest, of the MPs and party leaders in the Homeland Union/Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party resisted the Soviet occupation from 1950 to 1987. From this obsequious past comes the need to seek for mitigating circumstances regarding collaboration, for instance, the fashionable excuse “he was only drawn into collaboration because of tragic circumstances.”

Full text in Lithuanian here.