by Grant Gochin
Eight days before Artur Fridman’s next hearing, Lithuania’s state history center should disclose the research behind any historical premise used against him.
The next hearing in the criminal case against Artur Fridman is scheduled for August 26. He is innocent, and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. Before the Vilnius City District Court hears more historical evidence, Lithuania should answer a simpler question: what research file, if any, supports the state history being carried into the case?
The prosecution began with a Facebook post. On May 9, 2024, Fridman stood at Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. He wrote about Soviet victory, Lithuanian partisans, and Lithuania’s heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Algirdas Ramanauskas filed a complaint with the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office on July 16, 2024. On January 8, 2025, authorities imposed a written undertaking restricting Fridman from leaving Lithuania. On October 30, 2025, prosecutor Kristina Minko signed charges in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Criminal Code Articles 170² §1 and 313 §2. The formal indictment runs twelve pages; the broader pre-trial file runs to roughly 220. The Vilnius City District Court opened the trial on March 5, 2026.
Article 170² §1 carries imprisonment of up to two years. It is not dormant. On February 26, 2026, the Vilnius City District Court convicted Erika Švenčionienė and fined her €3,750 for denying Soviet crimes. On June 17, the Vilnius Regional Court partly granted the prosecutor’s appeal, replaced the fine with eighteen months’ restriction of liberty, and ordered her to remove the Facebook post. The prosecutor considered a criminal fine too lenient. The appellate court agreed that a harsher punishment was required.
The State’s Own File Raises the Historical Question
The historical proposition is not abstract. The prosecution’s own evidence includes archival documentation of Soviet security-service recruitment contact with Ramanauskas-Vanagas in January of 1945 under the codename Džūkija. I set out that record in The Prosecution’s Own Evidence and in The Indictment That Put Lithuania on Trial. The state has charged a Jewish citizen for raising a historical question that the state’s own file partially corroborates.
That is the point at which a research file becomes indispensable. If the prosecution intends the court to treat the commemorated version of Ramanauskas-Vanagas as established background fact, someone must have examined the contrary archival record and reached a reasoned conclusion about it. The public file already shows that the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania, LGGRTC, is not peripheral to that question. It supplied a letter concerning the Soviet security-service record. Eugene J. Levin has shown separately why Lithuania cannot make the Center’s historical outputs effectively non-reviewable when challenged and then treat the same institution as an historical authority when a Jewish defendant is prosecuted. His article is The Court That Already Disqualified the Witness.
The first disclosure question is therefore direct. Has any LGGRTC opinion, consultation, memorandum, publication, employee assessment, archival letter, research note or other material been requested, supplied, cited, summarized or relied upon in Fridman’s case? If yes, produce the complete basis for it. If no, the prosecution should identify the historical sources it did use and explain the Center’s absence.
A Shadow Witness Still Needs a File
The LGGRTC need not sit formally in the witness box to function as a shadow witness. Its classifications, biographies, commemorative judgments, published conclusions and archival letters can supply the historical baseline against which prosecutors, experts and judges evaluate Fridman’s words. Its historians can also testify as individuals. The form matters less than the function.
A serious historical institution should be able to identify the sources it examined, the competing sources it rejected, the archival collections it consulted and the reasons for its conclusions. If an LGGRTC-derived premise is used in a criminal case, that work should be open to adversarial inspection.
Its Own Oversight Body Says Documents Arrive Late or Not at All
The demand is not theoretical. The Center’s council is not a group of outside critics. The Lithuanian parliament or Seimas created it in November of 2024 as a collegial governing organ, its members delegated by the Lithuanian universities’ rectors’ conference, parliamentary bodies, the president, the Government, the Lithuanian Institute of History and the LGGRTC itself. On March 22, 2026, LRT reported that the council had informed the Seimas speaker and three parliamentary bodies of systemic problems at the Center: recommendations not acted upon, documents supplied too late for meaningful review or not supplied at all, and a strategic plan approved by the director’s order in January of 2026 which disregarded the results of the council’s own strategic session.
On May 20, the council refused to approve the Center’s 2025 activity report. At the same Seimas commission sitting, acting director Arūnas Bubnys said that he is not invited to council meetings and is not informed that they are taking place, including occasions when the council convenes at the Center’s own premises. The same report records that his term as director expired in April of 2026.
On June 10 Bubnys presented that report to the Seimas Human Rights Committee. LGGRTC’s own publication described the Center as serving “state interests” and seeks to remain a “reliable partner” for the Seimas, government, academia and patriotic and civic organizations. On June 11 the Seimas rejected his successor nominated by the council. Eight days later the council wrote to the speaker and two parliamentary bodies, recording that it had rejected the report by a large majority and that Seimas committees and commissions had not considered the Center’s 2024 or 2025 activity reports at all.
Council member Algis Vyšniūnas wrote in LRT in July of 2025 that the Center is de jure a research center and de facto some kind of bureaucratic office, and asked who could deny that it is an institution of managed historical memory. This is a member of the parliamentary body created to govern it.
This does not prove the LGGRTC mishandled Fridman’s case. It proves something narrower and directly relevant. Its council says documents are sometimes supplied too late for meaningful review or not supplied at all. It refused to approve the 2025 annual report. Seimas committees and commissions examined neither the 2024 nor the 2025 report. Bubnys’s term expired in April, and while the LGGRTC’s own publication described him in May as acting general director, its leadership page continued to list him as general director. A criminal court should not assume the missing methodological step.
What Should Be in the File
The file should be litigation-specific. It should identify every historical source underlying any LGGRTC material requested, supplied, cited or relied upon in the Fridman matter, and every communication by which that material entered the case. The issue is not whether a memorial book, archival letter or state biography is automatically true. The issue is whether the state tested competing evidence before using historical conclusions against a defendant.
Jewish sources belong in the inquiry where they bear on a historical proposition, institutional biography, or characterization which the LGGRTC supplied and the prosecution is using. The legal demand is therefore narrower than the institutional one: counsel can seek the sources underlying the LGGRTC material actually carried into Fridman’s case. The wider question for LGGRTC remains whether a state institution claiming authority over Lithuania’s 20th-century history tested the Jewish memorial record when forming the historical narratives from which that authority derives.
Their strengths and limitations should be examined, not ritualized. On the Lita translation pages themselves, JewishGen states that it makes no representations regarding the accuracy of the translation, that the reader may wish to refer to the original material for verification, and that it cannot verify the accuracy of statements in the underlying work. That is a reason for historical testing, not an argument for omission.
A competent file would show whether LGGRTC compared Jewish memorial testimony with German records, Lithuanian archives, Soviet postwar investigations, Yad Vashem and YIVO holdings, German trial records and modern scholarship, and would identify what it rejected and why. The point is not to make Jewish testimony immune from criticism. It is to make the state disclose whether it read and tested it.
Lithuanian Rescuer already Set the Standard
Ona Šimaitė, the Lithuanian librarian who rescued Jews from the Vilna Ghetto, set the standard herself. Writing in Lita, she refused collective Lithuanian guilt and then told what she had seen. She wrote that the Lithuanian Special Squad, the Ypatingasis būrys, murdered Jews together with the Nazis in a series of places, and named individual perpetrators– Bobelis, Piragius–as men who would remain accursed by Lithuanians and not only by Jews. She recorded that Lithuanian police units did not merely carry out German orders to kill Jews, but in many localities volunteered to do it, or began on their own initiative. She then condemned the postwar Lithuanian habit of preserving the positive facts while tearing negative pages out of the history. Her article “Lithuanians and Jews During the Nazi Occupation” appears in Lita on pages 1661 to 1672, translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freund for the JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, and was republished by the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
That she named the Ypatingasis būrys is not incidental. This rescuer whom Lithuania honors identified the formation by name. The state institution whose material already appears in the criminal file should be able to say whether it has read her.
That is the standard: no collective indictment, and no institutional erasure. If LGGRTC has applied that standard, it should be able to show its work. If its historians reviewed contrary Jewish sources and rejected them for specific reasons, state those reasons. If they did not review them, the limits of the Center’s expertise should be obvious to the court.
Moscow Will Not Be Asked for a File
On August 17, a Moscow court sentenced Lithuanian citizen Romas Liutkus in absentia to seven years, including for insulting the memory of Soviet soldiers. I set out the comparison in Two Peas in a Pod, Six Years Later. Moscow does not pretend that its court is doing historical scholarship. It is enforcing protected state memory through criminal law.
Lithuania insists it’s different: a research center rather than a ministry of truth, historical research rather than decree, an independent judiciary rather than political enforcement. Lithuania set that standard itself, condemning state historical revisionism in Seimas Resolution No. XIII-2847 on April 7, 2020, passed unanimously, with ninety-seven votes. The file is where the distinction can be tested. Produce it and Lithuania can show that the court is receiving testable evidence. Refuse, and the comparison with Moscow becomes harder to dismiss.
The Motion before August 26
Counsel can put the question procedurally. If an LGGRTC historian is being used procedurally as a specialist and has supplied a written specialist conclusion, Article 90 of Lithuania’s Code of Criminal Procedure requires that conclusion identify what was examined, the methods and technical means used and the circumstances thus established. Article 97 authorizes the court to require documents and items relevant to investigating and adjudicating the offense from natural and legal persons. Article 238(1) expressly covers requests for additional evidence and requires requests filed later to be decided when received; a rejection requires a reasoned ruling. Article 270 governs the submission and resolution of requests at the trial hearing. Article 20(4) supplies the governing principle, that data qualify as evidence only if lawfully obtained and verifiable through the procedures which the Code defines.
Article 90 does not by itself compel production of an entire LGGRTC research file. It requires the specialist conclusion to disclose what was examined and how. The demand for the underlying documents runs through Articles 97 and 270, on the basis of their relevance for testing that conclusion. That is a narrower argument than wholesale production, and a more defensible one.
If an LGGRTC historian, conclusion, archival letter or institutional premise is being used to establish historical fact against Fridman, the defense can ask the court to order the production of the source material and the methodology on which it rests. A written request submitted before the August 26 hearing can invoke Article 238(1); requests made at the hearing fall within Article 270. Counsel will decide the procedural form.
The prosecution should identify every LGGRTC-derived premise and produce its foundation. The defense should demand the same. If the Center played no role, prosecutors can say so. If it did, formally or indirectly, its historical contribution should not receive untested deference.
Jewish organizations should ask the same question before lending Lithuania further reputational credibility on Holocaust memory. IHRA’s own expert leadership had already warned LGGRTC in 2019 about its treatment of Jonas Noreika. The signatories expressed grave concern over the Center’s justification of his wartime conduct, cited documentary evidence of his role in the ghettoization of Jews and the expropriation of Jewish property, and measured the Center’s treatment against the IHRA’s Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. The threshold is not whether a Lithuanian official can speak correctly at a remembrance event, it is whether the state institution entrusted with historical authority examined the Jewish sources before its conclusions entered the arena of a prosecution against a Jewish citizen.
The answer is revealing whichever way it falls. If LGGRTC read the memorial corpus and rejected it, show the methodology. If it did not read it, say so. If a research file exists, produce it. If no file exists, then the aura of state historical expertise has no documented foundation in the proposition.
Lithuania is entitled to prosecute crimes defined by law. It is not entitled to turn a preferred historical narrative into criminal background fact by institutional prestige alone. A defendant must be able to test the evidence used against him.
Show the file. Show whether LGGRTC examined the Jewish record. Show whether the institution did historical research or state defense.