by Grant Gochin, March 25, 2026

In “The Impossibility of Ignorance” and “The Company He Kept,” I argued that Lithuania elevated Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas into its head-of-state canon without producing the Holocaust-era due-diligence file that such elevation required, and that it did so from within a hero class already contaminated by exposed perpetrators, facilitators and state laundering. This article addresses the consequence. What does a democratic state do when a protected national myth collides with a morally devastating historical record?

Poland faced that question at Jedwabne. The reckoning was incomplete, contested, and politically painful. But the state still moved through investigation and presidential remorse. Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors forced the issue into public view. The Institute of National Remembrance investigated. President Aleksander Kwaśniewski stood at the site in July, 2001, expressed “deepest remorse” and said the truth could not be denied. Poland did not silence the questioner. It investigated the question.

Lithuania has chosen the opposite order. It canonized first, insulated second, and prosecuted the question third.

That is why Artur Fridman is Lithuania’s Jedwabne moment. Not because the facts are identical, but because the institutional test is the same. A democracy confronted with a protected national story and a morally charged archive has two choices. It can investigate, publish, correct and absorb the consequences. Or it can defend the myth and punish the person who tests it. Poland investigated. Lithuania prosecuted.

The Soviet Union was a criminal regime. Its occupation, deportations, executions, imprisonments and repression are matters of record. There can be no redemption or forgiveness for those crimes. Nothing here softens that judgment. I fully support those Lithuanians who resisted Soviet rule as a force of evil. But that fact does not cleanse the record of those who also participated in the persecution and murder of Jews. Lithuanian participation in Holocaust crimes was so widespread that figures of military age from that milieu cannot responsibly be treated as morally unexamined patriots by default. The burden must run the other way: absent a serious and documented investigation, anti-Soviet biography is not exculpation. Fighting Soviet crimes did not absolve genocide against Jewish neighbors.

The Fridman case makes that comparison concrete. According to the published indictment record, Fridman posted a Facebook message on May 9, 2024 (screenshot below). On January 8, 2025, Lithuanian authorities imposed a written pledge preventing him from leaving the country. On October 30, 2025, prosecutors filed charges under Articles 170-2 §1 and 313 §2. This is not a seminar-room dispute. It is criminal process directed at a Jewish citizen for Holocaust-related speech.

Full text with illustrations here.