A Trojan Horse?

III A Trojan Horse? “A nation is composed more of the dead than of the living.” —Augustinas Voldemaras, Lithuanian Yellow Book, 114–16 “They did not give us all this for our beautiful eyes...” —Kazys Grinius, Lithuanian Prime Minister, 1920 Trojan horse—“someone or something intended to undermine or subvert from within.” —Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary On October 14, Smetona’s Seimas ratified the mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union. The government’s official mood of the moment found expression in the speech of deputy Mečys Kviklys, who praised the “leadership of the powerful Soviet Union, who, one can say, atoning for tsarist Russia’s guilt in the troubles and sufferings of the our people, today show their noble impartiality and great generosity toward us, a small nation, in returning that which both historically and ethnically belonged to us through the ages.” He still went on to complain that the Soviet Union had not yielded all the territory inhabited by Lithuanians, but he concluded with the thought that “Soviet Russia is a state whose word one can trust, in whose good will one cannot doubt.”99 This was a hopeful statement, asserting that the Soviet Union was accepting responsibility for historic wrongs against the Lithuanians, complaining that the Soviet Union had not fully recognized what was due the Lithuanians, and working to convince listeners that nothing bad would come as a result of the movement of Soviet troops into the land. “Trust” was a key word in the political vocabulary of the day, together with “good will” and “sincerity.” Could Lithuania, could Latvia and Estonia, “trust” the “good will” and “sincerity” of Soviet promises, nay Stalin’s promises, that the Soviet troops moving into the Baltic had only defensive purposes and that the Soviet government had no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of any of the three countries? In a major speech in January 1940 Urbšys declared that those who criticized the mission of Soviet troops into Lithuania “have based their argument on the view that the Soviet Union was not sincere.” These people, he declared, were mistaken.100 Privately, no one in the government could be so sure. As of the fall of 1939, Lithuanians had contradictory images of the Soviet system, but they had a positive image of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy. There were stories of arrests, to be sure, but the stories of persecution in Germany were hardly better. The Soviet government had steadily supported Lithuania in the Vilnius question, and in the mid 1930s, even 50 Alfred Erich Senn Smetona and some other government leaders had suggested that perhaps Lithuanian culture could survive better under a Soviet protectorate than a German one. For a generation, the Soviet Union had had the image of being a friendly state. The Soviets claimed to have protected Lithuania against a Polish threat in 1927 and then again against the Polish ultimatum of March 1938. Now, as the choice began to appear more urgent and real, Lithuanian officials hesitated to make a commitment, while a number of leftist intellectuals, increasingly hostile to the Smetona regime, expressed enthusiasm for the coming of the Red Army, apparently convinced that Lithuanian language and culture would thrive under Moscow’s umbrella and apparently not even considering the possibility of Lithuania’s losing its independence. Some critics have called the Red Army a Trojan horse, but others, considering the deceit involved in the original Trojan horse, wondered whether the Vilna region itself was to be a Trojan horse. Did the Soviet Union turn Vilnius over to the Lithuanians with the thought that it would eventually take over all of Lithuania? (Before the Lithuanians entered the city, the Lithuanian Saugumas speculated as to whether the Soviets expected to get the region back with “all bolshevized Lithuania.”) 101 The original Trojan horse had been an inanimate object with troops hidden within it; rather than concealing troops, Stalin’s “gift” of Vilnius to the Lithuanians came clearly wrapped in Red Army units. Nevertheless, Vilnius itself might well be considered a “Trojan horse” in this drama; all the more so because Lithuanians were not wont to look critically at their own claims on the city. Vilnius now became the source of great stress for the Lithuanian government and a major vehicle for the Soviet penetration of Lithuanians’ consciousness. The city’s multi-national population posed a myriad of problems for the Lithuanians. At the beginning of the 21st century, when Lithuanians constitute a majority of the residents of the city of Vilnius, it is perhaps difficult for a foreigner—certainly for a Lithuanian—to understand the controversy over the city in the first half of the 20th century, when Lithuanians constituted only a few percent of the inhabitants of both the city and its surroundings. The present-day Lithuanian majority is a relatively recent development, perhaps realizing itself only in the decade following Stalin’s death in 1953. When I first visited Vilnius in 1960, I found that I had to speak Russian rather than Lithuanian to make my way around; Poles I met told me that they spoke Russian in public. On my second visit, in 1970, I could speak Lithuanian almost everywhere. To be sure, using the same— unscholarly—test in 1988, I found I could shop in the city on a Saturday morning speaking only Polish. The city’s history is a multi-national kaleidoscope. The original, original inhabitants of the Vilna region were ancestors of modern day Lithuanians, but as the city developed in its capacity of capital of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy, it drew residents from all peoples in Eastern.

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