XIV the Balance Sheet

XIV The Balance Sheet “We will not aim at sovietizing them… There will come a time when they will do this themselves.” —Joseph Stalin to Georgii Dimitrov, October 25, 1939 “Everything was done with dizzying speed.” —Liudas Truska “It is necessary… to rid Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia of this hostile scum [svolochi].” —Andrei Andreevich Andreev In the course of just seven weeks, Lithuanians experienced a dizzying transition, from an independent state to a constituent republic of the USSR. The pro-Soviet regime swept them along in a populist-style campaign of meetings, denouncing the old regime and promising an exciting future. There was no organized resistance to the sovietizing juggernaut. The campaign called itself “democratic,” but its declaration that democracy cannot tolerate opposition, backed up by arrests of possible opponents, “enemies of the people,” points up the perils of presuming that certain international words carry the same meaning in every society. The Soviet camp was enforcing its own definitions of such words as “democratic,” “independent,” and even “international.” For fifty years, Soviet writers would call this process “progress.” But given the opportunity to rid themselves of Soviet rule at the end of the 1980s, the vast majority of Lithuanians, in a new series of neo-populist meetings, opted for the reestablishment of an independent state. 442 It remains here to summarize that process of incorporation in 1940. The Soviet takeover of Lithuania in 1940 was “a revolution from above.” Although Lithuanian communist leaders, together with Soviet historians, insisted that the Lithuanian people had voluntarily, enthusiastically, demanded the establishment of the Soviet order in Lithuania, the direction for the changes in Lithuania came from Moscow, communicated through the person of Vladimir Dekanozov, Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, a longtime associate and colleague of Lavrentii Beriia, the USSR People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. Dekanozov’s arrival in Kaunas effectively brought Lithuania under the roof of the Soviet party-state, and his task was to restructure Lithuania’s political system to fit into the Soviet model. The Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party had established the basic political and economic lines of this program in its decision of October 1939 outlining the procedure to be followed in incorporating Belarusian and Ukrainian territories taken from Poland. This program offered 244 Alfred Erich Senn to outsiders the image that the Lithuanians were doing this themselves. As Joseph Stalin declared to Georgii Dimitrov in October 1939, “We will not aim at sovietizing them… There will come a time when they will do this themselves.”443 The first step in Dekanozov’s program was to set up a “people’s government,” originally with no communist members, and then quickly to establish control of the repressive forces—the police and the military—and to limit public discussion while staging multitudinous shows of enthusiasm and support. The Lithuanian Ministry of Internal Affairs, headed by Mečislovas Gedvilas, directed the new forces of repression, and Dekanozov trained Lithuanian Communist Party leaders to administer a Soviet-style party-state. The last step involved replacing the authority of the People’s Government with the formation of a popular assembly, a People’s Seimas that would go on to request Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union. The inhabitants of Lithuania, despite the popular demonstrations and even without strong leadership, in fact displayed significant passive resistance to the imposition of Soviet rule in their participation in the voting for the People’s Seimas. Lithuanian voters refused to endorse some of the new regime’s major figures. The regime found that in order to claim victory it had to violate its own election rules. The Election Commission did not have the time to forge individual voting returns, and in order to claim a communist victory it had to invent a new way of counting votes. The authorities went on to suppress the evidence of resistance, and when Lithuania elected deputies to the USSR Supreme Soviet in January 1941, the regime was more ready to deal with the voting. To carry out his mission, Dekanozov had to act quickly. As Liudas Truska has written “Everything was done with dizzying speed.”444 First the Germans told the Lithuanians “rasch, rasch”; then Moscow said “bystro, bystro”; and at the beginning of July Dekanozov insisted on elections in just 10 days. Like Andrei Zhdanov in Estonia and Andrei Vyshinsky in Riga, he could not stay long in Lithuania; Moscow had more important work for all three. Dekanozov left Lithuania at the end of July, and he soon went on to his new job as Soviet diplomatic representative in Berlin. Nikolai Pozdniakov succeeded him as Moscow’s “plenipotentiary” in Lithuania. In later years, Lithuanians who participated willingly in the processes of June and July spoke of having been deceived. “Deception” in fact lay deeply embedded in Lithuania’s fate in 1940—from the pronouncements of the Smetona regime and the Dekanozov regime to the self-deception on the part of individuals, whether in government or out. The Smetona regime had built a house of cards glorifying the wise “Leader of the Nation”; it had trained the society to remain passive and accept directives. Then Dekanozov had created the illusion of mass participation while playing his “shell game,” encouraging people to watch the government while he used other channels to arrange Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union..

Load more