A history of oppression - a timely reminder
A museum visit in Vilnius offers a moving insight into Soviet rule
On a sunny day in late June, in the beautiful Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, I had one of the most affecting experiences of my life.
I’d been in the city for a few days, attending an anti-corruption conference. It felt a privilege to be in Vilnius: the historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; and earlier that day I’d enjoyed a trip to the spectacular Trakai Castle, set on an island, in a lake, in the countryside a short train ride from the capital.
The contrast with how I was to spend my afternoon could not have been more stark. From the outside, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights looks benign enough. Built in 1899 to house the Vilnius district court, it could be any one of the many Neoclassical government buildings erected around Europe in the period.
But for much of the twentieth century, as Vilnius was shunted between occupying powers, the building was a prison run by some of the world’s most notorious state security services, including the Gestapo and the KGB. In the two decades from 1944, more than 1,000 of its prisoners were executed on the site.
The upper floors of the building have been converted into a conventional museum, telling of the devastation wrought on the land of Lithuania in recent decades by a succession of brutal occupiers (a subject I’ll return to in more detail next month). But as I enter the building, past a chilling photo montage of those who met with gruesome violence within its walls, I’m directed not to the museum upstairs, but down to the basement.
It’s a warm midsummer day, but here the air is cold and the light is from a string of bare lightbulbs. Stretching into the distance is a stark, roughly-painted corridor bordered on either side with heavy prison doors. Behind these are the cells where for decades political prisoners were held captive, abused, and tortured.
The prison was home to Soviet state security and intelligence agencies from 1940-41, German intelligence and secret police from 1941-44, and the Soviet security apparatus once more from 1944-91. The last political prisoners held there by the KGB were released in 1987.
On the walls by the cells I read the descriptions of the horrors perpetrated within. Each cell, each description, takes me further from my world and towards not an experience of the suffering endured but a visceral sense of it - the kind of feeling that if you want to leave behind you have to physically shake off. My fellow visitors walk around slowly; no voices are raised beyond an occasional brief whisper.
In the years following the Second World War, those detained in the prison were typically members of the anti-Soviet resistance. Cells of no more than 10 square metres (such as that pictured above) held 15 to 20 people. Windowpanes were glazed or painted white; wooden boxes fitted on the outside allowed no more than a sliver of daylight. The light was on all day and night, the walls were damp with condensation that trickled down to the cement floor.
From the 1960s, when the armed resistance to Soviet rule had ended, the prison held those who fought for human rights and freedom of conscience, authors of anti-Soviet leaflets, underground publishers and distributors, and those under investigation by the KGB for criminal offences.
‘Active interrogation’
It was during the early postwar years that the worst brutality took place. Physical torture, blackmail, threats and provocations were standard practice. Interrogations could last several days, and drugs were administered to break the will of inmates. Torture was officially referred to as ‘active interrogation’ or ‘physical influence’.
I stand inside a tiny cell with a boarded up window, a basic latrine and a small wooden bench. Inmates who violated prison rules, or refused to give evidence under interrogation, were held in isolation in this unheated concrete box for up to 10 days, wearing nothing but their underwear. They were given a daily ration of 300 grams of bread and half a litre of warm water, and allowed no more than five hours’ sleep.
Through steel bars I look into another solitary confinement cell. In cells like this one, the floors were flooded with ice-cold water and prisoners were forced to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room, falling into the water whenever they lost their balance. Another cell has padded walls, a padded door, and a straitjacket on display. The padding absorbed the cries of those suffering torture, or of those whose minds it had already broken.
Uncertainly, I follow a sign marked ‘Execution Chamber’. With morbid aptness, the room is like a concrete catacomb. In a display beneath my feet are shoes, glasses and other belongings of those executed here. On a screen in the corner, a scene from a Polish film, Katyń, is playing. The scene was filmed in this room, and shows a security official killing a prisoner with a shot to the head.
The information panel by the door to the chamber tells me that more than a thousand people were killed in this room between 1944 and the early 1960s. The remains of 767 people shot between 1944 and 1947 were later discovered in a mass grave just outside Vilnius. The burial places of those shot after 1950, when the Soviet Union restored the death penalty, remain unknown. It is believed that there are several undiscovered mass graves within 30 kilometres of the capital.
I visit the museum upstairs before escaping into the sunshine, where within a few hundred yards I happen on a vocal street demonstration. It’s a sign that freedoms have returned in Lithuania since the restoration of independence in 1990. But such freedoms cannot be taken for granted. Freedom of speech and political representation are deprived to the majority of the world’s population, and the imprisonment, and sometimes torture, of political opponents are hallmarks of repressive regimes throughout the world.
Lithuania shares a border with Russia’s exclave Kaliningrad and its ally Belarus, making it fearful that Moscow’s efforts to impose itself on its former empire could easily spread. In July, Lithuania appealed to the EU and NATO to help bolster its border defences, and on 20 August it began building a military base that will house Germany’s first foreign troop deployment since the Second World War.
Fundamental freedoms are threatened not only by dictatorships and sham democracies. Among a myriad of cases of human rights abuses featured in my Conflict and Human Rights Update earlier this month were an Amnesty International report into 21 European nations showing how the right of peaceful assembly is coming under attack, and a warning from Global Witness that custodial sentences for climate change activists are threatening democracy in the UK.
Many of us can be grateful that we are free. But let’s not be complacent that our freedoms can’t be taken away.