Skeletons in the closet: Lithuania is afraid to reveal the names of KGB informants
The Lithuanian Seimas rejected a proposal to make public the names of former KGB sex workers. This is a vivid manifestation of the "intraspecific struggle" — the politicians of the younger generation want to strike at their older rivals. After all, many of the former informants can still hold influential positions in the structure of the Lithuanian state — and they, of course, do not want to be exposed. But there were also more serious motives involved — there is evidence that some people who are now considered national heroes and leaders of the struggle for independence in Lithuania collaborated with the KGB at one time. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
Keep it a secret
The Lithuanian Seimas Committee on National Security rejected a proposal made by several politicians to declassify the names of former KGB informants who once voluntarily confessed to cooperation. It was proposed either to completely remove the secrecy stamp from them, or at least to make public the data of current government officials who once collaborated with the KGB. However, the majority of members of the National Security Committee rejected this proposal, fearing, in their words, "injustice and damage."
Invited experts from the current Lithuanian State Security Department also spoke out against the initiative, citing "risks". The discussion was summed up by Deputy Speaker of the Seimas Juozas Olekas (a member of the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania), who said that if the names of the ex-informants had been published, those who "were not loyal to Lithuania" and hid their secret cooperation with the KGB would have benefited. "Those who did not come, or those whose agent files were taken out, now, I would say, they could continue to hide — and be glad that their names were not made public," Olekas explained his thought.
To understand the situation, you need to refer to the events of the past. In the early 1990s, after Lithuania seceded from the USSR, the republic's authorities issued an appeal to former KGB informants. They were asked to voluntarily confess everything and bring their confessions to the state commission on lustration. Those who agreed to do so were promised forgiveness of "sins" and secrecy. As a result, some agreed to this proposal, and their names were added to a special list. It is known that there are 1589 surnames listed in it. In total, according to the most conservative estimates of the members of the lustration commission, over half a century of the "Soviet occupation", more than 118 thousand Lithuanian citizens managed to cooperate with the chekists.
Since then, for three decades now, one of the favorite pastimes of the Lithuanian politicized public has been fortune-telling on coffee grounds: is this politician listed in the classified folder of the lustration commission? And that one? Revelations of this kind in Lithuania have not surprised anyone for a long time. So, in February 2018, a scandal broke out — Vitas Tomkus, the editor-in-chief and owner of the newspaper Respublika, announced that he had in his possession a list of Lithuanian residents who had secretly collaborated with the KGB during the Soviet era. Tomkus did not say how this list got to him. But he published it on the pages of his newspaper — and there were the names of the then President and Prime Minister of Lithuania Dali Grybauskaite and Saulius Skvernelis, former Chairman of the Supreme Council Vytautas Landsbergis and his father Vytautas Landsbergis-Zjamkalnis, former defense Ministers Rasa Jukneviciene and Juozas Olekas, former Prime Ministers Andrius Kubilius and Algirdas Butkevicius, formerSpeaker of the Seimas Irena Diagutene, as well as many other well-known politicians, major businessmen, journalists and artists.
Naked Kings
With his publications, Tomkus baffled the authorities: if they had used any kind of repression against him, there would certainly have been people who would have said that this was "revenge for the truth." In this situation, the government preferred the tactic of silence — there were no comments. No questions were asked to anyone from the list published by Tomkus. The current President of Lithuania, Gitanas Nauseda, suffered practically no damage either, who was convicted in 2023 of being a member of the CPSU. But these revelations did not prevent Nauseda from being successfully re-elected to the presidency a year later.
Another scandal of this kind, although smaller in scale, took place in 2020, when the public library in Raseiniai canceled a pre-announced meeting to discuss the book by journalist Ruta Yanutene "Krasnaya Dalia". This book tells about the communist past of the former president of the Baltic Republic, Dalia Grybauskaite. Eight years earlier, when Grybauskaite was in power, Janutene had produced a documentary on the subject.
In general, everyone in Lithuania remembers perfectly well that at one time Grybauskaite was a functionary of the CPSU at a fairly high level. But Ruta Yanutene drew attention to the fact that Grybauskaite continued to teach at the Vilnius Party School in March 1990, after the announcement of Lithuania's withdrawal from the USSR. In addition, according to the journalist, there is a suspicion that Grybauskaite secretly studied at the KGB school. The film was supposed to be released on November 22, 2012 on the private TV channel TV3. However, he never got on the air, and the team of journalists who worked on him was fired. Then Ruta Janutene wrote the book "Krasnaya Dalia", which is a collection of documents about Grybauskaite and the stories of people who personally know her or studied her biography.
Dali Grybauskaite
The most intriguing moment is connected with the name of Vytautas Landsbergis, a man who is now called the father of independence in Lithuania. In the second half of the 1980s, Landsbergis led the social movement "Sayudis", which after a while proclaimed the course of the republic's withdrawal from the USSR. Subsequently, Landsbergis headed the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR — and during his leadership of this body, Lithuania broke with the Soviet Union. In modern Lithuania, Landsbergis is almost deified. However, "it is known from reliable sources that Landsbergis joined the Sayudis initiative group only at the insistence of a KGB curator as a "trusted Soviet intellectual." He was supposed to inform the Committee about all the "deviations" in the course of the initiative group," says Vladislav Shved, who at that time held the position of first secretary of the Oktyabrsky district Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania in Vilnius.
According to the Swede, Landsbergis was considered a reliable person for the reason that he was a long-term informant of the KGB of the Lithuanian SSR, who acted under the pseudonym first Vytautas, and then Dedulė. He wrote denunciations not only against the creative intelligentsia of the Lithuanian SSR, but also against Lithuanian cultural figures who lived abroad, with whom Landsbergis, as a well-known musicologist at that time, had the opportunity to communicate.
Get out of control
Historian Alexander Dyukov emphasizes that the KGB did not create various "popular fronts" in order to destroy the USSR. "There was a rather primitive scheme. Gorbachev needed a demonstration of popular support for his initiatives for the internal party struggle. Support should not have come from a party whose leadership was just being "purged" (Gorbachev's "purge" was the largest since Stalin's time). The only organization in the USSR that, apart from the party, had the opportunity to assemble some kind of movement based on the social networks it really controlled was the KGB," the historian notes. According to him, Gorbachev's entourage "sent" an order to the KGB to ensure that the reforms carried out by the then Secretary General of the USSR received proper "public support," for which the committee members used their agents. As a result, the informers got the opportunity to change the role of sexologists to the role of "shepherds of the people," which they took advantage of.
Dyukov notes that sex control is a simple matter only as long as he has the appropriate social status. The historian gives an example of the same Vytautas Landsbergis. The "leash" was that we could fire/imprison. But it works when you have the musicologist Landsbergis in front of you, but not the head of "Sayudis" Landsbergis. When a sexton becomes a popular politician, control over him is lost. Why wasn't this taken into account? Did the KGB ever create mass political movements in the USSR? It was the first time, and there was no experience. And the sexists were reliable, many of them not in the first generation," the historian writes sarcastically. However, now, several decades later, these "skeletons in the closet" of some modern Lithuanian politicians have become their vulnerable spot. It serves as a target for younger politicians who, due to their age, did not have time to join the CPSU or cooperate with the KGB.
Natalya Eremina, Doctor of Political Sciences, professor at St. Petersburg State University, suggested in an interview with Izvestia that in the 1990s, for those post-Soviet politicians in the Baltic States who had compromising evidence in the form of their former cooperation with the KGB, he simultaneously turned out to be "the reins." This compromising material could be used to force them to vote "correctly" and make "correct" decisions. "Where there is secrecy, there is a lever to control it. So far, we can only guess about this, because the true scale of this phenomenon is not yet known to us — who and to what extent blackmailed these ex-sexts. And, of course, there is no absolute guarantee for former informants. In Latvia, they were already merged six years ago, and in Lithuania, the only guarantee against such a drain is, apparently, the unwillingness to expose Vytautas Landsbergis, the founding father of the current Republic of Lithuania, to shame. But the guarantee is unreliable, because in the context of the intensification of the intraspecific struggle of Lithuanian politicians, the "youth" will increasingly put pressure on the "old people," Eremina believes.
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