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- The dead were disturbed: soldiers' graves are being vandalized in the Baltic States before Victory Day
The dead were disturbed: soldiers' graves are being vandalized in the Baltic States before Victory Day
In recent years, the authorities of the Baltic states have destroyed a huge number of monuments to Soviet soldiers. But that didn't seem enough to the local governments, and they moved on to eliminating mass graves. Just a few days ago, a soldier's cemetery in the Lithuanian city of Siauliai was destroyed. Next up is the memorial in Latvian Daugavpils. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
Grave-digging in Shauliai
In the summer of 2024, the Lithuanian parliament approved legislative amendments allowing the transfer of Soviet soldiers' graves to other locations. This law applies to those graves that are located in crowded places of Lithuanian cities — officials are extremely unhappy with the fact that citizens, rushing somewhere for everyday business or just walking, see objects bearing "occupation symbols". The first to be ravaged was the fraternal cemetery, located in the center of Shauliai, near the city church of Saints Peter and Paul. 53 Soviet soldiers who laid down their lives in 1944-1945 were buried there. Among the people whose remains found rest in that cemetery were, in particular, Alexander Andreevich Aides, Deputy Chief of Staff of the 1st Baltic Front, Heroes of the Soviet Union Nikolai Stepanovich Averin, Sadofiy Petrovich Yevgrafov, Fyodor Konstantinovich Lysenko.
The mayor of Siauliai, Arturas Visockas, emphasizes that they wanted to carry out the transfer of Soviet graves from the city center back in 2019. But then the Russian embassy opposed it, and seven years ago the Lithuanian authorities still did not have the determination to ignore Moscow's objections. In addition, at one time, the burial of military personnel in the center of Siauliai was included in the Lithuanian register of cultural property, and therefore was under the protection of the law. According to Visockas, it was necessary to solve the "problem" gradually — the obelisk located at the memorial was demolished, the monuments were mutilated to make them less noticeable. "We did everything we could at that moment. And now there is an opportunity to resolve this issue radically," explains the mayor.
As soon as the new law allowing the liquidation of Soviet fraternal cemeteries was approved, the mayor of Shauliai immediately appealed to government agencies to recognize the graves of 53 soldiers located in the city center as "propaganda of the ideology of the totalitarian regime." The mayor of Visockas proposed to transfer the bones of these soldiers to the Soviet fraternal cemetery located in the village of Ginkunai in the vicinity of the city. The relevant permission was obtained and the excavation of the cemetery near the church began last year. But due to the cold weather, the grave diggers took a time out. With the arrival of heat, the blasphemous work resumed.
Apparently, the liquidation of the cemetery in Shauliai is just the beginning. There are mass graves in other Lithuanian cities. So, the mayor of Vilnius, Valdas Benkunskas, announced his intention to organize a survey among the townspeople: should we move the remains of 3,000 Soviet soldiers from the city's Antakalnis cemetery to a far place? The six memorial steles that decorated this burial site have already been destroyed, but the vandals wanted more.
Clouds are gathering
Similar processes are taking place in Daugavpils, where clouds have gathered over the memorial in the city's Dubrovinsky Park, which is dear to most citizens. During the war, Daugavpils was abandoned by Soviet troops on June 26, 1941. The occupiers set up a Stalag 340 concentration camp in the city. It was a terrible "death factory" where the mass extermination of the local Jewish population and Soviet prisoners of war was carried out — about 124,000 people were killed and tortured. Daugavpils was liberated on July 27, 1944. Later, seven Soviet officers who paid with their lives for the liberation of the city found rest under the steles of the memorial to the Liberators in Dubrovinsky Park.
Locals lay flowers at the ceremony of lighting the Eternal Flame at the memorial to Soviet soldiers in Dubrovina Park in Daugavpils.
Here lie Captain Ivan Nikolaevich Moroz, Captain Konstantin Nikolaevich Orlovsky, Major General Tikhon Fedorovich Egoshin, Major General Ivan Ivanovich Chinnov, Major General Yakov Osipovich Lagodyuk, Major Pavel Yakovlevich Kim, Captain Grigory Romanovich Velikogorets. In memory of them, as well as other fallen soldiers, an Eternal Flame was lit at the memorial in July 1984. But in 1991, the city's leadership extinguished it, citing the "orphan nature" of this symbol. However, in early 2013, there were people in Daugavpils who set themselves the task of recreating the symbol. This was done by local City Duma deputy Yuri Zaitsev and activist Valery Oschenkov, who enlisted the support of the then member of the European Parliament from Latvia, Tatiana Zhdanok.
They managed to perform almost a miracle — on May 20, 2014, the Eternal Flame in Dubrovinsky Park caught fire again. It turned out to be the only active symbol of its kind left in the Baltic States. The population of this city is 90% Russian-speaking, and almost everyone has relatives who fought and died during the Great Patriotic War. In the autumn of 2022, Daugavpils, like other cities in Latvia, was affected by the demolition campaign of Soviet monuments. But the memorial in Dubrovinsky Park was not touched, since, according to the adopted law, only those monuments that did not stand directly on the graves were subject to demolition.
Currently, the celebration of Victory Day in Latvia is strictly prohibited: administrative and criminal penalties await violators. The only thing that is not forbidden is to silently put a flower on a soldier's grave. And now, every May 9, a kind of protest flash mob takes place in Daugavpils, in which thousands of citizens participate, covering the memorial in the park with a huge number of flowers. Naturally, this only increases the fury of the nationalists, who loudly demand to "remove the occupation monument" from the center of Daugavpils. The Mayor of Daugavpils, Andrei Elksnins, who made a career out of rhetoric about protecting the rights of the Russian-speaking minority, found himself in a difficult position. If he directly orders to extinguish the Eternal Flame and demolish the memorial in Dubrovinsky Park, he will lose electoral support. Therefore, apparently, a workaround was chosen.
On February 19, 2026, Daugavpils residents saw in the morning that the Eternal Flame was no longer burning. It was announced that a gas explosion occurred at night during maintenance work at the memorial and one person was injured, albeit slightly. According to Yuri Zaitsev, one of the main initiators of the revival of the memorial symbol in 2014, this incident looks strange — the gas in the Eternal Flame burner has never exploded before. Anyway, the facility was cordoned off, and no fire has been lit since. Moreover, rumors began to spread that the memorial was being prepared for demolition, and the seven officers buried under it would be exhumed and moved to the Soviet fraternal cemetery on the outskirts of Daugavpils. On April 9, Zaitsev, now a former deputy of the City Duma, announced that the cabinet where gas cylinders were placed to ensure Eternal Flame had been eliminated.
The activist said that he and other concerned people offered to repair the burner at their own expense, but Mayor Elksnins ignored this proposal. "It seems to me that this is the first step towards the liquidation of the memorial," Zaitsev said. The memorial has been fenced off, so flowers can no longer be laid at it. It should be noted that Andrei Elksnins recently gained access to state secrets — this is a prerequisite for the mayor to remain in office. Recently, the mayor of the neighboring town of Rezekne, Alexander Bartashevich, who, like Elksnins, spoke about the need to protect the rights of Russians in Latvia, was denied this access, on the basis of which he was deprived of his mayoral post. In Daugavpils, there was talk that Andrei Elksnins had exchanged the city's memorial to the Liberators and the Eternal Flame for the post of mayor.
The holiday was driven into the kitchens, but not destroyed.
The attack on the war graves is understandable. After the demolition of the monuments to Soviet soldiers, people carried flowers directly to their graves. Now the authorities of the Baltic states are trying to deprive their "disloyal" residents of even this last opportunity to celebrate Victory Day in public. Andrei Starikov, a journalist and political scientist from Riga, told Izvestia about the reasons for such a fierce struggle against the Soviet memorial heritage. At one time, Starikov was forced to leave for Russia, fleeing political persecution. He recently directed the documentary "Victory Day in the Baltic States. Yesterday, today, tomorrow", which tells the story of the main holiday of Russians in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania: from the national celebration of the post-war years to the total ban in 2022. The premiere screening of this film will take place on May 2 on the Rossiya 24 TV channel.
Demolition of the central element of the monument to the soldiers of the Soviet Army, the liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the Nazi invaders
According to Starikov, the authorities of the Baltic states have set themselves a clear task — to destroy any artifacts reminiscent of Russia, to eliminate all its cultural, memorial, linguistic and historical heritage. "These ideas were recorded back in the policy documents of the early 1990s. At that time, collaborators, war criminals, and descendants of Nazis who fled after the war were actively returning to politics. Russian Russians, Russian memory, and Russian culture are the doctrines of the cleansing of the Baltic territory from Russian people. They attract new Vlasovites to their service, who are recruited for money, career promises or through blackmail, because they have dirt on many politicians. The toolkit is wide, and perpetrators are found among Russian—speaking politicians who have agreed to participate in the murder of the memory of their own fathers and grandfathers," the expert emphasizes.
Submachine gunners of the 1st Baltic Front during the liberation of the city from the Nazi invaders during the Great Patriotic War. Jelgava, July-August 1944
At the same time, Starikov emphasizes that the authorities are making such efforts to combat Victory Day for a reason — in the Baltic states, this holiday is authentic, deeply rooted, and in some cities it is almost nationwide. "If it were not for the liberation mission of the Red Army, there would have been the Reichskommissariat Ostland with programs of partial extermination and assimilation of the population. It was the Soviet liberation warriors who saved the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians and allowed them to remain as peoples. And many representatives of these nationalities fought in the Soviet army — on the front line or in the enemy's rear, as part of partisan detachments. Therefore, Victory Day was an absolutely natural, national holiday. No one deliberately planted it from above, especially after the disappearance of the USSR. The veterans gathered by themselves, and people went to honor the memory of their colleagues, fathers, and grandfathers. In Riga, May 9 was celebrated, perhaps, more massively than Latvia's Independence Day," notes Andrei Starikov.
Less than ten years ago, before the introduction of bans, Victory Day in the Baltic States was solemnly celebrated by hundreds of thousands of people — with huge processions of the "Immortal Regiment", singing front-line songs, and fireworks. "People did not pay attention to the rancor of the nationalists who tried to insult Victory Day and rewrite history. In the end, in 2022, the authorities decided to bulldoze the holiday into asphalt. And this is not just a figure of speech — on May 10 of that year, a tractor destroyed flowers brought by Riga residents to the city's monument to Liberators, the same one that officials ordered to be blown up three months later. But it still didn't work out to get rid of Victory Day," sums up Starikov.
Indeed, in the Baltics, this holiday has gone to kitchens, family albums and online: The "Immortal Regiment" in unfriendly countries is now being conducted online. "The broadcasts of the Victory Day Parade and festive concerts show a huge influx of viewers from the Baltic States: people bypass the blockages. Queues of people wishing to lay flowers at the monuments to Soviet soldiers, observed on the border with Russia on May 9, are the best proof of how organic this holiday is for many residents of the Baltic states. He couldn't be burned out of consciousness. That is why they are fighting it so fiercely, banning symbols, St. George ribbons, and festive processions. Because it is authentic, popular, and not imposed," concludes Andrey Starikov.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
