North Korea, the world’s only country-sized prison camp, has just executed Pak Nam Gi for the crime of ‘deliberately harming’ the country’s economy. I personally don’t think economic sabotage ought to be a capital crime, but if it is, the firing squads of North Korea have a lot of work ahead of them. Pak was the designated scapegoat for the latest blunder by one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen; by rights virtually the entire leadership elite of the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” should have been by his side.
In other developments from the front lines of global progress, the Cuban government arrested a group of dissidents protesting the recent death of Orlando Zapato Tamayo after an 85 day hunger strike. The increasingly eccentric president of Brazil, whose tender sensibilities and high toned moral standards prevented him from visiting the grave of Theodor Herzl in Jerusalem, has defended the Cuban government against the scurrilous rumors that somehow the hunger striker was a victim of political persecution.
One of the two greatest moral and political evils in human history is slowly guttering out, but even in what one hopes are its last throes, communism is still lashing out, still torturing and brutalizing where it can, still counting on ‘progressives’ to look the other way.
It’s corny and unfashionable to write about the evils of communism, but here in Vilnius it’s hard not to think about the suffering and ruin Stalin and his heirs left here.
Not that the city is particularly unpleasant or gloomy; while it’s snowed every day since I arrived on Sunday, the people are friendly and the food is hearty and warm — lots of tasty soups and mushroom casseroles.
But yesterday I had some time off after my lecture at the university and went down to see the building used by the KGB and the Gestapo as a prison and torture chamber from 1939 through Lithuanian independence twenty years ago. They’ve turned it into a memorial and a museum; on the walls they’ve chiseled the names of some of the victims.
Vilnius is one of those European cities that shifts from country to country as great powers rise and fall. Part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth until Russia snapped it up in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, Vilnius was on Napoleon’s line of march; I passed a house where the novelist Stendhal stayed while serving in the Grande Armée. After Napoleon, the city returned to Mother Russia — more slatternly and abusive stepmother, actually. The university was closed in 1832 following the failed Lithuanian and Polish revolution against Russian rule, and in the 1860s, after the failure of another revolt, the use of the Lithuanian language in Roman letters was forbidden. Books were published abroad and smuggled in. Children were taught Lithuanian in secret schools.
Lithuania managed to free itself from the ruins of the Russian empire after World War I, but the Poles snatched Vilnius in the general post-war confusion and Vilnius was part of Poland until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact divided the region between the Nazis and the Reds. Until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Lithuania was left to Stalin’s tender mercies. American Communists applauded as a reported 99.1 percent of Lithuanian voters enthusiastically supported the single legal party in the country and their new assembly requested to join the socialist fatherland as a the latest republic of the USSR. 18,000 people were arrested and deported in four days in June of 1941; like the hunger strikers and marchers in Havana, they were constitutionally incapable of appreciating the joys of scientific socialist rule.
Despite Stalin’s frantic efforts to appease them, the Nazis came in 1941 and things got worse. Quickly moving into the former KGB headquarters, the Gestapo and its colleagues set to work with a will. Pre-war Vilnius was about one third Jewish and it had long been a center of Jewish scholarship and life; it had been the most vibrant center of Zionism in the Russian empire. Roughly two hundred thousand Jews perished in the next four years. They were driven out of town and shot in rows in the fields; they were clubbed down in the streets and burned alive in buildings; they were tortured and murdered in the old KGB prison; they were deported and gassed. The diminishing band of Jewish survivors huddled together in the ghetto did their best to keep their culture and their traditions alive; they organized a lending library which celebrated a milestone in December 1942 when the 100,000th book was checked out. Ethnic Lithuanians and Poles sometimes participated in the massacres, either out of generalized anti-Semitism, the hope of ingratiating themselves with the Germans, or revenge against an ethnic group they believed had welcomed and supported the Reds. Perhaps another 30,000 to 40,000 ethnic Lithuanians were killed by the Germans during the war.
Once the Germans were driven out, things got worse (for everyone except the handful of surviving Jews). While partisans — hoping for help from the West — fought a guerrilla campaign against the Soviets, the KGB undertook a ruthless and savage repression in Lithuania. The old Gestapo prison came in handy; the communists tortured and murdered thousands of Lithuanians in padded, soundproofed cells just a few blocks from the city’s cathedral.
As was the case in so many other countries overrun by the reds, priests, nuns, students and intellectuals faced especial brutality. Today the solitary confinement cells, the cells where prisoners were forced to stand in icy water and beaten brutally when they fell, the holding cells for the condemned and the execution ground are all open for visitors. Garish and clunky Soviet high tech phones and communications devices are still in the guardrooms; there are bags full of shredded documents left by the KGB in its rush to abandon the building as the USSR fell apart in 1990.
Standing in the cellar of the KGB prison, admiring the ingenuously designed torture cells, retracing the final steps of the prisoners on their journey from the condemned cells to the execution yard, it’s impossible not to think of Vladimir Putin bemoaning the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Putin made his career in the same KGB that murdered and tortured for decades in Lithuania and its neighboring republics; the longing for the good old days must sometimes grow unspeakable.
To visit Lithuania is to feel both pride and shame at America’s foreign policy record in the last one hundred years. We helped western Europe stand firm and put together the coalition that in the end held together until poor Mr. Putin’s dreams came crashing down. Lithuania would not be free today if it weren’t for the United States and, frankly, if we left Europe the old slatternly stepmother would sweep back in.
Yet those poor Lithuanian partisans who fought a hopeless guerrilla campaign against the Soviet occupation after 1945 kept waiting for us to show up. Apparently they made the mistake of believing all those fine words that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wrote in The Atlantic Charter.
I have no doubt that Roosevelt and Truman were right to avoid war with the Soviet Union after World War Two. Yes, it consigned hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to exile, deportation, torture and death. Yes, it made a mockery of allied war aims; Britain after all had gone to war to protect Poland in 1939. Yes, it committed us to the grotesquely expensive and drawn out Cold War, fought out under the grim shadow of the nuclear arsenals both sides built up.
But war over eastern Europe in 1945 was unthinkable; containment was the best we could do.
That’s all true, but it didn’t make it any easier to look at the photographs yesterday of those haunted, idealistic young partisans in the Lithuanian forests. It didn’t make it any easier for me to explain to the Lithuanian student taking me through the museum why reasons of state made it impossible for the United States to do anything but wring our hands as the Soviets closed in on the last, desperate partisan bands in the deep woods.
Lithuanians ask me over and over again whether the United States will stand by them now. They are worried about Russia, worried about the fallout from the economic crisis, worried about their inability to get the European Union to pay them the attention they seek. They depend absolutely on Russia for their energy needs; they know all too well how easy it is for large nations to sacrifice small ones for the sake of some greater good.
I do my best to reassure them. Lithuania is a member of the NATO alliance, I say. We have a treaty; we will honor it. “But Russia could occupy us in two hours,” they say. I reply that that’s unlikely, but don’t speculate on what we would do in such a case. I am sure that at the minimum we would send President Medvedev a truly stinging letter; perhaps the secretary of state and the president’s senior adviser would be almost as harsh with Russia as they were with Israel last week. Conceivably, we would boycott the next winter Olympics scheduled for Sochi in 2014; that would impress on them just how displeased we were.
In fact, I don’t think the Lithuanians are in immediate danger, or anything like it. The Russian bear is not what it was; the European Union and NATO offer Lithuania and its neighbors far better security than they have ever had. Lithuania’s new president is taking some sensible steps that could lead to improved relations with Moscow. As long as the general geopolitical climate in this part of the world stays reasonably stable, Lithuania is safe.
But in the meantime, Lithuania is doing everything it can think of to show the United States that it is a good citizen and a worthy ally. It has a PRT in Afghanistan which has won high praise from Americans and others for its commitment and professionalism. It supported George W. Bush as much as it could; it’s ready now to help the Obama administration in any way it can.
Diligent readers of this blog know that I’m here as a (non-partisan and non-official) speaker on a State Department sponsored cultural program. Sometimes people ask me why I spend as much time as I do visiting other countries, giving lectures on the history of American foreign policy, and sharing my thoughts about the current state of our foreign policy debates with students, professors, journalists and officials around the world. It’s partly because I like to see the world and find out what other people are thinking. But it’s more than that. Visiting places like Lithuania, and seeing sights like the KGB/Gestapo HQ reminds me what the stakes are in American foreign policy.
What we do matters. Developing American power and reinforcing its economic foundations at home, building alliances, promoting democracy, deterring aggressors: when we do these things well, people thrive. When we fail, they die miserably, and in droves.
When I get home tomorrow and the Bentley drives through the welcoming gates and up the long driveway at the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens, I’ll be tired and jet lagged. But I’ll have also renewed my commitment to the study of the United States and its role in the world. When I face my students on Monday night, I’ll be clear on why teaching matters. And I’ll have just a little bit more insight into the kind of world we live in and the way things work.