The remains of Soviet soldiers buried in town squares should be removed and reburied in accordance with international treaties, Lithuania’s Desovietisation Commission decided on Wednesday after considering appeals from the local authorities of Šiauliai and Varėna.
Vitas Karčiauskas, who chairs the commission, argued that the Soviet authorities deliberately buried or reburied the remains of Red Army soldiers in central squares in order to entrench the “Great Patriotic War narrative”.
“These are ideological sites, not a tribute to soldiers, and therefore, of course, they violate the law,” Karčiauskas told BNS. “We have recommended that the burial sites be redesigned in accordance with the Geneva Convention.”
Signatories to the convention undertake to respect war victims buried on their territory and not to make any alterations to those cemeteries at their discretion.
Lithuania recently passed a law that prohibits any public displays that promote “totalitarian or authoritarian regimes”. In June, the Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, added tombs to the list of public sites covered by the law.
It also stipulates that burial sites recognised as propagating totalitarian or authoritarian regimes and their ideologies would not be entitled to cultural heritage protection.
Salomėja Nėris monument
The commission also decided that a monument to the poet Salomėja Nėris should be removed from its site near a school in central Vilnius that used to bear her name until recently.
“After lengthy discussions, we have unanimously agreed that Salomėja Nėris and Vilnius have little connection and no explanatory plaque will replace what the monument stands for, so it should be removed,” Karčiauskas told BNS.
The monument was installed in 1974 next to the Salomėja Nėris Gymnasium. The school has been renamed to Vytis Gymnasium earlier this year. The Desovietisation Commission also decided to rename a Vilnius street named after Nėris.
Salomėja Bačinskaitė-Bučienė, better known by her pen name Salomėja Nėris, was one of the leading figures in the Lithuanian neo-romantic literature of the early twentieth century.
Controversy surrounds her involvement with the Soviet occupation. She was appointed as a deputy to the Soviet-backed People’s Seimas and was a member of the delegation that went to Moscow in 1940 to request Lithuania be accepted into the Soviet Union.
Nėris was also requested to write a poem glorifying Stalin and was subsequently awarded the Stalin Prize (posthumously, in 1947). Her later writings suggest that she regretted her role in legitimising the Soviet occupation.
The Desovietisation Commission earlier decided that all tributes to Nėris should be removed throughout the country except in her native Vilkaviškis.
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