The Lithuanian Social Democratic Party’s candidate for culture minister, Šarūnas Birutis, has criticised decisions to remove public tributes to the poet Salomėja Nėris.
The Desovietisation Commission has issued a recommendation and the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania director has made the decision that streets named after Nėris should be renamed and that Vilnius should remove her monument.
They based the decision on the artist’s role in legitimising the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940.
“I’m not OK with this as there was practically no public discussion. Sometimes we have to consider all sides. I can safely say that Salomėja Nėris as a poet is a genius, and we have not had another poet of such genius in the history of our literature,” he told the Žinių Radijas radio station on Thursday.
“Now it is very easy to judge her political deviations, to condemn them in today’s position. In one way or another, artists have always been utopians, let’s say, and leftists,” the politician said.
Alongside other writers, Nėris wrote poetry and prose glorifying the Soviet government, and in 1940, was among the delegates of the People’s Seimas who went to Moscow to present Lithuania’s petition to join the Soviet Union. She later regretted her role.
The Desovietisation Commission argued that Nėris was thus an active member of the occupation regime’s political structures and took an active part in decisions that helped consolidate the Soviet occupation.
“People in Lithuania have certainly been misled very badly. Artists are not politicians, and one cannot hold them as responsible as us, politicians of an independent Lithuania, for not resisting the occupation in one way or another. I think you can’t compare those things, but you have to clearly state what they did, how they did it, why they did it, but to condemn her work... I would make a distinction between the two,” Birutis argued.
He said that while not all monuments erected during the Soviet period could be left standing, they should not be destroyed.
“This does not mean that they should be left standing. These things should not be destroyed. To destroy your past and say it didn’t exist is the worst thing. And painful past must be remembered so we don’t repeat it,” the candidate for culture minister said.
“That cancel culture is totally unacceptable to me,” he added.
In May 2023, Lithuania passed a law banning “the promotion of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and their ideologies”. According to the law, symbols associated with such regimes – monuments, street names, etc – must be removed from public places.
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