State as Transgressor: Šilingas versus the State—A Case Study

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Notes

1. Insight Guides: Baltic States, 30, 34.

2. Senn, “Baltic Languages,” 531.

3. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 148.

4. Insight Guides: Baltic States, 31.

5. Pond, From the Yaroslavsky Station, 136.

6. Ibid., 126.

7. Ibid., 125. On deportation numbers, Anne Applebaum writes in Gulag: “The combined effect of the deportations and the war on the demographics of the Baltic States was shocking: between 1939 and 1945, the Estonian population declined by 25 percent” (Applebaum, Gulag, 423). Harold Wilson provides this summation: “Lithuania's population for 1940 to1945 was 3,081,289 and a projection of her population for 1959 had been 3,706,193. But, the actual population in 1959 was 2,486,370. A third of the Lithuanian population [was] sacrificed for the greater good of the Soviet Union” (Wilson, Lithuania, 263).

• On the day that Silingas was arrested—14 June 1941—15,000 Lithuanians were arrested for deportation, as is widely known.

• Applebaum explains: “In a survey of Archival publications, Otto Pohl … counts over seven million special exiles from 1930 to 1948” (Applebaum, Gulag, 581). Silingas was a “specexile.” In volume 3 of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a chapter is entitled “Nations in Exile” (pp. 385–405).

8. In a letter written in 1965, Silingas describes his earlier exile in the harsh interior sub-Arctic Altai Mountain region just north of Mongolia, thousands of miles from the gentle climate and topography of Lithuania:

• We chop, dig, pull, and drag the stumps through swampy woods—trudging to work in the morning and returning in the evening—loaded with heavy tools—sometimes as far as 6 to 10 km (4–6 miles) on mountain roads. We'd cook our own supper, slurping and gnawing it on the spot, and we relished it. I dug and heaped potatoes, vegetables. We cleared fields. We excavated ground for construction. I made and hauled bricks. With my bare feet, I kneaded mortar for the plastering, even when the weather was quite cold; after hammering up laths, I plastered the walls. I put shingles on roofs when it was as cold as 5 degrees. I loaded and unloaded wagons.

• As if I could remember everything—I've already forgotten so much. I think in 1949, while cutting roof shingles, I collapsed from my kidney ailment. After that, I worked at easier housekeeping chores. And you see, I endured it all. I would even say, the work dispersed depression, made me stronger, toughened me.

9. “In effect, Article 58 was carte blanche for the secret police to arrest and imprison anyone deemed suspicious, making for its use as a political weapon” (“Article 58”). Amis explains that “the politicals” [political prisoners] “aka the 58's” (p. 67) were “at the mercy of the urkas” who were “circus cutthrats, devoted to gambling, plunder, mutilation, rape” (p. 68), and that “the 58ers were exposed to the urkas on principle, to increase their pain” (p. 68), all the more horrible “Because they were all innocents, the politicals. None of them had done anything” (p. 68). Solzhenitsyn calls the inmates “lambs” throughout the Gulag Archipelago.

10. In a letter to a colleague, Silingas describes the conditions in the Invalid home:

• The atmosphere is dreadful—caused by the invalids themselves. There are three main groups. The rest are their shadows. First. Those who are deprived of sky and the natural world. Solitary confinement, mentally abnormal. Second. The strong ones. Shameless—impudent hooligans, drunks, thugs, cowards, moral degenerates, capable of doing anything. They are in charge. They are of course a minority, but they terrorize. Third, the weak ones. Quiet, decent, to whom anything may be done. Mutual envy rules among them—misanthropes, grinding intolerance. The most zealous keep an eye on each other, what they get, do, eat they know better than the person himself. You could say that's how they survive. They just look for a chance to quarrel, to torment one another, as if deliberately pushing-chasing each other towards the grave, waiting for one another to die. They identify a candidate, vying with each other, lurking until they can grab the dead one's rags … in such surroundings my life creeps. (Underlining in original)

11. 58-10. Anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation: up to 6 months of imprisonment. In the conditions of unrest or war: same as 58.2.

• 58-2. Armed uprising or intervention with the goal to seize the power: up to death with confiscation, including formal recognition as “enemy of workers.”

• 58-4. Any kind of help to “international bourgeoisie” which, not recognizing the equality of communist political system, strives to overthrow it: punishment similar to 58-2.

• 58-11. Any kind of organisational or support actions related to the preparation or execution of the above crimes is equated to the corresponding offenses and persecuted by the corresponding articles. (“Article 58”)

12. In the December 2004 issue of Smithsonian, in an article titled “Vilnius Remembers” about the memorializing and restoration of the once great Jewish Quarter there—the Jerusalem of the North—one Justas Paleckis is quoted: “It's very important to rebuild the Jewish Quarter and right the wrongs of the past” (p. 3). His observation is tremendously ironic as he is the son of the very Justas Paleckis who pointedly ignored, at the very least, Silingas' appeals for release from incarceration in Ukraine near the end of his life.

• And to this day “Justas Paleckis' [pere] last name became [is] synonymous with that of a traitor in Lithuania and has the same reputation and connotation as Quisling's in Norway” (“Justas Paleckis”). Silingas wrote to colleague Juozas Urbsys who had also been a specexile also before being allowed to return to Lietuva that “My letters are lying on P's [Paleckis'] desk ignored.”

13. Christopher Hitchins aptly observes: “Stalinism was, among other things, a triumph of the torturing of language” (Hitchins, “Lightness at Midnight,” 2).

14. Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil, 55–56.

15. Politkovskaya was the twelfth Russian journalist to be murdered since 2000 when Putin first came to power: “At the time of the murder, no one in Russia expected that anyone would ever be arrested for murdering Politkovskaya,” and “Politkovskaya's assassin, like so many Russian assassins, did not seem to fear the law” (Applebaum, “Foreword,” x).

16. Prunskis, Lietuviai Sibire, 67.

17. Ibid., 43.

Additional information

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Svaja Worthington Vansauskas

Svaja Vansauskas Worthington, Adjunct Professor, Department of English, University of Alaska-Anchorage, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508, USA. Email: [email protected]