by Geert Mak
‘So there we stood on 7 November, 1952, at that window, with a few other families and the ever-present plainclothes policeman. I was six, my friend was seven. Below they were carrying around huge portraits. I loved Comrade Stalin, and that was the extent of my knowledge of politics. But my friend wanted to show how smart he was, and suddenly he asked my father: “Alexander Alexandrovitch, if Stalin dies, who will be his successor?” Well, the very idea that Stalin would ever die was taboo, and talking about his successor was nothing less than a deadly sin. My father turned white as a sheet. Later he told me that the plainclothesman had clearly heard the comment, and that a whole range of emotions had crossed the man's face. Starting with: Should I arrest this man? Then: But he's only a child. And finally: Why not act as though I didn't hear?
‘My father didn't sleep for a week. When he told me about it, years later, you could still see the tension in his face.’
Chapter FIFTEEN
Riga
VARSHAVSKY STATION IN ST PETERSBURG CAN HARDLY BE CALLED A station at all. It is more like a vague, open lot through which one picks one's way with difficulty, a place criss-crossed with tracks and here and there a long platform. The engines roar behind their snowploughs and the carriages reek as the coal heaters are fired up for a new journey, but inside the compartments it is the very picture of conviviality. The professional busybody assigned to our carriage has settled down in the last compartment. Why would she want to be anywhere else? Her whole life is laid out in her home on wheels, with coloured cushions, flowers, her own curtains, an icon on the wall and a singing kettle on the stove. Always on the road.
Our first-class compartment is also like a salon, with two velveteen pull-out beds, red draperies, white lace curtains and plastic flowers on the table. My only fellow passenger, Andrei Morozov, deals in ship's tackle. The train pulls away, outside there is nothing but white barrenness, here and there a chimney, from the speakers the soft sound of Russian songs, and quite soon the day begins to fade.
Together we polish off two bottles of vodka. First we talk about Andrei's thirteen-year-old daughter and her favourite magazine, Callgirl. Then we speak of the lightness of Pushkin. Then he informs me in detail about the peculiarities of the whores who work the trains in Lithuania.
In the next carriage everyone is sitting or lying on plank bunks: farmers with red faces, shy soldiers and wizened grandmothers. My bed shakes gently, the train couplings creak, from somewhere far down the corridor comes the sound of an accordion, outside the window the endless snow slides by, the lanterns of a sleeping village, above it the stars.
I get off at Vilnius at 4.30 a.m. It is quiet as the grave. Close to the station, standing half on the tracks, four greyish-looking men are staring at the lights and the train, their faces tense from the cold, fishing equipment in hand. They do not speak a word. Then I walk down the city's main street and suddenly I see German houses, American advertising, Italian cafés and Swedish hotels, as though the city centre is cut off from the winter by an invisible glass dome.
My room is at the Hotel Neringa. I'm awakened by the groans of the man in the next room, and a few yelping cries from one of the working girls. It is quiet for a bit, and then together they sing a sweet melancholy song in an incomprehensible language. Meanwhile I lie there feeling a bit out of place in a Western bed, next to a shower that actually produces clean water. Just as my mattress springs easily back into shape, so has this entire city sprung back in a moment to European life, as though there had never been anything in between. Still, it was only ten years ago that people here first dared openly to celebrate Christmas. And ten years ago that they formed that human chain, right through three Baltic States, 650 kilometres long, with two million participants. And the bitter fighting with Soviet troops close to the television tower of Vilnius, that was only eight years ago. All the while, Lenin stood looking calmly out over Lukiškiû Square.
But all that was centuries ago. On the main street of Vilnius, Western vacuity has descended with a vengeance. The yellow walls are tidily plastered, the old ornaments look like new, and Adidas, Benetton and other familiar spirits smile down on you as you walk. Halfway down the street, a new wind is blowing: six boys, two girls and one guitar, short leather jackets covered in shiny studs, above them soft, blushing faces.
The inner city here has been converted, with much European funding, into a showcase, a beacon of Western welfare. Last year, in their enthusiasm, the Lithuanians even adopted Western European time, so that now their winter evenings begin around 4 p.m. But the city's Western European image feels a bit brittle. Cross a bridge and you will find yourself in the old Užzupis district, the Latin Quarter of Vilnius, full of mud, flaking walls, scenes straight out of Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, right down to the rotting hay in the courtyards. Outside the city there are wooden houses everywhere, their roofs rusty corrugated iron, a few half-rotted balconies, smoking chimneys, a horse and wagon, and crows in the bare fields, lots of crows, this is crow country. In some of the villages there are boarded-up sheds, the remains of an old wooden synagogue.
Meanwhile, the city's jeunesse dorée gather day after day at Café Afrika. They smoke in great earnest, drink coffee in silence, listen to French chan-sons. Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in Europe.
The spring thaw has begun. On this March day, the sunlight on the nineteenth-century walls is merciless and clear as glass. There are not many cars on the street, the few people out walking cast sharp shadows on the pavements. I pass a mercantile house built in 1902, with striking grill-work around the roof. The house must once have had a Jewish owner. The front of the one next to it is decorated with stylised, seven-armed candlesticks. Around the corner is a centre for social work, formerly a heder, a Jewish school.
Vilnius – ‘Wilna’ in both German and Yiddish – was once a thoroughly Jewish town, a centuries-old centre of Jewish learning and culture. There was a Jewish university, and the town had six Jewish daily newspapers. After 1945, the Jewish gravestones were used as steps for the new union hall. Today there is a little Jewish museum with two Torah scrolls, the skeleton of a lectern, a couple of portraits and a handful of commemorative plaques. That is pretty much all that remains.
Close to my hotel is a sombre government building, a solid chunk of stone with huge doors, massive thresholds, stairs and galleries. The pillars at the front of the building remind me vaguely of a Greek temple. It could once have been a college, or a government ministry, or the offices of the district administration. It is one of those nineteenth-century government buildings of which there are hundreds all over Europe. The front is spotted with blank patches, the places where the eagles, shields, swastikas and hammers and sickles followed each other in rapid succession. Otherwise little has changed throughout the years.
In 1899 it was built as a courthouse for Vilnius, as an administrative district of the Russian Empire. That was what it remained until 1915. Then it became a German courthouse: the inhabitants of Vilnius were subject to German martial law, and the Germans enjoyed all the privileges of the new coloniser. From January to April 1919, the building housed a Bolshevik revolutionary tribunal. The Lithuanian flag flew above it for a while, then for more than fifteen years it was where justice was administered under the auspices of Poland. Between 1940–1, the courtrooms, halls and cells were used by the judges and executioners of the Soviet Union; more specifically, those of the secret police, the NKVD. In 1941 the building became the headquarters for the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst and the notorious Lithuanian Sonderkommandos. After 1944 the NKVD, and later the KGB, resumed activities here. That lasted until August 1991. Today it is a museum.
The old courthouse has witnessed the entire historical drama of the Baltic States throughout the twentieth century. At this moment, Lithuania has 3.5 million inhabitants, Latvia 2.5 million (one third of whom, by the way, are Russians), Estonia only 1.5 million (also almost one-third Russians). Just like the Benelux countries, the three Baltic States are where the fault
lines between a number of European cultural regions come together. Lithuania is the last remnant of a once powerful Central European empire that extended to the Black Sea. In the fifteenth century, Vilnius, Minsk and Kiev shared the same rulers. Estonia was more closely aligned with the Scandinavian world; it has been Danish, German, Swedish and Russian property, in that order.
Latvia was ruled by the Drang nach Osten, the Drive towards the East. From as early as the twelfth century, this pre-Christian, heathen Courland served as the hunting ground for Prussian crusaders. Into the twentieth century, the descendants of the Teutonic Order – with names like Lieven, Pahlen and Behr – ran enormous estates here. The area was officially part of the czarist empire, but unofficially it was an important German colony.
Vilnius occupied a position in the middle: forty per cent of the population was Jewish, thirty per cent Polish, two per cent Lithuanian. That was how things were at the time the old courthouse was built.
In 1918 the Bolsheviks seized power in the Baltic States. They sacked estates, murdered a few thousand civilians and established a ‘people's tribunal’ in the courthouse. But soon they were chased off by a joint army of German property owners and Baltic nationalists. Then the purges began on the other side: thousands of real or supposed Bolsheviks were shot without a trial. According to the French ambassador at the time, at least fifty executions took place each morning in the central prison at Riga. And so began the rounds of slaughtering on the left and on the right that would repeat themselves again and again in the decades to come.
In 1920 the Soviet Union recognised the Baltic States’ independence ‘unto eternity’. The building once again became a normal courthouse. By then Latvia had lost forty per cent of its population to wars, famines and emigration. In 1926 the flow of goods through Riga harbour was only a tenth of what it had been in 1913. Entire factories had ‘emigrated’ to Russia. Hundreds of German estates were divided up among small farmers, and the Lievens and the Behrs left with bitterness in their hearts.
The British sent their fleet to the aid of the three little countries, but to no avail. When a youthful British diplomat stood up for Estonia and Latvia at the 1919 Paris peace conference, the British chief of staff, Sir Henry Wilson, led him to an enormous map of the Russian Empire.‘Now, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look at those two little plots on the map and look at that enormous country beside them. How can they hope to avoid being gobbled up?’
I wander now through the cellars of that courthouse. It is all still there: the bucket latrines of the NKVD, the Gestapo's hatches, the doors padded to muffle the screams. I see the ‘little cell’: officially designed for solitary confinement, but in reality often used to pack in ten or twenty prisoners; the wooden beds, dating from 1947 (before that, prisoners slept on the stone floor); the lamps that stayed on around the clock. On the wall is a photograph of a young girl with a smart cap on her head, half sitting, half lying against a wooden wall, a pair of binoculars in her lap. She is dead, her chest riddled with bullets. She belonged to the Lithuanian resistance which waged guerrilla warfare against the Soviets until 1953. These ‘Brothers of the Forest’ believed that, under international law, Lithuania was still an independent country. Their covert government had its own laws and its own administration. Courthouses were occupied to make sure Soviet law could not be applied. Some 20,000 Lithuanians were killed in that struggle. The life expectancy of a partisan was two or three years. Most of them were under the age of twenty-one.
A few of the cells are locked. Behind their doors lie the bones of the more than 700 Lithuanian members of parliament, priests and other prominent figures killed in a KGB massacre. The bodies were dug up in 1993 and 1994; only forty of them have been identified so far.
There is another visitor walking around down here, an old man. We strike up a conversation. Antonnis Verslawskis is back here for the first time since he was seventeen. Yes, he knows about the solitary lock-up, he stood there in cold water, forever, until he finally collapsed. His German is old and rusty. ‘I had German back in my gymnasium days, but it's been half a century since I've spoken it.’ He came to Vilnius today just for this, he says, and wanted to see it one more time. ‘I spent three months here in Cell 19, in 1948. There were seven of us. All students. I was with the partisans.’ He sighs deeply, taps his chest. ‘Emotions, yes.’ He points to the door of the solitary cell. ‘I was in there for three days. Then they sent me to Siberia for twenty years. Digging. Chopping. I was thirty-seven by the time they let me go.’ He has dark brows and sunken eyes. ‘This is where it all began. I was so afraid!’ He has difficulty going on, he has to dredge up the German words from deep inside, and he becomes more and more upset.
An important political barometer for the region is the Baltic Times. The weekly, only three years old, is put together by a dozen journalists working in a few jumbled rooms. A brief selection of this week's news: ‘Female President of Latvian Association of Models Arrested for Drug Trafficking’, ‘Parade of Waffen-SSVeterans Divides Latvia’,‘Estonian Parliament Broadens Language Demands: all Russian businessmen, civil servants, waiters and physicians must now speak Estonian’.
There is an article about anti-Semitic posters at the Lithuanian embassy in Warsaw. The text reads: ‘All crimes are instigated by Jewish Freemasons, and carried out by Jews.’ A demonstration by the elderly: ‘My retirement pay is just enough to pay the heating bill, but the Riga City Council doesn't care. How am I supposed to buy groceries?'The mayor of Visaginas has hanged himself: an investigation had been started concerning his alleged corruption and ‘pro-Moscow activities’. There is a report on the Estonian province of Polva, where the farmers have lost their Russian export market. ‘Unemployment, poverty, the young people are leaving by the hundreds. The locals, worried about their future, no longer dare to have children.'The Latvian prime minister, Vilis Kristopans, is interviewed: ‘If you want to see what Latvia should look like, look at the Netherlands.’
Steven Johnson, a young American, has been the weekly's editor-in-chief for the last two years. The supposed unity of the Baltic States, he feels, is only there when viewed from a distance. ‘Just look at the capital cities. Vilnius was built as the capital of a huge empire, Lithuania. Tallinn is and remains an overgrown Danish village, every bit as Scandinavian as the rest of Estonia. Latvia always was more or less a remote Prussian province, and you can see that as well: Riga is a true German trading town, and always has been.’
In recent years, Johnson says, the differences are becoming marked. After 1989, Estonia immediately established an excellent image in the West, and still leads the pack. Until 1996, Lithuania was still half communist. ‘The three countries may be working at the moment on a kind of economic community, but they are developing at very different rates. And that leads to a great deal of tension. You regularly hear Estonians in Riga or Vilnius shout: “What do we need these people for?”’
And what about the Russians? ‘After all those years, that intertwining is more complicated than ever. I know of a city in the south-east of Lithuania where eighty-five per cent of the population speaks Russian. In that same region there's a city that is dependent on one dairy factory, which is in turn totally dependent on the dairy consumption of a number of Russian cities. That still works, but for how long?’
According to Johnson, there are also huge differences between the Baltic States in terms of their relationship with Russia. ‘Latvia has always had the worst relations, Lithuania the best. Right after independence, Lithuania granted citizenship to all its Russians. In Latvia, only those Russians between the ages of fifteen and thirty were allowed to be naturalised. But if you were thirty-one and your native language happened to be Russian, then it was no go, even if you had lived there all your life. Latvian Russians are still in a tight spot: their pension rights are limited, they enjoy few or no social facilities, and they have no say in things.’ Latvia would rather focus on the Baltic, and forget the rest, Johnson feels. ‘The president is always talking about the
Nordic Six. In his view, the Baltic must become the Mediterranean of the North.’
The young people in these countries, Johnson says, are very optimistic. The older generations simply let all the changes roll over them. ‘They've become cynical, they've been through too much already, they don't trust anyone, including the West. The last time the Baltic states became independent it lasted only twenty years. Then, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they were swallowed up by Russia again. The West never lifted a finger to help. They haven't forgotten that.’
Riga has an intimate feel to it, and at the same time the lightness of the sea. It is a true Hanseatic port, with a whiff of Denmark, and sometimes a touch of Deventer. In ten years’ time, a fantastic Potemkin town has been created here as well.
Today is the first real day of spring. The centre of Riga has been transformed into a cozy place full of pleasant little streets, pretty façades, restaurants and grand cafés. On a smaller scale, the city's story is almost the same as that of St Petersburg: because the poverty allowed little construction work or demolition after 1918, Riga is a city almost perfectly intact, unchanged from the year 1900. Everyone is out strolling under the bare trees: a tall man with a moustache and a beret, a Jewish woman with a mink cap and stole, a drunken worker with torn trousers and no toecaps in his shoes. Engraved in a rusty wrought-iron balcony is the date 1879, and I think: who lived behind that date in 1918, 1920, 1940, 1941, 1944, 1989? A Jewish businessman, German officers, a Soviet civil servant and his family?
In 1939 the Baltic States were divided between Hitler and Stalin, when the two powers carefully circumscribed their future European spheres of influence. In the afternoon and evening of 17 June, 1940, while the whole world was focusing on the German occupation of Paris, a long column of Russian tanks rolled into Riga. One year later, more than 650,000 Soviet troops were garrisoned in the Baltic States. Looting was commonplace. Hundreds of ‘enemies of the people’ were lined up and shot. In the night of 14 June, 1941, more than 20,000 people were rounded up in Lithuania, loaded into cattle cars and deported to the remotest corners of the Soviet Union. That same night in Latvia, 15,000 people were picked up, in Estonia 11,000. Only a few thousand of them ever came back.