HINSEY: Khrushchev's famous “Secret Speech” in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin sent shock waves across the whole of Eastern Europe. However, the first secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Antanas Sniečkus, was relatively cautious about de-Stalinization, and waited a month to officially announce in the party newspaper Tiesa that the nowvilified “cult of personality” referred to Stalin. How was de-Stalinization first received in Vilnius?

VENCLOVA: Here, we have to go back a bit in time. The Twentieth Party Congress was held in February 1956, in the second year of my studies. That was before I learned to take advantage of the samizdat network. I was still a member of the Young Communist League, rather knowledgeable about the dubious nature of the regime and skeptical toward its practices, but still a member of the league. Like many Soviet people, I tended to believe that Lavrenty Beria, now executed, had been responsible for the deformities of the system to a considerable, perhaps even predominant, degree (in Lithuania, such beliefs were uncommon). Therefore, the Secret Speech came as a profound shock to me.

Antanas Sniečkus, a professional—and fanatical—revolutionary during the independence period, owed his career to Stalin. He understood perfectly that Stalin could destroy him at any moment, which only contributed to his zealousness. He fought the partisans with an unusual degree of hatred, was quite active during the deportations, and sent some of his own relatives to Siberia. At the same time, he was not devoid of political acuity, which helped him to survive and remain at the top not only under Stalin, but under Khrushchev and Brezhnev as well—a veritable exception among party leaders in the Soviet republics. Many, though not all, historians believe that he became a sort of closet separatist in his later years and attempted to work for the benefit of Lithuania (as he understood it), shirking the demands of the Kremlin. In 1956, as on many other occasions, he displayed as much cautiousness as possible. It was far from certain who would prevail in the final account. Besides, I believe that Sniečkus held Stalin in a certain esteem (though the traits of a cunning, if narrow-minded, Lithuanian peasant finally prevailed over his Stalinist beliefs).