Hostages in their homeland
Krickus, Richard J.
LITHUANIAN HUMAN RIGHTS & AMERICA'S CATHOLICS Hostages in their homeland RICHARD J. KRICKUS NOT LONG after he was released in the exchange of five dissidents for two Soviet spies, Aleksandr...
...The Vatican's attempt to reconcile differences with Communist governments (the policy of Ostpolitik) may also play a part in the silence of the American Catholic hierarchy...
...Second, Americans of Lithuanian descent number about two million but most of them do not have strong ties to Lithuania...
...Since then Gajauskas has married his fiancee, Irena Dumbryte, in Moldavia where he is imprisoned...
...It is revealing that when the Coast Guard was considering whether to keep him on board the American vessel or return him to the Soviet ship, the officer in charge characterized Kudirka as a "traitor...
...After serving his full eight-year term, Petkus returned home but was not allowed to teach literature...
...This effort has met with success: Notre Dame's President, Father Theodore Hesburgh...
...He worked at various jobs, among them hospital attendant and sexton in several Roman Catholic churches...
...DESPITE kgb harassment, Petkus remained free...
...During his visit to Poland in June and his tour of the United States in October, the pope, via television, profoundly moved Americans of all backgrounds...
...I would consider it an honor to die in the camp, as many other servants of the Lithuanian Church have died.' Hundreds of Lithuanians came to bury Father Karolis...
...The son of a prominent Communist, he was given a visa to teach at the University of California but later stripped of his citizenship...
...Although some conservatives criticized the Vatican's Ostpolitik policy, Pope Paul VI—who on other matters was closer to them than to the church's liberals—defended it by proclaiming that it would allow the church "sufficient breathing space'' in the Communist lands...
...ALTHOUGH this attempt at reconciliation was favorably received in the West, there was strong resistance to it among Catholics living in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...T)he Catholics of Lithuania are not allowed to enjoy the rights and freedoms contained in international agreements, and which the Soviet Union pledged to respect and uphold...
...John Paul II's forthright defense of religious liberty, however, constituting a revision of his predecessors' cautious approach to Ostpolitik, may encourage American Catholics to employ their considerable influence in the defense of co-religionists in the USSR who are victims of human rights violations...
...First, because of widespread ignorance about East Europe, it is not surprising that many Americans do not know that Lithuania was an independent country prior to 1940...
...Unintimidated, Petkus helped form the Lithuanian Helsinki Monitoring Group in November 1976, emulating several sister organizations which had been established in other parts of the Soviet Union to monitor "Basket Three" of the Helsinki Accords guaranteeing freedom of speech, conscience, and travel...
...Upon returning home he graduated from high school and attended Vilnius University as a major in Lithuanian literature...
...Is it not Christ's will, that this Slav Pope should at this precise moment manifest the spiritual unity of Christian Europe...
...Petkus was found guilty of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and was sentenced to three years in prison and seven years at hard labor...
...THE POPE'S pronouncements on religious liberty have certainly had an impact upon Lithuania's Catholics, but perhaps an even more far-reaching consideration is the impact they will have upon Catholics in the United States...
...During Vatican II, observers from the Moscow Patriarchate were invited to Rome and in 1963 the leader of the Uniate, or Eastern Rite Catholic Church, Metropolitan Josef Slipyi (in jail since 1945) was released and allowed to go there...
...Their imprisonment did not, howCommonweal: 78 ever, stop the Chronicle's publication and in 1976 new supporters were caught, imprisoned, or confined to psychiatric hospitals for examination...
...They were joined by Lithuanian protesters outside the courthouse, but all were denied entrance to witness the four-day trial...
...Ethnic cleavages, as well as the power of the Soviet state, represent a strong barrier to the success of the reform movement in the USSR today...
...He did just that on numerous occasions during his triumphant tour of Poland in June...
...The editors used moderate language and restrained rhetoric, carefully checked out complaints, and made demands that were consistent with the Lithuanian and Soviet constitutions...
...For all intents and purposes, their fate depends upon the help they receive from the West and from their co-religionists in particular...
...He was denied legal residence, however, and his mother was fined on several occasions for harboring an "illegal resident...
...Presently there is only one organized effort in the United States to collect and disseminate information bearing on the plight of Soviet Catholics—the Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid located in Brooklyn, New York...
...When the Russians returned in 1945, they began a six-year deportation of an estimated 350,000 Lithuanians...
...I say your constitution...
...Many members of the House and Senate, along with President Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, have pledged their support for the release of Petkus and Gajauskas...
...Sister Ann Gillen, Executive Director of the National Inter-Religious Task Force on Soviet Jewry...
...In 1957 he was arrested and imprisoned for disseminating ' 'anti-Soviet'' propaganda...
...In December, Petkus announced the formation of the Lithuanian group in Sakharov's Moscow apartment...
...About 50,000 Lithuanians were killed in the process...
...In spite of a nationwide campaign to destroy it, the KGB has not interrupted the Chronicle's publication...
...He has stated publicly that "half my heart is in Lithuania...
...This ploy did not deter Sakharov and several other Russians from making the trip...
...He returned tothe city of Kaunas where his elderly mother lived on a pension...
...If the Coalition can successfully demonstrate that it has the support of many prominent Catholics, pressure exerted at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue will take on a new, important aspect...
...There is some indication, however, that at long last the American Cathclic clergy have begun to move on this front...
...A priest accompanied her from Lithuania to perform a Roman Catholic ceremony but the authorities would not allow it...
...The Helsinki Accords were widely publicized and praised in the Soviet press so the Lithuanian Helsinki Watch Group was a source of embarrassment and the authorities decided to crush it...
...The vast majority of articles finding their way into the press are the work of this American-born priest who provides documentation and materials to journalists, scholars, and government officials...
...What is even more startling is that the organization has a single full-time person IS February 1980: 79 devoted to this work, Father Cazimir Pugevicius...
...Just how much impact Pope John Paul IPs outspoken support for religious freedom has had upon the Coalition's success is uncertain, but it is fair to assume that his blessings have induced many Catholics to join the effort...
...Finkelstein.'' The Chronicle's editors suggested that the letter was bogus, the work of the KGB which hoped to divide the Catholics and the human rights activists associated with The Helsinki Watch Group with the wedge of anti-Semitism...
...Included in this number were Catholic clergy...
...Lay Catholics were fired from their jobs for attending church and youngsters were expelled from school or denied entrance to college for doing the same...
...One's conscience would not allow silence...
...Like many Americans, he simply did not understand that most people who reside in the USSR are not Russians and many of them do not think of the Soviet Union as "their country...
...MANY LITHUANIANS who had resisted the Germans gathered together with new recruits to fight the Soviets the second time they occupied Lithuania...
...Stalin clearly intended to destroy the Catholic church, which served about 85.5 percent of the country's population of three million...
...It is essential to have a dialogue with the Communist governments, he said...
...Given Petkus's record, he became their main target...
...Kudirka had jumped ship off the Massachusetts coast in November 1970, but was returned to his superiors under orders from the Coast Guard...
...ALTHOUGH ANDREI SAKHAROV has called upon the Western press to help win the release of Petkus and Gajauskas and Amnesty International has declared them prisoners of conscience, the American Catholic community has been relatively silent about their plight...
...Ironically, the KGB's policy of integrating political prisoners from all parts of the Soviet Union in the Gulag Archipelago enabled them to work together during and after their incarceration...
...The Chronicle's editors opposed the Vatican's giving its blessings to church appointees who were "approved of" by the Soviet government and who meekly accepted anti-church policies...
...Father Karolis Garuckas, Catholic priest, member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, died of cancer on April5...
...It is unclear why he was not arrested at that time...
...We still want to believe that the government of the Soviets will understand that it is committing a major error in supporting the atheist minority (in Lithuania) and thus inciting the Catholic masses against it.'' The security police conducted a nationwide campaign to arrest the Chronicle's editors, and sought to discredit it by forcing people who had contributed to it to retract their statements and by inducing clergy friendly to the government to disavow the Chronicle...
...Under the Czars and the Soviet rulers alike, inter-ethnic divisions have deterred the formation of opposition to government abuses of power...
...he was often interrogated and ordered to leave Lithuania or face arrest...
...In Gniezno, Poland's oldest diocese, he indicated that his ascendancy to the papacy had been preordained...
...In October 1975, when Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize, the editors of the samizdat Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania wrote: "All the people of good will in Lithuania are truly happy that your courageous struggle for justice, freedom and the dignity of man was highly esteemed, that your big heart, in which even the tribulations of the persecuted Lithuanians found a place, did not go unnoticed...
...We also mourn his death...
...Such inter-religious cooperation is another source of concern on the part of the authorities...
...What they are demanding is simply the freedom to adhere openly to their religious beliefs and practices as Soviet law permits...
...The Soviets recognized that the Vatican, which represented half a billion Catholics, wielded considerable influence...
...Many times during discussions with prison camp and KGB officials," he said, "the question was raised: 'Why did you lead the fight against the Soviet regime?' They did not want to face facts, to recognize the injustice which reigned supreme in those days...
...His signatures are on all the" group's documents...
...I must start with a sad announcement," he began his testimony...
...These words were written before the Polish Cardinal Wojtyla, who staunchly resisted efforts to compromise the Catholic church in his country, became pope...
...nor has the United States Catholic Conference, which has a large staff in Washington serving the Catholic Bishops of America in a variety of capacities—conducting research, developing policy options, and disseminating materials...
...The encyclical was favorably received in the Soviet Union and widely publicized there...
...Decades before the term ' 'human rights'' became fashionable, events which would involve them in such activities had been set in motion with the annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union...
...New people have filled the ranks of the Helsinki Watch group left vacant by Garuckas's death, Petkus's imprisonment, and Venclova's departure for the United States...
...He is in very poor health as a result of the twenty-five years he has already spent in Russian concentration camps...
...He is now Scharansky's cellmate at Christopol prison in the Tartar Republic...
...The Soviets were especially anxious to secure the Holy See's support for the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty and the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and got it...
...The "legal basis" for the incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR was part of a secret protocol to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact...
...Gajauskas was caught in 1948 and sentenced to 25 years in a Soviet labor camp...
...He was put in a mental hospital for examination, where he received drugs which subsequently led to a serious nervous disorder...
...The Lithuanian group documented human rights violations and sent material to Soviet authorities and the 1977 Belgrade Commission monitoring the Helsinki Accords...
...Ignoring these threats, Gajauskas gathered documents bearing on the post-World War II Lithuanian resistance movement...
...they were impressed by his intellect, wit, and humanity...
...In March 1972, opponents of Ostpolitik began documenting the persecution of Catholics through the Chronicle...
...He found work as an electrician but, using the pretext that he was living outside the law, the KGB persistently harassed him...
...In December he was tried in Vilnius, allegedly because of his association with Lithuanian civil rights activists...
...It is not mine...
...The statistical profile of the institution, in other words, shows a church that is still strong by any comparison except with its own past, but whose condition can very quickly go from worse to desperate...
...His draconian methods forced priests and nuns to conduct religious activities underground in private homes and wherever they could be performed undetected by the KGB...
...Pope...
...Working with Aleksandr Ginzburg, Gajauskas helped distribute money from the Solzhenitsyn fund to them and members of their families...
...He was picked up, interrogated for three days, and released...
...Balys Gajauskas, than a teenager, joined the partisan movement which waged a guerrilla war against the Red Army until 1952...
...on the contrary, he devoted much of his time to composing a massive 15 February 1980: 75 bibliography of Lithuanian poets and frequently gathered with young Lithuanians who wanted to learn more about aspects of their country's history and culture which were neglected or distorted at school...
...And after Kovalev's arrest, the editors remarked that the work of the Russian liberals had "compelled the Lithuanians to take another look at the Russian nation...
...Gajauskas was told to leave...
...a search was conducted in the Petkus apartment and two typewriters and many documents were confiscated...
...and it is rumored that he has appointed a Lithuanian, Bishop Julijonas Steponavicius—who has been prevented by the Soviet government from carrying out his role as Archbishop of Vilnius since 1961— as a Cardinal "in pectore" . . . secretly, or "in the breast...
...NONETHELESS, the Catholics in Lithuania are waging a desperate struggle which they may not win...
...The KGB informed Petkus that his association with Kovalev's supporters and his attempt to witness the trial would get him in trouble...
...The words he used were not novel but the fact that a man of his stature and character articulated them gave the issue of human rights new legitimacy...
...USSR, 35,000 Lithuanian political leaders, intellectuals, and some clergy were rounded up and shipped to concentration camps in the Soviet Union...
...He observed that many people worldwide were attracted to Marxism because they were victims of poverty, ignorance, and neglect...
...She was informed that she would not be permitted to see her husband again for four years...
...He collected and distributed the works of Lithuanian writers, including those who had fled their homeland rather than endure Soviet rule...
...During a two-year period in the early 1970s, for example, 50,000 Lithuanians courageously signed petitions protesting the government's anti-church activities which were in violation of Soviet law...
...In 1973 the KGB arrested numerous people allegedly associated with it...
...This can be attributed to several inter-related factors...
...He also collected the names of prisoners who were serving time for their political beliefs...
...It took many forms, involving restrictions on hearing confessions, conducting funerals and Mass, administering last rites, celebrating holy days, providing religious instruction, printing church literature, selling religious objects, and caring for church property and securing funds...
...but "they must respect the convictions of believers, ensure all the rights of citizens, and also normal conditions for the activity of the church as a religious community...
...In November 1975 he was found dead, killed by a train in what was an alleged suicide...
...The KGB kept him under close surveillance and was especially displeased by the assistance he lent to the mother of Simas Kudirka, who was seeking the release of her son from prison...
...A civil ceremony was held instead and after two hours Mrs...
...none had more than high school educations and none were clergy...
...While in prison he had met political prisoners from various backgrounds who, in spite of ethnic, religious, and political differences, shared the common bound of fighting for human rights...
...In June 1941, just prior to the Wehrmacht's invasion of the RICHARD }. KRICKUS teaches political science at Mary Washington College in Virginia...
...Petkus, a man in his fifties who has suffered the rigors of Soviet prisons for fifteen years, is not faring well either...
...He angered the Communist authorities when he spoke of the "silent church" in those parts of Europe where a religious freedom does not exist and verbalized the incompatibility between Christianity and Communism...
...But perhaps most important of all, they were moved by his staunch and eloquent defense of human rights and of the preservation of spiritual and humanistic values cherished in the West...
...The author of Pursuing the American Dream (AnchorIDoubleday), he has written for The Nation, Dissent and other journals...
...The document concentrated on the plight of the Catholics, but in addition to Catholics such as Petkus and Garuckas, a Lithuanian Jewish intellectual who had been denied a visa to Israel, Eitan Finkelstein, also signed...
...Although he is committed to a policy of reconciliation with the Communist governments, Pope John Paul II has revised the Ostpolitik policy of his predecessors insofar as he has boldly spoken out against religious persecution in Eastern Europe and the USSR...
...Petkus was among the Lithuanians who sought access and it was here that he met Sakharov...
...Who could have quietly accepted the sight of bayonet-wielding foreign troops surrounding mothers and children, whose fathers and husbands were being deported to Siberia...
...The significance of Lithuanians and Russians—traditional enemies—working together in a dangerous undertaking did not escape the authorities' attention...
...Ginzburg then alluded to other prisoners of conscience, among them Balys Gajauskas, a Lithuanian who like Petkus was in a Soviet prison for his human rights activities...
...many Lithuanian leaders were executed...
...The editors of the Catholic Chronicle, in a plea to Western Catholics, have observed, "If the Catholics of Lithuania can be defended by non-Catholics and even persons of atheistic persuasion, like Academician Andrei Sakharov or Sergei Kovalev, at the risk of their freedpm, then all the more we expect a word of intercession from our brothers the Catholic bishops and believers of other lands...
...According to the Lithuanian Chronicle—which has thanked Jewish organizations and journalists for publicizing the plight of Catholics in Lithuania—Father Garuckas received a letter from "Lithuanians" attacking him for maintaining contact with * 'Jews like Dr...
...Moreover, there was not a sufficient number of young people allowed into the seminary to replace priests who had died or retired and those who got in were being denied books and curricula necessary to provide them with a contemporary Catholic theological education...
...He remained there until the second week of July, 1978—the same time Shcharansky and Ginzburg were tried...
...He was convinced that "the preservation of (Lithuania's) national culture (and) spiritual values" represented another way to struggle against the subjection of his country...
...The union of both factors explains in part why the Catholic clergy has not demonstrated much interest in the persecution of Lithuania's Catholics...
...It is a source of grave frustration to him that the Catholic media, which have outreach throughout the country, have not seen fit to devote much time to the Catholic human rights movement in Lithuania...
...He contended that the Soviet Union was a powerful reality that had to be dealt with and in his famous Encyclical Pacem in Terris he urged greater toleration 15 February 1980: 77 of Communism and the Communist governments...
...The burgeoning Catholic civil rights movement attracted people from all parts of the country and every walk of life...
...Recently, in a letter to the pope read before Western correspondents, a group of Lithuanians belonging to the "Catholic Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers" proclaimed: "We were overjoyed when we heard from the lips of your holiness that the silent church no longer exists and that from now on it will speak with the voice of the pope...
...This time his luck ran out...
...Most Lithuanian Catholics, especially intellectuals, cannot attend religious services, because they are then discharged from their jobs, for instance teachers and the like...
...he named a Lithuanian, Audrys Backis—son of the emigre Lithuanian Charge d'Affaires in Washington— Undersecretary of the Council of Public Affairs...
...In 1975, however, Sergei Kovalev, the Russian biologist who was a charter member of the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International and one of the editors of the dissident Russian samizdat (underground) journal, The Chronicle of Current Events, was arrested...
...V. Stanley Vardys, one of the leading scholars of Lithuania in the United States, has characterized the church's prospects as follows: "(T)he disastrous decline of the numbers and the intellectual preparation of the clergy and a jealous control of admission to the priesthood is likely to allow doctrinal and religious devastation of the Catholic people whose numbers, too, are not growing with the population, but shrinking, though the sympathies of many a-religious people very likely remain with the church...
...The Soviet constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the men and women arrested were accused of political crimes under Article 70 of the penal code, which refers to' 'organized activities that seek to prepare or commit especially dangerous crimes against the state...
...Catholics who refused to accept restrictions on their religious beliefs were put in prison or incarcerated in mental hospitals...
...They reminded the Vatican that the KGB placed agents in the Kaunas seminary and encouraged seminarians to spy on their fellow students...
...In the summer of 1940, as Russian troops marched into Lithuania, rigged elections were held establishing a pro-Soviet government...
...but if they are convinced that influential Catholic leaders are prepared to employ their clout in this endeavor, it is a safe bet that the Soviets, in turn, will be subjec^to greater pressure from the American government than has been the case to date...
...Commonweal: 80...
...and the labor activist Monsignor George Higgins, among many other influential clergy, have joined the Coalition...
...Thomas Venclova, one of the founders of the Lithuanian Helsinki Watch Group, now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, has commented, "It is interesting to note that at that time, in 1957, a collection of the Russian poems of Jurgis Baltrusaitis, published in 1912, that is five years before the Revolution, was included in this 'anti-Soviet literature...
...To no small degree this practice provided a network for the spread of the human rights movement which evolved in the USSR after Soviet forces crushed the Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...Several weeks later the new People's Diet unanimously declared Lithuania a Soviet Socialist Republic...
...His return became a cause celebre and after several years he was released and allowed to emigrate to the United States when it was learned that his mother was an American citizen...
...A year later, he was tried and sentenced to ten years hard labor and five years of internal exile for "antiSoviet agitation and propaganda...
...The Vatican, in turn, supported Christian-Marxist dialogues to reduce the chasm separating the competing philosophies...
...Indeed, they would welcome the opportunity to conduct their affairs even in the limited fashion granted Catholics in Poland...
...According to the Lithuanian Chronicle: "On August 23, 1977 at about 1:00 PM, at the Vilnius railroad station, security police arrested Viktoras Petkus...
...His commitment to the preservation of Lithuanian culture had not cooled in prison...
...Catholic civil rights activists and persons associated with the Helsinki Watch group—like Petkus and Gajauskas oftentimes one and the same—have begun to work together and several other samizdat publications treating Lithuanian history, culture, and political affairs are in circulation...
...On another occasion he said that the Vatican's goal was ' 'to save what can be saved'' in those countries dominated by Communists...
...Priests who persisted in performing such pastoral duties openly were fined or imprisoned...
...The Vatican's Ostpolitik policy was first formulated in the early 1960s by Pope John XXIII...
...Support from people of all faiths and backgrounds has been sought—Aleksandr Girizburg is a member, as is Glen Watts, the President of the Communications Workers of America—but special attention is being devoted to attracting prominent Catholics...
...and that "(T)he court process and persecution shows that the secret police is capable of bringing closer together the Lithuanian and Russian nations...
...Mindaugas Tamonois, who worked at the Institute for the Conservation of Monuments, for example, refused to repair a monument honoring the Red Army unless a monument to those who resisted Stalin was also built and the Social and Christian Democrat parties were legalized...
...Several people who have protested human rights violations have died under mysterious circumstances...
...They warned, however, that by persecuting Catholics the authorities were turning the Lithuanian masses against the government...
...But in February 1977 his apartment was searched again...
...He outlawed all religious orders, closed and demolished churches, and those priests who escaped execution or arrest were exiled or denied the opportunity to perform their pastoral duties...
...Sakharov said Petkus refused to enter the court and had to be dragged in by four soldiers...
...Upon finishing his ten-year sentence he would live in enforced exile from Lithuania for five years...
...It is noteworthy that those who were imprisoned were from peasant and working-class backgrounds...
...They brought to the Commission's attention numerous examples of how the Soviet government violated human rights: —"The freedom of religious worship is guaranteed by the USSR and LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) Constitutions, but the faithful of Lithuania do not enjoy this right...
...On April 20, he was interrogated as a witness in a case involving the Catholic Chronicle, then arrested and detained at the KGB isolation prison in Vilnius...
...The entire audience, reporters, and commissioners all rose in response...
...In marked contrast to the Russian dissidents, they were bona fide members of the proletariat, militants of what the authorities feared was a burgeoning mass movement—although few Lithuanians who felt as they did had the courage to openly challenge the system...
...May I ask you to join me in honoring his memory by observing a minute of silence...
...After serving his full term, he was released in 1973...
...At present Viktoras Petkus is being held at Commonweal: 76 the State Security Prison Vilnius, Lenino 40...
...To no small degree, the fate of both depends upon the reaction of America's Catholics...
...This was clearly the case in Lithuania...
...In 1977, during the trial of Viktoras Petkus, also a member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, Father Karolis, already gravely ill, said: 'We worked together with him, so you should put me in the dock as well...
...He received a ten-year sentence at hard labor but was released in 1953 in a post-Stalinist amnesty...
...Although Kovalev had assisted the Lithuanians on occasion, Andrei Sakharov claims that he was tried in Lithuania to discourage friends and supporters from attending his trial and to limit publicity about it...
...It now carries pictures, letters from prisoners of conscience, reports of human rights activities in other parts of the Soviet Union, and its editors have spoken out in behalf of persecuted Catholics in Belorussia, the Ukraine, Moldavia, and Siberia...
...Under the leadership of several Lithuanian-American organizations, The Coalition to Free Petkus and Gajauskas was formed last April...
...In Czestochowa, however, he reaffirmed the Vatican's policy of Ostpolitik, asserting that the church would "cooperate with all countries and- with all peoples of good will...
...On Christmas Eve 1974, the KGB searched Gajauskas's apartment and found religious literature, fifty pages of a Lithuanian translation of the Gulag Archipelago, a list of political prisoners, and money from the Solzhenitsyn fund...
...Pope John Paul II has bolstered the hopes of Lithuania's Catholics...
...Simas Kudirka, who now lives in Brooklyn, stated after Gajauskas's trial: "This is a certain death sentence for him...
...In 1967 after Khrushchev's downfall, the Kremlin's efforts to improve relations with the Vatican were stepped up as President Podgorny had an audience with the pontiff and representatives of the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church met to discuss areas of cooperation...
...In prison, Gajauskas, whose formal education did not extend beyond high school, devoted his time to self-education and mastered many languages, including English...
...The Moscow dissidents' help has had a marked impact upon the Lithuanians' perception of "Russians...
...Here the church was divided between "moderates" who adhered to the Vatican's advice to keep a low profile and the "militants" who believed that to suffer persecution in silence was leading to the demise of Catholicism in their country...
...LITHUANIAN HUMAN RIGHTS & AMERICA'S CATHOLICS Hostages in their homeland RICHARD J. KRICKUS NOT LONG after he was released in the exchange of five dissidents for two Soviet spies, Aleksandr Ginzburg was invited to speak before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe—a joint legislative/executive body formed to oversee the Helsinki Accords...
...But the church militants clearly had the support of most Lithuanian Catholics...
...By establishing detente with the Vatican, the Kremlin hoped that Catholics in Western Europe—France and Italy in particular—might find it less difficult to vote for Communist candidates and that the prospects for promoting Soviet objectives in Latin America would also be enhanced...
...In 1947, seventeen-year-old Viktoras Petkus was arrested for his activities in an anti-Soviet Catholic youth organization, Ateitis (' 'the future...
...The Lithuanians state categorically that they are counting on Western pressure to encourage the Soviets to change their policies toward the Catholic church...
...although he receives assistance from a variety of Lithuanian-American organizations, he gets no funds from the church...
...As Kudirka informed his prosecutors during his trial: "My decision to go abroad does not even contradict your constitution to emigrate (sic), as you seem to have conveniently forgotten...
...the security agents confiscated a camera, personal letters, a photo-enlarger and his mother's diaries...
...The Coalition's organizers point out that, while there are many Lithuanian prisoners of conscience, the release of Petkus and Gajauskas may be a matter of life or death...
...If my country, Lithuania, were sovereign and free, I would not be standing here before you...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 3
