Lithuania: a country that is loved and lost

By Edward Lucas

Date: 24/11/05

On the surface, Lithuania has changed a lot since I was last there four years ago, particularly in the scenic square mile of central Vilnius. But the real story is barely changed from when I lived there 15 years ago.

The four main levers of corrective power in a democratic country are all weak, broken or bent: the media is bullied and bought by political and economic power; the criminal justice system is demoralised and ineffective; political parties represent narrow business interests and egos, not political ideas; and civil society is still an elite project of intellectuals, with little hold on the wider population.

No surprise then that reform is stalled, that bureaucracy is obtrusive and wealth-destroying, and that 100,000-plus of the ooomphiest and most ambitious Lithuanians have gone abroad. EU membership has boosted growth, not least by stopping the customs mafia from throttling the country's western border. But it has added a whole load of new regulations and rent-seeking possibilities to a system that could barely cope with the home-grown ones. Foreign investment is just about the lowest per head in Eastern Europe.

As I write, the government is on the verge of collapse because of a complicated scandal involving a hotel privatisation conducted by the prime minister's ex-waitress wife (both deny all wrongdoing). The main popular daily, Respublika, is engaged in a mystifying and vitriolic campaign against the Soros foundation and anyone connected with it: yet it was only Soros grants that kept the Lithuanian intelligentsia from destitution over the past 15 years. The opposition is a hopeless muddle. The president - an estimable, liberal-minded 79-year-old from the Lithuanian emigration - is faced with a hard choice between prompting political instability or tolerating continued sleaze. Amid all that, the country's most important industrial asset, the Mazeikiai oil refinery, is about to be auctioned off, either to a Kremlin-backed buyer, or at an extortionate price, to the Lithuanian government. I talk to a government representative about these interesting matters but she tells me, straigh!

t-faced, that "all necessary information is on the website". I just love that use of the word "necessary".

But there were bright spots. One was a provocative and erudite lecture by Egidijus Aleksandravicius, a Kaunas-based historian, about the much-contested role of minorities in Lithuania's historical self-image. On one side are ethno-nationalism and philological pointy-heads, defining Lithuania by language (and, in whispers, race). On the other is the open, inclusive tradition dating back to the ultra-tolerant medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania. That's represented by writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Mickiewicz, who wrote in Polish but loved Lithuania in its widest sense. One camp ignores minorities unless they are nearly extinct and therefore decorative. The other celebrates them: Jews, Karaim, Tatars, Polish Szlachta and also Tutejszy-the most forgotten people of Europe, who lack even a name and describe themselves simply as "local".

Even more interesting, with tears and tingles, was the opening of an exhibition of Samizdat materials from the archives of the Oxford-based Keston Institute, showing just how big and brave was the religious underground in occupied Lithuania. It's humbling to see documents produced by people who risked gulag sentences for doing so. It's even more humbling to meet them. I caught up with Nijole Sadunaite, an inspirational gulag survivor, over large Armagnacs at the British ambassador's house, and heard her unstoppable enthusiasm for her new work - raising cash for Lithuania's poorest families. My friend Canon Michael Bourdeaux, founder of Keston, remarked: "When you meet her, you realise that the Communists didn't have a chance."

Comment feature on the political situation in Lithuania