(Un)erased from the history of Vilnius University

Like other autonomous public institutions of high standing, universities have always proved a significant obstacle to totalitarian regimes attempting to alter the structure of society according to their ideological views. Although unable to destroy them completely, the Communists and Nazis sought to violate the autonomy of universities, undermine their authority, and turn them into obedient instruments of the system. On 15 June 1940, Lithuania lost the statehood it had been building for a couple of decades and was turned into a testing ground for social and political experiments of the interchanging totalitarian regimes. Vilnius University, one of the leading research and studies institutions, faced major challenges as well. The destruction of the academic community soon became an inevitable part of the grim reality through the removal of ideologically unacceptable students and members of the teaching and administrative staff.

Vilnius University suffered the most devastating losses during World War II and the post-war Sovietisation period. The first politically motivated dismissals of active staff took place in the autumn of 1940 when several professors who did not comply with the Soviet ideological vision lost their jobs. However, this campaign failed to gain pace before the start of the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany, as the Soviet occupational regime did not manage to promptly mobilise enough loyal cadres to fill the vacant positions of the dismissed professors. Neither did the ‘cleansing’ of students according to social and political criteria build any sufficient momentum in 1940 and 1941. Although nearly 800 students are known to have left the University in the autumn semester of that academic year, it is unclear how many of them were actually forcefully expelled. Moreover, it still has not been established how many of the Vilnius University teaching staff and students of different nationalities were exiled during the mass deportations in June 1941.

Furthermore, the University community suffered some major upheavals due to the Nazi occupation. By the order of the Nazi authorities, all Jewish educators were dismissed in the summer of 1941. A little later, this was followed by orders to expel all Polish and Jewish students from the University. According to some data, during the first months of the Nazi occupation, the University’s administration was forced to dismiss about a third of the academic staff and almost 1,000 students on the basis of racial and political motives. Nearly all Jewish members of the University community that had been expelled or forced to terminate their studies subsequently became victims of the Holocaust: they were killed in Paneriai, other places of mass extermination, or at forced labour and concentration camps. Having already been haemorrhaged at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, the University continued to experience oppression in the subsequent years. While building their plans to Germanise the country, the Nazis hampered the activities of Lithuanian universities, looking for pretexts to have them closed. Such intentions were finally realised on 17 March 1943, when all higher schools, including Vilnius University, were closed down, as Lithuanian intellectuals were accused of having thwarted the mobilisation into the SS Legion.

A new stage in the University’s destruction started after the Soviet re-occupation. In the summer of 1944, with the Soviet army approaching Vilnius, tens of former University teachers and students fled to the West in fear of potential reprisals. Therefore, that autumn, the new academic year began under extremely difficult conditions for as few as one-fifth of the students and only about half of the academic staff. The Soviet regime was extremely suspicious of the intellectuals who had worked in Lithuania during the German occupation, and thus, all the incumbent lecturers and professors remaining at Vilnius University were closely monitored by the repressive structures of the Soviet

regime. After collecting sufficient evidence of anti-Soviet views, professors were pressured to turn on their colleagues and forced to betray them, or risk becoming subject to the repressions themselves. The mass arrests of the teaching staff started early in 1945 and lasted until Stalin’s death. Many distinguished researchers became victims of the Stalinist terror. Even more professors, although they had managed to avoid the repressions, were dismissed on political grounds. All this particularly affected the Faculty of Natural Sciences and the Faculty of History and Philology, whose academic staff members felt the greatest effects in the late 1950s when the pseudo-scientific, heavily ideologised, and overly-politicised debates swept across the Soviet Union.

The procedure for admission to higher education institutions established by the Soviet authorities had to ensure that no persons opposed to the regime were among the future students and intellectuals. Prospective students were selected by special mandate commissions. First of all, such commissions would check the social origin and the political credibility of applicants. Priority was given to those whose parents were active supporters of the Soviet system, workers, or small farmers. For that reason, a great many talented young people could not enter establishments providing further education. ‘Politically unreliable’ persons would find it especially difficult to enrol in the humanities. Submitting false data could result not only in expulsion from the University but also in criminal prosecution. The permanent mandate commissions would regularly verify the data provided, and if any new facts come to light, they could expel students from the University even in the middle of an academic year.

In the post-Stalin period, when the classical Vilnius University had already been transformed into a Soviet university, it was renamed the ‘Vilnius Order of the Red Banner of Labour State University of Vincas Kapsukas’. Repressions against the University community were no longer commonplace, but there were still isolated cases of political crackdowns. One of the best-known cases was instituted against the Department of Lithuanian Literature and lasted from 1958 to 1961, resulting in the dismissal of five members of its academic staff. That was one of the darkest periods for Vilnius University that, sadly, confirmed its successful Sovietisation. This was the first time ever that a political crackdown ordered from above by the authorities was not only executed by the University administration as per usual, but it also garnered public approval and even complicity from the majority of the University community itself.