Student Leonardas Gogelis

Student Leonardas Gogelis (1938–2015) was born in a family of civil servants in Biržai. He studied the Lithuanian language and literature at the Faculty of History and Philology for two years, from 1955 to 1957. In 1957, while still a student, he wrote a letter to the rector of the university, Professor Juozas Bulavas, in which he defended students expelled from the university for anti-Soviet activities. Betrayed by his room-mates, who wrote a letter to the KGB, he was arrested on 26 April 1957 for participation in the so-called events of All Souls Day on 1-2 November 1956 and for supposed anti-Soviet agitation of his room-mates and other residents of the student hostel in Tauro Street. Books with drawings of the tri-colour Lithuanian flag and of the Vytis were found in his possession during searches. Leonardas Gogelis pleaded guilty. On 10 July 1957, he was sentenced to five years in a labour camp. On 24 June 1957, during his arrest, the dean of the Faculty of History and Philology appealed to the rector asking to ‘strike off’ the second-year student from the lists as ‘he had failed to attend the examinations’. In 1963, the former student of Lithuanian returned from the gulags of Mordovia and put in efforts to leave the Soviet Union. In 1970, he appealed to the university with the request to collect his personal documents from the university archives. He lived in Poland for several years, and emigrated to the USA in 1980 where he worked with Lithuanian and Polish émigré organizations and wrote for their press. For many years the poet and journalist Leonardas Gogelis worked at the Lithuanian Research and Studies Centre based in Chicago.

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