Lithuania Declassified KGB Reservists

· KGB, Lithuania, Security Services

The list of “former” individuals attracted so much attention that the website where it was posted crashed for several hours.

The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania, which examines Soviet state security documents, has published 238 names of former KGB reservists. This is the first major action to disclose the names of people who collaborated with the USSR State Security Committee.

Immediately after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, following the dissolution of the USSR, local authorities called on former KGB officers to come forward and report their activities. The lustration law—the document requiring such secret repentance—guaranteed confidentiality of confession and state protection. According to lawmakers, this was necessary to protect former KGB officers and informants from blackmail by foreign intelligence services, so that people burdened by their secrets would not work against the Lithuanian state.

Confession was also encouraged by restrictions imposed on former KGB officers who did not confess. They are barred from holding positions appointed by the Seimas and its chairperson, the president, the government or the prime minister, as well as positions of deputy minister, state secretary of a ministry, ministry secretary, heads of state institutions or agencies and their deputies. They cannot serve as prosecutors, state controllers, career civil servants, state security department officers, or in diplomatic service. There are also restrictions in the private sector.

Nevertheless, by 2011 only about 1,400 people had confessed, although according to some experts, up to 60,000 secret collaborators could have assisted Soviet state security. As a result, the Seimas decided to begin publishing KGB documents. However, press reports indicated that the archive detailing secret and non-secret collaborators was transported to Russia just before the dissolution of the USSR, yet aside from personal files a wealth of other documents remained that directly or indirectly pointed to specific individuals.

Perhaps these were precisely what helped make public the current list of KGB reservists. “We posted everything we found,” said Birutė Burauskaitė, director general of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania. However, in 2005, when the scandal over KGB reservists first erupted (they turned out to be high-ranking civil servants, including Foreign Minister Antanas Valionis), it was said that the list contained about 420 names.

The current list includes both Valionis and former head of the Lithuanian State Security Department Arvydas Pocius, around whom the scandal originally broke. According to well-known Lithuanian politician Arvydas Anušauskas, now chair of the parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defence, being in the KGB reserve is tantamount to collaboration with Soviet intelligence, because individuals were first summoned for an interview and asked for their consent to be included in the lists.

But Valionis explained his name on the list differently: in spring 1980 he was summoned to the municipal military commissariat in Tauragė and asked to fill out some forms and an autobiography. “I was only told that, along with a group of other reservists, I was being transferred to a new structure in which we would be listed as ‘staff officers.’ And allegedly when I asked what that meant, the answer was: ‘You will find out when the time comes.’” Only a year later, he says, at the KGB of the Lithuanian SSR he was told that he had been transferred “to the mobilization reserve of the army counterintelligence of a tank army in the Kaliningrad Region.” That is how he ended up in the reserve of KGB reserve officers. “I saw no possibility to protest this decision, because no one asked for my consent to my transfer to the KGB reserve officer list,” Valionis said. Yet it is known that at that time he worked as an instructor for the district committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party…

As for the future head of state security of independent Lithuania, Pocius, according to the newspaper Atgimimas, in August 1989 he allegedly personally approached the leadership of the Lithuanian SSR KGB with a request to be included in the reserve list, and after 1990—that is, after the declaration of independence but before the dissolution of the USSR—expressed a desire to continue collaboration.

The newspaper Lietuvos žinios detailed that procedure by publishing facsimiles of reports “On the conversation held with A.Z. Pocius” and “On the operative officer’s personal acquaintance with USSR Ministry of Defence reserve lieutenant A.Z. Pocius.” It stated that Arvydas Zigmunto Pocius, prosecutor of the Šakiai district of the Lithuanian SSR, without hesitation accepted the offer to transfer to the KGB reserve and even carried out three operational assignments entrusted to him. A conclusion dated 13 November 1989 signed by Major General J.L. Žukas, deputy head of the special department of the USSR KGB for the Baltic Military District, said that Arvydas Pocius had demonstrated full readiness to transfer to the KGB reserve.

Nevertheless, in 2005 then-President Valdas Adamkus came to the defence of the exposed KGB reservists. He was particularly active in defending Valionis, arguing that the minister was bringing great benefit to independent Lithuania. A parliamentary commission concluded that KGB reservists posed no danger to the republic. But in 2007, amid political struggle, the Seimas passed a decision to equate reservists with full-time KGB officers and banned them for ten years from holding the same positions for which restrictions had been imposed on Soviet state security officers.

Oddly enough, the Council of Europe came to the defence of KGB reservists. It strongly recommended that Lithuania not limit their right to work in state institutions and even threatened sanctions. President Valdas Adamkus vetoed the law.

As a result, both Lithuania’s foreign minister and the head of Lithuanian state security at that time remained in their posts and carried out their duties very diligently. True, they later had to leave their seats, but that is a completely different story, connected not with the KGB but with intrigues, political struggle, and new secrets of this Baltic republic.

Vilnius

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