Ghosts of Lithuania’s past brought back by a child’s toy*

JOANNA PLUCINSKA

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An amendment to consumer law sparks a firestorm over Russian propaganda and the Holocaust.
The “Polite People” toy made by a Moscow firm references the supposedly “polite” Russian soldiers who annexed Crimea in 2014 | iStock

VILNIUS — Lithuania is embroiled in a spat over freedom of speech, Russian propaganda and the Holocaust — all because of a children’s toy.

The Russian-language toy — called “Polite People” and made by a Moscow firm — lets youngsters paint or assemble military figurines (and, for reasons that aren’t clear, a cat) and stage their own occupation. Its innocuous sounding name is a reference to the supposedly “polite” Russian soldiers who annexed Crimea in 2014.

People across Lithuania are none too pleased with the toy and the Lithuanian government said its presence in shops is an act of aggression.

The government’s response has been to push for changes to consumer laws that would ban retail goods that “distort Lithuanian history.” A parliamentary plenary debate on the planned changes is expected in mid-June but there’s already an impassioned discussion underway about how Lithuania deals with its own history: both the post-war Soviet occupation that ended with independence in 1991 and the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust during German occupation in World War II.

“It’s censorship, what else is it? It violates … the constitution of Lithuania” — Rūta Vanagaitė, author of “Our People”

That has put the government in Vilnius at odds not just with the toy’s Russian manufacturer Zvezda (which didn’t respond to requests for information about how many copies were sold in Lithuania, or why it was marketed there in the first place), but also with historians and the country’s Jewish community.

“Russia has been using ‘soft power’ for a long time to target people’s minds, and in this case toys are the means of shaping people’s point of view,” said Rasa Juknevičienė, a Lithuanian MP and member of the committee of national security and defense, who supports the idea of using legislation to tackle such issues.

The big concern among Lithuania’s Jewish community is that the amended law would target books viewed as unfavorable to the country’s national narrative.
In 1939, the city had about 80,000 Jewish residents (there were about 208,000 Jews in the whole country), according to historian and proclaimed Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff. By the end of the war, there were just 8,000 Jews left in all of Lithuania. That clashes with the narrative that Lithuanian involvement in the Holocaust was limited to a handful of “degenerates.”

It’s an argument echoed across Central and Eastern Europe, with Poland also trying to use legislation to block any narrative that puts blame on Poles.
Lithuanian writer Rūta Vanagaitė presents “Our People” — the book she co-authored with Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff (right) | Petras Malukas/AFP via Getty Images

And it adds to the fear that Russia is manipulating information to make it appear as if Lithuanians were complicit in the Holocaust. “If you accuse somebody of [perpetrating] the Holocaust, you immediately accuse them of being fascist,” said Tomas Ceponis, an analyst at Lithuania’s Ministry of Defense.

One book that could be targeted by any changes to the law is “Our People” by Rūta Vanagaitė, which looks at the role of some Lithuanians — and not just Nazis — in the targeting and killing of members of the country’s Jewish community.

Vanagaitė’s book, published in Lithuania in January 2016 — months before the board game caught the attention of concerned shoppers — argues that Lithuanian citizens, including members of her own family, aided the Nazis in the murder of around 200,000 Lithuanian Jews.

“The reaction was very stormy,” she said of the book, co-written with Zuroff. “Politicians were very much against it because they said the book was inspired by Kremlin propaganda.”

Lithuania’s first post-Soviet head of state, Vytautas Landsbergis, even wrote an op-ed saying Vanagaitė should go to a forest, find a tree and pray for her sins after she said a Lithuanian war hero could have been a KGB collaborator.

“It was a direct invitation for me to hang myself,” Vanagaitė said.

The “Polite People” toy as it is sold online | Zvezda

To the author, the planned consumer law change feels like a personal attack on her work and on Lithuania’s complicated history with the Holocaust.

“It’s censorship, what else is it?” said Vanagaitė. “It violates … the constitution of Lithuania.”

Trivializing the Holocaust

The government insists there’s nothing to worry about.

The legislation originated in the office of Lithuania’s new Economy Minister Virginijus Sinkevičius, a 27-year-old with a “Make America Great Again” hat in his office.

The minister said the amended law was proposed days before he took office late last year, which didn’t give him enough time to scrutinize it. The aim was to provide the legislative tools to remove items like the board game from shops, he said.

Time is running out before debate on the consumer bill
— which will also touch on sensitive issues such as the
sexualization of goods sold to minors — gets going.

“We’re not discussing questions like the Holocaust,” said Sinkevičius, adding that freedom of speech would not be harmed in any way. He said he had listened to Jewish concerns and would delete any part of the legislation that might harm their interests.

“We value our friendship with the community,” said the minister.

However, a historian and spokesperson for the country’s Genocide and Resistance Research Center, Monika Kareniauskaitė, described the planned legislation as “potentially dangerous” and the man behind it as “unprofessional.”

Members of the remnants of Lithuania’s Jewish community, now numbering around 3,500 people, agree.

“It is another one of these laws against true history,” said Dovid Katz, an American historian and specialist in Yiddish poetry based in Lithuania

Armed men believed to be Russian military stand outside a Ukrainian military base, March 2014 | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

In his sprawling apartment filled with poetry and literature, Katz said there is a reluctance on the part of the Lithuanian government to openly discuss the Holocaust.

Fear of Russian aggression is being used as a justification for “far-right rewriting of history to trivialize the Holocaust,” he said, adding that the consumer law could set a dangerous precedent in Lithuania, following in the footsteps of Poland’s Holocaust law, and “won’t help [deal] with Russian propaganda.”
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Back at the economy ministry, Sinkevičius said it is up to the Ministry of Defense and parliament’s committee of national security and defense to rewrite the rules in a clearer way, to more explicitly target games like “Polite People” and steer clear of any potential censorship.

In parliament, however, lawmakers said they believe it is up to the economy ministry to provide clarity on the law.

Time is running out before debate on the consumer bill — which will also touch on sensitive issues such as the sexualization of goods sold to minors — gets going.

Critics say the vague wording of the legislation is not accidental, and harks back to Soviet times when laws could be applied in whatever fashion the authorities liked.

“You can take the country out of the Soviet Union, you cannot take the Soviet Union out of the country,” said Vanagaitė.

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