LITHUANIA

COMMUNIST INFILTRATION AND EXPLOITATION OF THE PRESS IN INDEPENDENT LITHUANIA

By Henrikas Blazas 1

Independent Lithuania was a country situated between Germany and the Soviet Union and therefore a steppingstone for both-for the Germans to begin their "Drang nach Osten" and for the Soviet Union to proceed with her expansion toward Western Europe. The Soviet Union was, on the one hand, interested in curtailing German influence in Lithuania and, on the other hand, careful not to arouse the suspicion of Lithuanian authorities and public opinion concerning the designs and the real intentions of the U.S.S.R.

After Hitler came to power in Germany, his foreign policy toward Lithuania was very helpful to the Soviets. Hitler's claims to the ethnographically Lithuanian area of Klaipeda (Memel), which was claimed by Lithuania in 1923, and also the economic pressure he tried to apply by barring all Lithuanian agricultural exports to Germany, steadily diminished German influence in Lithuania.

Before 1940, the Lithuanian Communist Party was outlawed and its membership never exceeded 1,000 card-carrying members. The Communist Party never exercised any significant influence on Lithuanian public opinion and its activities were kept under careful surveillance by the Lithuanian security forces.

The organizations which really carried out the task of expanding Soviet influence in Lithuania were the Polpredstvo (full-fledged Legation-Soviet Embassy) and the Torgpredstvo (Soviet Trade Legation).

The Polpredstvo and the Torgpredstvo had huge staffs whose numbers could not be justified either by the requirements for maintaining diplomatic relations or by the need to conduct the very limited volume of trade between the Soviet Union and Lithuania. Both of these Soviet Legations were involved in Communist activities, and they maintained public relations with more or less influential Lithuanian intellectuals and leading personalities of the press, literature, and the performing arts. Their activities in Lithuania were conducted along two major lines of endeavor:

Firstly, they tried to prevent the publication of hostile information about the Soviet Union or communism in the Lithuanian press and to arrest the circulation of such information through other channels such as radio, lectures, public discussions, etc.

Secondly, they attempted to get the Lithuanian press to print favorable evaluations of the state of Soviet domestic affairs and the conduct of Soviet foreign policy. It was their job to foster public recognition of Soviet successes in the construction of gigantic new projects, in

1 Managing Editor of the International Peasant Union Bulletin, New York, former publisher and Chief Editor of the daily, Laikas (The Times) and other periodicals in Lithuania prior to the Soviet occupation of that country on June 15, 1940.

industrialization, in collective farming, and in cultural achievements. They spread the belief that the Soviet Union is a rapidly progressing country and a true friend of the Lithuanian people and their independent republic.

The Polpredstvo was always busy keeping in touch with Lithuanians who had any influence upon public opinion. Every month, sometimes even every 2 weeks, the Polpredstvo invited them to small informal receptions under the pretext of various cultural activities. These receptions took place in the Soviet Legation, where the Ambassador, Mr. Pozdniakov, was the host and the First Secretary of the Legation, Mr. Molochkov, and other staff members assisted him. Usually a strictly male affair, these receptions generally lasted all night, from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. No matters of any special importance were discussed, and most of the time was spent in eating, excessive drinking, and singing, so that a friendly atmosphere was created. When it became necessary, Mr. Molochkov or the representative of the Soviet Information Agency Tass could pick up the phone and ask the "friends" they had met at these receptions for small favors such as the publication of favorable information about the Soviet Union or the suppression of Western dispatches on certain subjects which went contrary to Soviet interests.

It was an open secret in Lithuania, that if a newspaper wanted to get a big advertisement from the Torgpredstvo, the only thing it had to do was to publish something favorable about the Soviet 5-year plan, about some Soviet industrial development or other achievement. By such methods, Soviet Legations acquired a degree of psychological and material influence upon people who were active in shaping Lithuanian public opinion.

Communist infiltration into the free press of Lithuania was never direct and rarely occurred with the knowledge of the publisher or editor concerned.

The top men in the journalistic profession in Lithuania were well known, and to employ them involved no difficulty at all. But the hiring of personnel for secondary jobs-translators, proofreaders, circulation clerks was a problem because it was not so easy to check the background of persons who are not well known.

Thus, for example, in April 1938 the daily Laikas (the Times) needed a translator from French into Lithuanian. Among the applications it received there was one from a former army colonel of the Imperial Russian Army, an elderly man who had gone into exile after the Communist revolution of October 1917. Naturally, it was assumed that he was an anti-Communist.

This colonel was with Laikas for 5 months, when he decided to move to Paris, France. Before leaving, he recommended as his successor a Lithuanian university student, Aleksandras Guzevicius, aged 30, who had been living in Paris for some time. Guzevicius was a bachelor, made the impression of being very shy, modest, and not too healthy. He performed his duties well and efficiently and was friendly with the members of the editorial staff and the workers in the printing plant, but somehow he managed to keep to himself and made no real friends. He never directly suggested anything new or different or took the initiative in anything. Occasionally he remarked about this or that matter and showed an interest in everything that was submitted for publication.

When, in June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, Mr. A. Guzevicius came to the publisher of Laikas the day after the occupation and presented a list of demands in the name of the Communist Party:

(a) Two staff members of the editorial office must be fired because. of their anti-Communist views.

(b) The paper must accept Communist management and Communists on the editorial staff.

(c) The daily will no longer be the property of the publisher.

All of these demands were rejected by the publisher and after 2 weeks, on June 30, 1940, Laikas was closed by order of the Communist Party.

It turned out that Mr. A. Guzevicius had been a secretary of the underground Lithuanian Communist Party and when the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania he was immediately made First Vice Minister and shortly thereafter Minister of Interior Affairs of Lithuania. There is no reason to doubt that also the colonel of the Imperial Russian Army who had recommended him was, in some way, used by the Communist Party to carry out Soviet orders long before Lithuania was occupied.

Independent Lithuania had signed a number of agreements with the Soviet Union involving mutual assistance, nonaggression and noninterference in internal affairs. These agreements were, however, used by the Soviet Union as a basis for meddling into Lithuanian press affairs.

During the Finnish-Soviet war, in the winter of 1939-40, the newspaper Laikas openly declared its sympathy with the Finns and refused to publish the dispatches of the official Soviet news agency Tass, which were one-sided and not objective. Laikas kept its readers informed about the Finnish-Soviet war by publishing news from French, British, and Scandinavian sources of information. Naturally, the Soviet Union regarded such information as harmful to its interests. The representative of Tass in Kaunas called on the publisher and chief editor of Laikas and asked him to give preference to the dispatches of Tass, because Western information about the FinnishSoviet war was "capitalist slander against the Soviet Union."

When Laikas refused to comply with the demands made by Tass, the Soviet Ambassador made three diplomatic representations on this subject to the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, on the ground that information about the Finnish-Soviet war as published by Laikas was in violation of existing Soviet-Lithuanian agreements of mutual assistance, friendship, nonaggression, and noninterference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union.

The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry informed the publisher of Laikas of the essence of the Soviet demands, without insisting upon any change in the stand already taken by the daily. The result was that the Soviet Embassy ceased to invite the editors of Laikas even to official receptions at the Soviet Embassy.

Today, when the Soviet Union insists upon a policy of coexistence with the West, when Soviet leaders are proposing nonaggression pacts between the NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact countries, when the disarmament conference in Geneva, at the insistence of the Soviet Union, almost reached an agreement to curtail so-called war propaganda, one is reminded of the Soviet methods used in the countries

of eastern and central Europe prior to the imposition of Soviet domination. These methods remain essentially unchanged: First get an agreement on mutual assistance, friendship, nonagression, and noninterference; after the agreement is signed, use it to halt the dissemination of the truth about the Soviet Union and the Communist conspiracy for world conquest under the pretext that this violates signed agreements, keeps alive the so-called cold war, and endangers the peace!

POLAND

METHODS OF COMMUNIST INFILTRATION AND
SUBVERSION IN THE POLISH PRESS*

By Janusz Kowalewski

In my description of the methods of Communist subversion and infiltration in the press, I shall use my personal experiences and knowledge which I gained from my activities in this field in the years 1932 through 1939 in Poland, in the capacity of an organizer of a certain type of Communist press. I shall also use my observations which I made after the above period up to the present time as a newspaperman and journalist fighting communism and interested in the activities of the Communist propaganda apparatus with the purpose of exposing it.

To give the reader an idea of my experiences, I think that I should briefly describe my life from this aspect.

It was in 1931 that I became interested in Communist ideology. At that time I was a student of the University of Warsaw. Poland experienced an economic crisis. General dissatisfaction was growing, due to proverty and unemployment. People were looking for a remedy to the crisis. Nationalist groups found a remedy for this crisis in fighting against national minorities, mainly Jews, and taking over from them their commercial and industrial enterprises. Polish leftists tried to find a solution in a basic transformation of the "capitalist" system. The Communists were the most radical, as they proclaimed the principle of the destruction of "capitalism" by way of a revolution and building of socialism on its debris. This path appeared to be fast, logical, and sound because it rejected all partial solutions and substitutes.

At that time, I was a member of the student's organization of Democratic Pilsudski followers, the Association of Polish Democratic Youth (Z.P.M.D.). At the meetings, I started to express ideas of a Communist type and spread them in a paper I was editing, the Academic Life (Życie Akademickie, "Z.A."). I was still a member of the Z.P.M.D. and the paper Academic Life was its official organ. There were discussions which started spontaneously. In the beginning I was in no contact with the Communists, nobody directed my actions, I built my ideology myself, learning from the classic Marxist literature and from articles in the legal leftist press, articles which, as I found out later, were written and inspired by camouflaged Communists. I mention this in order to show, in my own instance, the effectiveness of the influence of Communist literature on "unattached" people, not bound to the Communist organization, but inwardly aroused. The propaganda of the Soviet 5-year plan played a great part.

Translated by George Starosolsky, Library of Congress, September 17, 1962.