Some examples bring us closer to reality. A straightforward case of kompromat that was both historical and circumstantial is provided by a male deputy chief technician, age twenty-four, with higher education, not a party member. He is listed as one who held a supervisory responsibility despite being compromised. During the postwar reoccupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, this person’s family was designated a “kulak” household; their land was seized, and they were forcibly deported and resettled in a remote region of Siberia. So, the substance of the kompromat was that the subject, a baby at the time, was resettled with his parents as “son of a kulak.” While this is not said, his family history and personal experience as a child might lead him to hold a grudge against the Soviet regime.
Other aspects of family history that evoked suspicion were parents, siblings, or other close relatives who had held positions of prominence in Lithuanian life before the Soviet annexation of 1940, or who had collaborated with the wartime German occupation of 1941 to 1944, or who had avoided the Soviet reconquest of Lithuania in 1944 by fleeing westward, or who had stayed to resist Soviet rule during the armed insurgency of 1944 to 1953.
For example, a female secondary schoolteacher (age fifty-nine, with secondary education, not a party member) was listed as holding a supervisory position despite kompromat. The substance was that in independent Lithuania before the war, her husband had been a police chief (the Russian word used is derived from the German polizei). At the end of the war, the husband fled with the retreating Germans and now lived abroad. It seems the couple were no longer in contact (if they had been, it would likely have been mentioned). Among other examples, a female typist in the Panevézys town hall (age thirty-nine, with secondary education, not a party member), had been granted access to “top-secret” work despite the following circumstances: in 1948, one brother received a five-year term of forced labor as a supporter of armed nationalist groups; and in 1949, another brother was sentenced under the law of 4 June 1947 (against theft of state and public property).[246] A young woman who managed a travel agency (age thirty-five, higher education, nonparty) was barred from foreign travel, because her father had served in the police under German occupation. All these people might be expected to have bitter feelings about what they had lost because of the Soviet occupation or the punishments their families had suffered for resistance.
Not all the circumstantial evidence was historical. Present-day circumstances and associations could also arouse suspicion. For example, a female secondary school teacher (age thirty-six, higher education, non-party), was reported to be living not far from “mailbox R-6478,” in other words, a strategic facility of some kind. There was more: the teacher had a close relative, an aunt, living in the United States. Finally, as a child, she had experienced forced resettlement. The outcome: the teacher’s request to travel to America to visit the aunt was denied. Living near a “mailbox” or a military establishment or having professional familiarity with a secret facility was also cited as kompromat in other cases where a foreign travel visa was refused. Even if nothing bad was known about their motivation, such a person had a capacity to do harm, and this raised a red flag for the authorities.
The involuntary circumstances that bred suspicion could amount to a cruel Catch-22. A male pensioner (age seventy-three, with secondary specialist education, nonparty) was refused a trip to Canada to visit his son. The kompromat that served as the basis for the refusal was that the pensioner lived alone and the son, who lived abroad, was wealthy. Nothing else was reported against either father or son. However, the circumstances implied that the son could easily support the father in Canada. If allowed to leave, the father had no strong reason to return home. The father’s loneliness, his separation from a son with the means to support him abroad, and lack of other family ties were the very reasons why he could not be allowed to make the visit. “Lives alone” or “Lacking family ties” was listed as kompromat in several other cases where permission to travel was denied.
All the forms of kompromat described so far were circumstances that the subject could not have changed. Other items indicate how the subject’s own choices could further shape the regime’s view of them. These choices could be far enough in the past to be considered historical, but they still carried weight. In 1948 a young woman had been given a ten-year sentence for supporting a nationalist group. Now a seamstress, in middle age, she was refused permission to travel abroad.
Of those listed as combining supervisory positions in the town with suspicious markers on their records, nearly one-third had spent time in a Soviet labor camp. Usually they had been convicted under the notorious Article 58, which was applied to counterrevolutionary crimes committed in the 1940s and early 1950s. The crimes in question stemmed typically from resistance to Soviet rule or collaboration with German occupation. They were punished by lengthy sentences, usually of ten years but sometimes of twenty-five (a term that replaced the death penalty between 1947 and 1950). What did such a sentence mean? It is a fact that, until the mid-1950s, those charged with such crimes could be convicted without evidence of guilty intention.[247] Some acted as they did under a degree of coercion; others may have faced a choice between competing evils with no obvious “right” answer at the time. Still, many Lithuanians did choose to resist Soviet rule or support the German occupation, and to classify such actions as chosen seems more reasonable than the alternative.
Some cases look historical at first sight, but then they turn out to have involved more recent factors. As a child, the male deputy chief of a factory workshop (age thirty-seven, with higher education, a party member) had been resettled because he was born into a “kulak” family—something he did not choose. Later, as an adult, he chose to make things worse for himself. At some point, most likely when joining the party, he was required to write down a short summary of his life. In doing so, he omitted the compromising aspect—his “kulak” family origin, for which he had been resettled. This raised suspicion: a truly loyal applicant ought to have entrusted the party with the truth. It was coupled with another suspicious factor: his uncle had fled to the West in 1944 and now lived in the United States. The outcome was that the workshop chief was denied access to secret work, although he continued to be employed in the same position as before. A negative outcome also awaited a female schoolteacher who supplied contradictory information (perhaps in successive versions of her formal autobiography) about the fates of various relatives who were now missing and perhaps abroad. That they might be abroad was already compromising, but she compromised herself again by her efforts at concealment.
Amid the base materials, finally, there was gold—the kompromat provided by evidence of recent or current misbehavior. A deputy chief engineer (male, age thirty, with higher education, nonparty) was reported to be hostile to Soviet rule and dissatisfied with the existing order. Previously chief engineer, he had been refused clearance for top-secret work and demoted. But deputy chief engineer was still a position of trust, which he continued to hold despite the kompromat. Another engineer (male, age forty-three, with incomplete higher education, a party member) had also been denied access to secret work, but he was not dismissed. He had been disciplined once by the party for theft of public property (in other words, he had been the subject of a party investigation, but his party membership had saved him from prosecution). On top of this, his wife’s family was in contact with relatives in the United States. In i960 he had met up with American tourists in Vilnius—implicitly, without authority.) Such indiscretions were unusual—at least among those counted as holding down responsible jobs.
246
This law cracked down on the pilfering of food and industrial materials in the context of postwar food shortages and consumer price increases; while it was in operation, the average sentence exceeded that for murder. See Gorlizki, “Theft under Stalin,” 302.
247
Noting the unjust convictions handed out in the Stalin era, a party Central Committee report dated June 1955 argued that the party’s habit of requiring its members to declare the past convictions of themselves and family members risked compounding the earlier injustices. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, 126. There is no sign that these considerations retained any influence with the KGB of Soviet Lithuania by the 1970s.