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I recently met an elderly man in Washington, who told me about the mid 1970s, when he organized the smuggling of The Beatles music through the ports of the Soviet Union. Some of the honourable guests present are well aware of the times, when we used to retype the works of Orwell and Franz Kafka on typing machines while listening if there was no one at the door to arrest you.

We cannot afford leaving the past epoch without assessment, since unidentified it tries to repeat itself in monstrous forms. In the old European continent Lithuania has a 700 km long border with Belarus that is ruled by Lukashenka, the last European dictator, who pursues to maintain all the features of prisons typical of the former Soviet Union. The border is longer than the one between France and Spain. Just imagine – this border in only 30 kilometres away from Vilnius. Behind it, new monuments to Felix Dzerzhinsky are being erected and political opponents disappear in broad daylight. In Lithuania we often feel the way people felt in Switzerland during the Second World War. After a brief period of freedom, the society of Belarus is filled with fear again. All mass media is under control. Gifted young people studying at law universities are tempted with work for repressive KGB structures. This takes place in 2008. This is Europe too.

The Lisbon Treaty, which, I hope, we will soon ratify with enthusiasm, commits us to live in new European solidarity. Upon my coming here, I stopped at the Lithuanian/Polish border to cross it back and forth, most probably, 10 times amongst abandoned checkpoints, which were the tremendous fortifications in the Soviet times only 18 years ago. Now I watched the farmers serenely pasturing their cattle on the field there.

The Republic of Lithuania initiated this first debate, since we believe the new European solidarity imposes on the old European states the perception of what happened to us in the second half of the 20th century.

The civil society of the European Union cannot be civil, if it is unable to recognise the signs, which led to the isolation of the part of the continent and to becoming a prison. Truly, I have to think how I shall explain to my daughter Estera, why she, a girl from Vilnius, is less important to the EU than Estera from Paris is. And my son Dovydas, a graduate from Vilnius University, will he not take up a window cleaner’s job in London as a second-class labourer? After all, before the Molotov-Ribbentrop conspiracy the potential of the Estonian society, for example, was higher than that of Finnish, while the level of development of the Czech society outstripped that of Spanish and a number of its other Western neighbours.

For 50 years, Central Europe and the Baltic states have been forced to lead a daily fight against the reality imposed on them by the might of the foreign army instead of creating or competing with the English, French and Germans remaining in the success zone on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Every day tens of European nations were facing the attempts to deprive them even of their history. We were forbidden to know what had been going on in our independent states before the war. I was forbidden to find out which parties my relatives affiliated with in the inter-war Lithuania. We were just whispering silently about that among ourselves. All books published before 1944 were taken out of library use when the Soviet army entered the Baltic states. We were isolated not only from the free world of the second half of the 20th century but also from our free past. We used to say: “this neighbour graduated from the Technical University in Brussels before the war; that artist was staying in Montmartre before the war“. They seemed to be the surviving ambassadors of the free world. Among the relicts of family libraries, children were accurately searching and giving signs of our communication with the West as sparks of freedom and secret belief that we will return to the family of free nations some day. WE ARE FREE now.

The Republic of Lithuania initiated this process and expresses gratitude to the European Commission for the support given to this matter in order to ultimately find out how it could have happened that half of European nations had been surrendered to the unprecedented regime denying human dignity and individuality, enforced by the Soviet Moscow through local collaborators.

In my capacity of Chairman of the Subcommittee on Cultural Heritage of the Council of Europe, I travelled to many capitals and was witness to an upsurge in the cultural communities of writers, artists and architects in Central Europe before the Nazi and Stalin regime got hold of the region. In the 1920s, the spread of post-impressionist and expressionist stylistic influence in Central Europe was nearly concurrent with the spread of these styles in the West, and the cultural exchange between the Central Europe and Baltic states on the one hand and Berlin, London, and Amsterdam on the other was thriving. A host of intellectuals travelled to and fro between these countries. The exchange of European visionary parties was in place. In 1920 my grandmother, owner of the “Komercija” hotel, used to go to Berlin, Paris, and the then European Königsberg once in three weeks. Two renowned artists from Kaunas hired a carriage with two horses in harness and went on tour to Vienna and Paris. Equipped with Lithuanian passports and European souls they felt quite at home in the all-encompassing and thrilling European vision that ran in parallel in the great European capitals.

The first attempt to build Europe failed.

My recent investigation into the records of interrogations by the Russian KGB led me to the documents attesting to the massacre of an extraordinary magnitude as well as to the facts that people, residents of independent Lithuania, the state which had signed all international peace treaties, who subscribed to Paris and London publications in the pre-war period, were sentenced to long years of imprisonment, which means that the citizens of the other state, the pre-war Lithuania, were tried as if they had been the entities of the Communist Soviet Union. Pre-war membership of the Lithuanian Christian People’s or Social Democratic Parties was found punishable after the war, in the Soviet period. In other words, the state that occupied us did not recognise the free being we had enjoyed. Building on the message left to us by the pre-war Europeans, the free will of who was violently broken in the Nazi and soviet camps, we must say that Europe is free again. It is the Europe where we will investigate what was going on, how English and American diplomatic services during the Potsdam Conference could be noting in their reports that the area of bloody dictatorship would extend from Bulgaria to Warsaw. Western governments must have been informed what Moscow indented to do with us, Central Europeans.

A part of the Western elite knew only too well that a half of Europe, which had been an essential part of Western civilisation for centuries, would now be coerced to form part of the new empire of forced labour camps. Therefore, we now have to launch the process of coming closer together and learning more about each other, where both the old and the new EU member states should participate. Apart from creating more room in English and French hearts to feel for the hardships of the new neighbours, this will also aid us in the process of establishment of the new EU security construction; armed with this new tool we will be able to immediately recognise the signs of threat given by the totalitarian regimes, regardless of whether they come from China or Belarus. We cannot undermine the joint efforts of Europeans to recognise the past threats to Europe. We must make sure the new European generations have the tools allowing them to recognise the manifestations of the Soviet Communist dictatorship.