The first issue of The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania came out on 19 March 1972. Itcame out regularly every two or three months for 17 years, despite arrests, incarcerations, intimidation, and the murders of members of its editorial staff, typists and couriers.

The last issue appeared on 19 March 1989. Working under the strictest secrecy in remote locations, a small circle of young priests and nuns had created the longest-running uninterrupted samizdat publication in the Soviet Union.

By that year it was no longer necessary. Lithuania had won the right to freedom of speech. The Chronicle had fulfilled its pledge that it would run until freedom of speech was restored in Lithuania. A total of 81 issues were published underground. This year marks its 35th anniversary.

The editors of the Chronicle collected testimonies of human rights abuses and religious persecution in Lithuania and in other Soviet republics. Through a clandestine network of typists and couriers, it was taken across the Iron Curtain to the West, where it was transcribed from microfilm and translated into English, French, Spanish and German, and then published, distributed and broadcast back to Lithuania over Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and Vatican Radio.

The goal of the editors was to undermine the lies about life in the Soviet Union being propagated in the West.

 

The Chronicle was born out of a growing sense of frustration over religious persecution in Soviet-occupied Lithuania.

By the early 1970s, only two seminarians were allowed each year to enter the Kaunas Seminary. Every year the number of active priests declined.

Some died of old age, but many were hunted down by the KGB and died in uncertain circumstances. Some were tortured, others died as a result of health complications after returning from exile in Siberia.

Although freedom of religion was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution, in reality the Church in Lithuania was being strangled.

“When three priests were tried and sentenced to hard labour for teaching the Catechism to children in 1972, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevičius, former editor of the Chronicle.

Then a young parish priest in the provincial town of Simnas in southern Lithuania, Tamkevičius began to think about fighting back. He had just spent a year working on a collective farm because the Soviet authorities had removed him from his post.

He decided to make the injustice public, and enlisted the help of two other young priests, Prosperas Bub­nys and Juozas Zdebskis (who was later murdered by the KGB, in a carefully orchestrated car crash that killed a total of four people).

They used a Moscow samizdat publication as their model. They gathered information about interrogations and sentences. Working from a small farmhouse in Simnas, they put together the first issue of The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania.

They made several copies and passed them on to trustworthy people in various cities. These people retyped it and continued passing it on. The first copy of the Chronicle was sent to the Lithuanian-American newspaper Draugas (Friend)in Chicago in the USA.

When the editorial staff began to rely more and more on tourists to take the Chronicle to the West, it became a matter of course to sew the microfilm into clothing and ask Lithuanian-Americans to literally wear the Chronicle across the border.

According to Soviet regulations at the time, American citizens could not be strip-searched without the American ambassador being present. Their pockets were regularly turned out, but their under­garments were never inspected.

After the first issue of the Chronicle was put together, Tam­ke­vičius faced a real problem. He needed to gather material for the next issue.

He did not want to put people into the position of revealing abuses they had suffered if they were not ready themselves to take the risk. It was clear that every person whose name was mentioned in the Chronicle would be interrogated by the KGB, and could face prison, hard labour or exile.

It took a few years before people began coming forward and offering their stories. However, once the floodgates opened, they were difficult to close. Soon the Chronicle was receiving much more material than it could publish.

“The Chronicle took on a momentum of its own,” says Tam­ke­vi­čius. “Because of the Chronicle, people became braver and braver, and more and more outspoken.”

In 1983, Tamkevičius was arrested, tried and exiled to a hard labour camp in Siberia for his involvement in the Chronicle.

He recalls that he was surprised by the bravery of a 16-year-old altar boy in his parish. The altar boy was interrogated, and asked whether he had read the Chronicle.

The young man answered that he had. When asked if he had passed it on to others to read, he answered that he had. When asked to reveal names or admit that Tam­ke­vičius had pressured him, the young man refused to buckle.

He was sentenced to three years hard labour in Siberia, and was held with criminals.

In the Soviet Union, the Chronicle became a way of monitoring priests, teachers and Communist Party members who were collaborating with the Soviet authorities. When these individuals heard their names and the incidents they had participated in announced on Western radio, they felt very uncomfortable.

One KGB interrogator said to Tamkevičius after his interrogations: “If it wasn’t for the Chronicle, we would finish off those priests.”

 

The Chronicle operated under the utmost secrecy. For many years its readers and followers did not even know who the editor-in-chief was.

When arrests were made, information about interrogations only reached the editorial staff years later, after the prisoner had been released.

The staff that worked with Tam­ke­vičius was small and trustworthy, and consisted of only one or two people. Not one of them broke down under interrogation and betrayed either each other or the Chronicle.

The editorial staff did not know exactly who their typists and couriers were at any given time. This secrecy was necessary to safeguard everyone involved if one member was subjected to interrogation.

Copies were hidden in the altar of the church in Simnas. There is a secret place in every altar where a relic is kept. Tamkevičius would remove the relic, hide the Chronicle deep within the altar, and replace the relic. Copies were also hidden under the floorboards of a church in a provincial town in the northeast of Lithuania. Neither of these hiding places was discovered by the KGB.

The Chronicle was put together mostly in rural areas outside Vil­nius. The capital, with its apartment houses with thin walls, proved to be too dangerous for underground activities. The sound of typing or talk carried too easily. The one issue of the Chronicle that was typed in Vilnius resulted in the arrest of Sister Nijolė Sadūnaitė.

 

Sister Gerarda Elena Šuliauskaitė was a nun in the Convent of the Eucharistic Christ where Sister Julija Kuo­dytė was the superior. Although it was illegal to join a convent and live as a nun in the Soviet Union, small groups of women would be admitted into convents, and would live and work as nuns under the strictest secrecy.

This small convent was in a house on Donelaičio gatvė in Kau­nas. A KGB informer also lived in the house, and therefore they often could not even speak out loud to each other.

Šuliauskaitė told the superior that she would go wherever she was needed by the Church. One day, Kuodytė told her she must go to Simnas. She had no idea why she was going to Simnas, and she did not ask.

“I was a very timid person,” Šuliauskaitė recalls. “I really was. I didn’t know what I was expected to do when I got there.

“Father Sigitas handed me some papers, and said: ‘Take this and edit the language.’

“Then he asked me: ‘Do you understand what you’ll be doing here?’ I said I didn’t. He said: ‘You’ll be working on the Chronicle.’

“I was so excited.”

She later realised she’d been asked to edit the Chronicle because she was the only nun in their trusted inner circle who had a degree in Lithuanian.

All the nuns were required under law to have outside work. Unemployment was punishable with a three-year prison term. Šuliaus­kaitė managed to stay unemployed for five years, so she could dedicate her time and energy to the Chronicle. After she registered as a part-time cleaning woman, she was interrogated seven times.

The editorial principles were strict. The editors felt that the Chronicle could not risk being discredited by providing inaccurate or incomplete information. Names, dates or places could not be altered.

If any information was missing or unclear, the piece would not make it into the Chronicle. Instead, it went directly into the wood-burning stove.

Few archives from the Chronicle remain today, because at the time Tamkevičius believed that saving any of the texts was too dangerous.

“It was of extreme importance that we told the truth one hundred per cent,” recalls Šuliauskaitė.

“Father Sigitas would come in and sit down. He’d begin pulling scraps of paper out of his boots, out of his trousers, his jacket.

“If there was a date missing, or a name, or the place wasn’t clear, he’d toss it into the stove. We gave up so much good material that way. If he’d included everything indiscriminately, each publication would have been several times thicker.”

Another editorial principle was that the tone of the writing should be dispassionate and journalistic. People who had suffered injustices would tell their stories themselves.

They would usually tell them to trusted priests. Many priests all over Lithuania began writing down people’s accounts and brought them in. Soon space was limited.

“Country people would write a long text about what had happened,” recalls Šuliauskaitė. “I’d have to edit it and cut it back to make it fit.”

Making human rights abuses public was a very effective means of forcing people to think twice about their actions. When bishops did internal inspections of parishes, they would say: “You don’t want to end up in the Chronicle, do you?”

“Evil fears openness,” says Šu­liaus­kaitė. “This was our core principle.”

When Tamkevičius was moved to the town of Kybartai, the editorial staff began meeting there.

Sadūnaitė recalls: “We would all travel by different means to Vilka­viš­kis. Some of us would hitchhike. Others would take the bus. We’d all be in disguise. Simple country people would take us in. They took the risk.

“Tamkevičius had a car. He’d take the back seats down and pile all sorts of carrots, potatoes and other vegetables in the back. He’d drive the few kilometres to Vilka­viškis. We’d climb into the back of the car. He’d cover us with sacks. On top of the sacks he’d pile the vegetables. Then he’d drive back to Kybartai.

“The police would stop him at a roadblock and check his documents. They never found us, though.

“Then he’d drive to the parish. He had built a garage on to the side of the presbytery. He’d back the car into the garage, which was attached to the kitchen.

“There were always men stationed outside, watching. He’d act as though he was unloading the vegetables, and we’d crawl out of the back of the car and climb downstairs into the basement. That’s where we’d meet.

“In the basement all the windows were covered with pillows to muffle the sound. We never spoke out loud, because we suspected we were being listened to. We discussed everything by writing notes. After a note was read, we’d immediately toss it into the stove.”

 Šuliauskaitė recalls: “We’d make the editorial decisions. Then I would type. If the paper was good, I could get twelve copies with carbon paper. If the paper was bad, I’d get ten copies.”

After the first few issues were published, it became too difficult to transport paper copies.

Tamkevičius had learned how to shoot and develop microfilm when he served in the Soviet army. After Šuliauskaitė had typed the pages, he would photograph them on to microfilm. Then he would roll up the microfilm very tight. He’d take a rubber glove and shove the microfilm into one of the fingers. He’d snip off the finger and tape the rubber so that the microfilm was protected from moisture. Then he’d put it inside a toothpaste tube, or he’d wrap it up in a sweet paper and add it to a bag of identical sweets.

By the 1980s most of the Russian dissidents who’d helped pass on the Chronicle had been arrested by the KGB. A new system was devised in which it was passed on to tourists to take across the border.

“If it was a nun, then we had no doubts we could trust her,” says Tam­kevičius. “But if it was a lay person, we’d have to rely on our intuition and take a chance.

Despite the precautions, the KGB followed the young priests. Sixty KGB agents were assigned to follow Tamkevičius, and 113 agents were assigned to follow Father Juozas Zdebskis.

Once the KGB began to understand how the system for collecting material worked, they sent false texts through priests who were working for them. They marked the pages with chemicals.

“We could smell the chemicals and knew they were fakes,” recalls Šuliauskaitė. “We would use a divining rod. They’d also send pages that weren’t marked, but we could tell intuitively which stories were fakes and which ones were real from the tone of the language.

“What gave away the fake stories was that they used very nasty language to describe the alleged perpetrators. Real people never wrote like that.”

Zdebskis would get the typewriters. The KGB could identify an individual’s typewriter by the type­face. Zdebskis had an extra set of typefaces hidden, and would change them, so it would be harder to trace if copies were intercepted.

Sister Nijolė Sadūnaitė recalls: “Whenever you sat down to work, you had to have a bucket of water ready, and kerosene and matches. If you got a signal that someone was coming, you’d burn everything immediately.”

In 1983, Father Alfonsas Sva­rin­skas was arrested and accused of anti-Soviet activity. He had spoken openly about Soviet persecution from the pulpit, and actively collected material for the Chronicle.

Tamkevičius was called in as a witness. The Soviet authorities expected him to betray Svarinskas, in order to save himself. Instead, he spoke passionately in his defence.

At the end of the trial, he too was arrested. At his own trial he was sentenced to eight years of hard labour and exile.

 

In the early spring of 1974, Sadū­naitė was asked by Zdebskis if she would agree to type the Chronicle and act as a courier.

“I was thrilled,” she recalls. “Finally, I’d be doing something meaningful!”

On 27 August 1974, KGB agents stormed her apartment in Vilnius and caught her red-handed typing the text of the Chronicle. She spent ten months incarcerated in the KGB basement cells in Vilnius.

On 16 June 1975 she was tried and found guilty of anti-Soviet activities. She was sentenced to three years of hard labour in Siberia and three years of exile.

Sadūnaitė is an unusually brave and outspoken person. She also has an implacable sense of survival humour.

“Exile! How romantic!” she laughs. “They take you to the wilderness, and with armed guards!

“Along the way, you get to stay in hotels for free! They feed you porridge! You meet the most interesting people! A tourist trip!”

Survival humour is a characteristic trait of the editors, typists and couriers involved in the Chronicle. However, Sadūnaitė took her sense of humour to the extreme.

“I relied on humour to keep myself going, and to help those who were in much worse shape than I was,” she says.

“When I arrived at the concentration camp, I was escorted in by two armed guards with two guard dogs. There was a sign on me that read: ‘Extremely dangerous criminal.’ A few of the criminals whispered to me: ‘Hey, what did you do?’ I whispered back: ‘I sank a submarine.’ They started to cheer.”

But faith mostly kept Sadūnaitė and the others going.

“The happiest years of my life were spent in prison,” she says. “You feel God’s presence physically. For the Church to be alive, you need to have martyrs.”

The Chronicle’s daring heroes inspired people to speak out and tell their stories. “People would come to us and tell us their stories, but then they’d say they were afraid of having their stories written down and published,” recalls Sadūnaitė.

“I’d say: ‘Want to keep on suffering? Keep quiet then.’ Then they’d write down their stories.”

 

Dissidents serving prison terms in gulags all over the Soviet Union were impressed with the tactical success of the Chronicle.

“I met Ukrainian, Russian and Armenian dissidents in exile,” says Sadūnaitė. “They considered it the biggest miracle that we’d been able to bring out the Chronicle for seventeen years, being followed the entire time. They’d say: ‘What are you? Just a bunch of little girls and a few priests? How do you do it?’

“The Ukrainians had an underground journal, but they only managed to put out two or three issues before they were all arrested and imprisoned.

“God protected us,” Sadūnaitė states firmly. She believes her intuition came from God. Intuition has saved her life on several occasions.

“There was a family in Moscow that had renounced their Soviet citizenship because they could not teach religion to their children. They had applied for permission to emigrate to the United States.

“I’d leave the microfilm with them. They’d go on Sundays to the American embassy to watch movies. During the movies they’d pass the microfilm to diplomats who’d get it out by the diplomatic bag.

“By 1986 they weren’t bothering with exile and concentration camps any more. They’d send thugs to kill you and make it look like an accident.

“I was going to my friends’ apartment in Moscow. I gave them the microfilm, and, as I was about to leave, I had an intuition. I should change my clothes. I was wearing a reversible raincoat: I turned it inside out. I had very blond hair: I pulled out a black curly wig from my handbag and put it on. I pulled out a large scarf with roses on it and wrapped it around my shoulders, and applied some makeup.

“There was only one way out of the building. Beside the door leading outside stood two thugs. They were sharpening a slaughtering knife on the banister. I had to walk right past them to get out. I confidently walked to the door as though I lived there, and pushed the button to open the door. The door wouldn’t open. I could see them watching me in the reflection in the glass door. I calmly turned the handle. The door clicked open, and I went out into the park.

“Two months later when I came back my friend handed me a note: ‘Last time they were waiting for you with a knife.’”

 

It took roughly two months after the Chronicle was published in Lithuania for it to become available in the West. In addition to tourists carrying itover the border, the first paper issues were brought to Moscow by couriers, and handed over to trusted Russian dissidents who had connections in the American embassy.

Embassy personnel would mail the Chronicle via the diplomatic bag to Father Kazimieras Puge­vi­čius, executive director of Lithuanian Religious Catholic Aid in Brooklyn, New York. This organisation, started by Pugevičius and other Lithuanian-American priests, provided support to the subjugated Catholic Church in Lithuania, and informed the press in the West about human rights abuses in Lithuania and behind the Iron Curtain.

Since news about the Soviet Union was considered old news by the 1980s, the staff had to constantly think of new ways of getting aid in and word out from behind the Iron Curtain.

On 4 August 1972 a Lithuanian-American organisation was formed to support the funding, translation and dissemination of the Chronicle in the West. On 9 October 1973, the Chronicle Support Group decided to publish it in volume sets that would include several issues in one publication. These issues would be sent to Lithuanian exile communities around the world.

In total, 75,000 copies of the Chronicle were published in translation. The translations into English, French, German and Spanish were sent to a total of 138 countries. They were sent to university libraries, press, radio and television centres, Catholic dioceses, convents and seminaries, news agencies, and other religious and government agencies. All of this activity was funded by volunteers, and all the work involved was done by volunteers.

 

“The Chronicle was a herald of freedom,” says the Lithuanian ambassador-at-large Gintė Damušytė. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Damušytė was the director of the Lithuanian Information Center in Brooklyn, New York, the news arm of Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid.

Damušytė went to work at the Religious Aid Center in Brooklyn in 1979, fresh out of college with a degree in political science and history. She expected to stay in the job for only a year. She stayed for 12.

She was planning on joining the American Foreign Service. She had already taken and passed the Foreign Service exam, but she never did join. Nonetheless, fate has a way of coming round full circle, because in 1992 she became part of the Lithuanian diplomatic corps.

Damušytė worked at the Information Center for a salary that was so meagre that KGB archives show that at one point agents discussed whether she could be enticed to leave her job for better pay. She led a frugal lifestyle in New York, and dedicated herself to her work.

“I believed in what I was doing,” she says. “And I personally supported Lithuanian dissidents. I had very strong ties with the Lithuanian underground.”

Those ties are deeply ingrained in the Damušis family history. Her father was a dissident who resisted both the Soviets and the Nazis.

He was one of the leaders of the 1941 uprising against the Soviets. During the Nazi occupation, he was arrested and sent to a prison camp in Germany, where he was shuffled from one prison camp to the next.

When the Nazis were defeated, he was liberated. That was how he ended up in the United States. Damušytė was born in the United States and grew up there. She visited Lithuania for the first time as an adult.

She recalls: “When the Chronicle came in, we would work through the night if necessary to get the information out while it was still fresh.”

The Information Center would disseminate 7,000 to 8,000 copies of each issue. “Anyone who did human rights work at the time knew the Chronicle well,” she says.

The translation, publication and dissemination of the Chronicle were financed by the Lithuanian American Roman Catholic Priests’ League. It was also supported by individual donors who would be asked to donate whatever they could at Lithuanian-American community fundraisers and via direct mail appeals.

“People were very generous when it came to supporting the Chronicle,” Damušytė recalls. “They gave whatever they could, because they believed in the work we were doing.

“Human rights begin with the basics, with fundamental free­doms, such as freedom of speech and conscience, and freedom from fear. Too often people think of human rights in terms of extreme examples. One of the main messages of the Chronicle was that human rights start with how regular people are treated in their everyday lives.”

Damušytė was also impressed with how surprisingly cosmopolitan the Chronicle was.

“They addressed human rights abuses in the Ukraine, Moldova and Russia. The dissidents worked together with Russian and Ukrainian dissidents, as well as with dissidents from other countries. This open and inclusive approach was refreshingly surprising, considering the dangers involved.

“It’s a shame the nuns and priests involved in the Chronicle have not got the recognition they so rightly deserve. I think of them as heroes. They played such an important role at the time, risking their lives and welfare when others were understandably afraid to speak out.”

In Lithuania, the Chronicle taught respect for basic human rights. In the West, the Chronicle proved that there were people in Lithuania who were willing to sacrifice their lives for their ideals.

For her work with the Chronicle,Damušytė was blacklisted by the Soviets for ten years. Tourists who were interrogated by the KGB in Lithuania would report that they were asked questions about Damu­šytė and Pugevičius.

“Our activities had to be conducted with a certain degree of discretion and confidentiality, because we didn’t want to harm our contacts in Lithuania,” says Damušytė.

“Old habits die hard, because there is still some information I keep under wraps. It’s really up to those who were involved with the Chronicle to make themselves and their work public, particularly for the history books.”

 

“In the West, the Chronicle was used as a weapon against Moscow,” says Sister Ignė Marijošiūtė of the Holy Cross Convent.

Marijošiūtė grew up in the United States, and as a young woman she joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Putnam, Connecticut. The mission of the convent was to work with children, and to foster a sense of patriotism in Lithuanian-American children.

For almost two decades Marijo­šiūtė used the Chronicle in experiential learning situations at Camp Neringa in Vermont.

“Our summer camps operated on the principle of experiential learning. One learns through direct experience. In order to gain a sense of national consciousness, you need to live through the experience. At the camp, we operated on these principles.

“When the Chronicle came into our hands in the early Seventies, we read it and decided to transform it into direct experience for the campers. The counsellors would role play scenes out of the Chronicle, and the children would respond. Children are very impressionable. They felt very deeply for the children being persecuted in Lithuania.”

The result was that the camp produced several generations of individuals who understand Lithuanian nationalism on a deeper level.

“There is a group of young Lithuanian-Americans who came through our camp programme who chose to come back to independent Lithuania to live and make a career.”

Marijošiūtė, who has spent the last ten years in Lithuania as a sister at the Holy Cross Convent in Vilnius, reflects: “A nation cannot forget its suffering. History repeats itself. We need to be ready.”

 

“This March we marked thirty-five years since the Chronicle began,” says Sister Gerarda Šuliaus­kaitė.

“The gathering of people involved in running the Chronicle was a quiet, modest affair. It had the feeling of family to it.

“None of us were ever in this because we wanted fame or notoriety. We did what we did because it had to be done. Thirty-five years later we still live in that same spirit.”