The Catholic Church and Lithuanian Nationalism in the Eyes of the KGB during the 1960s and 1970s

• In Event: Religious Resistance to Communist Authority from De-Stalinization to Glasnost and Perestroika

Abstract

This essay examines how the Soviet political police, the Committee of State Security, both viewed and attempted to suppress the growing nationalist movement within the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Viewed by Soviet authorities in both Vilnius and Moscow as one of the most chronically unstable parts of the USSR, Lithuania was marked by a series of nationalist demonstrations and acts of resistance to Soviet authority during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev. The KGB blamed these largely on the Catholic Church in Lithuania, as well as the Vatican, seeing a network that connected Rome, Vilnius, and numerous Lithuanian emigre organizations, and endeavored, with mixed results, to suppress them. This proved to be only a temporary solution, given the revolutionary events from 1989 to 1991

Author

• Sean Philip Brennan, U of Scranton