East European history

Dramatic Biographies Part Three – Kostas Kubilinskas

~ Antanas Sileika

The story of Kostas Kubilinskas is something like an East European joke, and by that I mean it is a particularly gruesome story with tragicomic overtones.

Murderer and Children's Poet, Kostas Kubilinskas

Kostas Kulbilinskas died in 1962 and at the time he was one of the best-loved children’s writers in Lithuania. (I mentioned him in an earlier post about Lionginas Baliukevicius  – author of Diary of Partisan.) It turns out he is an excellent example of the type of writer described in Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind, a writer who will do anything to get published. He was a man who became a murderer in order to earn the right to write children’s poetry.

Kubilinskas was born in 1923, one of four children in a poor family. Right from his youth he established himself as a poet of sorts by wining poetry prize at the age of fifteen. He was in high school during the first German occupation, and began to write satirical poems about Stalin and Jews (!). From the very first, it seems he tailored his writing to the current ruling regime. The problem would come when the regimes changed.

Kubilinskas had a knack for rhyme and wrote easily and quickly. Later in life, he was known as the kind of man who could compose rhymes at the printer’s if a magazine had an unexpected white space.

When the Soviets were approaching Lithuania for their second occupation, Kubilinskas decided to stay behind because he felt he was a poet above all and could not leave the land of his language. He imagined he might adapt to the regime by writing for its rulers.

At first this worked well. He joined the Communist Youth League and became one of the promising writers in the new writers’ union. But in 1946, he was identified as a German collaborator and removed from his post. He was unable to publish, and eventually ended up as a teacher in remote village in the south of Lithuania.

It must have felt like banishment to Kubilinskas, but it led to an interesting turn of events. Kubilinskas stood out as an intellectual in these surroundings, and intellectuals were rare and valuable in a land where one crop had been deported to Siberia, another died in the Holocaust, and a third fled before the invading Red Army in 1944. The local ant-Soviets could use a man like that because they lacked writers and intelligencia for their newspapers. Kubilinskas’s friend, Algirdas Skinkys, was in a similar position. Skinkys is almost a double of Kubilinskas, although a lesser double because less talented.

Kubilinskas had said to friends he would go to any lengths for the ability to publish poetry, and the contact with the partisans opened an opportunity for him to redeem himself. He wanted to leverage the partisan contact to gain bigger rewards than the resistance could offer him.

Not trusting the local MGB, Kubilinskas wrote to the chair of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Antanas Snieckus, and volunteered to infiltrate the anti-Soviet partisans. His file was handed over to a Vilnius MGB officer, and Kubilinskas was trained in firearms and deception.

His job was to find local partisan groups, infiltrate them, and assassinate the leaders or bring in troops to do the job if need be. Fearful for their safety, Kubilinskas and his friend Skinkys hesitated to commit murder until they were ordered to fulfill their tasks within the first weeks of 1949 or face the wrath of the MGB.

In a botch job that ended up turning out well for Kubilinskas, he and his friend shot a sleeping partisan in his bunker and then fled to Alytus, a provincial capital, where they summoned MGB soldiers to surround another bunker where several more partisans were killed in a firefight.

The botch occurred when Kubilinskas was identified while fleeing, and thus could no longer be used in other operations to infiltrate the partisans, who issued an execution order against him (which was never carried out).

The botch played to his advantage. Kubilinskas was free to publish as a poet, which he did, with great success. Although he never published much for adults, Kubilinskas became a roaring success as a children’s writer, producing many rhyming stories. He was the Doctor Seuss of Lithuania in the 1950’s.

But Kubilinskas was a drinker, whether because of a guilty conscience or natural tendency, and his alcoholism began to interfere with his work to such an extent that he was sent in 1962 to a sanitarium for alcoholics outside Moscow, where he died under mysterious circumstances, some say murdered by the KGB (the heir of the MGB) for being too talkative. He had lived only until the age of 39. His colleague in crime, Algirdas Skinkys, lived until 1970, reaching the age of 45. The latter, though, never achieved the fame of Kubilinskas.

It seems impossible to the modern western reader that a man so pliable to ruling regimes, and a murderer as well, should be capable of writing lasting poetry, all the less children’s poetry. Yet his choices reflect the reality of Eastern Europe where one had to select among bad choices. Kubilinskas made some of the worst of them.

This egotistical artist was the inspiration for the character called Rimantas in my novel, Underground, code-named Poe for his fondness for the American poet. I chose Poe as his code-name for the gruesome connotations we have for that writer.

What is the fate of the reputation of this murderer? For all his crimes, some readers in Lithuania continue to enjoy his children’s work. Public taste and public morality are two distinct realms, although there are few cases as extreme as that of Kostas Kubilinskas.

Eastern European jokes can be cruel indeed, and the life of Kostas Kubilinskas shows us a man who loved to write for children so very much that he helped murder to get the opportunity to do it.

Doctor Juozas Markulis – Code Named Eagle – Soviet Agent and Provocateur

~ Antanas Sileika

Lithuanian partisans captured by the MGB in the postwar period were sometimes turned into provocateurs or double agents – few could resist the intimidation and torture used against them in interrogations. Some collaborators were more thorough and enthusiastic in their work than others. Among them were Juozas Deksnys, described in earlier posts, and Algimantas Zaskevicius (reported to have contributed to the capture of 300 partisans).

Collaborator Markulis narrowly escaped execution by Juozas Luksa

But the most famous of them all was Dr. Juozas Markulis, who taught medicine at the university of Vilnius.

Markulis was born in the USA but returned to Lithuania to complete studies for the priesthood. He never took religious orders. He was handsome and attractive to women, and he shifted instead to officer training in the military and finally into medicine in 1940. He joined the LLA, an underground Lithuanian resistance organization in 1941.

The organization was smashed by the Soviets at the end of 1944, and its archives fell into their hands. Markulis may have been identified at this time – he certainly was turned at this time.

The partisan underground lacked intellectuals – many of the fighters were the children of farmers, and Markulis insinuated himself into a local regional partisan unit where he was much beloved and looked upon as a father figure.

Markulis had two strategies – to unify the partisans in the country and to convince them to move toward passive resistance, tactics that were beginning to work. He was convincing to the partisans and impressive to his MGB superiors, writing long and detailed reports that showed he had an excellent memory for detail.

Working under intense pressure, Markulis could not avoid making mistakes, and one of them was permitting the MGB to arrest Jonas Deksnys, who had been instructed by his brother to maintain ties with no one but Markulis.

Thus it became clear that Markulis was a collaborator and spy and Juozas Luksa himself went to Vilnius in 1947 to execute him, but Markulis escaped.

He lived in Leningrad until 1953, when the partisan movement had been destroyed, and then returned to teach at the University of Vilnius.

His motivations remain opaque. He died in 1988, just before Lithuania regained its independence. His legacy is a name synonymous with treachery – he is the Benedict Arnold of Lithuanian to those who know the story of the resistance to the Soviets.

A Week in Canadian Literature

~ Antanas Sileika

It’s been a busy week of literary appearances, most of them for my novel,  Underground.

On Thursday, April 27, I was at the North York Public Library in front of a small crowd of twenty or so who peppered me with questions on the research for Underground as well as some of my older books.

At the Toronto Public Library

On Friday, April 29, I was reading for Diaspora Dialgoues at the Central Library. Diaspora Dialogues, run by Helen Walsh and Co, do good work bringing immigrants and immigrant writers into the Canadian literary world. One of the readers that night was Joyce Wayne, a lovely journalism teacher from Sheridan who ran a special program for immigrant journalists. We at Humber took one of her graduates, Myank Bhatt into the correspondence program in creative writing, where he is working with M G Vassanji, and I have high hopes for good literary outcomes there.

On Saturday, April 30, I attended the Random House Open House cocktail party at the Bar Mercurio. All the Random House luminaries were there, from president Martin to Louise Dennys and publicist Randy Chan (delicious hors d’oeuvres included steak tartare) . I talked for a while to Harbourfront director Geoffrey Taylor, who was just back from literary events in Ireland, and then to James Bartleman, former lieutenant governor of Ontario and Humber alumnus. A couple of former Humber publishing students were there as well.

On Monday, May 2, Snaige and I drove to Ottawa for, among other things, tea at the American ambassador’s house. It turns out she is a supporter of literature. There, I met Madeleine Thien for the first time and chatted with Sylvia Tyson and Elizabeth Hay. An embassy official was playing show tunes on the piano, but he took a break as American poet, Robert Pinsky recited some poems by heart.  The residence is a stunning pile up on a hill overlooking the Ottawa River with some decent art on the walls including a Georgia O’Keefe and an Emily Carr. It is hard to imagine a more beautiful setting.

Tea at the American Ambassador's House

Then it was down into Ottawa to Arc the. Hotel, a hipster-cool black place where I felt as if I should always be speaking in hushed tones. On Tuesday night, May 3, I read and spoke in the Mayfair Theatre along with Humber alumna Suzanne Desrochers (Brides of New France) and Sarita Mandanna (Tiger Hills). The old theatre served popcorn during the talk – a nice break from the habitual literary fare of canapés or cakes.

With Sarita Mandanna (left) and Suzanne Desrochers in Ottawa

Afterward, I hung around the hotel hospitality suite with the excellent Ottawa festival organizers and David Adams Richards. The sesame shrimp were delicious, and after a few glasses of white wine, I was talking wildly about Canadian literature from Wayne Johnston to Michael Crummey, with David filling in a few discreet details. He doesn’t drink, so his restraint was better than mine.

On Wednesday, May 4, the Lithuanian ambassador, Ms Ginte Damusis, invited me to speak to the ambassadors of central European countries over a buffet lunch on the subject of my novel. We had representatives from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries. They were interested in my talk of postwar partisans because many of them come from countries with similar post-war histories. The American ambassador’s wife, Julie Jacobson, was there too and all of them took away copies of Underground. Then it was off to Dinner at the Blue Cactus later that evening.

Left, German Ambassador, me, Lithuanian Ambassador, American Ambassador's wife ( fan of literature)

I should have gone to Humber alumna Sarah Raymond’s book launch at Type Books in Toronto on Thursday, but we were held up on the road in Gananoque, visiting my former Humber student Colette Maitland and Snaige’s art friends, Otis Tamasauskas and Jan, and so I arrived home too late to make it.

What would think literary exhaustion would set in, but I am deep into Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.  She’ll be in Toronto in a couple of weeks.

Stepping back for a Long, Hard Look

~ Antanas Sileika

A new overview of the territory between Russia and Germany has just appeared, called The Lands Between, (Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870 – 1992), by Alexander V. Prusin.

This history covers some of the same territory as Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands with a few differences. For one, Prusin’s book is almost three times more expensive than Snyder’s costing a hefty sixty plus dollars in Canada.

Also, the historical range is longer, taking us back to the time before WW1 when the area was dominated by three powers – Czarist, German, and Hapsburg, and continuing to 1992.

As well, Prusin is considerably less sympathetic to the inhabitants of these lands, depicting them as inhabited by squabbling ethnic and religious rivals. Pressed by either Germans or Soviets, these rivalries became exacerbated and murderous, with the Jews the major but far from only victims.

Curiously, the least troublesome era in Prusin’s history seems to be the time before WW1, when religious and ethnic rivalries were controlled by the old empires. By implication, he seems to be saying these are areas guilty of irredentism when not suppressed by outside powers, yet the outside powers were trying to mold the area to their own image (in the case of the Czarist lands, by imposing the Cyrillic alphabet and orthodox Christianity).

The part of the history which interests me most is this text’s take on 1944-1954, the era of the anti-Soviet underground resistance. Prusin characterizes this period as one of civil war between collaborators with the Soviet regime and those who opposed them. As happened all too often in this part of the world, brutality upon brutality led to escalating violence until one side won, in this case, the Soviets.

Here’s a bit more detail on that – as the local partisans fought against the Reds, they forbade locals to take up positions of responsibility in the new Soviet administration. When collaborators did so anyway, the partisans attacked them. These attacks led to counterattacks by the relatives of deceased collaborators, backed by the Soviet army and secret police. In Lithuania, these Soviet forces numbered 12,000 security personnel and 40,000 – 60,000 troops.

This claim is slightly problematic because it begins with the attack by the partisans rather than the attack on the whole country by the Soviets. Notwithstanding that, let’s continue.

In the last six months of 19444 alone, once Lithuania was free of German troops, the Soviets arrested more than 22,000 individuals and carried out over 8,000 anti guerilla actions. The following year they captured 58,000 people.

In this dirty war, some of the Soviets disguised themselves as partisans and went out to commit atrocities. Partisans who were killed were stripped to their underwear and dumped in public places. Soviet propaganda also denounced the partisans as criminals and wartime German collaborators.

In 1953, the Lithuanian underground still managed to kill 84 Soviet functionaries, but by then the area was saturated with police and informants and the partisan war was essentially over,

Prusin points out that the vast majority of functionaries killed by the partisans were Lithuanians themselves, about 21,000 of a total of 25,000 killed, including, 1,000 children. Thus the partisans were trying to prevent collaboration, but failed, and their victims included many innocents.

The whole question of collaboration is thorny in this part of the world. Simply to exist, one likely had to collaborate either with the Germans or the Soviets. There was no other option in this unhappy slice of geography.

Prusin’s view of the partisan war in Lithuania as a civil war is interesting, but it does concern me that it lets the Soviets off the hook. If the Lithuanians were simply fighting one another, I might agree, the the internecine fighting occurred precisely because the Soviets were there. without them, this particular slaughter would not have happened.

I’ll give an overview the rest of Prusin’s history book in my next post when I’ll discuss the broader context for the postwar partisan resistance.