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A fiftysomething man I met in Klaipėda, Lithuania, last week told me his life story. As a teenager, he’d been a Soviet army conscript, ferrying prisoners to Siberia and sleeping in two-hour shifts. In the early 2000s, he worked in a petrol station in Dublin. Now, he and his wife have joined Lithuania’s army reserve, ready to repel a Russian invasion. If he died while killing five Russians, he chuckled, it would be his “personal revenge” for his Soviet service.
Today’s Lithuania is prospering. Former emigrants are returning, especially from the UK, to a burgeoning economy. Incomes have jumped from Soviet levels to 89 per cent of the EU’s average. Signs of peaceful prosperity abound: a shopping mall in an ordinary suburb of Klaipėda with Pierre Balmain and Calvin Klein outlets; beachcombers by the Baltic Sea picking through seaweed for bits of amber; Soviet apartment blocks around Radviliškis renovated to look OK.
Peaceful prosperity is an anomaly in modern Lithuanian history. Russian invasions are the norm. Russia is a “survival threat”, Lithuania’s former president Dalia Grybauskaitė told me. Vladimir Putin’s troops could destroy in days everything Lithuanians have built since independence in 1990. Just 2.7mn Lithuanians are sandwiched between Russia’s satellite Belarus and the Russian exclave Kaliningrad. How can they resist? By mobilising every Lithuanian. Inspired by Ukraine, Lithuania is trying to build a resilient society.
Of course, everything starts with a resilient military. Russia’s war of destruction in Ukraine has shown Lithuanians that they cannot retreat and then retake territory. “If you have to retreat,” warned Grybauskaitė, “there will be nothing to regain.” The new strategy is therefore for beefed-up Nato and Lithuanian forces (conscription was reintroduced here in 2015) to defend land from the first centimetre. Above all, said Neringa Bladaitė of Vilnius University, the aim is to deter Putin from even contemplating invasion.
Then comes the resilient society. It means that every Lithuanian person, company and organisation is co-responsible for defending the country. Lithuanians who learnt in Soviet times to distrust the state will have to become active citizens. There are signs this is happening: the reserve army volunteers, the public collections for arms for Ukraine, and the Lithuanian Russian-speakers who phone people in Russia to dismantle their delusions about the war. Bizarrely, Lithuania is also reviving the Soviet legacy of civil defence. For instance, Soviet air-raid shelters built to withstand a Nato attack are being rehabilitated. Schoolchildren are learning about national security. And there is the undramatic work of planning to keep public services working whatever happens.
A resilient society must stay united under pressure. Lithuania probably will. Putin’s brutality in Ukraine has decimated pro-Kremlin sympathies even among older, rural Russian-speakers with Soviet nostalgia who haven’t done brilliantly since 1990, according to Bladaitė. Russia’s war is wrecking its own long project of wooing foreigners through propaganda. Then there’s Lithuanian memory: every family suffered under Soviet occupation, from 1940 through the underground resistance of 1944-53, when Lithuanians fought the occupiers from the forests, until 1993 when the last Soviet troops left. I met a woman in Vilnius whose grandfather was shot and grandmother and mother sent to the gulags. A poll last year found that 83 per cent of Lithuanians viewed Russia negatively, said Ligita Šarkutė of Vytautas Magnus University.
She added that Lithuanian unity has to include ethnic Russians, who make up 5 per cent of the population (far less than in Latvia and Estonia). Lithuania mustn’t stigmatise all Russians, as the National Opera seemed to do this year when it dropped works by Russian composers.
Nobody in Lithuania expects an invasion tomorrow. Who would Putin invade with? He hasn’t even got enough troops for Ukraine. But if Ukraine loses, the Baltics presume they will be next. Their future may hang on Lithuania’s chief ally, the US. Already, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is blocking aid to Ukraine. Next November, Donald Trump could retake the presidency. Last week, he repeated threats to abandon Europe’s defence for money-grubbing reasons, boasting that while president he’d told a fellow head of government: “I will not protect you,” if Russia attacks.
“It’s very worrying that Nato could be weakened by the outcome of these elections,” said Grybauskaitė. More generally, she doubts Lithuania’s western allies: “We have leadership in the east who are willing to fight, to go to war, to change the world. We do not have such leadership in the west.”
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