On May 9, 2024, a Jewish citizen of Vilnius went to Antakalnis Cemetery to stand at the grave of his grandfather Aron Fridman, who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army, and posted on Facebook. Seventeen months later prosecutor Kristina Minko signed a criminal case against him. The pre-trial file runs to roughly 220 pages. On August 26 the Vilnius City District Court sits again in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24.\n<\/p>\n
Artur Fridman is innocent and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. He is charged under two provisions. Article 313 \u00a72 concerns defamation of a deceased person and is not my subject. My subject is Article 170\u00b2 \u00a71, and the test Lithuania\u2019s own Supreme Court has given it.\n<\/p>\n
The provision\u2019s official English heading is Public Condonation of International Crimes, Crimes Committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against the Republic of Lithuania or Inhabitants Thereof, Denial or Gross Trivialisation of the Crimes.[1]<\/a> I set out its fifteen-year construction in Lithuania Built the Memory Crime<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n The post<\/a> was written in Russian on Victory Day. It reads, in part:\n<\/p>\n \u201cSeparate gratitude and respect to the citizens of Lithuania, grandfathers and fathers, who fought against the fascist filth and against the forest bandits. Despite the fact that enemies of the people have for many years tried to rewrite history and to make heroes out of bandits, all adequate people know that the greater part of Lithuanians fought on the side of the Red Army, and did not hide in the forests and did not rob and did not kill their own and did not take part in the genocide of the Jews.\u201d[2]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n And on the man at the center of the case: \u201cAll those who heroize Adolfas Vanagas apparently do not know that this pseudo-hero, born in America, collaborated with the KGB and handed over all his cutthroats.\u201d It closes on his grandfather, who went to the front as a volunteer, and on four hashtags, the last of which is freedom of speech.\n<\/p>\n Forest bandits. After Paleckis that phrase carries obvious Article 170\u00b2 significance, and I am not going to walk past it.\n<\/p>\n On December 9, 2025, seven weeks after Fridman was charged, the Supreme Court of Lithuania upheld the Article 170\u00b2 conviction of Algirdas Paleckis. The ruling is final and not subject to appeal.[3]<\/a> The path there is worth noting. Kaunas District Court acquitted him under that provision in November 2024. Kaunas Regional Court quashed the acquittal and convicted in March 2025. Lithuanian judges did not agree about where the criminal line falls.\n<\/p>\n The Court set out the elements. The prohibited speech is condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of specified crimes, and liability arises only where it is delivered in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner, or where public order was disturbed as a result. The first of those limbs is where the Court did its work.\n<\/p>\n International crimes, it held, may be denied or minimized not only in direct language but through omissions, and behind cautious formulations or hypotheses that do not change the substance of what is being said. Denial of significant and proven circumstances \u2014 among them the persons responsible, the scale and the consequences \u2014 is essentially equivalent to denial of the crime itself. The Court took those propositions from Strasbourg and applied them to Paleckis: he assigned the partisans only negative motives, passed over in silence the aim of the resistance, shifted responsibility to the United States, produced a victim figure unsupported by research, and mentioned the destruction of the resistance only in the abstract without specifying the number of Soviet victims. Characterizing partisans as criminals, the Court said, corresponds to the occupying power\u2019s own assessment of the partisans as bandits.\n<\/p>\n Lithuania has therefore given itself a serious analytic instrument. It does not require a numerical denial. It reaches silence, framing, cautious wording, misattributed responsibility, understated scale, understated consequences. It is the Supreme Court\u2019s final interpretation in Paleckis, and it is the reason the Fridman prosecution is legally intelligible. He used the occupier\u2019s word. Whether his post satisfies the elements is for his defense and for the court, and the indictment\u2019s own theory has not been made public, which is its own comment on a 220-page file.\n<\/p>\n Now turn the instrument around.\n<\/p>\n Responsibility. Nazi Germany was the occupying sovereign and the directing power of the Holocaust, and no honest account says otherwise. The question the Court\u2019s test asks is narrower: whether responsibility has been allocated exclusively, with a participant role passed over. In December 1942 the American Legation in Stockholm forwarded six Lithuanian documents that had bypassed German censorship, and summarized what they showed as including \u201cGerman policies aimed at the extermination of the Jews in Lithuania.\u201d The Lithuanian Activist Front memorandum inside that file explains the annihilation entirely through German agency \u2014 Germanization of the towns \u201cprovides the reason why the Germans are annihilating the Jews in Lithuania\u201d \u2014 and identifies no Lithuanian perpetrator role at all.[4]<\/a> What the state\u2019s memory institutions have made of that frame since is set out in Where Was Vanagas in 1941?<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n Omission. Despatch No. 2680 prints a Lithuanian statement dated Kaunas, September 6, 1943, written for the information of a German general and originating, in the Legation\u2019s words, in nationalist circles in Lithuania. Its section on German atrocities against the civilian population itemizes shootings of peasants, shootings of bailiffs and village overseers, shootings of innocent inhabitants, deportations to concentration camps. Then one clause:\n<\/p>\n \u201cWe will not mention here what horror was felt among the Lithuanian people beacuse of the annihilation of Jews, which is still continuing.\u201d[5]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n Still continuing, in the present tense, in a document whose entire purpose was enumeration. The Supreme Court has a name for that technique. Nutyl\u0117jimas \u2014 omission. The Court held it can be one of the means by which international crimes are denied or minimized.\n<\/p>\n Scale and consequences. Approximately 212,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered, a destruction rate near 96.4 percent, the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe<\/a>. The Genocide Equalization Doctrine<\/a> denies none of those deaths. It sets them beside Soviet repression as a matched pair and divides the moral weight. The scale survives as a number and is dismantled as a consequence.\n<\/p>\n That operation can be read in a book published in Vilnius. Thomas Remeikis compiled the Stockholm despatches and Vilnius University Press published them in 2005 with the Institute of International Relations and Political Science. On page 4 of his introduction he writes that the despatches contain \u201cthe earliest information about the Jewish holocaust in Lithuania.\u201d Six pages later he explains Lithuanian cooperation with the Germans as intended \u201cto prevent Soviet re-occupation and avoid Soviet holocaust of 1940\u20131941.\u201d[6]<\/a> One word, two applications, six pages apart. The same introduction carries a table of wartime political organizations whose final row groups the Communist Party, the Soviet partisans and the Jewish underground, classifies them as system rejective, and gives their orientation as Moscow controlled. The prose repeats it: those three, \u201call controlled by Moscow.\u201d[7]<\/a> It is the only row so described, and the table and the surrounding prose supply no evidence for the classification.\n<\/p>\n The wartime antecedent is in the same volume. The Kaunas statement of September 1943 closes by comparing the two occupations: Lithuanians were convinced that Bolshevik rule meant the annihilation of the Lithuanian people, and are \u201cno less convinced now that the policy of the German Civil Administration in Lithuania has the same aim.\u201d[8]<\/a> Equalization was available to Lithuanian nationalist writing while the murders were in progress. It did not arrive from Moscow after 1990.\n<\/p>\n Several of the techniques the Supreme Court identified are present in that material. Responsibility allocated exclusively to the foreign occupier with the participant role unmentioned. Omission, in terms. Scale and consequences preserved as arithmetic and reframed as one catastrophe among two. Cautious formulation doing the work that direct denial would do.\n<\/p>\n Nothing described here supplies the second limb that Article 170\u00b2 requires, and I do not want any of it prosecuted. A university press introduction is not delivered in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner and disturbs no public order. I would oppose any attempt to charge the Remeikis volume, to withdraw it, or to place any institution under investigation for publishing it. It should stay in print. Its documents are among the most valuable primary sources on the German occupation in any language. I want it read.\n<\/p>\n My question is not who else belongs in the dock. It is why an analytic test this sharp is used forensically against a citizen and never diagnostically against the state\u2019s own account of the murder of its Jews.\n<\/p>\n The direction is not hard to trace. Lithuania has not punished any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. Confronted with Algimantas Dailid\u0117, an adjudicated participant in the persecution of Jews, the state imposed no punishment<\/a>; prosecutors appealed the absence of a sentence and the appellate court left the refusal intact. Under Article 170\u00b2 itself, every prosecution identified in this record runs the same way. Paleckis, for minimizing Soviet crimes. Erika \u0160ven\u010dionien\u0117, convicted in February 2026 for grossly minimizing the 1991 Soviet aggression against Lithuania, whose \u20ac3,750 fine was replaced on 17 June 2026 by eighteen months\u2019 restriction of liberty, with an order to delete the post.[9]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n Note what that second appeal was for. In \u0160ven\u010dionien\u0117 the prosecution appealed to make the punishment for historical speech heavier, and succeeded. In Dailid\u0117 the prosecution appealed the absence of any punishment for the persecution of Jews, and obtained nothing. One prosecution service, two appeals, two directions.\n<\/p>\n The historical baseline against which Fridman\u2019s words will be measured is supplied by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. The prosecution\u2019s own file contains a letter from that Centre confirming one factual premise of the dispute: that Ramanauskas was recruited by Soviet security organs in January 1945 under a codename. That confirmation does not establish the whole of what Fridman asserted, and I do not claim it does. It establishes that the historical question he raised is a real one, inside the state\u2019s own file, certified by the state\u2019s own institution. What that Centre will and will not disclose about its files is set out in Show the File<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n The defendant here is a doctrine and the hand that aims it, not a nation. Lithuanians published the Remeikis volume. Lithuanian broadcasters aired the questions Fridman is charged with asking, and a Lithuanian author wrote the book his lawyers filed in his defense. The Lithuanian World Community named the problem in writing<\/a> in May 2026.\n<\/p>\n On December 9, 2025, the Supreme Court of Lithuania set out what historical distortion looks like. Silence where the record demands speech. Responsibility narrowed to a single party. Scale and consequences left vague. Cautious formulations that do not change the substance. That description maps onto Lithuania\u2019s own account of the murder of two hundred and twelve thousand of its inhabitants with very little friction. The Court was not asked to apply it there.\n<\/p>\n On August 26 it will be applied again.\n<\/p>\n [1]<\/a>Criminal Code of the Republic of Lithuania, Article 170\u00b2, official English heading: \u201cPublic Condonation of International Crimes, Crimes Committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against the Republic of Lithuania or Inhabitants Thereof, Denial or Gross Trivialisation of the Crimes.\u201d Introduced by Law XI-901 of 15 June 2010, in force 29 June 2010.\n<\/p>\n [2]<\/a>Artur Fridman, Facebook, 9 May 2024, posted from Antakalnio kapin\u0117s, Vilnius. Original in Russian; translation by the author. Key phrases as posted: \u201c\u043f\u0440\u043e\u0442\u0438\u0432 \u0444\u0430\u0448\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0441\u043a\u043e\u0439 \u043d\u0435\u0447\u0438\u0441\u0442\u0438 \u0438 \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0442\u0438\u0432 \u043b\u0435\u0441\u043d\u044b\u0445 \u0431\u0430\u043d\u0434\u0438\u0442\u043e\u0432\u201d (against the fascist filth and against the forest bandits); \u201c\u043d\u0435 \u0443\u0447\u0430\u0441\u0442\u0432\u043e\u0432\u0430\u043b\u0430 \u0432 \u0433\u0435\u043d\u043e\u0446\u0438\u0434\u0435 \u0435\u0432\u0440\u0435\u0435\u0432\u201d (did not take part in the genocide of the Jews). The post closes with the hashtags #9\u043c\u0430\u044f, #\u0434\u0435\u043d\u044c\u043f\u043e\u0431\u0435\u0434\u044b, #\u043c\u044b\u0441\u043b\u0438\u0432\u0441\u043b\u0443\u0445 and #\u0441\u0432\u043e\u0431\u043e\u0434\u0430\u0441\u043b\u043e\u0432\u0430 \u2014 freedom of speech.\n<\/p>\n [3]<\/a>Supreme Court of Lithuania, ruling of 9 December 2025, criminal case No. 2K-173-1073\/2025 (judicial process No. 1-01-1-39003-2022-4), anonymized text published in the LITEKO public decisions database; final and not subject to appeal. Elements at \u00b6 9; interpretation at \u00b6\u00b6 15\u201316, adopting European Court of Human Rights case law including Perin\u00e7ek v. Switzerland, Past\u00f6rs v. Germany, Le Pen v. France and Witzsch v. Germany; application at \u00b6 18; conclusion at \u00b6 19. Procedural history: Kaunas District Court acquitted under Article 170\u00b2 \u00a71 on 20 November 2024; Kaunas Regional Court quashed that judgment and convicted on 13 March 2025. Elements as stated at \u00b6 9 apply the version of Article 170\u00b2 in force at the material time; the provision has since been amended and the consolidated text should be checked for current wording. Translation by the author. Original phrases: \u201cgrasinan\u010diu, u\u017egauliu ar \u012f\u017eeid\u017eian\u010diu b\u016bdu arba d\u0117l to buvo sutrikdyta vie\u0161oji tvarka\u201d (\u00b6 9); \u201cpanaudojant nutyl\u0117jimus, prisideng\u010diant atsargiomis formuluot\u0117mis ar hipotez\u0117mis, kurios nekei\u010dia toki\u0173 pasisakym\u0173 esm\u0117s\u201d and \u201cu\u017e genocid\u0105 atsakingi asmenys, jo mastas ir padariniai\u201d (\u00b6 16); \u201cpartizan\u0173 kaip bandit\u0173 vertinim\u0105\u201d (\u00b6 18).\n<\/p>\n [4]<\/a>Thomas Remeikis, comp. and ed., Lithuania under German Occupation 1941\u20131945: Despatches from US Legation in Stockholm (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press \/ Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University, 2005), ISBN 9986-19-732-5, 731 pp. Desp. No. 1244, 19 December 1942, \u201cThe German Colonization of Lithuania,\u201d signed Winthrop S. Greene, Charg\u00e9 d\u2019Affaires ad interim, file no. 852. Legation summary of the six enclosed Lithuanian documents at p. 167; the Lithuanian Activist Front memorandum at p. 182.\n<\/p>\n [5]<\/a>Remeikis, Desp. No. 2680, 13 January 1944, enclosure no. 1, \u201cThe Failures of the Mobilization of Men and Women in Lithuania for War Employment and Their True Reasons,\u201d subtitled \u201cFor the information of His Excellency Major General Just, Commander of the Security District Lithuania\u201d; section VIII at p. 556, spelling as printed in the volume; dated Kaunas, September 6, 1943, at p. 559. The covering despatch, signed Herschel V. Johnson, states at p. 541 that no information as to authorship was available but that the statement \u201cunquestionably originated in nationalist circles in Lithuania.\u201d\n<\/p>\n [6]<\/a>Remeikis, Introduction, \u201cAmerican Despatches from Stockholm,\u201d p. 4, and \u201cThe Politics of Passive Resistance,\u201d p. 10. The introduction is signed Chicago\u2013Vilnius, 2004.\n<\/p>\n [7]<\/a>Remeikis, Introduction, p. 9, table \u201cPrincipal Political Parties and Resistance Groups Involved in the Anti-German Opposition\u201d; prose restatement at p. 10.\n<\/p>\n