Page 177 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

obligation to participate in punitive expeditions to get, so-called, "forest brothers" who
were nobody else but young fellows like my father, whose parents were dispossessed
as kulaks, and they hid in the forests fearing to be taken to the far away and intimidating
Siberia.

The rule of the Soviet power during several years left no family in Lithuania which
had not had at least one member taken to Siberia, and very often it was the whole family
that was driven away. Lithuania was a small but very rich country with a magnificent
economy and enormous farms, the owners of which began to be called kulaks in the
soviet times and the soviet power actively carried out a policy of their dispossession...
It was exactly the best Komsomol members who were choosen for these punitive
expeditions to show a "contagious example" to others... They were friends and
acquaintances of the "forest brothers" who attended the same schools, played together
and went with girls to dances... And now somebody's mad will suddenly made them
enemies and ordered them to exterminate each other…
He took part just in two expeditions, after one of which only two fellows out of
twenty came back home (and my dad appeared to be one of these two), he got terribly
drunk and the next day made a written statement where he categorically refused to
participate in any similar "action" in the future. The reaction to this did not keep him
waiting – he was sacked and lost the job he desperately needed. However, my dad was
a truly talented journalist and another newspaper – "Kaunas Pravda" from the nearby
town – offered him a job. But he did not stay there too long. A short call "from the top"
and my dad lost his new work in the blink of an eye and once again he was politely
shown the door. This was how his long war for personal freedom began which I
perfectly remembered too.

In the end he had to be the secretary of the Komsomol organization of our town,
a position which he quitted several times, handing in his resignation, but it was rejected
and he returned to the post. Later he became a member of the Communist party, out of
which he also was ignominiously thrown and immediately taken back, because at that
time there were not many Russian-speaking excellently-educated people in Lithuania.
And my dad, as I’ve mentioned before, was a magnificent lecturer and different towns
gladly invited him to give a lecture. The thing was that being far from his "employers"
the subjects of his lectures differed from those they wanted him to give and he got
additional problems for that too.
I remember that in the time of Andropov’s rule, when I was already a young
woman, the men were strongly forbidden to have long hair, which was considered a
"capitalist provocation" and (although it sounds today absolutely ridiculous!) the
militia had the right to detain them right on the street and to cut long hair by force. It
came into practice after one young fellow (his name was Calanta) set fire to himself on
the central square of Kaunas – the second largest city of Lithuania (my parents worked
there at that time). It was his protest against the suppression of the individual freedom,
which frightened the communist bosses and they undertook "intensive measures" to
fight against the then "terrorism". Some of those "measures" were most foolish and
strengthened the dissatisfaction of all rational people of the Lithuanian republic.

My father, who was a freelance at that time and several times changed his

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