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Lithuania — the only Soviet Republic with a Roman Catholic majority — has been the scene of the latest and the most powerful surge of religious dissent in the Soviet Union. Like the earlier waves of religious protest — most notably, theiniciativniki movement among the Evangelical Christians and Baptists¹ and the ferment within the Russian Orthodox Church² — the Lithuanian Catholic dissidents have overtly repudiated the existing pattern of church-state relations, challenging the legitimacy of the norms and structures governing these relations.³ But in contrast to these earlier protest currents, the Lithuanian dissent was not primarily generated by Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign of 1959–64, a campaign which had largely spared the local Catholic Church.⁴ The latter had experienced much more severe persecution during the years 1945–53 at the very time when the Russian Church, the Evangelical Christians and Baptists, and some other "loyal" denominations were enjoying the full benefits of Stalin's "religious NEP". During that period all but one of the Lithuanian bishops were imprisoned or deported and one of the imprisoned bishops was executed.⁵ Perhaps as many as one third of the clergy — 350 in all — were arrested or shipped away to Soviet Asia; all monasteries and convents were suppressed or driven underground, while of the four theological seminaries only one, the Kaunas seminary, was allowed to subsist, its enrollment reduced from 350 to 75 by 1949. Over 300 chapels and some ten percent of churches were closed during these years.⁶

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1870-8_9

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