Lithuania does not need to prosecute everyone. It only needs to prosecute one person visibly enough that everyone else understands the price of speaking.

That is what makes the case of Artur Fridman so important. Fridman, a Jewish Lithuanian citizen, faces criminal prosecution for a Facebook post addressing

Lithuanian Holocaust history. This is not about one man, one post, or one criminal file. It is about the use of state process as punishment — a government teaching a lesson it does not need to say aloud:

Speak against the approved historical fiction, and this can happen to you.

The defenders of the Lithuanian state will say the courts have not ruled, that charges are not conviction, that procedure must be respected. All of that misses the point. In a case like this, the process is already the punishment.

A criminal prosecution imposes its penalty long before any verdict: stress, cost, uncertainty, stigma, fear. It forces a citizen to retain counsel, manage risk, and live under the weight of the state’s suspicion. It warns everyone around him that this person is now marked. Even if the case collapses, the punishment has already been administered in time, money, and intimidation.

States like this do not need many prosecutions. They need one. One visible target is enough to create hesitation in every other mouth.

Fridman is the perfect target precisely because he should never have been one. He is not a violent extremist or a mass agitator. He is a Jew speaking about Holocaust-era truth. Lithuania did not reserve its coercive machinery for danger. It used it against historical speech.

That is not democratic confidence. That is state insecurity.

And state insecurity of this kind does not express itself through crude denial. Lithuania does not say black is white. That would be too easy to expose. Lithuania says black is complicated. It says the context is difficult. It says all sides suffered. It says the records are incomplete. It says the court did not reject the claim — merely declined to hear it. It says the institution followed procedure. It says the nation is defending its good name.

This is not truth. It is managed ambiguity in the service of innocence.

A state that denies outright can be caught in the denial. A state that manages ambiguity — that surrounds every documented fact with qualifications, procedural hedges, and scholarly fog — forces critics to argue not against a lie but against a posture. The posture absorbs criticism without changing. It concedes nothing because it asserts nothing firmly enough to be falsified. That is Lithuania’s method. It is not confusion. It is design.

I recognize this design. I was born in Riga, Latvia, and I grew up inside the Soviet system. I know what state intimidation looks like when it operates through process rather than force. The Soviet method was never only the gulag. It was the summons. It was the file. It was the neighbor who understood that someone had been called in for questioning and drew the correct conclusion without being told. The KGB did not need to arrest every dissident. It needed to arrest one, visibly, and let the rest calculate the odds for themselves. The formal charge was never the point. The point was the demonstration — that the machinery existed, that it had been used, and that it could be used again. Lithuania’s prosecution of Fridman operates on the identical principle. The instrument has changed from a Soviet security apparatus to a European Union criminal court. The logic has not changed at all. Lithuania has not evolved past the Soviet model of managed intimidation. It has refined it for a European audience.

Weak states do this when they cannot defeat an archive honestly. They shift from evidence to process, from truth to intimidation, from debate to deterrence. They do not need to prove the speaker wrong. They need only make speaking painful enough that others decide it is not worth it.

When I produced Baltic Truth, I documented how Lithuania’s state institutions fraudulently launder perpetrator histories and suppress the archival record. Four years later, the method has not changed. What has changed is that Lithuania has moved from passive suppression to active prosecution and persecution. The target is no longer an inconvenient archive. The target is an inconvenient Jew.

The legal file is only one part of it. The deeper punishment is social and psychological. A man under criminal accusation is living with pressure, interruption, and the knowledge that the state has chosen him. The accusation colonizes attention and consumes energy that should belong to work, family, and peace. State apologists pretend nothing has happened yet. In truth, the target has been selected, the machinery activated, the warning delivered. That is enough.

If Lithuania withdraws, it will only have proven it was willing to proceed until scrutiny became inconvenient. If Lithuania loses, it will have exposed its methods. If Lithuania wins, it will have declared that historical dissent touching Holocaust memory can be punished by the state. In no scenario does the reputational wound disappear, because the wound was created the moment the state chose criminal process over open historical contest.

That choice tells us that official mythology is too fragile to survive ordinary contradiction. Grant Gochin filed approximately thirty legal actions in Lithuania seeking judicial examination of archival evidence concerning Holocaust-era collaboration and the state’s rehabilitation of certain historical figures. Every case was dismissed on procedural grounds. Lithuanian courts ruled that historical conclusions issued by state institutions constituted “informational acts” not subject to judicial review. The merits were never reached. But for one Jewish citizen’s Facebook post, Lithuania deployed two criminal charges, a travel restriction, and a 220-page indictment. The government prefers coercion to candor. Behind the language of law stands something older and uglier: the demand that citizens repeat the national story or bear the consequences. This is Stalinism in 2026.

A state that must protect itself from the truth is a state that already knows what the truth would do.

A state does not make an example of a citizen because the citizen is powerful. It makes an example of a citizen because the state wishes to make everyone else smaller. Fridman’s case is there to create hesitation — in other writers, other Jews, other historians, other ordinary people who might ask whether the truth is worth the file, the expense, the stress, and the danger. That hesitation is the state’s real objective. The case must be judged not by its legal outcome but by its political function. Its political function is intimidation.

The point is not that states regulate speech at the margins. The point is who gets targeted, over what, and in what environment. In Lithuania, this is happening in a state with a documented record of Holocaust distortion, perpetrator laundering, and institutional evasion — where the LGGRTC, described by Lithuania’s own Seimas-created expert council as “de jure a research center, de facto a bureaucratic institution,” supplies historical conclusions that courts treat as unchallengeable doctrine when they support prosecution and as non-justiciable “informational acts” when they are challenged. A state museum publishes detailed accounts of Lithuanian Holocaust perpetration authored by Dr. Arūnas Bubnys — naming perpetrators by name and rank. No prosecution was opened. A historical claim published by a state institution is too weightless to trigger legal consequence. The same claim, spoken by a Jew, supports a criminal indictment. The courts function as a one-way membrane: state narrative passes outward unchecked; challenge does not pass inward. Stalinism.

This is not neutral law. This is a state using legal process to harden a preferred narrative.

When that happens to one Jewish citizen, the signal travels far beyond the individual case. It tells the Jewish community that truth grounded in history can become dangerous if it collides with national myth. It tells researchers that documents are less protected than reputations. As Silvia Foti documented in Storm in the Land of Rain, the method of inflating one fragment of ambiguity to conceal a structure of perpetration is Lithuania’s governing technique — applied to reputations, to institutions, and now to criminal prosecution.

So what does Lithuania need? Not many defendants. Not many convictions. Not many trials. It needs one Jew. One Jew visible enough to warn the others. One Jew isolated enough to pressure. One Jew ordinary enough to frighten everyone else. One Jew placed under file, charge, and accusation so that all the others understand the boundary. Stalinism.

Every state with a compromised historical conscience watches how far another state can go. Can you protect perpetrators with institutions? Can you criminalize inconvenient speech? Can you make one citizen carry the weight of the warning? Can you do it all while speaking the language of democracy?

It is not routine when a Jew is prosecuted for historical speech in the country with the highest Jewish murder rate in Europe — where approximately 96.4% of Jews were murdered, mostly, by Lithuanians. It is not routine when the process itself becomes the punishment. It is not routine when the real audience is everyone who might speak next.

The Fridman case is not a legal proceeding. It is an instructional performance by the state. And the lesson is simple:

Lithuania does not need to prosecute everyone. It needs only one Jew. Stalin would recognize the method. He taught it to them.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)