Lithuania’s Next Jewish Target |
On a public Facebook thread, a Lithuanian citizen named Saulius Gudas wrote: “O will be for him, and so will A. Fridman—to the LT court. I don’t think it will be possible to hide it like Nachman Dušansky…”
Gudas was not making a prediction. He was drawing a line of continuity—and he drew it approvingly. He did not compare Fridman to any non-Jewish defendant. He compared him to the last Jew Lithuania selected for prosecution. He said the quiet part out loud.
I recognized the logic immediately. I spent sixteen years inside the Soviet system. When a state chooses one person from a category of comparable actors and makes an example of that person, we did not call it justice in Riga. We called it messaging.
Lithuania has done this before. After independence, it investigated Soviet-era repressions. Among those involved in comparable structures and conduct, it selected one man for special symbolic attention: Nachman Dushansky. As Dr. Efraim Zuroff documented, twenty-five Lithuanian officers of equal or higher rank who served with Dushansky were not even investigated. The distinguishing variable was not rank, not uniqueness of alleged conduct, and not evidentiary clarity. It was Jewishness.
Consider the biography Lithuania chose to prosecute. Dushansky’s father was murdered by Lithuanian police during the Holocaust. His mother was murdered at Majdanek, a camp guarded by Lithuanians. His siblings—Rochel, Peisach, and Yitzhak—were murdered. The Lithuanian state exterminated his family and then, decades later, chose him alone from among his non-Jewish peers for prosecution.
Israel took the extraordinary step of refusing Lithuania’s request for judicial assistance because it suspected the charges were motivated by antisemitism. Zuroff described the request as “insolence.” No serious legal system can call that ordinary prosecutorial discretion.
Lithuania could not lay its hands on him. Dushansky died in Israel, beyond Lithuanian jurisdiction. But his name remained useful. Inside Lithuania, “Dushansky” functions as a narrative instrument—a Jewish Soviet name invoked to muddy Lithuanian responsibility for the murder of 96.4 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population. The utility is straightforward: it sustains the old inversion in which Jewish suffering is displaced by the political usefulness of a Jewish Soviet.
Lithuania learned from Dushansky. It could not reach him because he was in Israel. Artur Fridman is not in Israel. The structural defect that prevented Lithuania from completing the Dushansky prosecution—the target’s physical absence—does not exist here. Dushansky was selected but unavailable. Fridman was selected and immobilized.
The Fridman prosecution has been documented in detail elsewhere. What published analysis of the indictment reveals is more damaging than the charges themselves: the prosecution’s own materials partly corroborate the historical issue Fridman raised, yet the state proceeds anyway. That means the real offense is not falsity. It is contradiction. Lithuania is not prosecuting a man who lied. It is prosecuting a man who was right about the wrong subject.
Gudas’s public statement confirms that the Dushansky-Fridman continuity is recognizable inside Lithuania itself, including among those who endorse the prosecution. The pattern is not being invented by outside critics. It is being confirmed from within.
A Show Trial in Democratic Clothing
I use the term advisedly. I grew up in a country that produced show trials. A show trial is not defined by theatrical confession. It is defined by the use of legal process to ratify a politically useful narrative under conditions where the evidentiary field is structured in advance. Its function is broader than conviction. It identifies the target, elevates accusation over proof, uses process as punishment, and demonstrates the state’s power to define permissible speech. The form may differ from Moscow’s old template. The function is recognizably identical.
Lithuania’s judicial system has classified state historical outputs as “informational acts” beyond substantive challenge. Members of the Lithuanian Parliament admitted on camera that the strategy was to structure the courts so that facts would not be examined. That footage appeared in Baltic Truth. A legal system that survives only by refusing to examine documents has already conceded the case on the merits. The courts that will adjudicate Fridman’s case are part of that same system.
The Chicken and the Monkey
On April 8, 2026, former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis—a descendant of a Holocaust perpetrator—spoke at Stanford University’s Bechtel Conference Center on “An Anomaly in the Realist World: Power of a Small Country.” During the presentation, he invoked the proverb: “kill off a chicken to scare a monkey.” Whatever the immediate context, the logic is unmistakable: punish one visible target so that others understand the cost of disobedience.
Nachman Dushansky was the unreachable chicken of an earlier era. Artur Fridman is the chicken now firmly in hand. Landsbergis’s casual deployment of the proverb from a former foreign minister’s podium illuminated the continuity that Gudas had already stated openly: Lithuania selects Jewish individuals for exemplary legal pressure, not because their alleged conduct is uniquely grave, but because their Jewishness renders them politically serviceable for reinforcing the state’s preferred historical narrative.
The quiet part keeps being spoken aloud. First by Gudas on Facebook. Then by a former foreign minister at Stanford. The only people who claim not to hear it are those who have decided not to listen.
The Standard Lithuania Endorsed and Violates
The IHRA working definition identifies Holocaust distortion as, among other things, efforts to minimize the role of collaborators, attempts to blame Jews for their own destruction, and efforts to blur responsibility for the machinery of extermination. Lithuania’s Dushansky-Fridman pattern fits that structure. Dushansky was used to shift moral weight onto a Jew while Lithuanian complicity remained unprocessed. Fridman is being prosecuted because he contests an officially protected historical narrative. The legal label for that is Holocaust distortion. The moral label is plainer.
The Verdict of Silence
As I wrote in The Silence Lithuania Chose, Lithuania answers its critics with prosecution and its allies with silence. A Congressman writes four times over seven years. No answer. A rabbi writes. No answer. A national advocacy organization writes. No answer. But a Jew posts on Facebook, and Lithuania produces a 220 page criminal indictment. The disproportion is the message.
Dushansky was not an aberration. He was the model. Fridman is the repetition. A state that selects Jews for exemplary prosecution while protecting national mythology from factual challenge is acting antisemitically in structure, not merely in tone. A state that minimizes collaborators, blurs responsibility, and criminalizes Jewish dissent about Holocaust history is not defending truth.
It is prosecuting truth.
I see Lithuania. I know Lithuania.