Former KGB Hqtrs. Vilnius – LITHUANIA --- Magnet

This white building in downtown Vilnius was once the KGB headquarters, where crimes and persecutions were planned and executed for 50 years, from 1941-1991. (When we visited the museum in 2013, we saw the basement rooms and cells where the KGB once carried out interrogations and torture on a regular basis.) Lithuania was the first satellite country to break away from the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), following the “singing revolution” (1987-1990) and the January 1991 standoff with Russian tanks in which 14 freedom fighters were killed, and nearly 1000 people injured. A series of events in the subsequent months fully restored Lithuania’s independence and triggered the ultimate downfall of the U.S.S.R. The government of Lithuania established The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (LGGRTC) in 1992. It occupies the former KGB space, but with a very different purpose. The Centre’s core missions are to educate and communicate, especially for Lithuanian memory, the breadth of atrocities (murders, mass deportations to Siberia, and other crimes) committed during Nazi and Soviet occupations.