Vilnius University has announced the termination of its employment contract with Russian biblical scholar and professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences Andrey Desnitsky. As the dean of the university's Faculty of Philology, Professor Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, told LRT radio, the contract with the lecturer will be terminated in August.
Desnitsky himself said that the reason for his dismissal was his article “Soviet Baltics: What Was It?”, written in 2012 for the portal Pravmir. In it, in particular, the occupation of the Baltic states by the USSR was denied.
“However absurd it may sound, tanks entered Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius, recently transferred to Lithuania (until September 1939 it was the Polish city of Wilno), with the full consent of the local governments. Neither the troops nor the population offered any noticeable resistance; many joyfully welcomed the Red Army, considering it a liberator from right-wing nationalist dictatorship. Then came staged elections and requests to join the USSR, but, again, however absurd it may sound, from a formal point of view there was more freedom under the Red Army, because before its arrival no elections were envisaged at all,” the article said.
Desnitsky stated that 11 years later he sees the situation differently. According to him, if he were writing on this topic now, he would limit himself to just one sentence from that article: “There is not the slightest doubt that the annexation was indeed violent and violated all conceivable norms of international law, and that repressions did indeed follow.”
The scholar noted that he sincerely regrets this article and apologizes for it. “I ask that I be judged not by individual statements more than a decade old, but by what I say and do now. Whether Lithuania still wants to give me shelter is for the Lithuanian authorities to decide, and I am grateful and will always be grateful to this wonderful country, to my colleagues and friends for everything they have given me,” Desnitsky concluded.
Andrey Desnitsky had worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1994, and also gave public lectures on the Bible. In February 2022, he signed an open letter by Russian scholars and science journalists condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In the autumn of 2022, the scholar was accepted into the Department of Slavic Studies at Vilnius University as a senior research fellow. Lithuanian media also note that before the annexation of Crimea, Desnitsky held the view that the peninsula should go to Russia, but later stated that he does not support the annexation.
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