Poll finds 45 percent back keeping Nėris monument in Vilnius

Forty-five percent of Lithuania’s residents believe the monument to poet Salomėja Nėris should remain on Vilnius Street in the capital, according to a public opinion poll commissioned by LRT.

Nėris collaborated with the Soviet authorities. The poll found that 23 percent of respondents would support moving the monument to a museum or another public place, while 6 percent said it should be removed and not displayed anywhere.

Twenty-one percent said they were not interested in the issue, and 5 percent had no opinion.

Arūnas Bubnys, head of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, said public opinion could be taken into account, but the decision had been made under the country’s current so-called desovietisation law. He said the law should be improved to allow room for compromise.

“A larger part of society supports keeping the monument in its current location in Vilnius, but a considerable number of people also believe it should be moved to a museum or another public place,” Bubnys said.

He said the decision to remove the monument was based on the powers granted by the law and a conclusion issued by the interdepartmental desovietisation commission. As the centre’s director general, Bubnys said he was responsible for decisions that municipalities must implement concerning the removal or retention of public objects.

Bubnys said he had made more than 200 decisions since the law came into force. Many concerned Nėris, including streets named after her. He said changing the names of streets had generally not caused major problems, while the monument in Vilnius had become the main point of dispute and was also being considered by the courts.

Asked whether claims that Nėris later regretted joining a 1940 delegation to Moscow-backed People’s Seimas had been considered, Bubnys said he had relied on the commission’s conclusions.

He said the centre based its decisions on documentary evidence and the political and public activities of individuals. In his view, Nėris’s collaboration with the Soviet authorities, particularly during the first occupation, was clear and had led to the decision to remove the monument.

Bubnys added that claims Nėris later regretted her choices were largely hypothetical and unsupported by historical facts.