PEMC praises a nominee for preserving historical truth. The state institution he led for a full five-year term has repeatedly moved non-exonerating records toward exonerating conclusions.

I do not use “Soviet” as an insult. I was born in Riga under Soviet rule. I use the word to describe an institutional method I know from the inside.

Four candidates have been nominated for the 2026 Prize of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience. One is Arūnas Bubnys. His five-year term as Director General of Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC) expired in April 2026, but LRT reports that he remains in office until a successor is appointed. The winner has not yet been selected. LRT also reports that a candidate overview prepared by the Platform praises more than forty years of his scholarly, archival and state-service work and says his research helps society recognize distortions of historical truth.

That description creates a test. It should not end one.

LGGRTC is a statutory state institution. Western organizations see historians, archives, reports, footnotes and international partnerships and assume they are looking at a Western scholarly model. The furniture is Western. In the disputed national-memory files, the method is Soviet: a preferred conclusion acquires institutional protection, and contrary evidence is narrowed, reclassified or absorbed without forcing the conclusion to fall.

Bubnys accepted a repair mandate

The credibility problem was public before Bubnys took the job. In February 2021, the Lithuanian Institute of History and history units at Vilnius University, Vytautas Magnus University and Klaipėda University said they could no longer cooperate with LGGRTC under its then leadership. They called for academic confidence to be restored. Their statement accused the leadership of allowing a politicized approach that ignored elementary source criticism and of weakening professional competence.

Bubnys was not outside that revolt. He was one of the Centre historians who had protested politicization. A contemporary scholarly account records that the petition complained of ideologized research, biased memoranda issued in the Centre’s name and devaluation of professional competence, and identifies Bubnys as one of its signatories. He then replaced the dismissed director.

Before his appointment, Bubnys promised Parliament that LGGRTC would restore its “recently damaged reputation” and again become an authority for Lithuanian society and “foreign colleagues and partners.” Soon afterward he spoke of restoring cooperation with academic institutions.

Some relationships were restored. The historical record was not repaired to the same standard. The Centre’s 18 December 2019 Noreika statement still says that Noreika “organized a Jewish rescue network in Šiauliai” and still presents categorical rescue conclusions. The underlying memorandum and the 2019 archive listing remained publicly accessible when checked on 3 September 2026.[1]

Brazaitis is a cleaner measure of the repair promise. On 12 May 2026, Lithuania’s own Foreign Ministry told Representative Brad Sherman that the Centre’s “complete exoneration” formulation was legally imprecise and that administrative discontinuation was not formal judicial exoneration under American law. The Ministry also told Sherman that the 2018 “complete exoneration” formulation “has since been corrected.” Page 3058, a 2019 LGGRTC defense of the same Brazaitis narrative, itself records an in-place correction dated 26 August 2026 – more than three months after the Ministry’s letter. The edit changed one formulation to say that Brazaitis and Jonas Šlepetys were removed from the list of suspects. But the same page still defends the larger vindication narrative and still characterizes the objection that Brazaitis was not rehabilitated as false.[2]

The correction mechanism exists. Bubnys had years of authority, then a Lithuanian government concession, and then an opportunity to repair the public text. One phrase changed. The broader exculpatory narrative survived.

The institution’s own external expert council supplies a current control. In March 2026 the Seimas-created council said LGGRTC leadership disregarded recommendations, provided documents late or not at all and failed to provide constructive feedback. Council member Algis Vyšniūnas said, “De jure this is a research centre, de facto – a bureaucratic institution.” In May, the council refused to approve the 2025 activity report; its chairman said at the time that the decision had been unanimous and that the report claimed seventeen scientific articles while the material he could identify yielded only six or seven. Bubnys disputed the process and said he was not invited to council meetings.

The succession process then broke down. The council selected Donata Kabelkė; Parliament rejected her by secret ballot on 11 June. Council chairman Arūnas Streikus rejected simply advancing Bubnys, who had finished second, because the council did not regard the remaining participants as suitable. On 19 June the council urged Parliament to evaluate LGGRTC’s 2024 and 2025 activity reports before another selection. His PEMC nomination arrived in August, inside that unresolved institutional succession.

The exoneration pattern

LGGRTC repeatedly moves records that do not exonerate into narratives that do.

On 27 March 2019 the Centre defended Jonas Noreika. On 11 April Lithuania’s own International Commission rejected central parts of that defense, calling the exculpatory arguments and obfuscations unacceptable and rejecting the attempt to treat the ghetto as a haven. Eight months later LGGRTC escalated: its December publication said Noreika led anti-Nazi resistance and “organized a Jewish rescue network in Šiauliai.”

Bubnys then became director. In June 2021 he would not repeat the Centre’s certainty. He said Noreika’s rescue role remained open to discussion, acknowledged that no documented evidence showed Noreika knew of the Jasaitis family’s secret rescue activity, and said he could not assert that events happened one particular way or another. Those were his own words. Doubt expressed by the official with authority to act, followed by non-correction, is documented knowledge without institutional cure.

Noreika’s granddaughter, Silvia Foti, independently followed the documents away from the heroic family narrative. When a 2020 complaint sought annulment of the December 2019 LGGRTC memorandum, the Vilnius District Administrative Court refused to hear it because the statement was informational and created no rights or duties. The Supreme Administrative Court upheld that refusal on 6 May 2020, holding that the memorandum was informational rather than an appealable administrative act. That procedural route left the publication intact without a court adjudicating the historical truth of the rescue claim.

With Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis the category shift is easier to isolate. Brazaitis died on 28 November 1974. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service inquiry was administrative. Its own letter defined the allegation under review as covering 23 June to 12 July 1941 – three weeks – and the disposition came after his death. The Service deactivated the investigation while preserving the possibility of reactivation if meaningful new information emerged. The later congressional covering letter used broader language, saying the INS had found no evidence of anti-Jewish or pro-Nazi activities and that the investigation had stopped. Neither document used the words “exonerated” or “rehabilitated.” LGGRTC added those terms. The underlying U.S. documents and Lithuania’s 2026 concession now sit in the same public package.

Škirpa shows a reversal inside the Centre itself. In 2019 Vilnius renamed the street honoring him. The contemporaneous record quoted an LGGRTC finding that Škirpa’s Berlin LAF had raised antisemitism to the political level and might have encouraged participation in Holocaust crimes. The Lithuanian Jewish Community later said the renaming rested on evidence gathered and findings made by both LGGRTC and the International Commission. Five years later, Report No. 9R-598 carried Bubnys’s name with Alfredas Rukšėnas and moved toward an exculpatory account. The Lithuanian Jewish Community, representing thirty-two Lithuanian and foreign Jewish organizations, categorically rejected it.

Bubnys once signed a protest against biased institutional memoranda. As director, he later put his name on a memorandum rejected by Lithuania’s organized Jewish community. That trajectory belongs in any assessment of his promise to restore credibility.

This is not one critic

The reaction has been institutional. The International Commission rejected the Noreika reasoning. The World Jewish Congress condemned a 2019 Centre document as Holocaust revisionism. AJC said the Centre’s defense of Noreika distorted Holocaust history. Chairs and recent chairs of IHRA expert working groups and committees expressed grave concern and described the March 2019 text as part of a series of attempts to rehabilitate Noreika’s reputation. The European Jewish Congress said the Centre’s explanation appeared to amount to Holocaust denial. In 2024 Lithuania’s Jewish Community rejected the Škirpa report.[3]

Those bodies did not all sever relations with LGGRTC, and it would be inaccurate to claim a current universal boycott. The 2021 academic break was real; some cooperation later resumed. The more durable fact is repeated institutional rejection of specific LGGRTC historical conclusions.

A historical institution can have partners and still lose the presumption that its contested findings deserve independent evidentiary weight merely because the institution published them. LGGRTC has reached that point for me. I would independently verify a material historical proposition before relying on the Centre’s name as authority. Bubnys’s full term is part of that credibility record.

Grant Gochin has already assembled and published the detailed documentary due-diligence case concerning this nomination in Did PEMC Check the History?. I urge PEMC members – and anyone assessing this nomination – to read it alongside the underlying documents before the winner is selected. My argument here is narrower: the record documented there is not an aberration. It reflects an institutional method I recognize, and Bubnys had a full term in which to correct it.

Disclosure: Gochin applied for the LGGRTC directorship in 2026; some primary-document copies linked here are preserved on his Times of Israel upload space.

PEMC should publish what its voters received

The Platform’s own description of its prize says it is awarded to people or institutions at the forefront of resistance to totalitarianism or authoritarianism, defending democracy, fundamental rights and the rule of law. Its laureates have overwhelmingly been persecuted dissidents, political prisoners, human-rights defenders or organizations under repression: Mustafa Dzhemilev, Alexei and Oleg Navalny, Leopoldo López, Ilmi Umerov, Oleg Sentsov, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Memorial International, Dmytro Khyliuk, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Iryna Danylovich. PEMC itself describes that tradition as civic courage in resisting totalitarianism and defending democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Bubnys is a category departure. A category departure is not automatically disqualifying. It requires more due diligence, not less.

LRT says the Platform prepared a candidate overview praising his decades of research and state service. LGGRTC’s public announcement quotes from that material; it is not the dossier supplied to voters. PEMC should publish the exact overview and supporting material it sent to voters. Then the omissions, if any, can be evaluated against the public record.

Did voters receive the 2021 academic boycott and Bubnys’s repair promise? His own signature on the protest against biased memoranda? The unretracted Noreika rescue claim he personally would not state categorically? The Foreign Ministry’s Brazaitis correction and the Centre’s partial in-place edit? The 2024 Škirpa report and the Jewish Community’s rejection? The 2026 council criticism, rejection of the activity report, expiration of his term and unresolved succession? Public reporting I have reviewed does not identify the nominating institution. PEMC should disclose that too.

Who votes for the acting head of a member institution?

LGGRTC sits inside PEMC’s institutional structure. It was a founding member and remains one of three Lithuanian member institutions. At the 16 May 2024 Council meeting in Vilnius, held during a gathering co-organized with LGGRTC, Bubnys spoke and the Council of Members selected Vladimir Kara-Murza by secret ballot. The published 2024 Council agenda expressly excluded membership candidates and applicants from voting on their own admission; its prize item specified a secret ballot but did not publish an analogous recusal clause.[4]

Before the 2026 selection is completed, PEMC should publish the governing conflict rule. May LGGRTC vote for its own acting head? What, if any, conflict rule applies to the other Lithuanian member institutions when the nominee is a Lithuanian state official? If an internal rule resolves those questions, publish it. If no rule does, explain the safeguard. Who submitted the nomination? These are due-diligence questions, not accusations of misconduct.

This is for PEMC’s protection. A professional credential can itself become the object of dispute. An organization survives a bad credentialing decision; the presumption attached to its name may not. Due diligence before an award is cheaper than defending the award afterward.

The method PEMC exists to oppose

The Soviet system did not need to erase every document. It needed to control which conclusions the documents were permitted to change. An anti-Soviet institution can reproduce that method while using Western statutes, titles and stationery.

Bubnys asked to be judged as the man who would restore LGGRTC’s credibility. He has now had a full term. The record permits a judgment on that promise.

PEMC should read the documents before it supplies the prestige.

[1] LGGRTC’s 17 December 2019 memorandum is available as a direct PDF at https://genocid.lt/UserFiles/File/Titulinis/2019/20191218_pazyma.pdf . It states that Noreika “organizavo žydų gelbėjimo tinklą Šiauliuose” (“organized a Jewish rescue network in Šiauliai”) and gives three categorical conclusions. The Centre’s 2019 archive index separately lists the item under 18 December 2019 and remained accessible when checked on 3 September 2026: https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/3149/a/ .

[2] LGGRTC’s 2019 archive lists “Genocido tyrimo centras nepasiduos vulgariam spaudimui” under 13 March 2019. The live page No. 3058 currently displays a 1 September 2026 site date but marks the relevant sentence “pataisyta 2026 08 26” (“corrected 2026-08-26”). The current text says Brazaitis and Šlepetys were “išbraukti iš įtariamųjų sąrašo” (“removed from the list of suspects”), while an earlier paragraph on the same page continues to describe Brazaitis as “reabilituotas JAV teisingumo ministerijos” (“rehabilitated by the U.S. Department of Justice”). I therefore treat this as an in-place correction to a 2019 publication, not proof of a new 1 September 2026 publication. Archive: https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/3149/a/ ; live page: https://www.genocid.lt/centras/lt/3058/a/ .

[3] The IHRA statement attributes the 11 April 2019 text to the “undersigned chairs and recent chairs of expert working groups and committees of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.” It should not be described as an IHRA Plenary or Member-Country decision. Direct statement: https://holocaustremembrance.com/statements/statement-center-study-genocide-resistance-lithuania .

[4] The public 2024 PEMC agenda says discussion and voting on membership applicants/candidates occurs “without the participation of candidates and applicants.” The prize item separately says “Presentation of candidates to the Prize of Platform and voting [secret ballot]” and does not state an analogous recusal rule on that page. Absence from the public agenda is not proof that no internal conflict rule exists; it is the reason the applicable rule should be disclosed. https://www.memoryandconscience.eu/pemc-2024/pemc-2024-council/