Fact-Checking

Only two months remaining in Lithuania…it’s difficult to believe that I’ve been here for ten months and that soon I’ll be returning to Seattle.  The pressure is on to finish up my research, while also enjoying a Lithuanian summer and time with my friends and preparing to move back to the States and to start teaching in September.  I’m continuing to interview and write, but my foremost priority right now is fact-checking.  As I do research and write, various things come up that I want to verify or find more information about.  These are just a few of the items that I am working on.  Some of them seem quite simple but, for some reason, getting an answer has been rather difficult.

The name of the Director of the Genocide Research Center in 2002 — I know that he (she?) testified before the Seimas but the transcript doesn’t give a name…and I can’t seem to get an answer from the Genocide Center itself.  Next step — show up at the Center and don’t leave until someone can tell me who it was.

The date and location of the construction of a television tower in Poland that broadcast into Lithuania — many of my interviewees have talked about access to Polish television in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  However, one person said that the tower wasn’t built until 1979.  I need to know the exact year the tower was built and began broadcasting.  A library assistant at the National Library who speaks Polish checked the Polish encyclopedia and looked online, but wasn’t able to come up with the information.  I’ve asked a fellow grad student who works on pre-war Lithuanian-Polish relations to check into this for me.

Foreign films shown in Kaunas in the later 1960s and early 1970s — I know that foreign films were being shown in the Soviet Union more frequently by that time, but I want to know what actual films were shown in Kaunas.  I am working on a a list of films from the listings in the Kaunas daily paper.  However, I have Lithuanian translations of the titles of French and Italian films that I’ve translated into English.  Next I will have to figure out what the French and Italian titles are and get more information about the films.  This last step can be accomplished in Seattle.  For now, I need to get through a couple more years of film listings to complete my list.

I finally learned that I can get a DVD of the 1971 film Mažioji Išpažintis about youth subculture (based on a Soviet novel that I recently found in a used bookstore) from the Lithuanian Film Studio.  I am still looking for the CD-rom Lietuvos Roko Pionieriai (2000).