Lukiškių kalėjimas kaip XXa. Vilniaus istorijos mikrokosmosas

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Vietos dvasia; Genius loci; Lukiškių kalėjimas.

ENLukiškės was built as a prison in the borderlands of the Russian Empire. It was a social microcosm shared by quite different social groups opposing Imperial law. Instead of becoming a heterotopian space of exclusion, Lukiškės throughout the late nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century became a hotspot of political struggle in the North-West of the Russian Empire. Excluding political enemies from the strictly limited Imperial public sphere outside the prisons brought them into an inner universe of ideas, programmes and action. Despite all the energy spend on tsarist style reeducation, during the moments of overall crisis Lukiškės remained a critical space where the detainees were not just well informed about the situation outside, but were ready for political and criminal action. In terms of military action, the power over the prison was a crucial factor during any forced takeover of Vilnius. A high concentration of political enemies of any former authority made it a valuable reservoir of future cadres and therefore a powerful force in the ongoing local fights.After the end of the Empire, too, prisons remained spaces of social control and discontent. When the agendas of states changed after the First World War, prisons increasingly became the spaces of the politics of ethnic unmixing. During and after the Second World War and of Lukiškės was a readymade infrastructure for police oppression, a starting point of deportations and state-conducted mass murder including genocide. It was used as a transit camp for the mass murder of Ponary, the victims which were not only thousands of Jews from Vilna, but also Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Russian victims of the German occupation. With the Soviet takeover in mid-1944, Lukiškės again was used by Soviet agencies to separate and punish members of the Polish underground movement as well as the Lithuanians suspected of being anti Soviet. Again, Lukiškės was the starting point for deportations to the Far East of Eurasia. [From the publication]