Lithuania wants to prove it was net contributor, not recipient of Soviet funds

It is expected that this would help prove that Lithuania was a net contributor rather than a net recipient of funds from the Soviet budget.

Birutė Burauskaitė, head of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre (LGGRTC), says that documents found in the Latvian Finance Ministry’s archives prove that those who say that the Baltic countries were net recipients of central budget funds during the Soviet period are wrong.

In her words, since labour productivity in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was higher and agriculture was more profitable, the republics contributed more funds to the central budget than some other Soviet regions, while the financial returns were lower than their contributions.

“Each of the former Soviet republics should have the same documents, because payments and cash flows were recorded. I believe that they are available in our archives as well,” Burauskaitė said.

Latvian specialists met with Estonian colleagues in late August and are now planning to come to Lithuania to discuss possibilities for using a similar methodology to supplement the existing calculations of the occupation damage.