By Ed Staskus

   Lithuania has got loads of historical show-and-tell. There is the Ninth Fort, Trakai Island Castle, and the Hill of Crosses. The capital city Vilnius has the Gates of Dawn, the Palace of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, and the Bernardine Cemetery. The cemetery can be hard going, though. The dead become restless when it rains. After drenchers old bones from ancient  graves tend to float to the top and stick out of the ground, in the meantime tripping up passers-by.

   Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque buildings are extant all around the city. There are 16^th and 17^th century churches. Narrow winding streets characterize the oldest stretches of Vilnius. The historic center was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the early 1990s, soon after the country threw out its Russian overlords. They went back to Moscow scouring the map for other countries to lord it over.

   There are dozens of tour groups, from Baltic Holidays to Discover Lithuania to Vilnius with Locals. There are hundreds of tour guides who can guide you to places both in plain sight and off the beaten path, brimming with anecdotes and history. They also have the know-how of when and where to stop for a cup of coffee and lunch.

   Pavelas Puzyna, a native of the city, got his start in the heritage business while studying archaeology at Vilnius University. He dug up something new. It was a small rusty metal box. “I was at the market and saw a box with the Sigma logo on it. Inside the box was the flash for a camera. They made cameras and the first Lithuanian computers. Finding the box was like a drug to me. I immediately started to research Soviet-era factories and got interested in the history of industrial Vilnius. I’m a big fan of the city. I thought it would be a good idea to make a tour.”

   He had already been having second thoughts about archaeology. “There are some job problems with it,” he said. Never underestimate the cold feet of an empty piggybank. Pavelas put the pedal to the metal on an expedition for cold cash.

   The Age of Discovery led to the Age of Colonialism, when European countries went far and wide to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, trading, conquering, and controlling natural resources, while benefitting themselves strategically and economically. They created sugar plantations in the West Indies and rubber plantations in the East Indies. They commanded herds of elephants to explore and exploit India. When they found oil anywhere they pumped it out of the ground as fast as they could.

   The world was their oyster. It was tasty, but it was risky hard work, no matter that they were playing the natives for suckers. Caravan routes thousands of miles long were an uphill struggle and boats routinely sank in storms, their treasures gone for good. It wasn’t a swords and sandals movie.

   That wasn’t for the Russians. “Why bother?” the czars said, chain-smoking and downing their strong coffee. “We’ll just go next door.” They sent their conscripts, whose military service was for life, or the end of the soldier’s life, to the Ukraine, the Khanates, and the united kingdom of Poland Lithuania. The faceless minions of the Empire followed, sucking the life out of whatever the Imperial Army had won.

   The Iron Curtain got drawn over the picture window of Eastern Europe in 1945. When the rusty curtain encircling Lithuania got to be full of holes, and after the Russians were pushed out once and for all in 1991, they left most of their relics behind. Some of the things they left behind, besides a bad taste, were zavody, which are Eastern Bloc factories. Even though Pavelas went looking for zavody, the first thing he found was a 1975-built civil defense bunker underneath a socialist sweat shop in Naujamiestis, a former industrial district next to Naujaninkai, the district where he lives.

   “The bunker was underneath a factory that used to make sliding electric garage doors,” he said. “It was all trashed out. I thought maybe I could talk to the person in charge and offer to look after it. Small enterprises were renting space in the former factory and one of them, a car repair shop, gave me the phone number of the owner of the place.”

   He called and was able to get through. “He’s a real millionaire, a Lithuanian guy, and I was able to talk to him. I told him your bunker is a mess, can I maybe look after it, clean it up, be like the overseer?” Although he didn’t expect an answer that very minute, the big man on the other end of the line said yes. “It was bizarre but after that I was like a little kid on Christmas.”

   The Russians started building bomb shelters in Lithuania in the early 1950s, especially beneath schools, apartment complexes, government buildings, railway stations, and smokestack enterprises. “There was an all-important rule then, that big factories had to have a bunker,” Pavelas said. They were equipped with steel doors, filtered ventilation, food, water, and medical supplies. Participation in civil defense training was compulsory for all able-bodied men and women. “If World War Three had started, like the Russians were afraid of, people would have had to live there.” 

   Nobody said anything about what they were going to do in their bomb shelters after a rocket from the tombs had wiped Lithuania off the map. When I was in grade school in Cleveland, Ohio we had a safety drill once a week. It was called Duck and Cover. We crawled under our desks and stayed there for a few minutes until our teacher nun sounded the all-clear. It was never clear to us what exactly was going on, although we knew well enough it was scary.  

   Nuclear weapons in the Iron Curtain age blasted holes in the ground 200 feet deep and 1,000 feet in diameter, blowing everything within a half mile to smithereens. Only skeletal remains would have been left within three miles of impact. After a month-or-two of radiation decay it might be safe enough to go outside, except it wouldn’t be safe.

   There wouldn’t be any power for light, heat, or refrigeration, no running water, no sanitary systems, millions of unburied dead, and an ecological balance gone out of whack. Stress, malnutrition, and damaged immune systems would be fecund ground for the contraction and transmission of disease among survivors.

   Pavelas took rags, brooms, and candles to the bunker. “The place didn’t have electricity. It was dark, but I cleaned it” He came back with a tool box and light bulbs. He came back with curtains for the no-window windows. A year later he was conducting his first tours of the bomb shelter.

   Tour guides escort people on sightseeing excursions, cruises, or through public buildings, art galleries, and native places of significance. They describe points of interest and respond to questions. Many of them research topics related to their site, such as history and culture.  “What’s special about our shelter is it’s almost all authentic, just like from the Soviet times,” Pavelas said. Some bunkers had been transformed into Cold War museums, but he played it close to the vest. “Ours is original, what you would have seen in those days. It’s the only one in Vilnius like it.”

   A year after his first tour he teamed up with Albertas Kazlauskas to form Gatves Gyvos, which means Streets Alive, and Albertas bought the bunker. “He was working for a bank and when the Litas was being converted to the Euro, he thought it would be an opportunity to make a tour company. He’s the owner, a great guy, and a great friend. I’m the main tour guide and main handyman.” They upgraded the bunker tour and made it a success, at least until the viral pandemic brought it to a standstill.

   “We did non-stop tours,” said Pavelas. “I was working nine in the morning until ten at night. The bunker was a money maker although it also eats money.” Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, he expanded his tours to include Soviet-era factories located in the Naujamiestu and Zirmunu districts. “They used to make everything, from vodka to electronics. After learning a lot about Soviet Lithuanian factories, I thought people would be interested in them, too.” His favorite is the former ELFA factory.   

   When the Russians occupied Lithuania during World War Two, the country was largely agricultural. To communize it, they industrialized it. From 1940 to 1959 industrial production in Lithuania increased nine times, while in Russia itself it increased only half as much. Much of the industry was in automobiles, tools, and metal processing, and most of it was exported to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The home folks drove crappy east German cars.

   It was full speed ahead in 1963, with plans on the books to build more than 700 new factories, including a synthetic materials factory in Kaunas, a refrigerator plant in Ukmergė, and a glass factory in Panevėžys. A furniture factory in Vilnius was going to be one of the largest in the USSR. Some of it got built. Some of it was a Potemkin Village.

   “When the Soviet Union collapsed all the factories were owned by the government, by Moscow,” Pavelas said. “It became like a race after independence, about who could take over the factories first. ELFA was bought and sold and bought until the last CEO standing, who wasn’t that great of a person, shut it down. There’s still a small office on the fifth floor, but it doesn’t exist anymore.”

   After the USSR went belly up Lithuania suffered a significant recession as well as a corrective inflation. It was a mess. There were major trade disruptions because the Russians had been the country’s main trade partner. Radical privatization didn’t help, since much of it was out and out piracy, resulting in a 40% drop in GDP in the first half of the 1990s.

   “The ELFA factory produced electric motors for fridges, washing machines, and drills. They made reel to reel tape recorders and record players, by the millions a year. They were shitty compared to Japanese and American production but in Soviet terms the quality was as good as it got.”  The Lithuanians who worked there worked at what was in effect a company town. Entire families were employed in the factories, fathers and mothers and their progeny. “It was son, father, and grandpa,” Pavelas said. Some of the factories had their own campgrounds, on their own lakes, and sponsored soccer teams and singing chorales. When a baton wasn’t enough the Muscovites led sing-a-longs with a truncheon. Chin music was the consequence of being out of tune.

   “The complex takes up about 5 hectares of space and had more than five thousand workers, many of them women. The most memorable item they made is the ELFA-001 reel to reel machine. It cost thousands and only 50 of them were ever made. Another is a small and very powerful motor made for Soviet submarines. Subs have a tower and towers have windows. The windows needed windshield wipers like in a car.”

   Another of his favorites is the Sparta plant. “Their name means speed and fast work,” he said. “Their main product was socks, which they made millions of them year after year. Now the factory is being demolished. I’m glad I had the opportunity to save some items, like stained glass from the canteen.”

   Albertas makes traditional tours of the Old Town, his wife Victoria leads tours for children, mixing entertainment with snippets of history, and Pavelas makes what he calls non-traditional tours, both on the job and privately. “My main goal is to research industry in Vilnius, its economics mostly during the Soviet times, why and what it was doing here,” he said. “I’m also interested in the industrial history of Lithuania, from the end of the Industrial Revolution, through the inter-war years, and into today.”

   The viral pandemic threw businesses of every kind everywhere for a loop, although if anyone needed to isolate, an underground home built with two-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls might have been the ideal place. In the meantime, waiting for vaccination efforts to ramp up and results to happen, Pavelas sat it out. “My guess is that if not for the pandemic our bunker would be one of the famous places in Lithuania,” he said. “What we have is the only one in Vilnius and the very first. We have had many different people come and see it, from deaf people to many foreigners. The bad days came when the lockdown started.” It was all hanging by a thread.

   During the second lockdown in Lithuania the sightseeing business was declared out of business for the duration. “We didn’t get any money, and we just tried to survive, but now that it’s over, people are going to be pouring back in. Our site is unique, in a class by itself.” He felt they were on the tip of something big. It doesn’t always pay to call it a day. The smart money is usually on history repeating itself, which it usually does. The sticks and stones thread from a long time ago is a long unbroken line to all of today’s masters of war bomb shelters. Pavelas was putting his money on walking the line.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

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