IN LITHUANIA, A RED ARMY MONUMENT WILL BE REPLACED BY A MEMORIAL TO THE THE BALTIC NATIONAL-LIBERATION MOVEMENT OF THE WW2

The authorities of Lithuania urged residents to raise funds for the construction of a monument to the Forest Brothers. Recently, a charity concert was shown on one of the Baltic country's top TV channels, the purpose of which is to raise funds for the monument.

The monument is planned to be set at the intersection of the Vilnius - Klaipeda and Riga - Kaliningrad highways, where in 1972, at the highest point of the road, in Krizkalnis, where a monument to the Red Army was erected by the Soviet authorities in the afterwar period.

Currently the Soviet epoch monument is in the park of Soviet sculptures in the town of Grutas near Druskininkai, where, at the initiative of local entrepreneur Vilumas Malinauskas, almost all the sculptures of the period of the Soviet occupation were brought.

Now there will be a 16-meter memorial in the form of a sword plunged into the hill, and a chapel, which bells will be ringing in memory of the "Forest Brothers."

The permission to erect the monument has been issued by the municipality of the Raseinis district. The area of 1.2 hectares was bought by the Lithuanian Union of Freedom Fighters and the Union of Memory of the Partisans Struggle for the Freedom of Homeland. 

The author of the idea is the Catholic priest Alfonsas Svarinskas, who was sitting in the camps for his participation in the struggle against Soviet power. In the WW2 period he used to serve a chaplain in a Forest Brothers detachment. He put forward his idea far in 2010. In 2014 Father Alfonsas departed. 

The Forest Brothers (Latvian - mežabrāļi, Lithunian - miško broliai, Estonian - metsavennad) is the unofficial name of the United Baltic armed national liberation forces that operated in the 1940s and 1950s in the Baltic republics of the USSR (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), in the western regions of the Pskov region of the RSFSR (transferred in 1944-1945 to the RSFSR from Estonia and Latvia). The greatest flourishing of this nationa-patriotic movement was observed in Lithuania in 1944-1947.