My studies at Vilnius State Pedagogical Institute

The author, on the basis of documents, literature and her own experience, aims to show the policy of russification and sovietisation after the second Soviet occupation. The data mainly refer to the Faculty of History at Vilnius State Pedagogical Institute. The institute lecturers, who worked in this faculty in the period of independent Lithuania, either emigrated from Lithuania or were not allowed to work at the institute. Thus, at first the teaching staff consisted mainly of secondary school history teachers, graduates from Kaunas Magnus University. In the course of a few years they were eliminated from the faculty on the initiative of the leaders of certain Soviet educational institutions or the communist party. All in all, till the death of Stalin, 25 lecturers were unfairly dismissed from their positions. Officially they were accused of collaborating with the resistance movement or adherence to the nationalistic bourgeois philosophy. Thus, they were considered unreliable as lecturers. From the first days of the Soviet occupation, history lecturers and other specialists were replaced by people who came from Russia or other Soviet republics. Many Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians became heads of the departments of Marxist disciplines, history lecturers or secretaries of the communist party. They introduced Stalinist methods of administration and regime based on fear and distrust