Lithuania’s “Bloody Sunday”: a criminological and legal approach

Abstract

Lithuania’s liberation from the Soviet Union did require certain sacrifices, and one of the biggest of them occurred on the so-called Bloody Sunday—January 13, 1991. Historically, January events in Lithuania might be paralleled to earlier massacres intended to stymie Soviet-era liberation movements: Black Saturday in Baku (1990) and The April 9 tragedy in Tbilisi (1989). This topic covers a wide range of legal and criminological themes, including selective justice; the issue of the liability of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (i.e., Mikhail Gorbachev); and limitations of criminal law while incriminating the acts falling under Arendt’s term known as the “banality of evil.” Naturally, similar events have a Rashomon-like character, with both facts and interpretations varying wildly depending on the source. In light of this, the article discusses several dichotomous (i.e., opposingly perceived) concepts: the relationship between spontaneous and planned, liberation and status frustration, and crowd and mobs. The aim of the article is to analyze the criminal case and the events of January 13, 1991, to apply criminological theories to this specific case, and last but not the least, to determine whether this legal case can be described as a quest for justice or a quest for criminals.