Terleckas Antanas
Antanas Terleckas (1928-2023) was born in the village of Krivasalis, Saldutiškis district, into a peasant family. He was the oldest child in the family. He graduated from grammar school in 1940, and later studied at the Švenčionėliai and Linkmenis progymnasia. While still in high school, he was arrested in the summer of 1945 and accused of belonging to an anti-soviet organization. After quite a long interrogation, no evidence was found, and he was released. After graduating from the Linkmenis progymnasium in 1946, he studied at the Vilnius Trade Technical School. He graduated from the trade school in 1949 and began his studies at the economics faculty of Vilnius University, specializing in finances. According to his dismissal note, he worked several months as a guard at the university and left that job on his own accord. His studies went well and in 1954 he successfully defended his undergraduate thesis on the activities of the Dvarčionys brickworks. After competing his studies at the university, he worked as a credit inspector at the Lithuanian Republic branch of the USSR State Bank (1954–57). Even though ideologically laden, economics and the economics profession interested Terleckas, and so in 1957 he enrolled as a doctoral student in the Institute of Economics of the LSSR Academy of Sciences where he specialized in the history of economic ideas in Lithuania. He was unable to complete his studies because he was arrested on 24 December 1957 for allegedly trying to organize an illegal underground organization and in June of 1958 was sentenced to four years of hard labor at the Taishet Labor Camp in the Irkutsk region of Siberia. When he returned to Lithuania at the end of 1960, he found work as an engineer in the construction firm Puntukas. But his interest in history did not fade and so, at the age of 36, he enrolled in the distance learning division of the history and philology faculty of Vilnius University. Although he passed all of his 31 exams and wrote a thesis, he was not able to complete his studies because his thesis was politically unacceptable. Officially, the order of the university rector was: “To remove […] as one who did not show up for the defense of his thesis or the state exam.” All of his life Terleckas was a very active political dissident calling for an end to the occupation of Lithuania. His most important achievement was the founding in 1978, on the 38th anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, of the Lithuanian Freedom League. Its goals were to raise the issue of Lithuania’s independence from the USSR in international forums as well as to develop national, religious and political consciousness among Lithuanians. Terleckas has been awarded: the Order of the Cross of Vytis, grade 3 (1998), the Lithuanian Independence Medal (2000), the Vytautas the Great Order Officer’s Cross (2004), the 2012 Freedom Prize and Estonia’s Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 3rd class (2013).
