In Europe

remnant of a once powerful Central European empire that extended to the Black Sea. In the fifteenth century, Vilnius, Minsk and Kiev shared the same rulers. Estonia was more closely aligned with the Scandinavian world; it has been Danish, German, Swedish and Russian property, in that order.
    Latvia was ruled by the
Drang nach Osten
, the Drive towards the East. From as early as the twelfth century, this pre-Christian, heathen Courland served as the hunting ground for Prussian crusaders. Into the twentieth century, the descendants of the Teutonic Order – with names like Lieven, Pahlen and Behr – ran enormous estates here. The area was officially part of the czarist empire, but unofficially it was an important German colony.
    Vilnius occupied a position in the middle: forty per cent of the population was Jewish, thirty per cent Polish, two per cent Lithuanian. That was how things were at the time the old courthouse was built.
    In 1918 the Bolsheviks seized power in the Baltic States. They sacked estates, murdered a few thousand civilians and established a ‘people's tribunal’ in the courthouse. But soon they were chased off by a joint army of German property owners and Baltic nationalists. Then the purges began on the other side: thousands of real or supposed Bolsheviks were shot without a trial. According to the French ambassador at the time, at least fifty executions took place each morning in the central prison atRiga. And so began the rounds of slaughtering on the left and on the right that would repeat themselves again and again in the decades to come.
    In 1920 the Soviet Union recognised the Baltic States’ independence ‘unto eternity’. The building once again became a normal courthouse. By then Latvia had lost forty per cent of its population to wars, famines and emigration. In 1926 the flow of goods through Riga harbour was only a tenth of what it had been in 1913. Entire factories had ‘emigrated’ to Russia. Hundreds of German estates were divided up among small farmers, and the Lievens and the Behrs left with bitterness in their hearts.
    The British sent their fleet to the aid of the three little countries, but to no avail. When a youthful British diplomat stood up for Estonia and Latvia at the 1919 Paris peace conference, the British chief of staff, Sir Henry Wilson, led him to an enormous map of the Russian Empire.‘Now, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look at those two little plots on the map and look at that enormous country beside them. How can they hope to avoid being gobbled up?’
    I wander now through the cellars of that courthouse. It is all still there: the bucket latrines of the NKVD, the Gestapo's hatches, the doors padded to muffle the screams. I see the ‘little cell’: officially designed for solitary confinement, but in reality often used to pack in ten or twenty prisoners; the wooden beds, dating from 1947 (before that, prisoners slept on the stone floor); the lamps that stayed on around the clock. On the wall is a photograph of a young girl with a smart cap on her head, half sitting, half lying against a wooden wall, a pair of binoculars in her lap. She is dead, her chest riddled with bullets. She belonged to the Lithuanian resistance which waged guerrilla warfare against the Soviets until 1953. These ‘Brothers of the Forest’ believed that, under international law, Lithuania was still an independent country. Their covert government had its own laws and its own administration. Courthouses were occupied to make sure Soviet law could not be applied. Some 20,000 Lithuanians were killed in that struggle. The life expectancy of a partisan was two or three years. Most of them were under the age of twenty-one.
    A few of the cells are locked. Behind their doors lie the bones of the more than 700 Lithuanian members of parliament, priests and otherprominent figures killed in a KGB massacre. The bodies were dug up in 1993 and 1994; only forty of them have been identified so far.
    There is another visitor walking around down here, an old man. We strike up a conversation. Antonnis Verslawskis is back here for the first time since he was seventeen. Yes, he knows about the solitary lock-up, he stood there in cold water, forever, until he finally collapsed. His German is old and rusty. ‘I had German back in my gymnasium days, but it's been half a century since I've spoken it.’ He came to Vilnius today just for this, he says, and wanted to see it one more time. ‘I spent three months here