Inside the KGB Museum: Understanding Lithuania's Soviet Past

The building at Aukų g. 2A, its main facade facing Gediminas Avenue directly across from Lukiškės Square, looks at first glance like any other stately 19th-century civic building in central Vilnius. It is over a hundred years old, and its use has tracked the region's worst 20th-century regimes almost in sequence: built under Tsarist rule for the judiciary, later occupied by Polish administrators, then the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation, and finally, for the longest and most consequential stretch, the headquarters of the Soviet security services — the NKVD, NKGB, MGB, and eventually the KGB — from 1940 until Lithuanian independence in 1991. Most visitors still call it simply "the KGB Museum," though its official name today is the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights.

What happened inside

Between 1944 and the early 1960s, more than 1,000 prisoners were executed in the building's basement, roughly a third of them specifically for resisting the Soviet occupation — members of the Lithuanian partisan movement that kept up armed resistance against Soviet rule for nearly a decade after the war ended elsewhere in Europe. Thousands more were interrogated, held, or processed here before deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia. The basement functioned as an active prison and interrogation centre for the entire span of the Soviet occupation, and it is preserved today largely as it was, rather than reconstructed for effect.

Visiting the museum

The museum, established in 1992, is laid out in two distinct registers. The upper floors take a broader, document-and-artefact approach: the Lithuanian partisan resistance, the mass deportations to Siberia, and the texture of everyday life under Soviet rule, told through photographs, personal belongings, and official records. The basement is a different kind of visit entirely — the original prison cells, an isolation chamber, and the execution room are preserved and open to walk through, deliberately unadorned. Most visitors describe the basement as the part that actually changes how they think about the building, rather than the upper-floor exhibits alone.

Outside, the museum's exterior wall along Aukų street carries a memorial feature that is easy to miss if you don't already know it's there: panels inscribed with the names of Lithuanians who died at Soviet hands, turning the building's own facade into part of the memorial rather than something separate from it.

A name that changed, and why it matters

Until 2018, the museum operated under the name Museum of Genocide Victims. The renaming to Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights was framed officially as a shift in emphasis — toward the resistance and resilience of those who fought and suffered under occupation, rather than centering the identity of the oppressors. Whatever name is on the door, the content inside has not softened: this is one of the most direct, unfiltered places in the city to encounter what five decades of occupation actually meant for the people living through it.

Practical notes

The museum sits an easy walk from Cathedral Square, directly opposite Lukiškės Square — itself worth pairing with a visit. The square carried a large Lenin statue throughout the Soviet period, torn down amid cheering crowds in August 1991, and historians believe it stands near, if not exactly on, the site where leaders of the 1863 anti-Tsarist uprising were publicly hanged decades earlier. Give the museum's basement section time rather than rushing it; it is not a large space, but it is not one to move through quickly either.