The Presentation of “The Red Flood”

The book cover of “The Red Flood.”

The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania together with the publishing house “Briedis” presented a book “The Red Flood” by Ignas Šeinius (1889-1959), a Lithuanian diplomat to Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, on January 25, 2018. The book “Den röda floden” first published in Stockholm, Sweden in 1940 is author’s authentic account about the events that took place in Lithuania in 1940.

The book opens a window to one of the most tragic periods in Lithuanian history, the Soviet occupation of the country. Šeinius describes how the Soviets destroyed country’s independence, trampled nation’s patriotism, forcefully introduced Soviet way of life; how they Sovietized country’s economy and expropriated private business. Once the Iron Curtain descended on Lithuania, a wave of surveillance, arrests and crackdowns began. “The Red Flood” serves as an eloquent testimony of those terrible events.

In 1952, the memoir was translated into Lithuanian and published in the United States. It was republished in Lithuania in 1990. The current, the third Lithuanian edition of the book is supplemented with historical photographs.