// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

[00:00:00]
Brian Mackey: It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. And for the rest of the hour, we're talking about the Republic of Lithuania. The Eastern European country is less than half the size of Illinois and has less than 25% of our population. And that is in part because a lot of people who once lived in Lithuania have emigrated, and many of them came right here to Illinois, including some of my ancestors.

This spring, a reporter and photographer from the Chicago Sun-Times spent two weeks in Lithuania as the Pulitzer Center's 2026 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellows, reporting a six-part series on the small Baltic nation's deep Illinois ties and its position on the front lines of Europe's standoff with Russia. Stephanie Zimmerman is a watchdog and consumer investigations reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. She interviewed more than 50 people for this project, from a former Lithuanian president to a driving instructor who lived through the Soviet crackdown. With her was Ashley Rezin, the paper's photo editor. Ashley's out on assignment today, but Stephanie joins us now. Welcome. Thanks for being here. Congratulations on the series.

[00:01:29]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Hey, Brian, thanks for having me.

[00:01:32]
Brian Mackey: Listeners, you can join us if you, like me, have some Lithuanian ancestry — we'd love to hear from you. 800-222-9455 is the number. 800-222-9455. What's the origin story of this reporting project? What made you propose Lithuania for this fellowship?

[00:01:51]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Yeah, well, first I have to admit that I am also a proud Lithuanian. My mother was a Lithuanian immigrant. But the project started because we're in our 250th year of our democracy here in the United States, and sometimes it feels a bit like it's been so long that people forget kind of the origins of that and the importance of that. And here we have Lithuania, which is a much younger democracy. They were the first to stick their necks out in 1990 and declare independence from the former Soviet Union. So they've got 36 years, and I find it fascinating that, you know, where we can't go back in time in the United States and talk to people who were there for the American Revolution, if you go to Lithuania, you can find plenty of people who clearly remember the late '80s, early '90s when a lot was on the line and people stood up to fight for their democracy.

[00:02:51]
Brian Mackey: So what — let's get into the politics, because this is one of your stories from this series — about what we can learn from them. So what surprised you most about how much it is still part of life, that there's this before and after for the Soviet occupation and how much people still think and talk about that?

[00:03:09]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Yeah, you know, there's so many weird contradictions there, right? So anybody who is probably in their 40s or older remembers, or has many family stories. If they were in their 40s, they would have been a little kid, but anybody in their 50s or 60s certainly lived under the Soviet occupation — which, just to remind your listeners, lasted from World War II up until the early 1990s. So those folks have clear memories of two completely different systems: one living under that Soviet system and the other being like a newly free, you know, baby democracy basically.

At the same time, now in Lithuania, after — so they joined the EU and they joined NATO in 2004, and shortly thereafter their economy just like took off. They're known as like a Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe. They're very forward-looking, you know, high economic growth that's kind of stabilized around 3% now, but at one point it was like 11%. And there have been surveys that showed that younger Lithuanians — like people 30 and under — were the world's happiest young people a couple of years ago.

So there's this situation where you've got older folks who still remember the bad times, you've got younger people who are the world's happiest. At the same time, where they sit geographically in Europe is in a really precarious spot, because their neighbors are Russia in the form of Kaliningrad — which is this little oblast we can talk about — and Belarus. So they're at this really sort of dangerous geographical spot on the map, but yet they are this vibrant, very forward-looking country. So I found all of that really fascinating, and I enjoyed hearing the stories from people of all ages, kind of getting their perspectives on that.

[00:05:08]
Brian Mackey: We need to take a break on the show here in a couple of minutes, but before we do, talk to me about that protest — 25,000 people in Vilnius, one of the big cities in Lithuania. What sparked that?

[00:05:19]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Yeah, so there was a series of protests, and that was one of the indications that people said, you know, our democracy is still alive — like we really care about our country. There was a coalition government that has since fallen apart, but basically a far-right party that had a leader that was accused of anti-Semitism got invited into this coalition, and they attempted to seize the Ministry of Culture, which obviously ticked off all of the artists and people that care about the arts and care about culture, and they started having protests over that going back to last fall. Then the same folks also tried to basically take over the editorial independence of the public media — so the public radio and television there — and that upset a lot of additional people, and people had protests all over the country. There were numerous protests actually. There was one that happened in April when we were there in Vilnius — 25,000 people came out, which is pretty remarkable for a fairly small city, as you know, compared to Chicago anyway.

[00:06:30]
Brian Mackey: All right. We are talking with Stephanie Zimmerman, who is a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times — consumer investigations reporter there. But this spring, she traveled to Lithuania with one of her colleagues, the photo editor, Ashley Rezin, as part of a fellowship to do a six-part series on Lithuania's ties to the United States. We're going to continue talking with her after the break.

If you have questions, or maybe some Lithuanian ancestry, we'd love to hear from you. 800-222-9455. Some notable Illinoisans with Lithuanian ancestry include our senior U.S. Senator Dick Durbin. Other Lithuanian-Americans you might have heard of: Anthony Kitis [Anthony Kiedis] of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, even "Ted Lasso" actor Jason Sudeikis. I hear all these names and it sounds like my grandparents telling me stories about their friends. If you want to join us again, 800-222-9455 is the number. We'll be back after a short break. This is The 21st Show. Stay with us.

It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. And for the rest of the hour today, we're talking with Stephanie Zimmerman, watchdog and consumer investigations reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, about her six-part series reporting from on the ground in Lithuania. She went there with Sun-Times photo editor Ashley Rezin to talk about life there and the connections between Lithuania and Illinois and Chicago. Her mother was born there, came here after the Soviet agreement with Nazi Germany to sort of take over Lithuania during World War II.

If you want to join us today, 800-222-9455. 800-222-9455. Stephanie, for people who may be less familiar with the immigration story from Lithuania to Illinois — I mentioned your mom, [and] four of my great-grandparents came here in the early [1900s]. Then in the '90s, my grandfather tutored a boy whose family came in the '90s. So what prompted the various waves of Lithuanian immigrants to choose Illinois as their new home?

[00:09:03]
Stephanie Zimmerman: You know, I think it's just a situation where people tend to go where they have family. There were, as you mentioned, a couple of different waves of immigrants. There were people that came, you know, over 100 years ago. We all probably remember Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle" that had a Lithuanian protagonist, [Jurgis], who was fighting his way through the stockyards of Chicago, like in the, you know, in the [early 1900s].

[00:09:30]
Brian Mackey: He might have been friends with my great-great-grandparents.

[00:09:32]
Stephanie Zimmerman: That book — I read that book in high school and I didn't eat sausage for years after that. So there was an established Lithuanian community, you know, centered around Chicago going way back. And then of course World War II, a lot of people left. That's when my mother left, and she was just a very small child. A lot of people ended up in displaced persons camps in other parts of Europe, especially in Germany, where the Allies had already controlled that after the war, after Hitler was gone. So there's a whole group of people that grew up in those displaced persons camps. My own mother went to school in Germany, and then she came to the United States on a college scholarship. Their folks came because their relatives who were already here sponsored them — maybe they had a distant relative who sponsored them to come to the United States.

There were other Lithuanians that ended up in South America or in Australia, and some also stayed in places like Germany. So the diaspora is all over the world, really. In Chicago, we have about 60,000. There's also this third wave of Lithuanians that came after independence, because of course they declared independence in 1990. It took a while — I should talk about 1991, because it didn't happen instantly. Gorbachev and the Soviets first attacked them before the Soviet Union itself finally dissolved. But after that time of independence and before Lithuania really started to ascend economically, a lot of people left because they wanted to find jobs elsewhere, so they went to Western Europe. A lot of people came to Chicago in that sort of third wave. So there's people that came like in the 1990s, early 2000s. There's a lot of Lithuanians at all different stages in Illinois.

And I love that you mentioned all the famous people. There's also Dick Butkus, who was a famous Chicago Bear, also Lithuanian.

[00:11:46]
Brian Mackey: My grandparents had such great radar for Lithuanian names, and they're no longer with us, so it just doesn't click with me the way it did with them. I'm sure they would have picked up on all those associations long before I did.

So you mentioned Russia — or the Soviet, well, it was the Soviet Union, now it's still Russia — it's threatening. It's a sort of frontline country. This term "dangerous neighborhood" came up. Talk about how much a fact of life this is for people living there now.

[00:12:17]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Yeah, they all talk about their dangerous neighborhood. And you have to kind of go back again to the Soviet occupation, which made a huge impression on Lithuanians, right? Because they felt oppressed for so long and they finally got their freedom. So there was a period of time when the Soviet Union dissolved, and I think the Western world was really hoping that Russia might join sort of the community of normal European nations, but that hasn't happened under Vladimir Putin.

You know, first of all, after Putin invaded Crimea in 2014, that set off alarms. But in 2022, when he launched the big invasion of Ukraine from their friend Belarus and went towards Kyiv in February of 2022, that was a huge wake-up call for obviously all of Europe. But here's Lithuania right in that part of the world. If you think about it on a map — and I would encourage people to try to find Lithuania on a map — it's a small country. If you picture it, Poland is at its southern border. To the west is this little blob, Kaliningrad, which is part of Russia. It's disconnected from Russia, but it's right on the Baltic Sea, and it is [reported] to have about 100 tactical nuclear warheads. Also about a million Russians living there. So that's this little blob. And then on the other side of the border with Poland is Belarus, which has a very long border with Lithuania, and it's basically a client state of Russia.

So the big concern among people in the United States military, also in all of the European countries and NATO members, is if Putin were to decide to militarily attack a NATO country, the easiest way for him to do that would be to go through his friend Belarus — would bring troops there, seal off that 65-mile border between Lithuania and Poland. It's called the Suwałki Gap. Seal that off, and then Kaliningrad would be connected with Belarus and no NATO land troops could come up through Poland and help the countries north of there, which of course are Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Those three countries would be cut off.

And if you think about it geographically — I like to say, OK, imagine if Illinois is Lithuania, Iowa is Kaliningrad, and Indiana is Belarus. This is where they sit, and the distances are not that far.

So they do sit in a very dangerous neighborhood, and they're well aware of that. They're now projected to be the highest-spending country of all the NATO countries on their own defense — 5.4% of their own GDP, which exceeds every country and is a higher percentage than even the United States. So they are trying as hard as they can to protect themselves.

They have — we talked to a lot of people about what they do internally in terms of civil defense and preparing the population. They have a group called the Lithuanian Riflemen, which dates back over 100 years but was reconstituted after independence. And all kinds of people are involved in that, from celebrities and social media influencers all the way down to ordinary people who can join and learn how to help their country, help their neighbors, if, God forbid, the worst ever happened.

So it's very interesting. Like I said at the outset, you have this paradox of this very vibrant, forward-looking, optimistic country that has really unfortunate geography. So they always kind of have that hanging over their heads, and I think they're doing the best they can. They also would like Americans to realize how important the NATO alliance is — the defensive NATO alliance — because it really, you know, the United States was the leader in creating that post-World War II. The importance of NATO to all of Europe and to what we consider our democratic friends — the Lithuanians would really like Americans to realize that.

[00:17:08]
Brian Mackey: We could spend an entire show talking about this subject, and maybe we should at some point. But for now, I also want to mention and move on to one other aspect of the stories you covered, which is a perhaps surprising connection with Illinois — and that is Valdas Adamkus. He asked you — this is a former president of Lithuania — he wanted to know about Chicago's deep tunnel project. Why?

[00:17:34]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Yeah, that's so cool. So Valdas — it's a totally logical question because he, before he ran for the president of Lithuania, was the head of Region 5, the Great Lakes region of the U.S. EPA, responsible for the cleanliness of all the Great Lakes. So he cares a lot about water.

He has an interesting story. He's one of those displaced persons that I mentioned. World War II, he was a teenager. He and his family fled, made their way to the United States. He arrived in the United States in 1949, ended up in Chicago, went to IIT in Bronzeville, got an engineering degree. He had another job before that, but he ended up at the EPA, which was a new agency at the time, created by Nixon in the '70s. And he was named the director of Region 5 by Ronald Reagan in 1981, and he served all the way through 1997 — so he served under Reagan, Bush 1, and Clinton, which tells you a lot about the guy. He gets along well with a lot of different people.

He ran as an independent for the presidency of Lithuania. This was in the late '90s. I think he —

[00:18:57]
Brian Mackey: He's [accused] of not being Lithuanian enough at the time. He —

[00:19:00]
Stephanie Zimmerman: He was, because he had spent half his life in Chicago, and his opponents raised the issue of residency. He had regained his Lithuanian citizenship in the early '90s, but yeah, his opponents said, hey, you've been in Chicago so long, you're not a real Lithuanian. He had traveled a lot to Lithuania in those intervening years, and he was well known there and a lot of people had his ear. In fact, his wife wanted him to just retire — she wanted them to have a happy, relaxing retirement. And he said she cried when he finally decided to run, but there were people in Lithuania that really felt that he was the man for the moment. He was somebody who had experience in government in the United States, which Lithuania looked to as a model of good governance and democracy. He had the connections in the United States, and this was a really pivotal time.

He ended up getting elected, and he served two non-consecutive five-year terms. So his first term ran from 1998 to 2003, and that was just as Lithuania was preparing to join the EU and NATO — they joined both of those organizations in 2004. So here comes this guy who can kind of speak the language of both the United States and the West and also relate to Lithuania itself. So I really do think he was the man for the moment at a really transformative time.

He seems to be beloved across the political spectrum — everybody kind of regards him as this sort of father of the country. He's going to be turning 100 — he's going to have his 100th birthday in November, and he's remarkably sharp and wonderful about talking about Chicago. Like, the first thing he asked me actually was about Chicago media. He was reminiscing about the Chicago Daily News, which, as you might know, got folded into the Sun-Times when it closed. I gave him a Sun-Times tote bag, so that was kind of fun. We talked about media in Chicago, and then later in the conversation, as we were wrapping up — I was like, you know, is there anything else you want to talk about? — he wanted to know about the deep tunnel.

And it was kind of funny because it was before we had the horrible spring rains up here in Chicago where the reservoirs are really filling up. But the deep tunnel as created is functioning as it was created to do. There are also a lot of Lithuanian Chicagoans — Lithuanian-Americans in Chicago — who still look at Lake Michigan and think, you know, Valdas Adamkus is the one who cleaned up the lake. That's why I can go swimming in Chicago. So it's kind of a cool connection that we have with this very big figure in Lithuania.

[00:22:04]
Brian Mackey: If people want to read the series, we'll have a link to it at our website. You can also find it at suntimes.com/Lithuania. The reporter behind it is Stephanie Zimmerman, along with photographer Ashley Rezin. Stephanie, thanks so much for sharing your reporting with us here on The 21st Show.

[00:22:19]
Stephanie Zimmerman: Thanks for having me.

[00:22:35]
Brian Mackey: That is it for us today. Coming up tomorrow, the second Trump administration has tried to assert more control over elections, and President Trump is still making false claims about election security as justification, as well as his own past election performance. We'll talk about security and safety at the polls here in Illinois, headed into this fall's midterm elections. That's coming up tomorrow here on The 21st Show.

Get in touch with us. Our email address: talk@[21st]show.org. The 21st Show is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey. Thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.

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**Flagged for human review:**

- **[00:06:30]** — The host refers to "Anthony Kitis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers." The transcript has been marked as [Anthony Kiedis], the correct spelling of the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman's name, but this should be verified against the audio to confirm what the host actually said.
- **[00:08:20]** (approximate) — The host states "four of my great-grandparents came here in the early 90s," which appears to be an error — context strongly suggests he means the early 1900s. This has been marked as [1900s] but should be verified against the audio.
- **[00:09:03]** — The character from "The Jungle" is referred to in the transcript as "Yergis." The correct name is Jurgis Rudkus. This has been marked as [Jurgis] but should be verified against the audio to confirm what was said.
- **[00:09:03]** — The host refers to the setting of "The Jungle" as "in the twenties." Context suggests this may refer to the early 1900s (the novel was published in 1906). This has been marked as [early 1900s] but should be verified against the audio.
- **[00:17:08]** — The host refers to "Valdis Adamkos." The correct spelling of the former Lithuanian president's name is Valdas Adamkus. The name has been corrected throughout the transcript per the established spelling, but the audio should be verified to confirm the pronunciation used.
- **[00:18:57]** — The host says "he's told of not being Lithuanian enough." This phrasing is unclear. The transcript has been marked as [accused] but should be verified against the audio.
- **[00:22:35]** — The host gives the email address as "talk@2firstshow.org." This appears to be a transcription error. The address has been marked as talk@[21st]show.org but should be verified against the audio and station contact information.