I am in snowy Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania and a city that reminds me of a communist-era joke that I first heard in Poland in 1980.

A Frenchman visits Warsaw, so the story went, and is so shocked by the bleak buildings and empty shops that he thinks he must have arrived in Moscow by mistake. Meanwhile, a Russian visits Warsaw and is so pleasantly surprised by the colour and the range of goods on sale that he thinks he must have arrived in Paris.

Political and economic conditions in Vilnius in 2008 are light years from those in Warsaw in 1980 - Lithuania wasn’t even an independent country back then, but rather a Soviet republic that was almost totally closed to western visitors.

In some ways, however, the old Polish joke still applies. Switch on your television in Vilnius, and you get easy access to Russian and Belarusan networks.  But poke your head out of the window and you hear the chimes of Catholic church bells; as in Poland or Ireland, Catholicism is in Lithuania’s DNA. Truly, this is a country precariously poised between east and west.

It is a point well illustrated by the story of the main thoroughfare in Vilnius, Gediminas Avenue, where the government buildings are located. Between 1922 and 1989, when Vilnius was under the successive rule of Poland, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, this street was named first after Adam Mickiewicz, the great 19th century Polish-Lithuanian poet, then after Adolf Hitler, and then after Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.

“Who knows what will happen in the future? Life is so hectic,” a Vilnius tour guide said to me, looking over the park where a statue of Lenin used to stand.

It wasn’t exactly a thundering expression of faith in Lithuania’s long-term independence. but if you think about what’s happened to the country over the past 100 years, you can see her point.

November 27, 2008 1:19pm in Baltic states, Poland, Russia | Comment