After her last visit to King Street Cloisters, our formidable Vilnius correspondent Ruta Tumenaite had to dash into town to record a programme for the BBC World Service’s Outlook series. Its producer Radek Boschetty wanted to ask Ruta about Jadvyga Bieliauskiene, one of Lithuania’s most fearless anti-Soviet dissidents, twice imprisoned.

As a young girl, Ruta – whose copy even then was immaculate – was instructed by her Aunt Jadvyga to type out strange documents in her windowless basement pantry. She accompanied Jadvyga on long bus trips to the countryside, where they often visited remote churches. Ruta learnt later that the typescripts were chronicles of persecuted Catholics, smuggled out and broadcast on western channels such as Vatican Radio. Ruta was, as she told the presenter Asya Fouks, a “device”. Women travelling with young girls were less likely to be objects of suspicion and, if Jadvyga had been caught, she risked being sent back to prison.

Later, Ruta went with Jadvyga to underground readings of work by forbidden poets and writers. As the struggle for independence from the Soviets gathered steam, Ruta – with her aunt’s encouragement – helped to spread the word to foreign news agencies. Always in the front row of any political rally, Ruta became known as “the girl with a dictaphone”. She told Fouks that during her second incarceration in a remote Soviet penal colony Jadvyga organised the smuggling of a letter to US President Ronald Reagan which pleaded for help for the women political prisoners jailed with her.

“Making the programme was a dream come true,” Ruta tells us. “Jadvyga and women like her deserve their legacy to be remembered and talked about.” Here’s a link to The Gulag letter to Reagan and the girl with a dictaphone: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct8jc3

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