The Gediminas Ilgūnas collection holds documents relating to Ilgūnas' very different activities as a journalist, writer, ethnographer and traveller. (His name was Stanislovas Gediminas Ilgūnas, but he chose to be called by his middle name.) In 1953, he was arrested, charged and imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities, and for maintaining contact with partisans. Ilgūnas was released from prison in 1957. He soon started to organise ethnographic expeditions in Soviet Lithuania with close friends, and to collect material about important personalities in Lithuanian national history. Based on the material he collected, he wrote books about the geologist Jonas Čerskis and Vincas Pietaris (1850–1902), the author of the first historical novel in the Lithuanian language. Pietaris' novel Algimantas glorified Lithuania's past (it was published for the first time in 1904–1906), although the novel and its author were practically unknown in Soviet Lithuania. Ilgūnas started to work on the biography of Pietaris in about 1980. He travelled twice to Russia, where Pietaris had lived and died. His biography of Pietaris was published in 1987 during Gorbachev's perestroika.
Untill the end of the 1980s, Ilgūnas focused on cultural actvism. But in 1988, he initiated a Sąjūdis movement group in Jonava, his native town. He was very active as a member, and was elected to the Supreme Council, which proclaimed Lithuania's independence. He made a political career in the independent Republic of Lithuania, as a director of the Archive Department and chairman of the Board of Lithuanian Television and Radio, and as an advisor to President Algirdas Brazauskas. He wrote several books.
The Gediminas Ilgūnas collection was founded in 1988. Ilgūnas himself presented nine units of materials to the archive. Among them is the manuscript of his biography of Vincas Pietaris. Lithuania was still formally a Soviet republic, but society and some state institutions were changing dramatically. Sąjūdis groups were very active in most state institutions, especially those involved in cultural policy. Because of the changing situation, Ilgūnas decided to present his collection to the state archive. From 1992 to 2008, he presented various personal documents, manuscripts and letters to the archive several times. The collection grew substantially. It now has 266 files.
The collection illustrates very well the dramatic shifts in the life of a Lithuanian national activist: starting as a political dissident and supporter of the guerrilla war in the Stalinist period, to being a cultural activist, historical collector, and ethnographer during the post-Stalinist period, and lastly as a political activist during the period of liberalisation under perestroika.
