Bitterness over their bloody exit from the USSR is still strong, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLINin Vilnius
WHEN ALGIRDAS Endriukaitis voted for Lithuania’s independence on March 11th, 1990, he and his fellow parliamentarians started a process that would ultimately unravel the Kremlin’s empire, create 15 new countries and end the Cold War.
Today, Endriukaitis and his compatriots mark 20 years since Lithuania regained the sovereignty that Soviet occupation had abolished 50 years earlier, when Moscow’s secret pact with Nazi Germany carved up eastern Europe between Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
Lithuania’s gambit stunned Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin and emboldened independence movements from the Baltic to Central Asia.
It also galvanised Soviet hardliners, hastened Gorbachev’s political demise and led to bloodshed in this nation of 3.5 million people.
Endriukaitis, a former prisoner in the Gulag, was a member of the Sajudis reform group that swept the communists from power in Lithuania and championed the first independence declaration by a Soviet republic.
Parliament proclaimed “the restoration of the sovereign rights of the Lithuanian state trampled on by a foreign power in 1940 . . . Lithuania has again become an independent state. The territory of Lithuania is one and indivisible. No constitution of any other state has any jurisdiction on it.”
People cheered in the streets of the capital, Vilnius, while inside the assembly deputies joined hands and chanted “Lithuania, Lithuania”.
Urged on by their newly elected president, Sajudis co-founder Vytautas Landsbergis, they began chanting “Latvia will be free, Estonia will be free,” referring to the two other Baltic states that were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 after 22 years of independence.
“We wanted to get out of the Soviet Union before they changed the constitution and made it even harder for us,” said Endriukaitis (73), who signed the historic act re-establishing the sovereign state of Lithuania.
“The people cheered and applauded our decision – but they also feared what would come next.” What came next was fierce denunciation from Gorbachev, the man beloved in the West for softening Moscow’s policies, allowing east European states to scrap communism and Berliners to bring down the Wall, but who was determined to preserve the Soviet Union in some form.
Within days, Latvia and Estonia were pressing for independence, and Gorbachev imposed an economic blockade on Lithuania that strangled the supply of oil, gas and other vital raw materials, forcing factories to close and making tens of thousands of people unemployed.
Moscow also sent special forces to Lithuania to “restore order” and ignored requests from its leaders to rule out the use of violence in settling their dispute.
“Violence had to be expected any day, and we met it in a full range of forms. The Soviets tried to deny us any right to be independent, but we went our way without waiting to see if they would let us or not,” Landsbergis told The Irish Times this week.
On January 11th, 1991, Soviet troops seized key buildings around Lithuania. Two days later, after a stand-off at Vilnius’s main television tower, Red Army tanks rolled through and over pro-independence demonstrators, while soldiers fired wildly into the crowd.
Fifteen people died and hundreds were injured on Lithuania’s “Bloody Sunday”.
“Many of us slept in parliament to defend it from Soviet forces,” Endriukaitis recalled. We built barricades outside and had small arms with us inside. The people defended the building – they saved it.”
Fighting abated in Vilnius but, later that month, at least seven people were killed in similar clashes between pro-Soviet forces and protesters in Riga, the capital of Latvia, which had declared independence in May 1990.
“The choice of Mikhail Gorbachev, when he allowed the use of military force in killing unarmed people, was a deeply wrong, if not a criminal, one,” said Landsbergis.
Gorbachev did not condemn the violence, but claimed that no one in Moscow gave the order to use force in Vilnius and Riga.
The bloodshed only steeled the Baltic independence drive and sullied Gorbachev’s reputation in the West, where countries soon began recognising the sovereignty of the ex-Soviet republics.
Gorbachev was also losing control at home. In August 1991 he was almost ousted by a reactionary old guard, and by the time he returned to Moscow from temporary custody at his Black Sea villa, he had been replaced as people’s champion by the dashing Boris Yeltsin. In December that year it was Yeltsin who signed the Soviet Union into history, making all 15 former republics independent.
“The beginning of the 1990s was a time of huge hopes, that we were once more Lithuanians and Europeans,” current president Dalia Grybauskaite said in an interview. “The violence and the economic blockade united the nation, and forced us to reorganise our economy.”
Two decades on, relations with Russia are still tricky, however, and Lithuanians see shadows of the blockade in Moscow’s suspension of oil supplies to a key Baltic refinery since 2006.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev declined Grybauskaite’s invitation to attend today’s celebrations, but did send written congratulations – the first time a Kremlin leader has done so. Many Lithuanians also want Moscow to hand over the officials and military men responsible for the bloody 1991 crackdown, or at least to apologise for its actions.
“This is a very serious and sensitive issue for us. The pain stays with us, and we need to find a way to get through it together, both countries,” Grybauskaite said.
Today’s anniversary finds Lithuania deep in recession after several years of rapid growth; the economy shrank by 15 per cent in 2009, and unemployment has risen to almost 16 per cent.
But, six years after joining the European Union, there is no great nostalgia for the old certainties of communism and Kremlin rule.
“We opened the gate and followed the way toward the EU. We are not outside of its problems or of world matters, such as the crisis,” said Landsbergis.
“Anyway, to be EU citizens is much better than to be barbed-wire ‘citizens’ of the USSR.”