Homage to Lithuania
Valiunas, Algis
Algis Valiunas HOMAGE TO LITHUANIA As the small country pursues its dream, Moscow reminds the West it is not in the business of making dreams come true. I daring their independence on March 11,...
...In May 1940 Mother Russia, solicitous of her defenseless wandering brood, accused Lithuania of shanghaiing some of her boys stationed there...
...The Hundred-YearLong Day, from the novel by the Sovietwriter Chinghiz Aitmatov, stunningly portrayed the spiritual opposition between Kirghiz tribesmen in Soviet Central Asia and modernity embodied by Soviet power...
...However circumstances might shift, they would always require the unswerving pursuit of the one true course...
...When this calculated application of Soviet legality failed to produce the desired effect, Gorbachev showed everybody that there's plenty more law where that came from...
...The leading figure in the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, he served hard time for his activities with this "kamikaze band"—he was Anatoly Shcharansky's cellmate for a while—to bring his total confinement to some twenty-four years...
...Americans love an underdog, until the overdog lunges their way and shows its teeth...
...Perhaps she too was guilty of too much hope...
...The boldness that marked him as a leader effectively disqualified him from presiding over the leadership of the organization...
...The Union of Labor Lithuania did not count many Lithuanian laborers among its membership...
...This mutual assistance sounded like a real sweetheart deal, on paper...
...Shortly afterward, Petras Cidzikas began a hunger strike in the Vilnius Cathedral to free political prisoners...
...finally the wind blew out the candle she was using, and the girl looked over at her mother, shrugged her shoulders, and then went about getting that candle lit again, from another...
...This is of course what the builders of the walls between East and West have been telling their captive populace all along: that the walls were built for their own protection...
...They have convinced themselves that their soothing diplomatic ways, their decorous avoidance of unpleasantness in word or deed, will bring the Soviet Union around in time to doing just the sort of thing the West would like it to do...
...This success has been a source of national pride...
...You might expect to see simple graciousness like this at a Wisconsin county fair, or the mayoral inauguration in a small Nebraska town...
...The Soviet Union has scored an invaluable coup in convincing the American press, politicians, and people to adopt the official Soviet manner of speaking about Lithuanian independence: what the Lithuanians did was an act of secession, which is not necessarily bad in itself, for there are legal ways of going about it...
...Two days before Christmas, and overly excited perhaps—Time had just named him its "Man of the Decade' Gorbachev had promised that any attempt to secede from the Soviet Union would end in "discord, bloodshed, and death...
...A Lithuanian investigation into the matter concluded that the misplaced soldiers were off doing what Russian soldiers do when they have the chance: getting drunk, sleeping it off, or making their getaway...
...moreover, Lithuania had secretly sealed a military alliance with Latvia and Estonia, and Baltic schoolchildren were sneaking around the forests, gathering kindling in preparation for putting the Kremlin to the torch...
...The Communists who headed the Ministry of the Interior and the security forces effectively did the governing...
...to form a new government that would not give offense...
...Three Lithuanian cities hosted a scholarly conference on theology and church music...
...Molotov told the Lithuanian premier, Kréve-Mickevicius, that Lithuania had a great destiny for so small a nation: to serve the far greater destiny of the titanic Russian nation...
...In Kaunas, at the Church of St...
...On July 7 a new political organization, the Union of Labor Lithuania, proclaimed the fraternal union between Lithuania and the USSR, although it failed to mention that the union it had in mind required the larger brother to eat the smaller...
...and then she worked her way around all the candles that were out, lighting every one...
...She shrugged again, and went back to work...
...The Soviet constitution was designed to make such disappearance a matter-of-fact affair...
...Nor does the than desperate...
...Gorbachev decided to show him otherwise...
...and Motieka represents the Lithuanian nation at its quixotic but perfectly reasonable best...
...Even Motieka, who seemedto be a natural ally, Petkus faulted for his sometime membership in the party: "I want to believe hes a good man...
...and to welcome as many Red Army troops as might be needed to ensure their own safety in that perilous land...
...Now nobody believes that Lithuania is justly part of the Soviet Union, but everybody is afraid that, if Lithuania regains its independence, the Soviet Union will either fall apart in a bloody shambles or that the ghost of Stalin will cast a shadow clear across the Atlantic...
...Brazauskas answered that, in Moscow, he'd made the remark without referring to notes, and in a foreign language...
...Elegant dining has infiltrated Vilnius, in the form of the Stikles Restoranas...
...There was soon a shortage of medicine, and the reduced flow of oil and natural gas—Lithuania had gotten nearly its whole fuel supply from other Soviet republics—brought on layoffs and plant closings...
...Stalin was only finishing the work that Ivan the Terrible had started, bulldozing a great wide way from Moscow to the Baltic...
...has thought of it every day...
...The first privately owned restaurant in Lithuania (there are a few others now, but none in its league), it was founded by a local entrepreneur, with the extensive assistance of a Philadelphia restaurant owner who had given similar help to culinary aspirantsin Nicaragua and Vietnam...
...Of course, they are not yet, and will not be for some time...
...the monument was made of fieldstones that volunteers had hauled from the major battlefields of Lithuanian history...
...The determination that Red Army have a similar directory of allowed them to endure an evil regime its own, if only because it would have when there was nothing to do but en- a hard time coming up with a similar dure now gives them the daring to try list of friends in Lithuania...
...For they despised the comparative ease their which is the translation of perestroika) seven affiliated publications...
...To inquire briefly into the nature of that request, and of the circumstances that prompted it, further illustrates the delicate interdependence between good laws and good arms...
...For some time Lithuania has had a remarkable passion for an American sportbasketball—but political passion has made it more than an amusement...
...Soviet diplomatic warm-heartedness put Lithuanian anxieties to rest with clauses limiting the number of troops allowed...
...Although Gorbachev has finally admitted the illegality of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he stands by the legality of the Lithuanian request for admission to the Soviet Union...
...Petkus has a peerless résumé as man of conscience...
...Culture cannot be restored until the Church resumes the place it had," Gede averred...
...When Lithuania observed the anniversary of its independence on February 16, one of the speakers at the rally in Vilnius called it "a celebration, but through tears...
...The Freedom Monument that was erected in Kaunas replaced the one the Soviets had knocked down after the war...
...In mid-September Sajudis sponsored another environmental protest, this one at the site of a Chernobyl-type nuclear power plant, which was notorious for leaks and minor accidents...
...the Soviet Union continued to deny that any secret treaty had ever existed...
...Lithuanians are sufficiently unembarrassed about their nation's Christian soul that they tolerate it not only in their philosophers but even in their theater types...
...VI O f course, one man's barbarism is another's sacred rule of law...
...Five days later demonstrators protested against distorted press coverage, and demanded freedom of the press...
...that is, they have convinced themselves that Gorbachev really wants precisely what we want, and the best thing we can do is to stay out of his way while he does everybody a favor...
...Sport, when it is not merely amusement or business, has traditionally provided a rest from warfare, as well as preparation for warfare, but it can also serve as surrogate or inspiration: momentous anti-Soviet riots in Vilnius in 1976 followed Lithuanian victories in soccer games against Byelorussia and Russia...
...in practice, it meant that Lithuania was to help the Soviet Union take what it wanted from her, while the Soviet Union would help Lithuania know precisely what it was that it wanted...
...Such a policy is all hope and no will...
...Whatever appeal the LCP campaign posters might have had—it turned out not to be much—implicitly rested upon the one undeniable pharaonic edge: that the Red Army could still come crashing down on this small place like the Red Sea at full throttle...
...Although this kind of glorious openhandedness we like to think of as peculiarly American, in this case it probably had a peculiarly Lithuanian derivation: from a tradition of Christian humility deeply graven, and from the closeness that years of shared suffering have given this people...
...The Mass in the Vilnius Cathedral was broadcast nationwide, and 20,000 gathered at the grave of Jonas Basanavicius, who drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1918...
...The set itself, with cruciform members outlining the house frame, embodied the company's Christian vision: the house owned by the foolish tyrant Professor Serebryakov was the place of travail for those who lived there, yet the suffering was clearly purposeful, and not without hope...
...sport is a perennial American growth industry...
...What the Soviets wanted to do was to cut off the Lithuanian nation from its deepest source of strength...
...Lithuania replied that it would submit a comparable bill for "moral and physical damage" to its people and land...
...ICrëve-Mickevicius was given a prolonged sick leave—one of those colds that won't go away—and a Communist installed in his place...
...some 1.6 million Lithuanians wound up signing...
...next year...
...political parties (the for the personal consequences but that its captivity had been just...
...If anything, it had been upheld, by this touch of neighborly kindness...
...Of course, they had every intention of taking command of the works...
...People do want these things...
...It was the duty of small nations, in the face of so superb an imperial undertaking, simply to "disappear...
...At any rate, when the nation called for boldness, there was no professorial diffidence about him...
...Lithuanians legally celebrated Christmas for the second time since the war...
...it started to print its own money...
...Stalin tendered THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 25 his personal assurance that he had Lithuania close to his heart...
...There was a ripple of laughter, and no one seemed to feel the national dignity had been affronted...
...The only hope they will be reunited any time soon would be if the International Olympic Committee honored Lithuania's appeal to send a team under its own flag to the Games in 1992...
...In the upcoming elections, he pointed out, Sajudis was endorsing thirty-one Communist party members, while the Communist party was not endorsing any non-Communists from Sajudis...
...It is a quaint peculiarity of the modern democratic character, as it peruses the myriad accomplishments of man, to reserve its most impassioned admiration for really good chow...
...Take up your guns...
...Landsbergis is a man of prudence in the fullest sense, capable of such daring or such circumspection as the times demand...
...Three of the starters for the Soviet Olympic team were Lithuanian, and one more besides played regularly...
...Generally known now as Sajudis, nian Olympic team...
...The Lithuanians would ask to be annexed to the Soviet Union...
...A few days later Lithuanian television offered a national theater production of Strindberg's The Father especially "for those who are tired of politics...
...Impelled by these hallucinations, the Soviets declared the mutual assistance treaty broken, and issued an ultimatum: Moscow instructed Lithuania to arrange for the punishment of the offending members of its government...
...The previous May Sajudis had opposed a petition, supported by the Freedom League among others, that the Red Army be withdrawn...
...The Soviet Union summarily insisted that each of the Baltic nations sign a mutual assistance treaty with her that would permit the Red Army to park some of its tanks there...
...Brazauskas himself soon called for Lithuanian independence...
...The beatings went on for half an hour," he remarked in a dead tone...
...The first—the common understanding of the mattergives itself credit for being both ethically astute and realpolitisch, when it is in fact craven and willfully blind: it holds justice and its opposite to be the same thing, because to make the obvious distinction between them would mean to side with one against the other, and that is an unpleasant task when the just nation has only justice to commend it while the unjust one has fearsome power...
...Gorbachev ordered the Lithuanians to surrender any guns they might have, so that the only Minutemen Moscow had to worry about were reposing underground somewhere between Pocatello and Cedar Rapids...
...While Cidzikas was fasting, the nation celebrated the raising of the Lithuanian flag atop the Castle of Gediminas, the medieval hilltop stronghold that overlooks Vilnius...
...Sajudis members admired him as a master of compromise, piecing together agreements between rival factions when they wanted most to leave each other in pieces...
...it also warned what he could do...
...When Kréve-Mickevicius dared to insist that the Lithuanian people would never ask to give up their freedom, Molotov set him straight: "We'll know how to teach the Lithuanian people...
...IV T welve years ago, when I first visited I Vilnius, women on the street tended to favor the babushka-with-birchbroom look that the imperial capital had authorized as ideologically sound proletarian daywear...
...A couple of months down the line, the Sajudis News published the complete texts of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocols, in which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union settled the fate of the Baltic republics and Rumania...
...Once Red Army of course does claim a cer- Lithuanian Democratic party, the without any real hope of changing the the hope of freedom was released into tain primacy of its own...
...The crowd, naturally, ran to six figures, and the carousing was rumbustious even by Eastern European anti-Communist fiesta standards...
...and other former teammates are playing in Western Europe...
...This inverted understanding propagates two varieties of moral slackness verging on stupor...
...Before long it became terribly clear just how much the Soviet Union wanted, and how peremptory the desire was...
...the seminary that remained open was riddled with KGB termites...
...He laughs drunkenly, then starts to cry, and, back to stage right again, he goes to sleep under the light, which is back on...
...agreeable enemies to the Soviets 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 than the Americans have...
...Two thousand people turned out to express their gratitude to the faster...
...But it is not certain we can resist the West...
...On March 8 Gorbachev warned that if Lithuania seceded from the Soviet Union, it would owe Moscow $33 billion for all the good it's done for her in the way of infrastructure and such...
...Soviet enlightenment swept its searchlight across the ways of the old superstition, and then swept the refuse it found there out of the way of progress...
...Brezhnev anymore...
...The three crosses that were erected atop the highest hill in Vilnius replaced the ones the Soviets had knocked down after the war...
...Within two weeks of voting itself into existence, Sajudis had its first audience with the secretary of the Lithuanian Communist party (LCP), and began its career as the opposition...
...a chapel was dedicated to the nation's exiles in the Vilnius Cathedral...
...Youths refused induction into the Red Army...
...Algirdas Brazauskas, then president of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet, advocated independence, but foresaw so daunting an array of trials to pass through beforehand that it was all but impossible to envision this feckless little country ever actually becoming worthy of nationhood...
...proscribing the interference of one party in the internal affairs of the other, "especially in the economic and social system by military means . . . "; and preserving the inviolability of Lithuanian territory...
...The regime shut churches down and put them to use for the public good, as warehouses, gymnasiums, garages...
...T he old beliefs hold true in Lithuania, making the present endurable, and the future possible...
...Lithuania declared its preference to get Vilniusback peacefully, and, in a secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the disgusted Germans signed Lithuania over to the Soviet Union in exchange for part of Poland and $7.5 million in gold...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 impudent Lilliputian charade that grown men would put an end to presently...
...But then to throw off that regime the moment the Red Army doesn't need friends: it such a thing seems possible...
...ecologithe past two years, every one of them jailers were allowing them, and the by some 500 intellectuals in June 1988, cal, legal, and cultural commissions...
...and some guardians of civilization even fear that, when independence comes, that heart might be stolen by temptations rather coarser than those Stikles offers but still too scrumptious to resist...
...In Petkus's view, political leadership had to be moral leadership of irreproachable integrity: the Lithuanian resistance must refuse any compromise with the occupying power, or with its local Communist minions...
...Foreign diplomats, two Americans among them, were sent packing...
...So they learn the city game, in these Baltic hamlets...
...but his fierce attack dwindled into a pro forma protest...
...At the moment of the nation's self-celebration, he severely reminded his parishioners that the things nations tend to celebrate are very often spiritually destructive...
...But by the time she had finished, some of the ones she had had aflame a moment ago were extinguished already...
...The government touted the elections as supremely democratic, however, and as the elections might seem somewhat less democratic if no one were to vote, it was announced that every voter's passport would be stamped, and those who failed to vote were to be denoted enemies of the people...
...Since a bunch of Lithuanian-American ringers—including Ed Krauciunas from Chicago, who under the name of Moose Krause later became athletic director at Notre Dame—helped Lithuania to the European championship in 1937 and 1939, basketball has been a serious game there...
...Nevertheless, it was a difficult habit to kick: he showed me a note he had received describing the recent police attack on a small political meeting in a private apartment...
...Go out and blast some windows...
...Russians who took their orders from the Soviet Legation gained command of this and that...
...The cur- just needs enemies who are so tired of rent hope of the Lithuanians is that of being enemies they'd do almost anya people who have foresworn false hope thing to become friends...
...center stage, the same...
...Such individual acts of reverentgratitude, combined with the huge gatherings on ceremonial occasions—the Cathedral was packed for Mass that night—have made the nation's soul...
...V S oon they were to claim it as their own...
...The Lithuanian government refused at first...
...The Red Army ordered the return of fifteen hundred Lithuanian deserters, and bloodily ferreted some of them out of a mental hospital where they were hiding...
...Sajudis had thought the action provocative, precipitant...
...The champion of the speed-merchants was Kazimieras Motieka, a lawyer who was a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet...
...Vytautas the Great, a fifteenth-century building currently undergoing extensive renovation, the pastor took special pleasure in the work being done to expose the original brickwork in the sanctuary, and he likened the architectural labor to the effort to restore Lithuania to its pristine glory...
...When Moscow television news reported his death, the announcer said that a suicide note in the press's possession indicated he'd killed himself over family troubles...
...Gorbachev appeared insulted to be told of such a thing...
...When a Kirghiz man who works as a signalman on the Soviet railway hears that his oldest friend has died, he ignores instructions to bury the man there, and sets about taking his remains to the tribal burial ground, as custom demands...
...Algis Valiunas is a writer living in The Lithuanians have been less Chicago...
...Petkus warned that there could be a revival of full-scale terror soon enough: the Red Army was building prison camps in Lithuania, so that it should not be caught unprepared if Gorbachev were to fall...
...Petkus's favored political approach is dramatic action that epitomizes unconquerable moral will, and he was convinced that, had the Lithuanian people risen up as one, peacefully but irrepressibly, at the same time the Czechs and the East Germans had done, Lithuania would have won its freedom already...
...I daring their independence on March 11, the course of events, and their pace...
...Molotov assured the Lithuanian government that, however it might respond, the Red Army was definitely coming, and in truly glorious force this time...
...So it is that Americans concede that there must be some significant portion of truth to the Soviet claim that Lithuania is not seeking to regain what the Soviet Union took from her, but is rather trying to take something from the Soviet Union...
...but their way was illegal...
...They have no past...
...in every last town and village, it seemed that a new monument went up and most everyone When the police had cornered a group of students at an early Sajudis demonstration and were moving in with clubs drawn, it was Landsbergis who had charged to the youths' rescue...
...Three Lithuanian yachts crossed the Atlantic in memory of the air crossing by Darius and Girenas in 1933...
...They must be eager to reach the ends to which the hallowed gathering and the grave declamation are but the means: wilting under the oratorical barrage at Kaunas, a young woman asked me, "When they do this kind of thing in Chicago, do they blabber on as long as this...
...On the flight from Moscow to Vilnius, a Lithuanian mother sitting just in front of me proudly pulled a large and vivid Revlon advertisement from her purse and showed it to her teenage daughter, who studied it with evident wonder and yearning...
...The artists' union declared its independence from Moscow...
...When the various members of the household gathered to complain about Serebryakov, they launched into the great Verdi chorus from Nabuccq "Va, pensiem" in which the Hebrew slaves captive in Babylon longed for their beautiful lost Jerusalem...
...To commemorate, in angry mourning, the signing of the pact, 250,000 people turned out in Vilnius, 50,000 in Kaunas, and thousands more in smaller cities...
...however, neither did it recognize the authority of the Lithuanian regime, because so long as the Red Army was in Lithuania it had the real authority...
...Perhaps the finest moment of the celebration in Kaunas came when the master of ceremonies, between speeches, tenderly held up a small child who'd gotten lost in the huge crowd...
...In particular, any victory that Zalgiris has had over a Russian team has outdone the eponymous battle in significance...
...In January 1989 a rally of 50,000 people, sponsored by the Lithuanian Liberty League, the Democratic party, Young Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, demanded outright independence...
...Condescending to play the provinces now, and strictly for their sake, he expected to knock the yokels over just by flashing the metal in his teeth...
...Vytautas Landsbergis, who was president of Sajudis and is now president of Lithuania, looks like the sort of man it would be all but impossible to throw a punch at, even in the throes of parliamentary procedure...
...The few decent men who were al-1 lowed a place in the new government served strictly as camouflage for the brutes...
...the Republic's leadership became very cross with Sajudis for this antagonism...
...Those who difThe Red Army doesn't need friends: it just needs enemies who are so tired of being enemies they'd do almost anything to become friends...
...to most everything the Red Army does they acted as suddenly, as boldly, as The founding of the Lithuanian Re- not have time for...
...it showed Gorbachev venturing deep into an oceanic crowd that didn't appear thrilled to see him...
...The United States magnanimously reiterated that it had never recognized the Soviet regime in Lithuania, then announced, rather less magnanimously, that it was not about to give the Lithuanian regime the recognition it sought either: the new government needed to demonstrate that it had "effective control of its territory and [that it was] capable of entering into, and fulfilling, international obligations" before the U.S...
...courage to call their rulers tyrants and assured it that it could now ask for in- organization is the predominant polit- fourteen youth organizations and four their country a prison, with little regard dependence would have been to admit ical force in Lithuania, although the for women...
...a while later still, so did the Lithuanian Communist party, led by Algirdas Brazauskas...
...Further to demonstrate how bad Lithuanian laws are, and how good Soviet ones, the Red Army seized Communist party headquarters and government buildings, including the offices of the chief prosecutor...
...Lithuanian intellectuals like Juozaitis are eager to embrace democracy...
...On February 15, when the LCP was conducting festivities on the eve of Independence Day, Motieka approached Landsbergis to suggest that Sajudis boycott the proceedings, or at the very least agree to walk out if they should turn distasteful...
...The teacher resists superbly...
...The democratic elections produced the customary totalitarian results: with 95.5 percent of eligible voters voting—a figure that only the wonders of Soviet science could determine so exactly, for no roll of eligible voters existed—the Union of Labor Lithuania got 99.19 percent of the votes...
...It asserted jurisdiction over factories, ports, utilities...
...and the best that Lithuania turns out can play with the best anywhere...
...Some slight eruptions of irreverence suggested that people do have it in them to get a bit bored sometimes with these grand occasions of state...
...When Moscow began constricting the flow of needed products to Lithuania —Lithuanians were speaking in February about economic blockade, and it was only the West that was shocked when the Soviets cut off the oil supply —Motieka blithely pointed out that this proved them guilty of the very thing they were accusing the Lithuanians of trying to do...
...Arthur Miller has called a genius, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya became a rendering of the Lithuanian soul under Soviet rule, an allegorical trial of patience...
...The only real difference between Lithuania today and Lithuania three years ago was that the use of terror had nearly been eliminated...
...The rolling countryside between Vilnius and Kaunas looks rather like a pinier version of southern Indiana, and the backboard and rim that you spot in every small town indicates that this knob or hollow too has been smitten with Hoosier mania...
...Petkus has a certain resemblance to the British character actor Robert Morley, most especially to Robert Morley's silhouette: Petkus is imposingly portly...
...So much for the first five months of the Movement...
...A factory worker told him the Russians were imperial exploiters...
...Petkus gave little thanks for the degree of freedom that Lithuania already had...
...From here, that appears unlikely...
...and even if there was someone who refused to vote for the resolution, he was held to be of no official consequence, for the measure was said to pass unanimously, as is best in such matters...
...then they wonder why the underdog should want to be running loose with the other puppies when it could be playing just as happily in the overdoes stomach...
...A man whom most of his countrymen thought of as a true patriot, Brazauskas nevertheless had acquired the habit of checking the accuracy of his own view of things by looking through Soviet eyes...
...Humanist and Progress party, the regime...
...W ithin Sajudis, too, there was a faction, including some Communists, inclined to foot-dragging, and another built for speed...
...In the six productions of theirs I've seen (they have a repertory of some two dozen plays, ten by Lithuanians), the leitmotif was spiritual endurance: how the soul seeks to preserve its integrity against forces determined to adulterate it, mutilate it, or simply blow it out like a match...
...and well: caressing a treasured recollection societies for Lithuanian minorities, inthat he brings out in time of particular eluding Armenians, Byelorussians, Esneed and then locks away, fingering a tonians, Georgians, Jews, Karaims, hope that he never permits himself to Latvians, Poles, Rumanian-Moldavicultivate into anything more than a ans, Russians, Tartars, and Ukrainians...
...Arvydas Sabonis, a 7' center who has been called the best non-American player ever, will probably join him in the U.S...
...We will all melt away without Christianity," Juozaitis warns...
...The new government called for a national election to the People's Diet on July 14...
...On February 16, Lithuania's Independence Day, Cardinal Sladkevicius, at large after twenty-five years of house arrest, invoked the spirit of Gandhi as a moral preceptor for the Lithuanian movement...
...Confrontation...
...In Hunger, based on Knut Hamsun's novel, vaguely, a cadaverous young man stops under a light downstage right to make some notes, and the moment he starts to write, the light goes out...
...He faulted Sajudis for sacrificing moral clarity, and the force that it bestows, for the sake of political expediency, which was so dimly conceived it wasn't likely anything much was going to get expedited...
...When Lithuania declared its independence, it looked to the great democracies for help: official diplomatic recognition at that time, Lithuanian Prime Minister Kazimiera Prunskiene has stated, would have made Moscow back down...
...Vilnius is a city of superbly good-looking women—the only other places where I've seen knockout beauties in comparable concentrations are Florence, Westwood, and Park Avenue between 46th and 59th Streets—and no one deserves more than they to be arrayed in the finest leather, silk, and fur...
...Plumpish, bespectacled, fifty-nine years old but looking forty-five, with a nervous hissing laugh, he is demonstratively unoffensive, unless the subject is the perfidy of the Soviet Union, or the indifference of the West...
...She tried and tried, but the wind was strong, and the flame just wouldn't take...
...In mourning, they came again to honor the sacrifice of a Lithuanian man who had set himself on fire in a Moscow square...
...The Russians persisted in the fantasy that a free Lithuania would stop trading with them, while in fact Lithuanians had every intention of continuing economic relations—but as one nation freely trafficking with another, not as a colonial outpost serving the imperial need...
...instead, the crowd sent him back to practice his scales...
...At this point Machiavelli decided he'd said all he needed to say about laws, and went on to talk about arms...
...Nobody believes him, but he knows that makes no difference...
...However, one must not confuse Juozaitis and his like-minded compatriots with the overlords they are working to get rid of...
...I n Kaunas, the Sunday after Independence Day, by the monument to Freedom—there were hundreds of flowers strewn around its base, and candles standing everywhere—a girl maybe eight or nine years old was trying to light one candle with another...
...eighteen Lithuanian recruits had been murdered or had committed suicide the previous year, persecuted for their nation's call to freedom, which Soviet patriots understood to be a recrudescence of fascism...
...And one suspects there were the open air, it was bound to dictate In any event, Sajudis manages to see Christian Democrats, the Social countless people who dreamed of free- Democrats, and the Greens...
...Outside the Cathedral young children lit candles at the foot of a very large cross to which a very small Christ was pinned...
...The Lithuanian president abdicated and fled to Germany the day the Red Army moved in, June 15, 1940...
...T he Lithuanian government con- ' tinued to insist it was very much there...
...Dear Teacher, by L. Razumovskaya, opened with a knock on the door that sounded like a summons tothe sub-basement at the police station: it was a few of the elderly teacher's recently graduated students, who had come to offer her thanks, and to inform her that, if she does them a favor, they will do her a favor, with the help of their friends the secret police...
...in fact, the note stated unmistakably that he had done it to protest the most recent Soviet barbarities...
...but it knew how to get the job done without them...
...The Soviet charges grew more bizarrely malign in reply: the Lithuanians were extracting military secrets from the purloined soldiers, to the end of launching an assault on the Soviet garrisons...
...The United States is willing to speak the truth only so far as it will not insult Gorbachev, and that leaves untruth plenty of room to maneuver...
...This lovely unaffected ease of affection was the product of democratic manners, which subordinate ceremony to natural sentiment...
...Having dramatically broken with Moscow the previous November, the LCP turned around and tried to use the fear of Moscow as its essential campaigning device: better a tete-a-tete with Mr...
...Show's over...
...A Sajudis member who preferred Motieka could find no fault with Landsbergis's courage, nevertheless: when the police had cornered a group of students at an early Sajudis demonstration and were moving in with clubs drawn, it was Landsbergis who had charged to the youths' rescue...
...114,,o plays that Nekrosius adapted from novels depicted trials of resolve in action...
...They have no future...
...The most dramatic confrontation—which one did not read of in the American press—came when a woman in the street demanded an end to the conscription of Lithuanian men into the Red Army: she told him about her own son, who killed himself after returning home from the army, where a group of his colleagues had castrated him for the crime of being a Lithuanian...
...In the hands of the director Eimuntas Nekrosius, whom...
...momentary idyll, for fear of rousing himself to desperation...
...By a vote of 124-0, with six abstentions, the Council voted to restore Lithuania's independence, which, in Landsbergis's words, had been "illegally suppressed by a foreign power and its army...
...People rallied to support democracy in Rumania...
...They'd known allalong they couldn't count on him...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990...
...and the Soviets insist that Lithuania cannot reassert the independence that it lost in 1940, because it renounced that independence, willingly, hopefully, joyously, when it requested to be accepted into the Soviet Union...
...and the Soviet Union, like a tenderhearted lady at the dog pound, could never find it in herself to turn down that woebegone look, that needy whimper...
...When the daughter was finished—it took a while—the mother put the ad back away again, with care...
...An Englishman of discerning palate on a swing through the East could scarcely be coaxed to leave this refuge from socialist grease and gristle: in the guests' book, he exulted, "Civilization at last...
...but the signs of aspiration to Western standards of elegance are unmistakable...
...Why did he join the party...
...The morning of Independence Day, I saw an old woman place a flower at the feet of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a small church courtyard, and, when I passed back the same way that night, there were several flowers scattered there, as well as one rather unprepossessing tuber in a Mason jar...
...According to the secret version of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was signed on August 23, 1939, Lithuania was to be a Nazi prize...
...The plays this company puts on live as they do because the actors so plainly know what fortitude is, and fear, and fatigue, and despair...
...One thought of Pharaoh in hot pursuit of the Israelites, just before the waters resumed their customary position, but one was sobered by the thought that nowadays it's Pharaoh who has the insuperable advantage in technology...
...When the crowd had gone, he dispersed the audience too: "All right...
...Priests went off to Siberia...
...The restaurant's huge success has inspired the owner to look into opening another, in Rome...
...Kalashnikov...
...but THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 23 they know she's carrying a knife in her garter...
...The current Sajudis C ince it became possible for Lithua- decisively as they did because the near- form Movement (reform is the transla- directory lists fifty-one local branches, ^.) nians to think of freedom, it has er they came to true freedom, the more tion of the Lithuanian persitvarkimas, in this country of 3.7 million...
...Sajudis let the moment go," and now all Sajudis was doing was getting ready "to take over the administration of the occupation...
...Before long the ghost was promenading about the streets of Vilnius: a fleet of tanks cruised past the Lithuanian parliament one morning, to remind legislators and their constituents of the Machiavellian lesson that there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and that where there are good arms there will surely be goodlaws...
...A spiritually bad time is coming," Arvydas Juozaitis, a young philosopher, politician, and newspaper editor told me...
...The Kaunas club team Zalgiris, named for a battle in which the Lithuanians repelled an invasion by the Teutonic Knights in 1410, won the European championship in 1988...
...Before setting off, he says to his own small son, whom he holds sleeping in his arms, "Sleep, dream, and remember...
...Gorbachev yipped in pain at the accusation, and retorted that the Russians "share everything...
...Moscow quickly made it clear that the Red Army—just a few of the boys, really—would be coming around soon, with a treaty or without one...
...She returned then to the candle she hadn't been able to light, keeping at it this time until she got it...
...Although few Lithuanians shared Petkus's view that Sajudis had failed the country, all of them knew that what Sajudis had helped Lithuania get—the right endlessly to speak of and to write of and to demonstrate for independence, and even freely to vote for a government that would advocate independence—was not independence...
...II T here has been no slackening in the I pace since then...
...However, there is plenty in Lithuania that bears a Western imprint, in manners, morals, and thought...
...you are more inclined to appreciate your enemy's fine qualities and to overlook his unpleasant ones when he has his knee on someone else's throat than when he has it on your own...
...Any association with the Communists, however patriotic they might declare themselves, Petkus found repugnant...
...Amusement too is very much part of the democratic deal...
...On March 11 the legislature chose Vytautas Landsbergis as its head, and proclaimed Lithuania a straightforward republic rather than one of those Soviet Socialist simulacra...
...Punctilious rectitude in league with the refusal to be intimidated, however fearsome the threat, does set a man apart, or a nation...
...That chorus had become the virtual anthem of Italian patriots who wanted an end to Austrian domination of their homeland...
...Yet Petkus placed no confidence in Gorbachev: "An individual like Gorbachev matters very little...
...In the wilds of Indiana, however, most every garage or barn has its own basket,while in Lithuania the public court, hardscrabble and hangdog, appears to be the only game in town...
...A whiff of freedom, a touch of prosperity (with Estonia, Lithuania has the highest standard of living in the USSR), and bingo: nobody walks around looking like Mrs...
...Ten days later 100,000 Lithuanians joined hands with 50,000 Latvians and 15,000 Estonians along the Baltic shore in order to protest the sea's ruinous pollution...
...This prudence of Landsbergis's—a word we hear more and more, lately—should not mark him as a timid or too easily agreeable man...
...Before more they needed the one thing they under the motto "Openness, democ- committees for Catholic hospitals, aid then, of course, there were heroic men had all yearned for all along...
...As the writer Sigitas Gede remarked on a television show about religion, "If you can smash in a man's head, why not break the wings off an angel...
...Gorbachev pleaded the security interests of the Russian people, who required access to the Baltic...
...the Communist leadership, both from fear of the crowd, and from the desire to ingratiate itself, announced that it was taking steps to make Lithuanian the official language of Lithuania...
...left, once again...
...Whenever the angry Gorbachev began to rumble, Landsbergis would remind everyone that the Gorbster was in charge of the country next door, and there only...
...twenty-been impossible for them not to...
...the stunning scale of this exhibition of moral force illustrated, as perhaps nothing else short of mass death can do, the enormity of the injustice that the Soviet Union has committed against these nations...
...Lithuania racy, sovereignty," was the catalytic to political prisoners, and the Lithuaand women who knew their souls to be could not wait any longer than it did: event...
...The solemnity of the occasion was by no means forbidding: the atmosphere was one of genial elevation, and not without a touch of humor around the edges...
...Only the Union of Labor Lithuania was permitted to submit candidates in the election...
...The liberties the Youth Theater took with Chekhov—and some Russian critics took offense when they performed Uncle Vanya in Leningrad—they took in the name of their nation's own liberty...
...The second form of moral failure is a refined variant of the first, and it is this that afflicts President Bush and his foreign policy advisers...
...clubs for writers free and who therefore possessed the to hang back in silence until Moscow or movement plain and simple, this and for those back from deportation...
...Not everyone wanted to watch that particular show every minute anyway...
...When Princess Caroline was in town, she dined at Stikles, and left a comely testimonial...
...it installed its own border patrols and began to issue its own passports...
...I have been to a funeral in the city and they say what work a man did . . . but nothing like a prayer...
...III o the eyes of some Lithuanian pa-1 triots, however, the adjustments that Landsbergis and Sajudis made to political circumstances proved them inadequate to lead Lithuania out of thosecircumstances...
...The deadeye guard Sarunas Marciulionis stars for the Golden State Warriors in the NBA...
...the Lithuanian prosecutor and the lawless laws he had enforced gave way to a Soviet successor and a legal code with superior firepower...
...until a couple of the thugs beat, and get ready to rape, a beautiful young woman who is in on the deal...
...a while later, so did the cinematographers' union...
...quite the contrary...
...Everyone wanted to take part in the democratic process on this grand occasion: among the actual members of the Diet sat soldiers of the Red Army, representatives of the Soviet Legation, and ambassadors of good will from Moscow...
...Shortly before Independence Day, Motieka lit into Brazauskas for the disparity between remarks he had made in Lithuanian about the Red Army and those he'd made in Russian: in Lithuanian he'd called it "one of the forces that would decide Lithuania's future," while in Russian he'd said it was "the one force...
...Although Lithuania declared that independence in 1918, the time it has actually been allowed to enjoy it has been achingly brief: from 1919 to 1940, first as a democratic republic until 1926, then as a dictatorship of the right—though a comparatively benign one, for those years, in those parts—until the Soviets, then the Nazis, then once again the Soviets occupied Lithuania during World War IL Last year the Soviet Union permitted Lithuania to celebrate its Independence Day for the first time since the war, and this year Lithuania marked the occasion with large public gatherings throughout the country...
...Mannerly agreeableness won out, prudently...
...Convened in the town theater in Kaunas, the Diet attracted a real crowd...
...Miffed by the unappreciative reception, he turned brusque, huffy, with these upstart colonials...
...The first Soviet premier ever to go and actually have a look at Lithuania, he breezed into Vilnius like a tenor with a throat of gold, who has spent his life singing for the world's most demanding audiences, and who knows that when he is done, there is never a dry eye in the house, or a dry seat...
...For many, the Church never lost its place in their lives, even when it seemed in danger of being lost altogether...
...the treaty was signed on October 10, 1939...
...By July Sajudis was out gathering signatures...
...He dispatched extra troops to guard Lithuania's Russians and Poles from fascist nationalists in a killing frenzy...
...The faith that sustained them when their country was virtually broken would have to guide them, as a people, when Lithuania was properly their own again...
...Landsbergis coolly replied that Brazauskas "was not as bad as that," and that he didn't want Sajudis "to turn this into a circus...
...it relies imprudently upon the good graces of a ruler who has demonstrated his capacity to be ungraciously cruel...
...A million Lithuanians were among the two million Baits who took part in the Baltic Way, joining hands to form a human chain between Vilnius and Tallinn, Estonia...
...jurisprudence to burn...
...Someone said Petkus had once observed that, having gone hungry for twenty years, he had no intention of missing another meal...
...A fuller account of the matter can be found in Lithuania 700 Years, edited by Albertis Gerutis, Manyland Books, Woodhaven, NY...
...When the vote came, everyone voted...
...Although Gorbachev has finally admitted the illegality of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he stands by the legality of the Lithuanian request for admission to the Soviet Union...
...In jaunty defiance, thousands of people held a political road rally in Vilnius, on bicycles...
...The Soviets who did not belong in the parliament outnumbered the Lithuanians who did...
...someone suggested the Soviet Union sign a treaty with a free Lithuania...
...between provincial tradition and what passes for imperial rationality...
...M ost Lithuanians find the heart of their civilization elsewhere than in the duck confit...
...Comforts and adornments are not the whole story, but they are part of the deal...
...A man of sixty, he has an air of contemplative serenity that is broken occasionally by a terse bitterness, though not at his personal suffering, which he did not care to discuss...
...The Soviet Union had arranged for the election of the People's Diet so that the Diet would proclaim Lithuania a Soviet Republic and petition the Soviet Union for membership...
...The Youth Theater of Vilnius, the nation's premier theater (and probably the best I have seen anywhere), has an imaginative foundation of nationalism reinforced by Christianity...
...The sort of man Sajudis needed for its president was one who would tame the potentially anarchic disputatiousness of a political organization that professed to have one aim but whose members disagreed endlessly about the waysto reach it...
...and it is especially fortunate to have precisely such enemies in Washington these days...
...It was Gorbachev's case that Brazauskas's party presented to the Lithuanian people, and they had better things in mind...
...Displaying a Neapolitan vehemence of gesture, he cajoled, hectored, and scoffed at his interlocutors...
...After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, and Stalin invaded it on September 17, the Germans applied a diplomatic half-nelson to neutral Lithuania, trying to convince it to march its troops into Vilnius, the immemorial Lithuanian capital, which the Poles had seized in 1919 and had held since...
...Daukantas, by Jonas Marcinkevicius, showed Lithuania's first historian struggling to bear the hard blows of history: when his brother dies in the Revolt of 1863, fired by a nationalism that Daukantas's writing helped to inspire, the scholar crumples under the accumulated pain of centuries, the tireless routine of slaughter and grief that a small nation endures at the hands of a larger one unconstrained by fear or remorse...
...Sadly, the Lithuanian roundball juggernaut is faltering, for its best players have come to want what every American athlete wants: lots of everything sweet...
...The speakers were numerous—almost everyone from the crowd who asked to speak was invited to do so—and the remarks tended to the dulce et decorum est vein: sonorous, poignant, perhaps rather long on wind and platitude, and emphasizing the united front that Lithuanians of various ethnic origins and political opinions have presented to invaders from East and West alike down the centuries...
...The wall will come down, and Western mass culture will come pouring in and flood us...
...He thought he'd do well to come to Lithuania and talk the folks there out of the gruesome way they had chosen...
...The next day Gorbachev declared the declaration "illegal and invalid," an The rolling countryside between Vilnius and Kaunas looks rather like a pinier version of southern Indiana, and the backboard and rim that you spot in every small town indicates that this knob or hollow too has been smitten with Hoosier mania...
...it decreed that Lithuanian men no longer had to serve in the Red Army...
...would enter into formal diplomatic relations...
...Gorbachev than with Mr...
...Most philosophers who do their philosophizing somewhere between, say, Dresden and Berkeley would sooner dissolve into a puddle on the spot than be caught talking like that...
...Motieka observed that he'd made the remark eight times...
...but the great democracies were guilty of far worse, and not for the first time...
...For years the Catholic faith was preserved in loving secrecy...
...The slogan on the poster did not just describe, and fulsomely enough, what Gorbachev had done...
...He called on Lithuania to show to the world a truly Christian nation, refusing a role in the endless bloodletting that the life of nations has always been...
...The sermon he preached to a congregation that packed the church from the communion rail to the front door, he based on the First Epistle of Peter 3:14: "But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled...
...There was a highly principled disagreement between Victor Petkus, the head of the Lithuanian Freedom League, which includes the Christian Democratic Union, and the Sajudis leadership...
...The preconditions Brazauskas spoke of were those that Moscow had imposed...
...Twenty thousand attended a meeting at which former political prisoners and exiles spoke...
...Their alarm is less intellectual than it is spiritual: "This may not seem serious to you," Juozaitis said, but the Roman Catholic Church will be Lithuania's fortress against the Western invasion, as it has been against the Eastern...
...They have only the present moment...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 turned out to see it and to show his children...
...The United States did not recognize the authority of the Soviet regime, which is to say, the authority of the Red Army...
...Perhaps he is the sort of man the very goons cannot bring themselves to throw a punch at, even in the throes of conscienceless state-sponsored violence...
...By and by a demonic figure with a boathook comes and drags him off to a phantasmagoric flophouse gulag: there he undergoes a harrowing test of his extravagant joyous faith in God, and little by little discovers the way out...
...The Soviet Union shut off the flow of all materials that Lithuania might conceivably sell for dollars...
...The centerpiece of the celebration was the unveiling in Kaunas, a city of some 450,000, and Lithuania's second largest, of a monument to those who've died fighting for Lithuania's freedom...
...Independence must be based on political, economic, and moral preconditions, but as yet I can't say We have achieved these preconditions...
...In Vilnius that night, on the balcony outside the Sajudis office, a young man who worked there was impersonating a revolutionary desperado and inciting the dispersing crowd to riot—much too quietly for anyone in the street to hear, but loudly enough to amuse the girl he was trying to impress: "My friends and countrymen...
...Nevertheless, he did have his Lithuanian supporters who could not imagine life without him...
...the important thing is that nobody dispute him, for the lack of disagreement permits him to behave as though it were true...
...He saw he would not be able to count on them...
...Motieka's aggressiveness has made him enemies in Sajudis, or determined opponents anyhow...
...So long as the Red Army remained in Lithuania, Petkus asserted, there was no reason to expect that parliamentary activity was going to win the nation its freedom...
...and it is through the previous fifty years: in de- especially fortunate to have precisely such enemies in Washington these days...
...But there's a but...
...In response, Landsbergis intoned, "The ghost of Stalinism is walking in the Kremlin, and the shadow of it lies far to the west...
...The overwhelming Sajudis victory in the February and March elections—it gained over 90 of the 141 seats in the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet—edged the independence movement toward escape velocity, and the announcement from Moscow that Gorbachev was about to arrange for his investiture with extraordinary presidential powers —the provision for direct presidential rule of especially troublesome republics sounded disturbingly pointed—did the trick...
...Inspired by Sajudis's daring, the Lithuanian people have seized upon the opportunity that Gorbachev's reforms have given them, not in order to enjoy the blessings that life in a reconstituted Soviet Union will bring, but rather to bolt the union they never wanted any part of...
...it was to last thirty-two days—and for much of the time Cidzikas was to lie cruciform on the floor, praying or meditating—until the party bosses agreed to let some of their captives go...
...seminaries closed...
...Juozaitis himself has written, "Then our ideal [of a just society], the star that shows our way, can be sought only in a social order ruled by law: that is, [in] the victory of liberal ideology and democracy...
...Whether the nation can retain its distinctive culture once it has been reunited with Europe depends on how well Lithuanian souls are equipped to resist an unexampled wealth of pleasure...
...doctors', dom as a man must do who has spent engineers', computer programmers', most of his life in jail, and who knows farmers', workers', and choir-masters' he is going to spend the rest there as unions or professional societies...
...Long-faced, with a prosecutorial gravity about him, he nevertheless shows in his face and carriage and rapid eloquence a relish for the vivid glamour of politics at its most thrilling upper reaches: moral seriousness without compromise combines in him with obvious pleasure at doing work that is the focus of his countrymen's passion...
...By the magic of diplomacy, when you looked the first time, the Red Army wasn't there and Lithuania was, and then when you looked again, the Red Army was there all right and suddenly Lithuania wasn't...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 21 fer with him think of him as a hothead...
...Motieka retorted that it was the LCP that was likely to turn it into a circus...
...On November 1, Lithuanians celebrated All Souls' Day for the first time since the Second World War...
...A week after that, a Sajudis meeting in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, drew 30,000 people...
...Purges cleaned out the army, police, and state bureaucracy in a hurry...
...On July 11 and 12, some 2,000 leaders of the "anti-state parties' under the circumstances, a category that a party was unlikely not to find itself in—were arrested...
...No, dialogue," read a campaign poster of the Lithuanian Communist party that I saw in Vilnius last February...
...Now the Lithuanians are roused all he Red Army goes unmentioned in right, but they are determined rather I the Sajudis directory...
...He was celebrated for his repeated attacks on Brazauskas, who relentlessly warned that Lithuania not get ahead of itself: "We want to get out of this accursed union, and [the LCP] wants to keep us in...
...A woman from Vilnius who reads and admires Juozaitis's weekly paper, The Athens of the North, stopped short of doomsaying but was apprehensive nonetheless: "We have resisted the East for a long time...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
