The Lesson of Lithuania

...Lithuania produced a fighting force which hit effectively at the German invaders for three years, then turned to face the Communists for eight more...

...It is the classic story, so long boasted by the Russians themselves, of partisans in the woods fighting barbarian occupiers—but the Nazi brute has become the NKVD brute, the Russian resistance soldier is now the Lithuanian resistance soldier...

...The Atlantic Charter, he says, "was regarded by LFA leaders as an actual blueprint for the postwar world . . . Moreover, the LFA command was firmly convinced that the security of the Western democracies made it imperative for them to bring immediately into play their superior military power against the efforts of the Kremlin . . ." He recounts the bitterness the fighters felt when BBC broadcasts to Lithuania were ended, and when the Voice of America failed to open its own Lithuanian service (until 1952...

...These questions will probably never be answered...

...It is far too direct an eyewitness account of one prolonged episode, its author was too involved to sit back and critically dissect the events of which he was so intimate a part...

...By anyone's standards, this was a resistance movement authentic beyond question...

...Wartime caches of weapons dwindled, NKVD measures became more efficient, partisan cadres could not be replaced fast enough through training, mass deportations depleted the pool of recruitable men and women...

...Did all the different shades of political belief within the LFA really subordinate themselves completely to the common tasks...

...Reviewed by GERALD L. STEIBEL Foreign Affairs Editor, Research Institute of America For those who believe that guerrilla warfare carries a Communist patent, that only Communists have the peculiar talents it requires, and that free people either cannot or should not try to wage it, this little book is highly recommended...

...Ironically, it fulfilled almost every requirement set forth in the manuals written by the Communists themselves for people's warfare against overwhelming material odds: a fighting force closely in phase with the ordinary peasants and workers...

...Moscow had good reason: It did not want world attention drawn to the full-sized rebellion on its hands, nor did it desire to expose its claims that Lithuania was voluntarily in the "camp...

...NKVD men and the Lithuanian puppets were fair game for the resistance, but the regulars were left alone and, by and large, they left the LFA alone...

...Out of its less than three million people...

...Ultimately, the LFA fell back because its resources gave out...

...In short, this is a "shoe-on-the-otherfoot" story, badly needed to complement the partisan legends and irregular warfare manuals, all of which seem to have been written by Communists...

...The tale is amazing...

...Whatever society these people may have wanted, whatever economic and political principles were represented in their ranks, they were driven by the overriding desire simply to be free...

...But they are highly relevant for future resistance movements, should the West ever seriously try to wrest from the Communists the great middle ground of struggle, between the use of weapons of mass physical destruction and the reliance on "ideas" wholly divorced from physical power...

...One act it did not commit: surrender...

...When the final handwriting appeared on the wall, the LFA demobilized as it fought—under its captors' noses, aided by loyal Lithuanians well placed within the Communist administration...

...These can be called naive judgments, except that in one form or another they are probably now a part of the deep-seated attitudes of all the peoples who found themselves cut off behind the Iron Curtain...

...There are, therefore, many questions the reader finds unanswered: Were Lithuanian collaborators really as few as the book seems to say they were...

...These clues to Soviet inhibitions on its own doorstep should invite much more adequate analysis than they have received...

...Their cumulative experience demonstrates that the urge for liberation can be an infinitely more powerful motivation than all the careful and massive indoctrination at the hands of masters...

...In this respect, the Lithuanian freedom fighters did violate a cardinal tenet of irregular warfare as the Communists have defined it, but so did the East Germans, the Poles and the Hungarians whose revolts followed later...

...The LFA strung its Russian tormentors to the point where they had to send in their best "pacifiers"—Mikhail Suslov, Sergei Kruglov and others...

...How democratic a regime would the LFA have given the country even if it had succeeded, as, say, the Algerian rebels succeeded...

...Lithuanian men and women . . . who are totally devoted to the liberation of Lithuania...

...This book is not a definitive manual on anti-Communist guerrilla warfare...

...It also demonstrates, unfortunately, that naked force can more than compensate for ideological ineffectiveness...

...Biased or not, it is one of the few stories of its kind—and it makes good, exciting reading...

...The measure of the Lithuanian Freedom Army's strength was not in the 4,000 Soviet NKVD security troops it killed, but in its organization, cohesion and ability to move lithely through its territory and to strike with precision and discipline...

...The author—a pseudonymic participant —soon paid with his own life for his work, but something of what the memory of the lost fight must still mean to the people of Lithuania comes through in his depiction of the partisans' disillusionment with the West: "The LFA command, in its evaluation of the international situation in 1945, refused even to consider the possibility that the Western Great Powers would fail to oppose Kremlin plans for world domination, and would permit the imposition of Soviet colonial rule on East-Central Europe...

...In their own ingenuous way, they warn by implication that, should the captive peoples ever emerge from behind their wall, the West can expect little respect from them...

...tactics that took full advantage of the hatred of foreign intruders...

...This is the book's claim on our attention: It is a case study in how once, long ago, and for a short time, it was actually done...

...Neither elaborate philosophical structures nor highly trained political officers were needed in all that time, only the one phrase in the LFA Constitution...

...It printed resistance newspapers, enforced a rough kind of police discipline against those whose tongues were loosened dangerously bv alcohol, and even managed to hold back collectivization by discouraging Lithuanians from yielding to Communist pressures...

...skillful use of terrain and cover for the waging of protracted war...

...Interestingly, there was a kind of tacit agreement between the Soviet Army and the LFA...

...The "Amber Coast" of the title is Lithuania, and the guerrillas who fought there were not mobilized by the Communists but against them...

...The intangibles of what we now call "doctrine" play little part in the book, and apparently played just as little part in the 11-year struggle itself...