Lithuania

Stepping Westward

Thomas Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134499342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Lithuania restored her independence, after half a century of Soviet occupation, in the immediate aftermath of the failed Moscow coup in August 1991. As the multi-national Soviet state disintegrated, Lithuania evolved, without war or violence, from a communist state and a command economy to a liberal democracy, a free market, and a society guaranteeing human and minority rights. Lithuania therefore offers a notable example of peaceful transition, all the more impressive in the light of the bloody conflict elsewhere in the former Soviet Union of Yugoslavia, where the aspirations to independence of the constituent republics were either violently resisted or dissolved into inter-ethnic violence. Equally remarkable has been Lithuania's determination to 'return to Europe' after half a century of separation, even at the price of submerging its recently restored sovereign rights in the supranational European Union. The cost of membership in western economic and security organizations are judged to be worth paying to prevent Lithuania's being drawn once again into a putative Russian sphere of influence. On the threshold of a new millennium therefore, Lithuania has made a pragmatic accommodation to the demands of becoming a modern European state, whilst vigorously resisting the dilution of her rich cultural and historical traditions. These twin themes of accommodation and resistance are Lithuania's historical legacy to the current generations of Lithuanians as they integrate into European institutions and continue the modernization process.

Section II

INDEPENDENCE AND THE POLITICS OF TRANSITION, 1985–1999

Chapter 3

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF INDEPENDENCE, 1985-1991

Few people in the 1960s and ′70s were bold enough to forecast the demise of the Soviet Union. Moscow, it was generally believed, still posed a formidable security threat and a major ideological challenge to the West. There were no indications that the Kremlin was about to loosen its hold on power, either in the Soviet Union or in East Central Europe, even though there was some evidence of systemic weakness and long-term relative decline. The emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) raised hopes in some quarters that the decline could be reversed. Indeed Gorbachev showed that a new leader could make a significant difference, but not in ways that could have been predicted. In fact, the reform process initiated by Gorbachev developed its own anti-system dynamic and defied the best attempts of the Kremlin to re-assert its control.

The Soviet Union had not one but several Achilles’ heels, the economy, the environment, and nationalities policy being among the most conspicuous. Arguably, the decades-long policy of Sovietization was the Soviet Union’s greatest failure. As soon as Gorbachev loosened the controls the various Soviet nationalities began to reassert themselves amid calls for self-determination and the restoration of sovereignty. Although there was undoubtedly a connection between Gorbachev’s assumption of power and the increased visibility of national movements, it would, nevertheless, be a mistake to over-emphasise the discontinuity of the mid-1980s. After all, a formidable dissenting movement had existed in the Lithuanian republic for two decades. What the world saw was a small group of active dissenters who were prepared to sacrifice themselves for their varied causes. For them imprisonment, consignment to psychiatric hospitals and loss of career were to be expected. What it did not generally see was that the active dissenters were the tip of the iceberg, enjoying the covert, and occasionally the open, support of large sections of the population. Gorbachev did not bring the dissenters and the reformers into life. But unintentionally he gave them the opportunity through glasnost, to form mass movements and to express their views openly before the world’s media. 1985 did not, therefore, represent a clean break with the past. Soviet rule had never been regarded as legitimate; aspects of it such as the denial of religious rights, the restriction of human freedoms, and the rejection of national self-determination had been increasingly challenged by the dissident movement. However, the population had been divided over tactics between the very small minority who wished to challenge the regime overtly, and the pragmatic majority who wanted to work within the permissible limits to achieve change, or to resist unwelcome Soviet-inspired policies, or to conserve what they could of the Lithuanian landscape, natural resources, and architectural heritage. Even the Lithuanian Communist Party leadership used what influence or obstructive capacity it had to oppose some of the most damaging Muscovite policies. After Gorbachev, this division between the dissenters and the pragmatists became increasingly artificial as the limits on the permissible widened significantly.

SPONTANEOUS PROTESTS AND ORGANIZED DISSENT

The defeat of the resistance movement in the early 1950s enforced a degree of quiescence, if not acceptance, on the Lithuanian population. We cannot agree, however, with one historian’s claim that there was ‘total outward compliance’ since for three decades after 1955 there were spontaneous mass protests in Lithuania against Soviet rule.¹ Sometimes these took the form of demonstrations of solidarity against Soviet oppression elsewhere, notably in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968 respectively. Occasionally sporting contests between Lithuanian teams and teams from other parts of the Soviet Union produced anti-Soviet demonstrations. Soviet attempts to celebrate anniversaries, notably the twentieth anniversary of Soviet rule in Lithuania in 1960, met with hostile demonstrations. When Romas Kalanta, a 19-year-old student, set fire to himself in 1972 as a protest against Soviet rule, there were violent and prolonged protests by university students and high school pupils. Sometimes demonstrations were accompanied by the singing of independent Lithuania’s national anthem, the waving of the national flag, or the placing of flowers on national memorials. These episodes, to be sure, were relatively infrequent, and could be interpreted by the outside world as isolated events of no long-term significance.²

These outbreaks of open dissent were paralleled in the 1960s by an underground dissenting movement. This expressed itself in civil disobedience, the production of samizdat, and the use of mass petitioning. The movement’s most important objectives were to protect the rights of religious believers, to advocate the principle of national self-determination, and to advance the cause of human rights. Protection of Lithuanian culture and the physical environment were also important aspects of the movement.³

A major impetus to the dissenting movement was the government’s attack on the activities and self-government of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuania, and the threat posed to its long-term survival by government restrictions. Archbishop Steponavičius had been exiled in 1961 for his refusal to implement government demands that priests be prevented from teaching religion to children in small groups, and that the state take over the appointment of priests. The government also proposed to make a drastic reduction in the number of priests in training so that there would be insufficient newcomers to replace those dying or retiring. These restrictions became law in 1966. Resistance initially took the form of petitions, the most notable being one to Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1971, which was signed by 17,000 people against the denial of religious freedom and freedom of conscience. The signatories claimed that this denial violated both the Soviet constitution and international conventions to which the Soviet government was a party.⁴

Although these petitions had a useful publicity and morale-building effect, they were unsuccessful in changing Soviet policy. Dissidents began to look for more effective means of advancing their interests. They chose the model of samizdat borrowed from the Russian human rights movement. The Chronicle of Current Events, which started circulating in Moscow in 1968, was the obvious model for the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania which began in 1972. The association between Lithuanian and Russian dissidents dated from the 1960s when Sakharov, Ginzburg, Kovalev and other Russian dissidents campaigned for the release of Baltic political prisoners. The Chronicle of Current Events first published news of dissent in Lithuania in 1970. Later, Russian dissidents in Moscow were able to make available to western correspondents copies of Lithuanian samizdat.⁵ The objective of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania was at first simply to record abuses and violations of religious rights but it soon widened its scope to report on human rights abuses in general. It restricted this role after 1976 when the Lithuanian Helsinki Committee was formed and several other samizdat were in circulation.⁶

The growth of the religious rights movement was enhanced by the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland as Pope John Paul II in 1978. This inspired Lithuanian as well as Polish Catholics. The new Pope explicitly supported Roman Catholics in the Soviet Union, convincing them that their interests would not be subsumed in a Vatican policy of ostpolitik. Perhaps inspired by this an organization called the Catholic Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights was formed in Lithuania in 1978 to document breaches of religious rights, such as dismissal from employment for attending religious services or prohibition on entry to university for religious students.⁷

Although dissent first took organized form in the religious rights movement it quickly became more diversified when a separate movement for the defence of national and human rights, composed of secular and religious activists, emerged in the 1970s. It is not always easy to distinguish between religious and national rights. The Roman Catholic Church in the nineteenth century was an important defender of national rights against Russianization. It was axiomatic for most Lithuanians that destruction of the Church’s influence was a prerequisite for denationalizing the state. The Catholic religion was widely believed to be an indispensable element of the Lithuanian national identity and the Catholic Church the only remaining institution capable of defending Lithuanian culture and traditions. Hence the unremitting government campaign against the Church was a vital element in Sovietization. Nonetheless, a separate movement for the defence of human and national rights emerged in the mid-1970s, composed of secular as well as religious activists. After its formation the Chronicle began to focus exclusively on the defence of religion. The Chronicle was joined by around a dozen other samizdat publications having both secular and religious orientations. At the heart of the new movement was the Lithuanian Helsinki Group formed in 1976, one of a number established in the Soviet Union. The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) held in Helsinki in 1975, in effect offered the Soviet Union international de facto recognition of its territorial gains in the Second World War in return for the observation of human rights and the rights of peoples to self-determination.⁸ The Lithuanian Helsinki Committee was established by a group of individuals to monitor the Soviet government’s adherence to its undertakings. It maintained links with similar committees in other parts of the Soviet Union and issued public statements on alleged human rights violations. It linked the struggle for national rights to the Helsinki process, calling the Soviet Union to account for failing to observe the internationally accepted standards to which it had solemnly subscribed.⁹ The ecumenical character of the Lithuanian group is shown by its founder members which included two in the Catholic tradition, the Reverend Karolis Geruckas and Viktoras Petkus, two secular figures, Tomas Venclova and Ona Lukauskaitė-Poškienė, both poets and leftist intellectuals, and Eitan Finkelstein, a Jewish scientist and a leader of the Jewish emigration movement.¹⁰

The formation of the Helsinki Committee was paralleled by the flowering of the samizdat movement. Two took the titles of dissident journals published during the Lithuania renaissance, Aušra (1975) and Varpas (1977). Other notable publications were Perspektyvos, Dievas ir Tėvynė (God and Fatherland), and Laisves Šauklys (The Upholder of Freedom). Unlike the Chronicle, a number of them were forced to stop publication and their editors arrested and sentenced. Yet there were more dissident publications and demonstrations in Lithuania in relation to population than in any other Soviet republic. There was also much unofficial publishing of books and periodicals for religious needs, including thousands of copies of prayer books.¹¹

By the late 1970s the dissident movement in Lithuania was growing significantly and the Kremlin was beginning to see it as a danger which had to be snuffed out. Protests against the Afghan war, messages of solidarity to Lech Wałęsa, whose activities in the Polish opposition were closely followed in Lithuania, many petitions and protests seeking religious rights, culminating in a well-supported petition in 1979 demanding the observance of rights to education in the Lithuanian language, all represented a challenge to the Kremlin which could not be ignored. The last straw was a statement published in 1979 signed by representatives of all three Baltic states and supported by Russian dissidents including Sakharov, demanding that the Soviet and both German governments publish the full text of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on its 40th anniversary, and requesting that the signatories to the Atlantic Charter condemn the Pact and its outcome. What infuriated the Kremlin was the accompanying demand that the Pact be nullified and Soviet troops withdrawn from the Baltic republics. As Shtromas has convincingly argued, this marked a ‘new departure’ in dissident politics since it went beyond calls for human and religious rights to demands for the restoration of Baltic independence. The independence movements from 1988 to 1991, Shtromas suggests, sprang from this significant 1979 petition. The petition was reinforced by a call in samizdat on Christmas Day 1983 that a European Parliament resolution demanding decolonization in the Baltic states be placed on the agenda of the CSCE. In fact, the challenge of dissent over Afghanistan and human and national rights was now so formidable that a full-scale crackdown was imposed by the Kremlin, even though this meant a damaging blow to the Helsinki process.¹²

The number of demonstrations and samizdat publications, coupled with the severity of the Soviet repression, suggests that the dissident movement in Lithuania was not confined to a small minority of intellectuals but embraced blue collar and farm workers as well. The key to achieving working-class participation was religion, and it was the Catholic rights movement which above all distinguished Lithuanian dissent from other dissident groups in the Soviet Union.

The environmental movement also mobilized support for dissent. Its campaign against water and atmospheric pollution broadened to include defence of the architecture, historical monuments and landscape of Lithuania. A decision in 1967 to replace thousands of farmsteads with new rural settlements generated intense discussion about the impact of such radical change on the identity and traditions of the Lithuanian people, particularly since the purest forms of Lithuanian architecture were believed to be found in rural areas. Since environmentalism could often be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Postcommunist States and Nations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Chronology
• Preface
• Introduction
• Map of Lithuania
• Section I: Revival and Repression, 1914–1985
• Section II: Independence and the Politics of Transition, 1985–1999
• Bibliography
• Index