Despite fiercely insisting on seductive calls like “leave that past, look forward to the future,” “let the past stay for historians,” — it is absolutely impossible to do so, even if you agree to undergo the amputation of your brain. To get entire nations degenerated is even less easy.

Lithuania is usually recalled by those interested in history as a state which has peacefully restored her independence after 50 years of Soviet captivity, and in this way in 1990 she started, as the first one, the dissolution of the huge and terrible Soviet Union, a totalitarian shape of the old Russian empire.

In line with such common understanding, the U.S. Congress praised Lithuania in March 2000, commemorating the tenth anniversary of this event and my country’s contribution to what they called “the leading role in the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.” Nevertheless, even this high and dangerous valuation should be commented upon and, in some aspects, corrected.

In a strictly legal sense and that of international law, Lithuania has never been a constituent “Soviet Republic” and only arbitrarily was given this imposed status after the occupation and forcible incorporation in 1940 into the neighboring U.S.S.R. The following 50 years should be presented more correctly as three subsequent periods of occupation during the Second World War. They were: 1940-1941, the first Soviet occupation; 1941-1944, the German one; and 1945-1990, the second and long-lasting Soviet occupation and brutal Sovietization. The latter period also included ten years of our resistance war (1945-1954). It was fought by the lawful underground government established by all military districts’ commanders unified in the Council of the Movement of Liberation of Lithuania and, certainly, by the real forest army of the occupied Lithuania. No surprise that that huge Soviet force majeure finally prevailed, but the endurance for ten more years of that “War after the War” is really surprising and seams unbelievable.

My third remark about our freedom regained 20 years ago is that Lithuanians, when standing for it once again in the late 80s, fought for democracy as freedom of yours and ours, even on the scale of the entire U.S.S.R., and the very democracy was our way to specific in methods of national liberation, exclusively non-violent but a moral, political and parliamentary one. We followed this way seemingly ignoring the continued presence of the Soviet occupational army and other repressive structures still on our land.

Democracy as a way toward liberation was understood and implemented in both forms: direct democracy and representative one. The first one recalls in our memory huge manifestations of hundreds of thousands of people demanding changes and freedoms and combining hot speeches with warm and conciliatory singing of all those masses together. From there goes the nice name of the “Singing Revolution” which anticipated those other at the later stage called “Rose” and “Orange” revolutions. One of our strongest demands, always correlated with the infamous date of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of Oct. 23, 1939 was to denounce that Stalin-Hitler conspiracy document which decided about the Second World War and our long-lasting Soviet captivity.

Among those manifestations one was extremely significant and rightly given the name “Baltic Way,” which I will discuss it later.

Twenty years ago, our main political and legal goal in our dealings with Moscow was official condemnation and denouncement in December 1989 by the People’s Deputies Congress of the U.S.S.R. of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact alongside with its damned secret protocols. This historical decision underlined once more the illegality of the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Stalinist empire of evil. Thus, it was and remains greatly important for our freedom case then and until now. It was also a rare and exemplary event for the fading U.S.S.R. – to do something honest and undoubtedly right.

The last and well-prepared step for us, the liberation movement Sąjūdis, was to achieve real competitive elections, to win solid majority in the parliament thus acquiring a democratically-given mandate by our sovereign people to proclaim restitution of the Lithuanian state.

We were not hostile to the Soviet Union. Our wish and claim was to normalize relations with our Eastern neighbor, returning back to the lawful situation of 1940, before the Soviet invasion. Therefore, we calmly rejected all allegations about secessionism and separation from the U.S.S.R. It was not we, but the Soviets, who had to leave.

This was a short review about the happenings with Lithuania putting emphasis on the struggle for democracy. Now allow me to dwell on three more peculiar points, mechanisms and events of that great European transformation, in which Lithuania and the other Baltic States duly participated.

Sąjūdis and other movements

The year 1989. I was then in the Lithuanian liberation movement Sąjūdis it had just recently elected to lead its Council. We followed with great concern the events and developments in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and the U.S.S.R., by no means only waiting to see what would happen. Lithuania was full of initiatives to move forward — toward liberty “of yours and ours,” to change the surrounding world with a specific Lithuanian and Baltic contribution.

Sąjūdis already had its own Seimas, elected by the politically active society as an alternative democratic parliament of the Lithuanian people, more representative and legitimate than that appointed by the local communists with Moscow’s approval. The Sąjūdis Seimas convened on Feb. 15, 1989 in Kaunas and adopted a declaration on the liberation of Lithuania from unlawful Soviet captivity, a liberation which had already begun and “would not stop at halfway.”

The declaration, accompanied by manifestations in Vilnius, was not only a political demonstration but a basic manifesto to direct the next steps and goals of Sąjūdis. The first real elections in the U.S.S.R. were approaching, in March. In that election of “people’s deputies” to the Congress in Moscow, Sąjūdis defeated the local Communist Party administration in a tremendous victory, taking 36 seats to their 6 after publicly promising citizens it would fight to regain freedom in the very heart of the Soviet empire.

In May we held a joint assembly of the three Baltic liberation movements in Tallinn, Estonia, elaborating there the principles and goals for the fast approaching common fight in Moscow. As I see it, the importance of the two first Congresses of People’s Deputies in 1989 is today strangely underrated. The tremendous changes in the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Hungary in 1989, not to mention the captive Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, could not have happened without that battle for democracy in Moscow. The Soviet system and leaders were challenged by a fundamental choice: either to make changes that included self-determination for those captives, or to enter a swamp of half-measures and decline. The leadership of the U.S.S.R. was unprepared to meet such great challenges in a bold and candid way. It continued to rely on force, and the empire crumbled down.

Back at the start of 1989, in January, when Sąjūdis was still planning its Seimas session with the resolution on breaking for freedom, we sent an invitation to Mr. Lech Walesa, leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement. In response we received a letter of solidarity from the leader of Solidarity, who also passed on the support of other Polish democratic opposition leaders, namely Jacek Kuron and Janusz Onyszkiewicz. That brought us joy, and encouraged us to believe that a free Lithuania and a free Poland would be able to put former abuses and animosities aside in the name of a common future without communism, together in Europe.

The victory of Solidarity in Poland in June was a good omen for us as we continued working in Moscow in fruitful cooperation with Latvians, Estonians and democrats from Russia. Among the latter, two names are of great historical significance: Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. One focus of our work was a parliamentary investigation of the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi on 9 April. Also among the key efforts of the Balts and Russian democrats in the Congress was a special commission on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. I was a member of that commission, whose official title was of course different. It was chaired by Alexander Yakovlev, then still an ally and aide to Mikhail Gorbachev. We wanted to adopt and announce our commission’s conclusions still in the summer, before the fiftieth anniversary of the pact on Aug. 23. That historical date was a reminder of the dark Stalin-Hitler conspiracy to begin World War II, one which included a sentence for the nations in between the U.S.S.R. and Germany. The day had been used for remarkable political rallies in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius already from 1987, just two months after U.S. President Ronald Reagan, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, called for an end to the Berlin Wall.

In 1989 we were planning, together with the Latvians and Estonians, the greatest and most impressive manifestation yet for the fiftieth anniversary. We also sought an official Soviet condemnation of the full Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocols whose existence Mr. Gorbachev had consistently denied. On Aug. 23 1989, the three Baltic liberation movements organized a magnificent manifestation in the form of a live chain of some 2 million people joining their hands over the 600 km from Vilnius to Tallinn. Known as the “Baltic Way,” it was and remains the world’s greatest-ever political demonstration. Cautious and indifferent Europe could no longer pretend not to notice the will and the actions of the Baltic nations. The manifestation was clearly noticed not only in the West, but also in the Kremlin, which exploded in a dreadful statement of anger. No armed response followed (until Jan. 1991), only a “dialogue” of action that involved a stream of intimidation coming from the Kremlin.

Meanwhile the entire system of closed societies and captive nations under totalitarian communist regimes that had been imposed in Central-Eastern Europe and maintained by the imperial USSR was challenged at the Berlin Wall. People wishing to reach liberty by escaping from the GDR were still shot dead as late as early 1989, and no Sąjūdis-type dualism of governance in self-transformation as in Lithuania, no Solidarity with roundtable-type of common effort for democratic changes as in Poland, could be applied in that artificially created, stagnating, Soviet-obedient part of Germany under the Orwellian name of the German Democratic Republic.

To open the gate, to “tear down this wall,” as Ronald Reagan publicly challenged Gorbachev to do already in 1987, would mean openness to liberty not only for the Germans. The opening came, at first with measures taken by the still communist regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On Aug. 23 1989, the same day the Baltic nations joined hands in Baltic Way, Hungary opened its border with Austria, a border ripe with significance for both the nations, which before the communist era were never divided. This breach of the Iron Curtain gave a long-awaited chance to thousands and thousands in both Hungary and Czechoslovakia, who “voted with their legs”. The puppet leader of the GDR, Erich Honecker, resigned in October. From Nov. 9, when the gate opened, until Dec. 22, when the wall finally disappeared, several million people demonstrated for the freedom they desired at Alexanderplatz in East Berlin and in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate. Only a year later, precisely on Dec. 22 1990, Lech Walesa was democratically elected president of Poland.

In November-December 1989, the Velvet Revolution took place in Czechoslovakia; Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was ousted and executed, and the whole system of occupied and subjugated central-eastern European nations, the great bloody creation of Joseph Stalin, came crumbling down.

And again, in the chain of coinciding events, developments in Moscow were of extreme importance. On Dec. 24 1989, the Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R. voted to adopt the Resolution on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The pact, with its protocols, was denounced as an unlawful breach of the international obligations of the then USSR and was declared null and void from the moment the signatures of Viacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop were put down. The Resolution noticed the violation of Peace Treaties of 1920 between Soviet Russia and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia being broken by pact respectfully. From the unlawful pact followed unlawful actions – the breach of peace and war against neighbors located between the U.S.S.R. and Germany, so, the occupation and incorporation of the Baltic states into the U.S.S.R. Absolutely evident was that the resolution was an additional legal basis for us to be independent again.

The evil empire had stepped into a period of essential transformation toward democracy and freedom of choice for entire nations. It was something that we, the undying idealists of the Lithuania’s Sąjūdis, used to call “perestroika to the end.”

May I notice here this that period of Russia’s democratic transformation was increasingly confronted from inside, blocked and hampered, and in ten years, from 1999, turned backward into a new one-partisan format of authoritarian non-democracy with growing features of neo-Stalinism … to avoid this, democracies should help Russia to make a better choice of its current trend to an over-centralised and hyper-controlled non-democracy.

Both old and new Orwellianisms must be rejected. No textbooks praising Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and great manager Stalin, who “left Russia larger as he had inherited.” Our message to our European partners in the Kremlin should be short and warm: “Dear Colleagues, tear down this wall from your minds, please”.

The main European challenge now comes when the very concept of democracy is targeted.

When usurpers of power anywhere do not allow people to make their free choices, there are no free people yet (if not to call openly “captive”) and the regime is a non-democracy. It does not matter, if the usurpers call their own regime any special title of fake “democracy”: that of “People’s”, “ruled”, “manipulated”, reviewed, Orwellian, Islamist, Socialist or Stalinist, “sovereign democracy,” etc., no true democracy which is freedom of mind and choice and law established by truly elected representatives, can be found there.

This line of distinction, while not even drawn on paper, does define by the features of political culture where is Russia today and, inter alia, Ukraine of tomorrow. Both of them may develop differently, if Ukraine is not absorbed by Russia’s backwards political culture and stays more Western-like. That latter would be good example for Russia as well.

Vytautas Landsbergis was the leader of Sąjūdis and an instrumental figure in Lithuania’s independence movement from the Soviet Union. He currently represents Lithuania in the European Parliament. The text was part of a speech he gave at Bern University.

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