Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

This was a disaster. If anyone found out that the Alpha Group had taken part in the storming of the television center, the official cover story would be blown apart. It would no longer be possible for Kremlin leaders to deny knowledge of the events in Lithuania. There would be a chain of evidence linking the National Salvation Committee to Kryuchkov and possibly to Gorbachev.

All night the generals in charge of the operation had been broadcasting messages to one another, full of strange talk about “big boxes,” “cucumbers,” and “tomatoes.” Decoded, these were cryptic references to tanks, bullets, and explosives. After Shatskikh’s death, a note of panic crept into the radio traffic.

“A two-hundred-kilo load has appeared. Over.”

“What do you mean, a two-hundred? Over.”

“The people who came with you in helmets, they say they have a two-hundred. Do you understand me? Over.”

The conversation continued for some minutes. “The people in helmets” was code for the Alpha Group. “A two-hundred-kilo load” was Afghan veterans’ slang for a coffin with a corpse in it.

“This is Granite-Eighty-two. Listen to me, and tell this to everybody else. About those striped ones in helmets, the ones who worked up in front. They weren’t there. Okay? You don’t know anything about them. Over.”

“Understood. Over.” 24

The KGB did its best to disown Shatskikh and cover up its role in the attempted coup in Lithuania. Stories in the Soviet press described the dead officer as a “paratrooper.” When the “two-hundred-kilo load” was transported back to Moscow, there was no KGB representative at the airport to take delivery. Kryuchkov and other KGB leaders failed to show up for the funeral. This know-nothing stance shocked other members of the Alpha Group. 25They had risked their lives for leaders who were unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and insisted on hiding their true identities behind an anonymous National Salvation Committee. By the time the “organs” finally got around to acknowledging that a KGB officer had been killed in Vilnius, the damage had been done. Cracks of dissent had appeared in the KGB’s avenging “sword.”

A PEDANTIC MUSIC PROFESSOR with a little goatee, Vytautas Landsbergis seemed an unlikely spokesman for a nation attempting to break away from the Soviet empire. His speeches were dry, even dull. He had never been a prominent dissident. Prior to his emergence as the head of the Lithuanian independence movement, Sajudis, he was best known as the world’s leading authority on Mikolajus Čiurlonis, a turn-of-the-century Lithuanian composer and painter. One of his first actions after being elected chairman of the Lithuanian Parliament was to have a piano moved into his office. He held up a parliamentary debate on independence with a long discourse on whether Lithuanians should sing the national anthem in the key of F sharp, as was traditional, prior to the Soviet occupation. Landsbergis was determined to convince his fellow legislators that it was impossible to sing that high. 26

After the assault on the television facilities Landsbergis appealed to the population to defend the parliament building. By dawn a crowd of seven to eight thousand unarmed civilians had gathered around the yellow stone building in the center of Vilnius. Inside, several hundred volunteers were busy transforming the symbol of the country’s independence into a sandbagged bunker. Their weapons consisted of a few dozen hunting rifles, Molotov cocktails, and fire hoses.

As an emergency session got under way in the parliamentary chamber, gas masks were distributed to the deputies. A Catholic priest blessed everyone present. Landsbergis was wearing under his jacket a bulletproof vest that made him look even more rotund and professorial than usual. He had spent the last few hours frantically trying to reach Gorbachev, only to be told that the Soviet leader was “unavailable.” His fury at Gorbachev was almost matched by his anger with President Bush for his inactivity in the face of Soviet aggression. He complained that Bush was completely preoccupied with the crisis in Kuwait, and preparations for Desert Storm.

“The Americans have sold us out,” he fumed, waving his hands. “Bush should ring Gorbachev on the hot line and tell him that, whatever the situation in the gulf, murder in Lithuania is also murder. If Gorbachev doesn’t stop this, nobody will defend Gorbachev from his own murderers. He will be a zero for the West and a zero for his colonels.” 27

What Landsbergis lacked in charisma, he made up for in stubbornness. In the ten months since the Lithuanian declaration of independence, Soviet leaders had done everything in their power to persuade the little nation of 3.7 million people to back down. They had sent columns of tanks and armored cars past the parliament building. They had shut down the gas pipelines. They had banned travel by foreign citizens to and from Lithuania, erecting a kind of cordon sanitaire around the country. The political and economic pressure failed to make much impression on the diminutive music professor. He shut himself up in his spacious presidential office, played his beloved Čiurlonis on the piano, and refused to budge.

Such intransigence infuriated Gorbachev, a compromiser born and bred. The Soviet leader could not understand why his adversary failed to play by the normal rules of the political game and was so obsessed with the outward symbols of Lithuanian independence. But it seemed entirely logical to Landsbergis, who had devoted his life to studying the symbolist movement inspired by Čiurlonis. “Everyday difficulties do not exist for him. He thinks you can do without such things as gasoline,” explained his wife, Gražyna. “He is guided by a single motivating idea—the freedom of Lithuania.” 28

The Lithuanian leader was a product of the inbred world of Catholic intellectuals who managed to preserve the nation’s identity in the face of terrible adversity. His maternal grandfather, Juonas Jablonskis, had been a fierce defender of the Lithuanian language. His paternal grandfather, Gabrielus Landsbergis, had helped lead the struggle against tsarist rule in the late nineteenth century and had been deported to Siberia for his activities. The ideas of such men were passed down to future generations, even as the Baltic states were crushed by the Stalinist and Nazi military machines. The Soviet occupation of Lithuania in June 1940 left a vivid impression on eight-year-old Vytautas. “Look, the Mongols have arrived,” he whispered to his older brother as the Soviet troops, who included a large proportion of Central Asians, took over the country. 29

During the dreary years of Soviet occupation Landsbergis devoted his energy to defending Lithuanian culture from “Sovietization.” His interest in Čiurlonis, who played an important part in the resurgence of Lithuanian culture, was a form of intellectual dissent. “For many years cultural activity meant political activity,” he later recalled. “By protecting our culture, we also protected our national identity. Otherwise we would have been Russified—first in language and later in thinking.” 30

SYMBOLS WERE JUST ABOUT ALL Lithuanians had to hang on to that grim winter, as the Soviet army strengthened its grip on their country. The bloodshed at the television tower united Lithuanians as never before. The more the Kremlin propaganda machine sought to justify the assault, the more they flaunted their long-banned national symbols: the yellow, green, and red flag; the white knight on horseback; the schematic outline of a medieval castle.

The ultimate symbol of Lithuania’s defiance of Moscow and its passionate desire for independence was now the parliament building itself. Ordinary people, who had never shown much interest in politics, mounted an around-the-clock vigil outside the bunkerlike building. Fearing a tank attack, workers erected a twelve-foot-high concrete wall on three sides of the virtually undefended building and dug a fifteen-foot ditch. The wall soon became a display case for anti-Soviet graffiti. “Gorbie, hell is waiting for you,” read one slogan in English, next to a crude drawing of Gorbachev, with horns growing out of his head. “The Red Army is Red Fascism,” proclaimed another.