Down with Big Brother (58 page)

Chudesnov and sixty-four of his colleagues had arrived in Vilnius after nightfall on January 11, on a special flight from Moscow.
²¹
The following day they received their orders. They were instructed to seize control of three facilities: the TV tower, the radio transmission center, and the Vilnius television station. A Soviet army paratroop regiment would provide the necessary support. Chudesnov was put in charge of the subgroup that was to capture the television station.

There were large crowds of people standing around the television station, just as there had been at the TV tower. After catching his first glimpse of these crowds, Chudesnov had a fleeting hope that the operation would be called off at the last moment.
²²
The armored convoy drove past the television station, but then it turned back, and he and his men were ordered into battle. They jumped out of their armored cars and dived into the human barricade, throwing stun grenades. One of the stun grenades hit a twenty-eight
-year-old Lithuanian defender in the chest, killing him on the spot.
²³
As the Alpha Group entered the building, a female announcer was broadcasting an emotional message to millions of Lithuanians.

“We address all those who can hear us,” she said, looking straight at the camera. “It is possible that the army can break us with force and close our mouths, but no one will make us renounce our freedom and independence.”

Seconds later Lithuanian television went off the air.

Chudesnov was running along the corridor of the television center when he heard a voice behind him. It was a young lieutenant, Viktor Shatskikh, a recruit to the Alpha Group. “Yevgeny Nikolayevich, I feel a pain in my back,” he murmured. When Chudesnov examined the wound, he saw that a bullet had penetrated a hinge in the lieutenant’s body armor, ripping open his right lung. He died shortly afterward. It was never established whether he had been shot by a Lithuanian sniper’s bullet, as the Soviet military later claimed, or friendly fire.

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.
²⁵
They 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

S
YMBOLS 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.

A nearby strand of barbed wire served as a collection point for the symbols of Soviet occupation: passports, conscription papers, Communist Party cards. Day and night Lithuanians threw piles of Soviet propaganda booklets on the bonfires in front of the parliament building. Even if their cause was doomed, the defenders of independence had the satisfaction of keeping warm by the embers of the complete works of Lenin and multivolume histories of the Soviet Communist Party. Many people brought their children along with them, so that they could describe Soviet tyranny to
their
children and grandchildren.

Bundled up against the cold, a three-year-old girl named Zhivele Kaslauskas listened to her parents discuss Lithuania’s chances of gaining full independence, before taking her home to bed. “It may take years, but in the end I am sure we will win,” said her father, Alvidas. “This empire cannot last. One day Russians themselves will rise up against it.”
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Inside the legislature the atmosphere was tense and claustrophobic.
Lithuanian democracy was less than a year old, and already it was being forced to defend itself from armed attack. The deputies were scared. “If the military attacks, we’re going to become human torches. Look at all this wood and fabric,” whispered one terrified legislator as rumors spread of an imminent assault.
³²
The spectacle of the freely elected representatives being issued gas masks and hunkering down behind concrete barricades was both shocking and ominous.

Soon such a sight would become commonplace, from Tallinn to Tbilisi, from Moscow to Sarajevo. Big Brother refused to go quietly, without a fight.

MOSCOW
January 14, 1991

T
HE BLOODSHED IN
V
ILNIUS CAUSED
a wave of revulsion and apprehension throughout the Soviet Union. There had been a lot of speculation about “a move to the right” by Gorbachev, but it was difficult to tell exactly what was going on behind the Kremlin walls. Finally, everything seemed clear. The reformer was turning his back on his own reforms. The sick joke about
pere-stroika
(restructuring) giving way to
pere-strelka
(a shoot-out) was in the process of being realized.

The time had come for a final parting of the ways between Gorbachev and the radical intellectuals, who had been his most enthusiastic supporters during the early stages of perestroika. As news of the massacre outside the television tower spread, they poured onto the streets of Moscow and other cities, carrying banners with slogans like “Gorbachev Is the Saddam Hussein of the Baltics!” and “Give Back the Nobel Peace Prize.” Yuri Afanasiev spoke for many Moscow intellectuals when he blamed the killings on a “dictatorship of reactionary circles” made up of the military, the KGB, and the Communist Party. “And at the head of that party dictatorship stands the initiator of perestroika, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,” he added bitterly.
³³
There was an upsurge in resignations from the Communist Party, beginning with the entire staff of
Moscow News
, one of the flagships of glasnost.