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EUROPE | FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 5 |
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Normalcy is the Best Revenge The Soviet pall lifts revealing a city of elegance and punctilious politeness By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE
There's no doubt that the country is trying to erase from its memory 50 years of Soviet rule. Visitors can tour the underground cells in the dreaded former KGB headquarters where political prisoners awaited interrogation or execution. Few bother, though, said a guide who had himself spent 17 years in prison camps and exile for armed resistance to the Soviet regime. Similarly, a small exhibition recounting Moscow's crackdown of January 1991 is haphazardly assembled and ill-maintained. But if pushed, Vilnius' citizens will recall, some with a fleeting and uncharacteristic flash of emotion, January 1991. Led by the nationalist movement Sajudis, Lithuania had declared its independence a few months earlier, but was in fact still completely at Moscow's mercy. Alarmed by an unexplained Soviet troop buildup in the capital, Lithuanians took to the streets at night, camping around buildings that might be attacked. In the early hours of Jan. 13 Soviet tanks suddenly struck at the main TV tower. Just before the armored column arrived, the demonstrators had been happily dancing to an improvised disco. In the next hour or so 13 died. In response, thousands flooded the streets to form a human shield around the parliament, publicly destroying their Soviet identity papers and offering foreign journalists shelter in their homes in defiance of Soviet laws. "We all thought independence was over," recalled a young woman, a computer programmer who spent two nights in the streets after the attack. "My parents told me to come with them so I would remember what it was like to be free." Now she has difficulty remembering the Russian language. Though we did not realize it at the time, the attack was one of the last spasms of the dying regime. The Soviet army barracks from where the crackdown was launched has become a commercial center--car dealerships and a crematorium among other enterprises. Some of the KGB officers who tracked Sajudis now live in retirement in Vilnius. Sajudis itself has splintered, and when its former leader, Vytautas Landsbergis, ran for President late last year, he was eliminated in the first round. In an ironic way the future seems to be represented by a 71-year-old retired American civil servant. By the thinnest of margins (just over half of a percent) Lithuanians last month elected Valdas Adamkus, late of Chicago, the Republican Party and the Environmental Protection Agency to be their new president. As he waits for his inauguration next month, Adamkus receives visitors in a modest apartment a few blocks from the presidential palace, solemnly taking his guests' coats and answering with exquisite patience the same questions over and over again--how he fought the advancing Soviet forces in 1944, then made his way to the U.S. via Germany, whether he has enough experience to be President, his hopes for European Union and NATO membership early in the next century. His stilted English and marked accent leave the impression of someone who did not try overly to assimilate during his 50 years in America. He is hardly a charismatic figure--but Lithuanian charisma may be an oxymoron anyway. During the election his adversaries derided the idea of a man who had grown up and grown old in a foreign land running for the presidency of their country. But his supporters see his long absence as his greatest advantage, another step in the sloughing off of two generations of occupation. "He doesn't have to explain his past and he does not have friends and relatives who left the Communist Party and became bankers," says the guide at the KGB museum. "We know what the Soviet Union was like. He doesn't have to: it's not important any more."
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or a journalist these days Lithuania's capital Vilnius is
dull--no crises, horrors or disasters to grab the attention of a
curious reader or jaded editor. But it was not always thus, and
normalcy now is something of a miracle. Just seven years ago
Vilnius was a place of confrontation and death, the city where
Soviet tanks tried to roll the clocks back. Now, you have to
pinch yourself to remember what those days were like. The pall
of Soviet drabness that once hung over Vilnius, covering it with
a uniform grayness, has lifted to reveal an ancient city that is
being restored with a restrained elegance much more Scandinavian
than Russian--pastel colors instead of the dripping gilt so
beloved of Czars, Soviet leaders or newly rich Russian
businessmen. Its people behave with the punctilious politeness
of another era--pre-World War II, perhaps--even when
unexpectedly addressed in Russian. Small, comfortable hotels
have supplanted the Intourist monsters that used to be the
state-ordained stopping places for visitors.