Soviet Union: Agents of Intimidation

Protected by a sandbag bunker, Anatoli Seryak peers down the barrel of his rifle, scanning passing cars in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius for drive-by snipers. He is one of two men on forward sentry duty for OMON, a paramilitary unit of the Soviet Interior Ministry. Nearby, an armored personnel carrier stands guard in front of the unit's fortified headquarters. Two more sentries pace the roof. "If they try anything, there won't be a problem," says Seryak, 33, his trademark black beret tilted high on his forehead. "We're always ready to fight."

The OMON base was the Lithuanian police academy until soldiers loyal to Moscow took it by force in January. Now the building looks like a command post in a war zone, and those who inhabit it view themselves as besieged defenders of the Soviet empire. In its unofficial role as armed protector of the republic's non-Lithuanian minorities, many of whom fear Baltic independence, the OMON unit has become a kind of partisan brigade determined to prevent Lithuania's secession at all costs. "We are drawn together by our attitude to the future of Lithuania and the Soviet Union," says Major Boleslav Makutinovich, commander of the unit. "When others talk to us of independence, we say people are only independent in the graveyard."

To a majority of Lithuanians, though, Seryak and his colleagues are not hero-protectors but agents of repression. One newspaper has dubbed them "angels of death in black berets." Ever since Soviet army paratroopers stormed the television tower in Vilnius in January, killing 15 unarmed civilian demonstrators, OMON has been waging a campaign of intimidation against the democratically elected leadership of the republic. The same is true in neighboring Latvia, where Black Berets raided the republic's interior ministry in Riga, leaving five people dead. In their zeal to enforce the Soviet constitution and the presidential decrees of Mikhail Gorbachev, OMON forces have subsequently carried out a series of surprise attacks, seizing buildings, ransacking customs posts and, on several occasions, shooting at people who got in their way.

The first OMON (standing for Special Assignment Militia Detachment) unit was created in 1987 to fight the rise in organized crime across the country. The following year, it took on the task of policing large demonstrations, ostensibly to provide riot control. Today there are 35 OMON units in the U.S.S.R., representing a total force of about 10,000 men, all of them answering to local authorities. The exceptions are the units in Lithuania and Latvia, which are supposedly commanded directly by Moscow as well as by the Soviet Interior Ministry forces stationed in the Baltics.