In Vilnius, 35 years ago, the beginning of the end of the USSR

The assault on the television centre in January 1991 definitively ruined the plans for perestroika, also giving Gorbachev the reputation of a dictator and persecutor of the freedom of peoples, destroying his image as a reformer. After Lithuania, it was the turn of Latvia and Estonia, with Yeltsin himself signing an appeal to the UN on the unacceptability of military interference. Today, this conquest of freedom and civilisation remains a faint memory.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Officially, the Soviet Union was dissolved on 31 December 1991 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who sent Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev home. In reality, the first date marking the dissolution of the Soviet empire is 11 March 1990, when the Lithuanian authorities declared the independence of the main Baltic country, the first of the 15 republics to leave the USSR.

This act of secession was followed by ten months of energy blockade by Moscow, until 10 January 1991, when the regime's special forces stormed the television centre in Vilnius, from where calls for revolt were being broadcast, definitively ruining the plans for perestroika and also giving Gorbachev the reputation of a dictator and persecutor of the freedom of peoples, destroying his image as a reformer.

The day before the forceful action, Gorbachev had addressed the Lithuanians with the claim of “restoring the validity of the USSR constitution”, and then sent the army to block all rail and air links with the Lithuanian capital, including telephone networks.

Thousands of citizens had gathered at the television centre, and as a result of the assault, 15 people died and over 900 were injured. Instead of strengthening Moscow's control, the action only hastened the dissolution of the Union.

As writer and journalist Mikhail Zygar recalls in his recent book “The Dark Side of the Earth”, the night of the Alfa special forces' invasion of Vilnius was very cold, and the demonstrators had been deployed in a very precise manner, in front of the parliament and other strategic locations, with buses running continuously to transport citizens from one part of the city to another.

Participants' testimonies state that “everyone was in a very excited and festive mood, people brought thermos flasks with hot tea and warm food, it was a communal feast of shared freedom that melted the external chill of the air and history in their hearts”.

At midnight, many returned home and turned on the television to see the news of the Soviet assault with grenade explosions and machine-gun fire. Some say they thought of becoming “forest brothers”, like the Lithuanians who continued to hide in the forests after the end of the Second World War to continue the partisan struggle against the USSR.

The live television coverage of the takeover of the city centre was the worst image Gorbachev could have attributed to himself, and the night's events in Vilnius became the main world news the following morning.

Some of the protagonists say they tried to telephone the USSR president during the night, but Gorbachev was asleep, while the scenario of Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 was repeated.

Gorbachev himself later acknowledged that he had been held hostage by the army, which was acting independently in response to the Lithuanian protests of the previous months, which had thrown mud and insults at the soldiers and their families. The result was that after these events, everyone began to curse Gorbachev: the Lithuanians, the army and democrats throughout Russia.

After Lithuania, barricades began to be erected in the streets of Riga, the capital of Latvia, where the army also sent tanks, while in Estonia it was the local military itself that threatened the Kremlin with “closing all access to the republic”.

The leader of Armenia, Ter-Petrosyan, tried to convince Landsbergis, his Lithuanian counterpart, to “dialogue with the military, as we have been trying to do for three years”. The events in the Baltics shocked all citizens of the USSR and, above all, created panic in Moscow, where even the new republican president, Boris Yeltsin, was uncertain about what to do.

The leaders of the Baltic republics, Landsbergis, Burbulis and Rjuitel, decided to meet in Tallinn, where they were joined by Yeltsin himself, and together they signed an appeal to the UN and the peoples of the USSR on the unacceptability of military interference in the internal affairs of sovereign republics, where for the first time Russia became an active subject of international law. Thirty-five years later, this achievement of freedom and civilisation remains only a faint memory.