Interviews with Vytautas Landsbergis
Lithuania
Gorbachev
“Gorbachev failed.”
Transcript
Sometimes Gorbachev is seen and evaluated as a single person who wanted to make or did not succeed to make great things. We are in the Soviet system. We understood very well that Gorbachev is selected for the role by, maybe, elder guys of Communist leadership as looking more young, more fresh, with some ideas of more cooperative stance towards the West. [Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 – ) served as the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 – 1991 and as President of the Soviet Union from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991.]
And this way, maybe meaning to confuse the West to get assistance to the failing Soviet Union. It was a complicated game. And in this, Gorbachev very probably felt himself also an ambitious leader. Be placed in the West– he wanted to be placed. And so some reforms were promoted by him with the idea that they can be limited and stopped in a framework, which means the Soviet Union [is] saved, not allowed to [go] bankrupt totally. He failed. Because the forces liberated from previous system of total control, were not possible to put back.
As for Lithuanian Sajudis, as I´ve said, yes, we are for perestroika but for the perestroika to the end, which is the free will of nations inside of Soviet Union and how they wish to live. [Sajudis, meaning “movement” in Lithuanian, was a civil society organization formed in 1988 to advocate the restoration of the country’s independence from the USSR. Perestroika, a Russian word meaning “restructuring” refers to the efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the USSR’s political and economic systems.]
About Vytautas Landsbergis
Vytautas Landsbergis was born in Lithuania in 1932 to a family of noted intellectuals. During the Second World War, Lithuania was occupied by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Nazi Germany, and once again by the USSR, which abolished Lithuania’s independence and forcibly annexed it. Landsbergis studied music and pursued a career as an educator, eventually becoming a professor of music history at the Lithuanian Academy of Music. He has written ten books on music and art history, five political books, and a book of poetry.
In 1988, Landsbergis joined other artists and intellectuals in forming the Sajudis movement, which developed to support the restoration of Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union. He was elected as chairman of the movement. Under his leadership, Sajudis quickly won broad popular support from the Lithuanian population.
In February 1989, Sajudis declared the Soviet occupation illegal and formally proclaimed its goal of restoring independence. Landsbergis was elected as a deputy to the new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in March 1989. Sajudis won 36 of the 42 seats at stake and used their mandates to lobby for Lithuanian independence.
On August 23, 1989, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet treaty that led to the abolition of the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and their forcible incorporation into the USSR, Landbergis and the leaders of Sajudis joined with their counterpart organizations, the Rahvarinne Popular Front of Estonia and the Popular Front of Latvia, in organizing the Baltic Way demonstration. Over one million people joined hands to form a 600 kilometer long human chain across the three countries. The nonviolent protest drew worldwide attention to the Baltic nations’ quest for freedom and independence.
In the first free Lithuanian elections held in February 1990, Landsbergis was elected to the legislature. When the new legislature convened in March, Landsbergis was elected chairman (speaker) and proclaimed the reestablishment of independence. In 1990 and 1991, he served as chairman of the commission that drafted the new Lithuanian constitution. He also chaired the Lithuanian delegation for negotiations with the USSR, achieving a withdrawal of Soviet military forces from Lithuania and securing widespread international recognition of the restored Lithuanian republic. In 1993, he cofounded the Lithuanian Conservative Party – Homeland Union and was elected party chairman.
From 1992 to 1996, he served as the leader of the opposition in the Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament. After his party won the 1996 elections, he served again as Chairman of the Seimas until 2000. He was an unsuccessful candidate for President in the 1997 elections.
In 2004, he was elected to the European Parliament as Lithuania joined the European Union. He was reelected in 2009.
Landsbergis has received numerous international honors for his artistic and political activities. In 2013, he received the Democracy Service Award from the National Endowment for Democracy’s for his efforts to build a stable democracy in Lithuania and to assist democratic development abroad.