Interviews with Vytautas Landsbergis
Lithuania
The Struggle to Preserve Lithuania's Culture
“Culture was a field of disobedience.”
Transcript
The Soviets had their policies and tasks to build up a new culture. A new communist, of course—culture -— a false culture dictated, limited, and degenerated to some level. Servile to communist rulers and praising the system as the best in the world and the future of all mankind. And therefore inside of culture, it was already a field of disobedience, of covert resistance, of criticism. I remember a nice sentence of Mrs. Applebaum. [Anne Applebaum (1964 – ) is an American journalist and author who has written extensively on Central and Eastern Europe. She said, “By politicizing everything, they also made everything into a potential source of dissent.”] Recently when she said that [paraphrasing] — “As much the Soviets went with their totalitarianism. To control everything they made a situation in which everything became a field of resistance.”
If you are disobedient in any of such fields, you are already resisting this total control. So Lithuanian culture suffered much. Great parts of their former culture were forbidden, denied, put out from the teaching, or of common use. So it was a complicated time with great losses in culture. But also concrete fields of confrontation, of no opposition. They appeared how to defend or preserve the Lithuanian language at least and not to be degenerated to the official Russian Soviet language. Therefore the intelligentsia went to have some circles of, not the word ´defense´ was not used — carefulness about Lithuanian language.
When the wave of more liberal youth wished to debate openly under the Gorbachev period, it was a struggle in several clubs and grassroots organizations to defend the historical truth, to defend the monuments of history and architecture. [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.] As they have been unregulated, the people will stand forward to defend them, to protest even unsuccessfully. But the fact of protest was already important.
Not total fear was governing already. And they were various and maybe smaller or greater sources of the consolidated Sajudis movement. [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.] From all those sources could appear in 1988. It was, I could say, the struggle for culture. Traditional in Lithuania´s history from 19th century when language, books, print were forbidden. It was also a struggle for culture. And illegal prints, smuggled from abroad, were distributed over all of Lithuania. The teaching underground, teaching children underground to learn Lithuanian, to read, to write Lithuanian. It was repeated again under Soviet system. Then formally the language was not forbidden but the mind was forbidden.
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.