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This is a historical article (February 4, 1991) about the events that you observe in Reneckis' film “One Night over Lithuania". Read it and be ready to use you knowledge from both the film and this article.

GORBACHEV'S TANKS

Among the fifteen Lithuanians killed by Soviet forces last Sunday in Vilnius was one Rolandas Jankaukas. Two months ago this 22 year-old returned from a tour of duty as a submarine electronics specialist for the Soviet navy. He was shot dead by the Soviet army because he was part of a peaceful crowd defending a television tower in Vilnius, his hometown.

The story of Rolandas Jankaukas says a great deal about the events unfolding in the Baltic states. The machinery of Soviet repression is now having to control itself. It began in Lithuania with Soviet troops enforcing the draft; it continued with the slaughter of Jankaukas and his fellow countrymen; as we write, the end looks bloodier still. It is becoming clearer that, since the Soviet armed forces are disproportionately staffed by the ethnic minorities they are required to repress, this will not be the last time that Soviet servicemen kill Soviet servicemen.

The similarity to 1956 has been widely noted. Soviet tanks and Soviet guns are being used as lethally against Lithuania as they were against Hungary, and their use is defended with essentially identical lies. It says something about the roots of glasnost that, in a twinkling of Gorbachev's eye, it can revert to levels of distortion even Brezhnev might envy. The intervention was planned for at least two months, with great precision. It was initiated, with cynical calculation, while the West was distracted elsewhere. But there is also a critical difference. This time it is an act of desperation, not of confidence; this time it is the gamble of a political elite in profound crisis, and not the cocksure repression of a regime unable to imagine its own demise.

What of Mikhail Gorbachev's role in this? His Western admirers are in acute discomfort, amazed that a man who has just amassed near-dictatorial powers in his revamped presidency should choose to use them, stunned that he should suspend the freedom of the broadcast media and intimidate the press when it suits him, horrified that perestroika should seem now to mean the crushing of human beings with tanks. Yet no one who saw Gorbachev's complete lack of remorse, or witnessed his energetic verbal attack on the Lithuanians two days after the Soviet army assaulted their country, can doubt that he is in control of this strategy.

Why should anyone have ever doubted it? Andrei Sakharov warned of it just before he died. Eduard Shevardnadze resigned because of it in December. Gorbachev has never really admitted the possibility of what Article 72 of Stalin's Soviet Constitution allows: the right to secede from the Soviet Union. He has known for some time that this union could only be held together by force of arms, and his ascent to dictatorial power shows a calculated bid to marshal the forces necessary for the violence.

The crackdown in the Baltics, then, is not—or not simply—some terrible betrayal of perestroika, but the inevitable playing out of Gorbachev's essential purposes. Gorbachev always conceived of his reforms—political liberalization and democratization— not as ends in themselves but as means to an end, the revitalization of the Soviet Union. But for the Soviet Union to be revitalized, it must continue to exist. No doubt Gorbachev once naively believed that Lithuania, Georgia, and the rest would choose to remain in his reformed Soviet Union. But there was never any chance of that. The Soviet Union cannot remain united except by gunfire. It has long been clear—at least to us—that Gorbachev's plan was from the beginning to pursue liberty for the sake of revitalizing the union. Now that liberty threatens union, he has, predictably, chosen union. Enforcing that choice will require not just putting down revolts on the periphery, but repressing the nascent civil society that has begun to flourish in all fifteen republics, including the Russian federation.

Gorbachev's government has brutally repressed secessionist revolts before: in Kazakhstan in 1986, in Georgia and Uzbekistan in 1989, in Azerbaijan and Tadzhikhistan last year. According to the human rights organization Helsinki Watch, more than 200 people were killed in such incidents. Tanks, machine guns, and, in Georgia, chemical agents were among the instruments of coercion.

The difference now is the shamelessness of it, the openness with which it is admitted, which is designed to shock and terrify the Soviet population. It is instructive in this regard that Gorbachev chose first the Lithuanian republic to advertise his violence. Lithuania presents the least ominous threat to the center, since its resistance forces have scrupulously adhered to nonviolence and are largely unarmed. Its population is not as threatening, or as important to Moscow, as those of, say, Georgia or the Ukraine. It is also extremely vulnerable to economic sanctions from the center. Gorbachev, like all those intent on intimidation, has picked what he supposes to be an easy victim. He is clearly intent on an unmistakable victory—bloody, if necessary—to send a signal to the others.

But Lithuania is instructive for the West too. Of all the Soviet republics, its claims to independence, and those of its neighbors Latvia and Estonia, are the most powerful. Lithuania was grabbed by the Soviet Union in the Hitler-Stalin pact. Gorbachev's desire to retain it as part of his empire is all the proof that's needed that, so long as he remains wedded to the structure of the old Soviet Union, he is still, essentially, Stalin's heir.

The United States no longer has any excuse for vacillating on this issue. If we can deploy over half a million troops to defend the sovereignty of Kuwait, we can surely expend a few uncompromising words and deeds in defense of the sovereignty of Lithuania. The argument that we still need Soviet support in the Gulf and so must stay silent does not stand up to scrutiny. The Soviet Union's endorsement of the U.N. resolution supporting the use of force in the Gulf is irreversible. Their military assistance is negligible. We can perform the task in the Gulf—indeed, will have to perform the task—without them.

Why, then, does the Bush administration still equivocate? Perhaps it is not surprising from a president who conceives of foreign policy as a series of personal relationships between himself and other heads of state. As Saddam Hussein is his enemy, Gorbachev, like the butchers of Tiananmen Square, is his friend. President Bush initially seemed to express more sympathy with Gorbachev's plight than with the Lithuanians', describing their struggle for independence merely as part of Moscow's “extraordinarily complex problems.'' For some time the White House has sacrificed American principles and Baltic liberties to the increasingly dubious task of advancing Gorbachev's political career.

But now at least the Bush administration—and others— must clearly see what a number of us have been saying for some time. The moral and material interests of the United States—and those of the people and peoples of the Soviet Union, for that matter—do not lie with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. And the time is long past when his fall could be seen as something Americans should dread. Indeed, it is fast becoming something we should hope for.

There is also clearly a chance that our actions could now make a difference. The fact that the Soviet government wishes to perform its unsavory business while the West is distracted suggests that it fears the possible results of Western attention. Gorbachev, after all, is not Khrushchev, or even Brezhnev: his repression is waged from the top of a teetering edifice, subject to the buffeting of its own internal politics and increasingly propped up by Western diplomatic and economic support.

We should withdraw that support. The United States should cancel the forthcoming summit with Gorbachev, explaining that it will be rescheduled only if he reverses course. We should further threaten to suspend all aid and credit guarantees to the Soviet Union if the Soviet government uses any further armed force in the repression of any of the fifteen republics. And we should open diplomatic relations with all of the republics, including, of course, the Baltic states. This could once, perhaps, have been derided as mere political posturing. As the tanks perch once more on the edge of Vilnius and other Baltic cities, it is a moral imperative. As the editor of the besieged Lithuanian newspaper, Respublika, told The New York Times, “The terrible thing is not that we have a new dictator, but that the whole world loves him."