Studies in Intelligence. Volume 50, Number 2, 2006
Abstract
In August 1991, the Soviet Union still regarded Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Latvia, as members of the Soviet Union. All three had progressed much further toward a break with the Soviets and real independence than other Soviet republics since Gorbachev's liberal policies of the mid-1980s had encouraged nationalists to begin breaking with Moscow. In Lithuania, a new political force Sajudis (the Movement) emerged in June 1988 ostensibly to support the Soviet leader's reforms, but it also promoted a Lithuanian nationalist agenda. Sajudis demanded that the Soviet Union officially acknowledge the excesses of the Stalinist era, halt construction of a nuclear reactor in Lithuania, and disclose the secret protocols of the Soviet-Nazi Non-aggression Pact of 1939 that had granted the Soviets control of the Baltic states. Encouraged by the successes in neighboring Poland of the Solidarity movement in 1988, Lithuanian nationalists began to drive events with lightening speed. In October 1988 Sajudis elected Vytautas Landsbergis, a dynamic professor of musicology, its chairman. In March 1989 Sajudis representatives won seats in the Congress of People?s Deputies, the Soviet Union's highest legislative body, and began advocating Lithuanian national interests in the Kremlin. In May the Lithuanians proclaimed their sovereignty and declared their country's incorporation into the Soviet Union illegal. State, and even communist, organizations declared their separation from Moscow and began to function independently. On 23 August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Soviet-Nazi Non-aggression Pact, about 2 million people from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia stood holding hands along a highway from Vilnius to Tallinn to form a human chain stretching over 350 miles. In December the Lithuanian Communist Party seceded from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1990, Landsbergis was elected Chairman of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA497904
Entities
People
- Aris Pappas
- Dennis L. Noble
- Edmund H. Nowinski
- Gregory A Elder
- Michael J. Sulick
- Michael S. Goodman
- Rebecca Donegan
- Richard Kerr
- Robert J. Kohler
- Thomas Wolfe
Organizations
- Central Intelligence Agency