Memories of Lithuania’s Bloody Sunday are a reminder of Russia’s long game

“Lithuanian brothers. This is the National Salvation Committee,” said the sickly sweet voice over the loudspeaker. “All power in the republic is now in our hands. It is the power of workers, peasants and soldiers. All resistance is meaningless.”

It was January 13, 1991, and I had just watched as Soviet tanks and soldiers mowed down civilians at the Vilnius television tower. Fourteen died on that day, which is now known as Lithuania’s Bloody Sunday.

It was the culmination of months of confrontation with Moscow, after the Lithuanians declared independence from the Soviet Union. I had flown to Vilnius from Moscow to report for the FT as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet leadership issued a string of ultimatums for Lithuania to back down. The crowd had gathered around the TV tower after Soviet troops seized control of other mass media in the capital. They remembered what half a century of Soviet occupation had been like — and they did not want to go back.

Ever since, Lithuania has celebrated the anniversary as the Day of the Defenders of Freedom. But that morning, as I rushed to parliament, the next expected target of a Soviet onslaught, it looked like the end of the Baltic republic’s struggle to regain the independence that had been snuffed out by Josef Stalin in 1940. With me were a dozen other foreign journalists including my husband, Ralph, then reporting for Reuters.

Knocking on a door in an apartment block overlooking the parliament, Ralph and I were taken in by Ramune and Arvijdas, a couple with a cat and a cello who saw it as their patriotic duty to help. We stayed with them for 10 days expecting the worst. Yet no attack came — and, by the year’s end, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed.

Today, as Vladimir Putin prosecutes a ruthless war to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, the Kremlin’s preposterous lies and total control of the media bring back memories of that time — as does western admiration for the heroism of a smaller nation defending…