The tanks moved out at 2 a.m. Sunday. They roared into downtown Vilnius under cover of a citywide blackout. They plowed into a crowd of hundreds of Lithuanian nationalists outside the state radio and television complex; troops fired tear gas and shot their machine guns into the air. “I saw one man practically sheared in half,” said a volunteer who had rushed to help defend the tower in response to a broadcast appeal by President Vytautas Landsbergis. “They are beating people, they are beating women!” said a journalist watching from inside the building. One tank fired a blank cannon round into the crowd to blast a path. After about 20 minutes, commandos broke in through ground-floor windows. Radio Vilnius, which had been broadcasting around the clock, said transmissions were being interrupted “by crude military force” and offered a final message to the outside world: “Nobody will force us to renounce freedom and independence.” Then silence.
At least 13 people were reportedly killed and more than 100 injured. “How could they do this?” sobbed a man as residents took to the streets shouting, “Lithuania, Lithuania.” Helicopters clattered overhead and scattered explosions were heard. Landsbergis and his top aides gathered in the Parliament building. Buses and trucks were positioned to block a tank advance and hundreds of armed supporters vowed to resist any assault. Legislators designated the Foreign minister, traveling in Poland, as head of state in the event the elected government is toppled. But the National Salvation Committee, a clandestine, pro-Kremlin group, claimed to have taken over. “We are your leaders,” members with bullhorns shouted.
The move crushed hopes that a military crackdown launched two days earlier had been mainly an exercise in saber rattling. First to fall was the headquarters of the Lithuanian National Guard. Soviet troops wheeled up in armored vehicles and rushed the building. Young guardsmen doused the invaders with fire hoses but fled when soldiers responded with warning bursts of automatic-rifle fire. Next an armored column moved on the government Press House. But a radio alert brought out thousands of Lithuanians intent on defiance. Air-raid sirens wailed in the capital for the first time since World War II. The Soviets fired gunshots over the nationalists’ heads, then used tear gas. A man was shot in the face after pouring water over a Soviet colonel, and six others were less seriously wounded. Landsbergis phoned Mikhail Gorbachev. But an aide said the Soviet leader was at lunch and would not take the call.
Last week’s crackdown is only the latest display of the Soviet military’s new political muscle. Its leaders are especially determined to keep the country’s independent-minded republics from leaving the Soviet Union. “It is the armed forces that ensure stability and permit the president to carry on his normal activities,” Gorbachev’s chief military adviser, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, told NEWSWEEK (box). The implication: that the generals will help keep Gorbachev in power only so long as he preserves Moscow’s authority.
Lithuania is a test of Gorbachev’s resolve. Last week’s sudden show of force was the biggest since the republic declared independence a year ago and came just a day after Gorbachev demanded “immediate measures” to comply with Soviet laws-or else. Many Lithuanians fear-ed the crackdown was a prelude to full presidential rule, backed by martial law. Neighboring Latvia denounced the move as “military terror.” It likened the deepening repression to Moscow’s 1956 invasion of Hungary. The Soviet military responded by announcing that 2,000 paratroopers were being sent to Latvia.
Even as war loomed in the Persian Gulf, George Bush marshaled his Soviet experts. The crackdown, he told Gorbachev by phone Friday, was “provocative and counterproductive.” But Moscow’s generals clearly were intent on keeping up the pressure. Lithuania’s demands for independence, and its shoddy treatment of the Soviets, have enraged the top brass. The Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda chronicles a daily galaxy of outrages against Soviet servicemen. Local authorities have denied housing permits to officers, forcing them to live in tents. Military men complain their children have been spat upon; convoys have been pelted with stones and, on occasion, gasoline bombs. Last year the republic’s breakaway Parliament decreed that its citizens needn’t serve an “occupation at-my.” Almost immediately, thousands of Lithuanian soldiers went AWOI,; now only one draftee in 10 reports for duty. “When is the government going to protect us, our honor and dignity?” one senior officer reportedly told Gorbachev during. an acrimonious meeting last November.
Military leaders have grown surprisingly harsh in criticizing Gorbachev, and not only for his handling of the Baltics. As the generals see it, (Gorbachev slashed the officer corps and brought in unreliable civilian strategists who pt-each “reasonable sufficiency”-a doctrine of more modest weapons spending that is anathema to the old guard. They accuse him of “losing” Eastern Europe, the buffer zone won so dearly in World War II. And they question his letting a reunified Germany stay in NATO.
Such doubts have emboldened the generals to take matters into their own hands. Under the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty signed in Paris last November, thousands of Soviet weapons in Central Europe were to be destroyed. Instead, the Army moved 8,000 tanks across the Urals to Soviet Asia and attached three motorized infantry divisions to naval forces exempted from the treaty. When Secretary of State James Baker asked Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze about the evasions in December, a well-placed source told NEWSWEEK, Shevardnadze claimed to know nothing about them. Moscow hard-liners applaud the generals’ apparent chicanery."
U.S. officials also worry that recent moves by the Soviet military could jeopardize the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), originally intended to be signed at a February summit in Moscow. NEWSWEEK has learned that Soviet negotiators recently stunned their U.S. counterparts by announcing plans to dig extra silos for SS-18 missiles-the U.S.S.R.’s largest slated to be reduced by half under START. The generals also want to link approval to an American commitment to scrap Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a position that Moscow’s negotiators long ago abandoned. The summit likely will be postponed.
Moscow’s backpedaling raises questions about who is in charge in the Baltics. Some suggest the generals presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum. Muddying the waters, both Akhromeyev and Chief of Staff Mikhail Moiseyev denied that more troops would be sent to the Baltics-just days before the paratroopers were deployed. Kremlinologists are studying recent appointments for clues to Gorbachev’s strategy. Military hard-liners appear ascendant. The conservative commander of the Army’s elite airborne troops, Col. Gen. Vladislav Achalov, was recently named deputy minister of Defense. His units would likely spearhead any campaign of repression. Boris Pugo, former head of the KGB in Latvia, became Interior minister. His new deputy, Gen. Boris Gromov, a rising star who commanded Soviet forces in Afghanistan, reportedly runs Moscow’s Baltic operation. Thousands of new troops have been reassigned to his command, presumably to enforce order.
‘In sync’: Washington finds itself in an uncomfortable dilemma. The United States has never recognized Soviet sovereignty over the Baltics, nor can it overlook a crackdown. Yet it needs Moscow’s support in the gulf. Perhaps coincidentally, Gorbachev phoned George day, the day of the first clashes. The two leaders mainly discussed gulf diplomacy, Bush said, adding: “We remain in sync.” But when it came to Lithuania, the president was blunt in his condemnation. “Gorbachev knows my position,” said Bush.
The words had little apparent effect. Within hours the Soviets shut down a liberal television program and sharply restricted the nation’s only independent news agency. “We’re seeing a coup. But in a country as big as ours it doesn’t take just an hour, like in Haiti,” said Yevgeny Dodolev, host of the banned “Vzglyad” TV show. If the generals have their way, the next step could be to declare martial law in Lithuania, disband its legislature, disperse the crowds around Parliament and do the same in other breakaway republics. All while the world looks elsewhere.
Photo: Shades of Budapest, 1956? Lithuanian nationalists demonstrate against Moscow’s control
Photo: A sudden show of force: Soviet troops on guard in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius
Map: Arc of Crisis: Of the Baltic republics, Lithuania is the most restive - and the most vulnerable.
As fears of a Soviet crackdown in the Baltics deepened last week, Gorbachev’s military, adviser, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, met with NEWSWEEK’S Moscow bureau chief Fred Coleman. Akhromeyev. 67, former chief of staff of the armed forces, is one of the most respected-and outspoken figures in the Soviet military establishment. Straitlaced and straightforward, he is known as a soldier’s soldier, a ferocious defender of the armed services and, as he puts it, the “socialist state.” He recently warned that “nationalist-minded elements” are out to “wreck” the country, and insists that the Soviet Army might be used to prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Excerpts:
Everyone in the world is happy about that, including me. But U.S. policy is contradictory. I don’t understand why under present conditions the Americans preserve a military organization like NATO and refuse to carry on reductions of naval forces-while the Soviet Union is reducing all other kinds of arms. Let’s be frank. The initiative for preserving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization comes not from the European countries, but from the United States.
We are also not happy that the United States still believes our Baltic republics entered the Soviet Union unlawfully. Problems remain between the Soviet Union and the United States. What do we do? We should improve our relations on the basis of realism.
I don’t see a danger. Do you think the president would impose martial law, consciously understanding this would lead to civil war? I think the opposite. He can impose martial law only to prevent an armed confrontation.
The Soviet Army will never go so far as to open fire on civilians. There are so many other ways to fulfill the decisions of the supreme bodies of power [e.g., an economic blockade, the threat of military force or the declaration of presidential rule].
At present, it is impossible to create a professional, all-volunteer army in the Soviet Union. The conscription laws must therefore be fulfilled. [By refusing to enforce the draft] some of the republics are trying the patience of the president. It is not unlimited.
President Gorbachev will not allow any republic to violate the Constitution by forming an independent army. We certainly support the president on this question.
The main problem is to preserve the integrity of our country. An officer swears an oath to serve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, his motherland. When the integrity of the country is endangered, an officer is very much concerned. lie turns to the president, who also gave an oath on the Constitution to preserve the integrity of the country.
All the talk about a military coup in our country is a lie. I’m sure nothing like that will happen. Our armed forces will not organize a coup d’etat. They will be loyal to the president while he is in office, and will not allow anyone to act against him by unlawful methods.
At the same time, it is the armed forces that ensure stability and permit the president to carry on his normal activities. But, of course, the president himself must also take action to ensure stability-and not only take decisions but ensure their implementation. If he needs the help of the armed forces of the Soviet Union, within the framework of the Constitution, the armed forces are ready to help him.
