Showdown: The Lithuanian Rebellion and the Breakup of the Soviet Empire

by Richard J. Krickus

Recounts the history of Lithuania and its struggle for freedom from the Soviet Union, and argues that Lithuania's declaration of independence in 1991 was the turning point that led to the Soviet collapse

244 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1997

Reviews

[Vic Lauterbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

This meticulous chronicle of how a small, Baltic state defied the superpower that occupied it is informative to a fault. Sometimes the level of detail gets in the way of the bigger picture, but that's a minor flaw. This is not a book for casual readers. If you have only mild interest in the subject, read the Wikipedia article instead. If you do read this book, you'll get a deep understanding of how the Soviet Union functioned, why it was failing by the mid 1980's, and how Perestroika and Glasnost accelerated its political demise. Ironically, it was a clause in the Soviet constitution allowing the constituent republics to elect their own Supreme Councils that provided Lithuanian leaders with the means of regaining political control of their own country. The Soviet Constitution was a dead letter under Stalin and his successors up to Chernenko and Andropov, who used a huge security apparatus backed by the Red Army to intimidate or crush dissent. In accordance with the secret protocols in his 1939 pact with Hitler, Stalin used the Red Army to occupy Lithuania and impose a rigged referendum that added it to the Soviet Union. Decades of 'Russification' and ethnic cleansing followed that drove tens of thousands of Lithuanians into exile. The constant threat of exile or punitive psychiatric incarceration enabled a Bolshevik elite to rule Lithuania for the next four decades, but the remaining population continued to overwhelmingly reject Soviet rule. In spite of his reformist mindset, Gorbachev was naive about the legacy of Stalinism and believed the Warsaw Pact nations would accept Soviet hegemony in a milder form. To Lithuanians brutalized by Stalin and his successors, reform was a Frankenstein monster that they hoped could be turned on its creator and used to restore their nations's sovereignty. Few of them expected their 'revolution without weapons' to succeed and add to the independence 'domino effect' that doomed the Soviet Union. Written in 1997, this book ends three years into Lithuania's difficult, post-rebellion struggle to reform its Communist economy and built a democratic political system, but fortunately the author's cautiously optimistic predictions for Lithuania came true in the next decade.

[Monty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Showdown prensents the inside story of Lithuania's contribution to the collapse of the Soviet empire. Krickus worked with media and political insiders to observe events as they were happening in both the United States and in Lithuania from the 1970s through the 1990's. This is an exciting read, and is packed with details showing the power players as well as those who humbly and quietly worked behind the scenes to bring Democratic change back to the Baltics.
For Western readers the most salient point made is that the Baltics lost their independence and were annexed by the USSR in an illegal power grab as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1940--which included written and secret protocols which removed Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian sovereignty and replaced it with the dictat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The true picture of the USSR is given, showing that "New Soviet Man" was a propagandistic Frankenstein monster...of one homogeneous empire sewn together from 14 separate republics all living happily together under the benevolent rule of the Communist Party and the Red Army.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Nationalities problem that Lenin and Stalin promised would evaporate as complete Russification progressed never came about. Those outlawed behaviors involving language, religion, culture, and nationality were always brimming below the surface in the Baltics,in the Caucasus, in Soviet central Asia, and in Ukraine. When the contradiction between the military power and the civilian social and economic poverty was manifested from the mid-1980's onward, the Soviet Dam began to collapse. Once the fissures of the Berlin Wall, Poland and Solidarity, and the Vilnius uprisings began, the pressures were too powerful to reverse. The Chechins kept the Russians violently occupied in the Causcasus. The rebel tribes in the Caucasus had been fighting with Russia since Tolstoy was a young man.
Free elections pushed the Communists out of power. The nationalities regained their independence as quickly as the peoples took to the streets and demanded it. The events between 1988 and 1993 are well chronicled. Gorbachev allowed Eastern European independence from Communism, but he also encouraged right-wing KGB-backed coups in Vilnius and Moscow. These coups failed as Boris Yeltsin pushed Gorbachev out of the way to clear the path for the new paradigm.
This book will be nostalgic for those of us who remember those heady days, and who perhaps were in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union between 1989 and 1994.