Along with Poland - to which it has been joined previously - and western Ukraine, Catholic Lithuania has traditionally been the "east of the West" in light of its Western religious heritage at the crossroads of the East-West, Catholic-Orthodox ecclesial schism. In this sense, it has always been a more reliable buffer against Russian influence into central and western Europe - today's free and liberal EU "core" - than its Baltic neighbors to the north, Latvia and Estonia, and in fact even more so than much larger Western stalwart Finland, all of which share Lithuania's history of periods of domination by Russia.
So it was no surprise that after Catholic Poland, inspired by its native Pope St. John Paul II, led the wave of east European communist bloc revolutions of 1989, Catholic Lithuania would be the first of the dominoes to fall within the Soviet Union itself shortly thereafter. The 1989 upheavals compelled the Soviet Union to adopt a new federated structure for its component socialist republics, quickly allowing for a new nationality and ethnicity-based power system within all 15 of them that brought such reformers as Russia's Boris Yeltsin to the forefront of day-to-day governance of their new federal republics. In practical terms, this amounted to a dismemberment of the Soviet Union: in the individual republics, but especially the most anti-communist ones such as the Baltics, the traditional trans-republic Soviet state apparatus found itself increasingly bypassed and marginalized, and in Lithuania's case it reached a point where it could no longer even function because of popular obstruction, which could only be suppressed violently.
The standoff on January 13, 1991, at the Vilnius TV tower turned out to be the crack in the Soviet edifice that, in a matter of months, would prove fatal. The Soviet military crackdown claimed 14 lives and injured hundreds, but was a death knell for communist legitimacy in the Lithuanian federal socialist republic, which dissolved its union with Moscow. Only seven months later, largely because of fears that the Lithuanian example would soon be imitated by other republics, Kremlin hardliners overthrew Gorbachev in a coup, setting the stage for their complete defeat by reformists of the Russian federal republic led by Yeltsin. Ironically, by acting to keep other small federal republics like Georgia from pulling a Lithuania, these hardliners turned the dominant central republic - Russia itself - against the Soviet Union, too.
And that bring us back to today's Russia-West crisis over Ukraine. As a young Lithuanian father has just been quoted at the memorial:
"I was just a kid back them, but remember my parents were scared," he said. "It was people, not some army, who defended their country and right to be free..."Therein lies the key to peace - both yesterday, today, and in the future. The events of 1989-1991 were a victory of people power, because in the end even the Russian people stood up against a system whose oppression of neighboring peoples, including long-despised Poles and Lithuanians, they could consent to no longer.
Today, however, while Russia's neighbors have vivid memories of oppression by Moscow (and even St. Petersburg earlier) that have been passed down to the rising generation, it is the rising generation of Russians themselves who have no memory of actually having oppressed foreigners beyond the post-Soviet borders. They are now fed a constant barrage of nationalist fervor by an increasingly populist government which plays up the story - at least somewhat based in reality - of a hostile United States bent on military domination through NATO expansion ever closer to Russia proper.
So if you're Pole or Lithuanian or western (Catholic) Ukrainian today, the onus is largely on you. Your salvation lies not in securing Western and especially American military support - to include perhaps even a nuclear deterrent on your territory - because that plays right into the Kremlin's arguments that foreigners are plotting to humiliate Russian pride. No, peace in 2016 depends on the same thing that peace in 1991 depended on: winning the hearts and minds of the Russian people. And that has to make some allowance for their conservative militaristic tradition and fear of chaos without a strong autocratic ruler.
Russia's best friends in eastern Europe, in fact, are the very Ukrainian neo-fascists and Polish and Lithuanian extreme right-wing politicians with which it is a sworn foe. With their Kremlin-like contempt for liberal cultural and social values and a progressive open society, they threaten to turn the crisis on free Europe's frontiers into one between small thugs and a much bigger thug. That's exactly what Russian expansionists - of which Putin is by no means the most extreme - want.
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