The event which most interested me in the Baltics, and in the struggle for the independence of the region, was one of the most important events in the transition away from Communism and in the breakup of the Soviet Union. That event was the Soviet attack on the TV tower in Vilnius, Lithuania on January 13th, 1991. That event was shown as it happened, not only to the world, but also in the region and in a few other republics of the former Soviet Union, and epitomizes the role the media has to shape not only our perceptions of world events, but to be a force or actor in them as well.

          The days when powers could simply rewrite history after the fact and that no one would be the wiser, if not gone forever, were shown to be far harder to do in the age of live satellite television feeds. It was that power of television and the will to control public opinion which clashed brutally that night, leaving 13 civilians dead, and hundreds injured. The television tower was the new symbol of power. The rebellious government could not hope to win any battles against the overwhelming might of the Soviet army all around them in permanent bases in their own territories. Their only weapon was their means to communicate what might be done to them to the outside world, and that weapon was television. CNN carried the assault on the tower itself live to many millions of viewers around the world. Video from the TV station in the tower was the primary means to continually show the world what was going on and which was the most difficult to suppress.

          The crisis came about while the government was in turmoil. The leader of the government, Kazimiera Prunskiene, had resigned due to problems with both her legislature and with the Soviet government. Inflation was out of control and there was pressure being put to make price hikes illegal, though they were inevitable. After her resignation, a less favorable to the Soviet government leader was chosen, and the nation had previously declared its independence outright from the Soviet Union. Its legislature was comprised of a divided opposition, but united in the fact that they wanted more independence.  It was wrongly assumed in Moscow that the divisions in the ranks of the opposition and the recent turmoil over having just had their head of government resign, that this would be an opportune time to crack down on a territory increasingly vocal in its calls for more independence, and with a Parliament openly proclaiming its independence. Soviet media control was all but non-existent there at the TV station, and if it continued, it would have undermined censorship all over the Soviet Union. In a way, they knew either they needed to regain control of the media and government in Lithuania, or they themselves would lose all control completely.

          This is not an understatement. Media control was crucial to the control network the Soviet Union used to maintain its dominance and control over its supposedly sovereign member states. The ability to control what information people had to think about and how they were told to best interpret events, was completely being undermined by live television pictures of people in protests holding up signs proclaiming their rights for freedom. Where there should have been, for a totalitarian state to succeed, images of people cowering in fear, instead people all over the world were seeing live pictures of people singing, and not afraid of the Goliath of the Soviet system anymore. Without being able to intimidate and suppress such images, they rightly feared it could and would spread to other regions also beginning to become emboldened themselves.

          The TV tower was to be only the first stage of the attack. Once the tower was taken, which was thought to have been fairly easy to have done, then military was to turn its sights to the Parliament. However, those who ordered the attack underestimated the resolve of the people defending it, and thought they would leave with relatively little resistance. Without adequate weapons to prevent losing control of the TV tower, people literally were willing to die just for the chance to show the world what Soviet utopia was really like. One woman was crushed to death as she laid down before an armored troop vehicle which did not stop, either by not seeing her, or by its driver being ordered not to care. 

          That people were willing to die for the chance to be free from what they saw as an external occupying force is not surprising, nor is it new. It is always a force which should be respected, even if you don’t agree with them or their definitions of freedom or their grievances. It is the human spirit not wanting to be denied, not wanting to be controlled by others whom they believe have no interest in themselves, other than wanting to control them and take from them whatever they will, even their very lives. That winter Estonia was having similar problems with Moscow over forcing its citizens to serve in the Soviet army.(1) That meant that they would have been expected to die trying to keep their own country from becoming free, against the wishes of its own people, and potentially be ordered to kill their own neighbors if necessary if they got in the way, the same as that woman who was crushed by an armored vehicle in Vilnius.

          What is unusual about this event to me though, is the means by which they were fighting for that freedom or liberation from that outside force, though the Soviets did not see it in the same light, and that it was in their eyes just simply putting down an internal rebellion. The weapon was public opinion. That was what the real battle which was being fought was really all about. How will those events be remembered, if they were to be remembered at all. One can say that history is always written by the victors, that after gaining independence, those who gave their lives that night would be seen as martyrs or freedom fighters, or if the Soviet’s prevailed and the Soviet Union still existed there might had been a monuments erected for their dead and injured, but the history under 
totalitarian regimes is far more immediate and  pervasive. Because so much depends on controlling how and what people think at each and every moment to maintain control, history is not rewritten with the benefit of hind-sight or remembering only what you wish to remember or what you wish to construct your national identity out of. With those regimes, history is being manipulated non-stop, every minute of every day. That is what they were fighting against and willing to die for being rid of, and what they were fighting it with, the ability to make and record their own version of their own history of themselves and for themselves.

          As one of those who was trying to defend the government that night recounted in “The Baltic Revolution : Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence” said,

                          “The intention is not to win, because we all know that this
                           is impossible; the intention is to die, but by doing so to
                           make sure that Moscow can’t tell any lies as they did in
                           1940. To make sure that the whole world knows that
                           Lithuania was prepared to fight for her freedom.”(2)

          That is the control media has, to give people their own history, or to take it away from them. So often while living under Soviet control, people were shown daily that they had no control over their own history. What they lived for, or died for, was always interpreted for others not by them, nor their relatives, but by those who controlled the media. One could literally set oneself on fire to protest their overbearing lack of control over their own lives only to have the newspaper, if it mentioned them at all, attribute it in some other way so as to promote the cause of Communism, or at the expense of some other segment of society they wish others to turn against, saying that they were protesting against self-interest, a lack of morals, or greed.

          Most of their lives, they knew the outside world would never know how they really felt, partially because it could never be reported accurately and fairly if it went against the views their government wished for them to have, or wished to promote, unless they used those views to slander that person, saying “look at what a bad person this is, how he or she does not think as we do.” It is this lacking of being able to have your criticisms listened to an evaluated without being merely ammunition to assail your character, which people did not have, and gave them little chance to develop those opinions through the natural ability to speak their minds without fearing potential, if not probable, repercussions. Once though, they knew they had that opportunity to speak around or outside of the normal channels directly to the outside world, to let their grievances be known, and know that they would be represented more fairly and that they would have some control over them themselves, that this also was worth dying for. That window of opportunity would not last, and could not last under the old system, but that it was also an opportunity to make that system not able to last, a foot in the door of freedom.

          So suddenly the very means of taking back control for the Soviets, or taking control back away from the people to communicate for themselves what was really going on, became itself a weapon against gaining control. So long as the channels of communication to the outside world remained open, there was the very real probability that it would have the opposite effect, and lead to only a greater erosion of control. China, which had a similar situation in Tiananmen Square in Beijing two years earlier was able to kill thousands of protesters with less long lasting damage to their credibility and reputation to both the outside world, and to their own people, simply by being able to shut out all coverage and confiscate all visual records of the massacre. Millions of people all around the world were able to bear witness to what was happening in Lithuania, and that was something the Chinese people were not able to use to their advantage.

          Credit must be given to the willingness of those who had the power then to have stopped it from going further than it did. Should the leadership had wished it, it could easily had turned into another Tiananmen. At some point, not soon enough for those who had already died at the TV tower, the plans to retake the Parliament building were called off when they realized that many of the people were willing to die to defend their brief taste of freedom and their ability to create their own history for themselves. As the then-Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis recounted in CITY PAPER in 1997, on why the army did not continue the planned assault,

                         “I think they fully intended to do it. But they did it badly,
                           and they did not expect such brave resistance from
                           unarmed people. This resistance meant that much more
                           time was spent on the occupation of the TV tower than
                           they had anticipated. The other factor was the coverage
                           of the terrible casualties by the Western press. This
                           created a reaction in the West almost immediately. 
                           There were huge crowds around Parliament. One
                           KGB officer, explaining why they did not take the
                           Parliament, later explained in his sick way: "We didn’t
                           take it because there was too much meat," he said.
                           You understand the mentality of these people.”(3)

          In any society, however free or otherwise, there will always be the temptation to turn back that amount of freedom, to impose ever greater control for ever more elusive or expansive ideas of security or predictability. That control is not accomplished just by guns, nor by money. It is enforced by cutting the tongues of those who would speak out against them. It is enforced by taking away peoples ability to create and pass on their own sense of history and their own cultural identities and not have that sense of identity which is imposed on them  by their society to be something that they would not agree with. The mistake is not in taking that path, in moving that far backward, for that backward transgression hopefully only brief, is just a natural part of the progression. The mistake is in not realizing that that is what is happening because always people would rather not see it that way, and cling to their illusions that they are already free and need to do nothing, than to instead open their eyes enough to see that is hardly the case. It is the media’s responsibility whenever they have that foot in the door of freedom, that brief fleeting opportunity to speak around those in power who would silence them or limit them, to force open others eyes and see that freedom is never found here, it is only on the way to being somewhere else. And getting to there is never assured, never safe, but it is also never more threatened than by those who would control what we can say and think, as the means of taking us there.