Gorbachev and Changes in East Bloc

I read with astonished disbelief your editorial on Gorbachev’s challenge in Lithuania. Your suggestion that the Lithuanians owed Gorbachev the preparation of a plan for their republic’s remaining in the Soviet Union shows a complete lack of understanding of how the Baltic republics were forcibly incorporated into this so-called Soviet “Union.”

If the common Russian house, as you describe it turns into a common vacant lot, it will be because the house is actually a Russian prison. The only crime the people being held there have committed is being located on the Baltic Sea, an area that the Russians have long coveted.

The United States to this day has refused to recognize as legal the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. Even Gorbachev has admitted that the secret protocols between Stalin and Hitler by which the Baltic states became part of the Soviet Union were illegal, but he shows no intention of giving up the spoils of this immoral action.

Gorbachev calls the people of these once free nations who want only one thing--their independence--”extremists.”

This independence was forcibly taken from them at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Baltic lives. Now, according to your editorial, the relatives and descendants of these dead are supposed to draw up a plan for how they will remain in the common Russian home. I suspect even Lithuanian communists aren’t capable of filling this bizarre request, much less the bulk of the Baltic peoples who desire above all else their independence and freedom from Russian domination and control.

Even the Man of the Decade has to function within this indisputable reality.

BIRUTA VELLUTINI

Torrance