Minorities in Lithuania Fuel Fires of Discord

On a central square in the Lithuanian capital the other day, a Russian and a Lithuanian were arguing with some urgency about their future.

“I am a Russian, but I was born here. Lithuania is my country too, and I don’t want to be your slave,” the Russian man said.

“You are a fool,” the Lithuanian replied. “I don’t want to do anything like that. Live quietly; who is bothering you? You have rights here. Why do you need the Kremlin or Moscow?”

The men were standing outside the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party; inside, a different kind of dispute was going on. A faction of the divided party that remains loyal to Moscow was matter-of-factly--with the help of a few dozen armed soldiers--taking over part of the building.

The move threw Lithuania’s new leaders into a panic. After all, it was the third building in two days occupied by armed soldiers on the orders of the pro-Moscow group, known here as the “Night Party.”

But what was going on outside is far more central to the crisis threatening the survival of the fledgling non-Communist Lithuanian government here: the use of the fears of Lithuania’s 20% minority population by political groups seeking to topple the republic’s first democratically elected government in half a century and to take power themselves.

So far, they have not been successful. The approximately 750,000 Russians, Byelorussians, Poles and other non-Lithuanians here have never been numerous enough to offer any serious resistance to the Lithuanian independence movement.

And, because as a group they are significantly less educated and less well-off than nationalist leaders here, Lithuania’s minorities have not articulated their concerns in a powerful, political way.

But in recent weeks, their low grumble of dissent has been taken up as a rallying cry by a group of Communists who have the political savvy that factory workers lack. They have organized strikes in factories and industries here, used Soviet army helicopters to shower the city with leaflets denouncing the new government and led demonstrations in which they compared Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis to former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

They say they are tired of being insulted, and they demand a referendum on independence and a new set of leaders in the republic.

Until recently, the new government here put little stock in the power of that opposition. But since last week, they have been stunned to realize that the tactics of the “Night Party,” so called because it held its founding meetings in secret late at night after most Lithuanian Communists had cut their ties to the central party in Moscow, have put Lithuania’s leaders on the defensive.

Since taking office three weeks ago, Landsbergis has gone on television four times and appealed for calm, in Russian, to Lithuania’s minorities. On Tuesday, the Lithuanian Parliament so feared an outbreak of violence at a pro-Communist rally outside the building that it assigned more than 200 militiamen to protect the building, the headquarters of the Lithuanian government. Fire hoses were unrolled in readiness for repelling any crowd trying to storm the building.

Lithuania’s new leaders, many of them former dissidents who have fought in the name of human rights quietly for years, are confounded by the fear that their government rouses among non-Lithuanian factory and farm workers.

“Perhaps only uncertainty is bringing these people to the rallies--uncertainty about the future,” said Ceslovas Stankevicius, Lithuania’s deputy prime minister. “But the repressions they fear have been perpetrated by the same leaders they so admire. I can only say that there is no Siberia in Lithuania, and there are no laws here which threaten any of its citizens.”

But the anxiety at the rallies is real. Dismayed to be living suddenly in a state with a language not their own and traditions they do not share, non-Lithuanians are worried about their future. They are increasingly demanding guarantees of their rights, a nationwide referendum on independence and the formation of autonomous regions in areas where they make up a majority.

“This is not my revolution, and it scares me,” said Valery Devoyed, 50, a Russian assembly-line worker at the Vilnius Fuel Equipment Works. “I don’t expect these Lithuanians to think about me and my family. To them, I am a third-rate man.”

Of most immediate concern to the Russian and Polish minorities is the prospect of unemployment, particularly frightening in this land of industrial paternalism. Poles and Russians make up more than 60% of the blue-collar work force here. They fear that if Lithuania continues on its path toward substantive independence, it will suffer severe economic reprisals from the Soviet Union, which supplies nearly 90% of its raw materials.

If the steel, wood and oil needed to feed the republic’s enterprises are cut, the resulting recession will hit factory workers hard.

“I’m worried about my future, because I don’t know if I’ll be jobless,” said Zbigniew Kushevsky, 32, a Russian assembly-line worker at the 60th Anniversary of the October Revolution Radio Electronics Factory in Vilnius. “This (Communist) party existed forever, and it always gave me a job. It has a right to exist today. Lithuania is no state at all. Here, I am defenseless.”

Lithuania’s new leaders have sought to calm such fears. They have repeatedly and publicly pledged to protect the rights of everyone living in the republic, and they have devoted significant space in Lithuania’s new constitution to minority rights.

Sajudis, the republic’s pro-independence movement, recently began printing a Russian-language edition of its newspaper, and the republic’s new Parliament has appointed a commission to address minority concerns.

“People are suffering here, and it is necessary that the level of injustice be reduced,” Landsbergis said in a speech to the republic’s Parliament before he was elected president. “We will certainly do our best to do that. We are committed to laws which will protect the cultural development of nationalities.”

Minority leaders say they doubt Landsbergis’ sincerity. They point to the fight he led last year to install Lithuanian as the republic’s official language. They also recall a speech he made to Parliament earlier this month, in which he suggested that people seeking to pursue higher education in Polish should go to Poland.

“Landsbergis and his company are just propagandists; they say a lot, but they do not do much,” said Riena Kaminska, 61. “I am afraid now. They say to us, ‘Go back to your Warsaw.’ But our fathers and our grandfathers lived here. This is our homeland, too.”

In Vilnius, Poles especially grumble loudly that they are becoming second-class citizens. Vilnius has a history as a Polish city that stretches back to the 16th Century, when Poland and Lithuania were united.

It once had a Polish majority and was held by Poland between 1920 and 1939, even as the rest of Lithuania was independent. When the area was returned to Lithuania by Stalin, intellectuals and skilled Polish workers began moving to Poland, leaving the Poles in Vilnius culturally and economically impoverished.

Today, Vilnius is still almost half Polish, but there is only one church in the city that holds Masses only in Polish, and at hospitals and clinics, there are very few Polish-speaking personnel. At the handful of Polish-language schools in the city, the quality of instruction is markedly lower than it is anywhere else. No post-secondary education in Polish is available in Lithuania at all.

As a result, Poles send their children to Russian schools, leading to a degree of Russification among local Poles that they find alarming.

Despite appeals from Poland’s Solidarity movement to support Lithuania’s independence, local Poles worried about their rights have been trying to establish an autonomous region in areas east of Vilnius where they are in the majority. This, in turn, has caused an upsurge in anti-Polish feelings among Lithuanians, already predisposed to dislike Poles because of the rampant and profitable black-market activities between Poles in Lithuania and across the border in Poland.

Now, there are no Poles among the independent-minded majority in the republic’s legislature. In fact, the six deputies elected to Parliament on the Communist Party platform are all Polish. They have abstained or voted against nearly every bill passed by the new government.

Those deputies also have found support among Lithuania’s 250,000 ethnic Russians, many of whom were resettled here by Soviet central authorities to work on the huge industrial projects of the Leonid I. Brezhnev years.

BACKGROUND

The 20% of Lithuania’s population that is non-Lithuanian reflects the area’s tangled history. Many of the 250,000 ethnic Russians were sent to Lithuania to work on Soviet industrial projects during the Leonid I. Brezhnev era. More than 60% of blue-collar workers are ethnic Russians and Poles, and they fear a Soviet economic squeeze if Lithuania achieves independence. Vilnius, the capital, has had a large Polish element dating to the 16th Century when Poland and Lithuania were united. The city was held by Poland from 1920 to 1939 during Lithuania’s independence. Today, Vilnius is almost half Polish, but there is only limited use of Polish in churches and public institutions. The 750,000 Russians, Byelorussians and Poles have never been numerous enough to block the Lithuanian independence movement.