Soviets Laughed Before Firing, Witnesses Say

Soviet soldiers laughed before they fired automatic weapons at Lithuanian nationalists. Without warning, they shot people in the back. They grabbed axes and bludgeoned 20 people on the head.

Survivors of the Soviet army’s bloody overnight assault on the Vilnius television tower and broadcast center spoke of such acts of brutality by soldiers sent in with tanks and armored personnel carriers to capture the installations.

“Their eyes were like glass; they were in a trance,” said Vaclovas Bernotas, 21, a physics student who said he was shot from behind in the left arm.

Mindaugas Cernius, 17, said he was trying to get away from the television tower when a squad of 20 soldiers, one with a machine gun, opened fire on him from 30 feet away. A bullet tore through his left ankle, crumpling him to the ground, he said.

Both men were taken to the First Clinical Hospital, where an emergency center to treat victims of the army assault was hastily set up in the first-floor gynecological ward.

Dr. Vytautas Kamarauskas, assistant to the hospital’s chief doctor, said Sunday afternoon that all but one of the 13 people known dead had died of gunshot wounds. The sole exception was a man who was crushed by a tank.

Kamarauskas said that in his hospital alone, he had seen 20 patients badly gashed on the head by axes, which Stafe Stankavicius, 57, who witnessed the army attack on the television tower, said the Soviet soldiers had grabbed from inside the broadcast center.

In the melee, in which she said her husband’s foot was badly wounded by a concussion grenade or another type of explosive charge, Stankavicius also said she saw soldiers hit a man on the head with an ax and then shoot him from about 15 feet away when he rose from the first blow.

Regina Liukineviciute, 30, a pharmacist from Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city, said she was pushed to the brink of a muddy cliff by soldiers taking part in the storming of the Vilnius television tower.

“The tanks began to move toward the people, and the soldiers were laughing,” she recalled.

“They said they were ready to shoot people who didn’t retreat. We were in a position where we would have had to jump down the slope. Then an older soldier gave the order, and the troops began firing their Kalashnikovs (assault rifles) at us.”

Liukineviciute said she was hit in the right calf as she tried to escape. She was near tears as she lay on her hospital bed and told her story. “Only people who didn’t know Gorbachev would give him the Nobel Peace Prize,” she said.