Algirdas Brazauskas

Algirdas Brazauskas was born in 1932 in Rokiskis, Lithuania, and studied hydraulic engineering at the Kaunas Polytechnic. Beginning his career on the construction of the Kaunas hydroelectric station, he rose through construction and planning to become the Lithuanian party's secretary for the economy: the very type of the manager rather than the ideologue. Practical and without pomposity, he enjoyed a public warmth rare in a party official.

When Sajudis's mass rallies shook the republic in the autumn of 1988, the Lithuanian party, caught between Moscow and its own conservatives, had to change its man. It was Brazauskas whose name the Sajudis crowds chanted, and so, under the pressure of a mass movement, he became first secretary. Almost at once he startled the republic by returning Vilnius Cathedral, confiscated under Stalin and turned into a gallery, to the church: a sign that the party could be reconciled with the nation's memory.

In an age when the party's authority was crumbling, he was approaching a conclusion: the way to save the party was not to follow Moscow but to follow the people.

In December 1989 the Twentieth Congress of the Lithuanian Communist Party voted by an overwhelming margin for independence from the CPSU: the first organisational break between a ruling republican party and the centre in Soviet history. Brazauskas's calculation was plain. In the free elections to come, a party that remained Moscow's branch office would be annihilated; only a national party supporting independence could survive.

A shaken Gorbachev flew to Vilnius himself in January 1990 and spent three days in persuasion and pressure, returning empty-handed. To a general secretary pleading before the crowds for the union, Lithuanians were courteous and immovable. The visit's failure is recorded as the event that told the Kremlin the age of holding republics by the party's authority was over.

In the February 1990 elections his party lost to Sajudis, but Brazauskas's personal standing held. He voted for the act of 11 March restoring independence, and as deputy premier of the new government endured the blockade winter with it. The party had lost the election, but its leader stood among the builders of the independent state.

In the autumn of 1992, as the euphoria of independence gave way to the fatigue of hardship, voters handed Brazauskas's Democratic Labour Party, the former communists, a landslide, and the next February he became independent Lithuania's first directly elected president with 60 percent. Part of the West gasped at the return of the communists; in practice he carried the market-economy and Western-integration line straight on. It was he who signed Lithuania's application to NATO in 1994.

A ruling party leaving power by election rather than violence, and returning by election: Brazauskas's career embodied this textbook path of post-communist transition, an early model of the social-democratic return of former communist parties repeated across Eastern Europe.

In 1998 he declined to seek re-election, then returned as prime minister from 2001 to 2006, steering the completion of EU accession in 2004. When he died in 2010, even his old rival Landsbergis did not deny his part in independence. In one nation's history of independence, a former communist first secretary and an anti-communist leader stand recorded side by side as founders.