Vytautas Landsbergis

Vytautas Landsbergis was born in 1932 into a Kaunas intelligentsia family; his father, a noted architect, had taken part in the anti-Nazi resistance, and the whole house belonged to the lineage of Lithuanian cultural nationalism. He chose music, became a professor at the Vilnius Conservatory, and devoted his life to the painter-composer Mikalojus Ciurlionis, Lithuania's national artist, becoming the international authority in the field.

In Soviet Lithuania the study of national culture was itself a quiet form of resistance. To lecture on Ciurlionis's paintings and music was to keep reminding the country that it had possessed a culture of its own before the Soviet Union.

When reform intellectuals founded Sajudis, the Movement, in June 1988, the fifty-six-year-old professor of musicology joined as a founding signatory and that November became its chairman. That a musicologist, neither apparatchik nor economist, came to command an independence movement was emblematic: the Baltic resistance was above all a resistance of culture and memory.

When Sajudis swept the February 1990 elections, the freest the Soviet Union had held, the new Supreme Council chose Landsbergis as chairman and at its first sitting passed the act restoring independence: since the 1940 annexation was void from the outset, independence was not declared but restored. Gorbachev answered with a decree of nullity and ultimatums, then with an economic blockade that cut oil and gas.

In January 1991, as the country endured the blockade's winter, Soviet troops and special forces came to seize the broadcasting facilities of Vilnius. Landsbergis appealed by radio for citizens to defend the parliament, and tens of thousands built barricades of concrete blocks and their own bodies. Fourteen died at the television tower, but the parliament held, and in February a plebiscite confirmed independence with more than 90 percent.

As a negotiating partner he was Moscow's nightmare. Gorbachev called his refusal to yield an inch of legal ground fanaticism; Lithuanians answered that precisely that stubbornness kept independence from becoming a bargaining chip. In September 1991 the Soviet State Council recognised it.

To the hero of independence, democracy presented its bill at once. In the 1992 elections voters, worn down by economic hardship, handed a landslide to Brazauskas's ex-communists, and Landsbergis became leader of the opposition. That the man who led independence was voted out at the first free election while a former communist became president was, paradoxically, proof that Baltic democracy actually worked.

He led the Homeland Union conservatives, served as speaker of the Seimas from 1996, and pressed Lithuania's accession to NATO and the European Union without deviation. From 2004 he sat in the European Parliament, a voice on the European stage warning of the Russian threat. When his grandson Gabrielius Landsbergis later became foreign minister, the surname became a dynasty of Lithuanian politics.

The verdicts still divide: reverence for the moralist whose unbent principles preserved the country, criticism of a divisive politician who never learned compromise. About that night in March 1990, though, there is no argument: the dismantling of the empire began in that parliament in Vilnius.