ON THIS DAY ·
January Events in Vilnius
13 Jan 1991 — Ten months after Lithuania declared independence, Soviet troops and tanks seize the television tower in Vilnius, and 14 unarmed civilians are killed. Thousands of Lithuanians surrounded their parliament to protect it, and the crackdown went no further.
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The moment in context
Eastern Europe went first, because its regimes had always depended on the threat of Soviet tanks. In 1989 Gorbachev made clear that Moscow would no longer intervene to save its allies, a change his spokesman joked was the “Sinatra doctrine”, letting each country do it “my way”. Poland’s communists lost semi-free elections in June to Solidarity, the independent trade union that had become a national movement, and Hungary opened its border with Austria, so thousands of East Germans crossed to the West along the route of the arrow on the map. Mass protests followed in East Germany, and on 9 November the Berlin Wall opened. Within weeks communist rule ended in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and the bloc states turn tan on the map of December 1989. Germany was reunited in October 1990. Regimes built on the promise of Soviet force fell within months once that promise was withdrawn.
From Collapse of the Soviet Union, chapter 9 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000 (1991).
The place: January Events in Vilnius — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Glasnost and elections gave nations a voice. Openness allowed Balts, Georgians, Armenians and others to discuss deportations, annexations and the suppression of their languages, and the…
- The turn — The White House, 19–21 August 1991. The coup’s defeat is the hinge because it destroyed in three days the institutions that held the Union together. The KGB, the army leadership and…
- What it changed — Fifteen states with inherited borders. The internal borders drawn by Soviet planners became international frontiers overnight, leaving about 25 million ethnic Russians outside Russia and…
Then ask the room: Was the Soviet Union destroyed more by the nations on its edges or by Russia at its centre? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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