Tapping my Lithuanian Resources

Transcription

1 My Student Days It is in the second half of the 1940s that I finally become a person in this memoir. As I grew up, I now realize, I had no sense of relatives outside my immediate family. I first met Swiss cousins when I was 17 years old. I first met a Lithuanian blood relative when I was 38 years old. I never knew my grandparents. We had family traditions, of course, but to this day I am not always sure whether a given practice came from my father s Swiss side or my mother s Russian/Lithuanian side. I have always felt that I had no clear ethnic background; I was definitely a product of the American melting pot, a concept that today s American immigration historians do not use. At the same time, I never gave much thought to the significance of living in a bilingual household. I was rather surprised when I was a senior in high school, 1949, and my English teacher, who had just met my parents, came to me to apologize for not having realized that my parents did not speak English at home. I had not felt at all deprived. As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, , I studied International Relations and thought of working in government, possibly the foreign service. I used all my elective credits to study languages: I had studied German for three years in high school, and I now added 3 more. Through confusion, I started Russian only in my sophomore year at Penn. My parents were traveling at the time I had to register as a freshman, and officials told me that Russian was open only to sophomore-level students. Upon her return, my mother angrily told me I should have pointed out that my father was the chairman of the department and that therefore such rules should not apply to me. As a sophomore I dutifully signed up for Russian, and I then made up for the lost year by taking intensive Russian at the University of California Berkeley in the summer of Upon returning to Philadelphia in the fall of 1951, I took two more years of Russian. When I took the foreign service examination in the fall of 1952, I passed both the German and the Russian examinations. Krėvė and Salys figured prominently in my education. My instructor for the first semester of Russian was my father not an easy situation. Salys was my instructor for the second semester, and Krėvė was my instructor for third and fourth year Russian. I still have the image in my mind of Krėvė s sitting in the back of the room and declaiming perhaps Lermontov s Воздушный корабль, while I stood at the blackboard writing it out. The class was very small; several times I was the only student there. Since Krėvė never fully mastered the English language, we occasionally had to discuss my problems and shortcomings in Lithuanian. Salys was also my professor in an intensive Polish class. In hope of improving my Lithuanian, I sat in on Salys s course in Lithuanian, but I did not care for his emphases on linguistics instead of simply improving one s spoken Lithuanian. (Prof. William Schmalstieg, now a well-known specialist in Lithuanian philology, was in that same class; he obviously stayed in it.) At the time, I had no idea that I would eventually be using the Lithuanian language as extensively as I do now. I dare say that many of my friends of that time did not even know that I could speak the language.

2 While I was yet at Pennsylvania, I certainly had no idea that I would eventually be writing about Lithuanian history, and therefore I obviously missed great opportunities to discuss controversial matters. Krėvė, for example, spoke to representatives of the renowned Kersten committee in the fall of I was then at Columbia, University in New York City, and I knew nothing then of the controversy that surrounded this meeting. I will discuss the controversy in the next chapter of these memoirs. To be sure, in those undergraduate days at Penn there was a small group of us who frequently gathered in the university library to talk about Lithuania. This included the curator of the Lithuanian collection in the library, Vincas Maciūnas, who for many years after helped me with bibliographical problems, even on occasion sending me Xeroxed copies of rare books that he thought I needed. At my father s urging, the library assembled a remarkable Lithuanian archive and book collection. The university had bought the archive and library of the Lithuanian diplomat Jurgis Šaulys. In giving his approval for the purchase, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences asked my father whether he could guarantee that at least two doctoral dissertations would be based on this collection. My father guaranteed it, although at the time he could not know that my dissertation would be the second. The first to use the collection was the playwright Kostas Ostrauskas, who was also a member of our little discussion group in the library. In my university years, the possibility of compulsory military service hung over the heads of my generation. We had been too young for the Second World War, but the war in Korea, which began at the end of June 1950, called up my friends. I had a deferment as a university student; to show that we were serious students, we had to file forms at the end of each year stipulating our class rank. The military obligation was a constant topic of discussion. I particularly remember a conversation with a friend who served as a marine in Korea: He argued that I should enlist in the marines. Why? Because I obviously would want to see the Soviet Union, and since travel there in the early 1950s was virtually impossible for people who did not have that certain smell, my only chance would be to join the marines and serve in the marine guard at the American embassy in Moscow. I was not convinced. As it was I was never called up for military duty, and my eyes were so bad already at that time that I might have been rejected in any case. As I approached the end of my time at the University of Pennsylvania, there were decisions to be made: What next? My classmates and I agreed that International Relations was a major that prepared you for everything and for nothing at the same time. The two immediate alternatives in my mind, in the fall and winter of were government work or graduate school. In the fall of 1952 I took the examination four days for qualifying for the United States Foreign Service,, and at the same time I applied to the Graduate School at Columbia University. Once again, looking back, I see how my path to studying Lithuanian history followed a contorted route.

3 My decision-making was at the mercy of chance and perhaps some greater power. (A Lithuanian priest who interviewed me one time took great delight in my thought that maybe it was the finger of God. ) In any case, after passing the written examination for the foreign service, I was rejected in the oral examination. This was the time of the passage of the United States presidency from Harry Truman to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the foreign service could not take many new recruits anyway. The service, moreover, had just lowered its age limit for new recruits to 21 I became 21 in April 1953, barely before the oral examination and the board members told me I was too young. As matters developed later in the decade, this was probably a blessing in disguise. In any case, I was left with Graduate School. I had chosen to apply to Columbia University at my father s urging. My field would be Russian studies, and at the time Harvard graduates seemed to be dominating the field. My father called special attention to Philip Mosely, a professor at Columbia who had earned his doctorate at Harvard. Mosely had been an advisor at the Potsdam conference in 1945, and German friends later told me that they felt a great debt to Mosely: It was at his insistence that the United States expanded its zone in Berlin-Dahlem, thereby assuring that during the Berlin blockade in , the Soviets could not cut off traffic to the airport in the zone by building high rise buildings around it. Columbia accepted me, and I hesitantly began heading to an academic career. Choosing A Career In the fall of 1953, when I moved from suburban Philadelphia to New York City to attend Columbia University, I still tended to think of my future career as probably in government. It seemed just a matter of straightening out priorities in the process of finding interesting opportunities. Lithuania did not figure into my list of priorities at that time, and I do not remember even thinking that my familiarity with the Lithuanian language would have any role in my future. In the course of the Columbia years, /58, my ideas would change drastically. Ultimately I would probably identify two days I think it was in March 1957 as the turning point. My graduate studies were coming to an end. I had been looking for a job in government; a government agency actually contacted me and told me that they were ready to hire me. But my family just the day before had received a letter from Siberia. The letter had followed a circuitous route: it was addressed to my father at the University of Wisconsin, which he had left 19 years earlier. Someone at Wisconsin knew that my father was now at the University of Pennsylvania, and the letter made its way to Philadelphia. The letter s author was my cousin Stepas Svirelis, once a playmate of my sisters, whom the Soviet authorities had dispatched into the Gulag in (The Soviets deported his family the next year.) Stepas informed my parents that my mother s relatives had in fact survived the Second World War. Her father was still alive in Lithuania, her brother Benediktas lived in Lithuania, and her sister Teklė, Stepas s mother, together with her family (husband, son, daughter) was now in Siberia. This was the first news that we had received from them since the spring of 1940.

4 When the government agents told me they were ready to hire me, I told them that we had just learned that my mother s family was alive. (I had previously said, Fate unknown, probably dead. ) The government men retreated in confusion, and the next day one of them called me to say that since I had relatives in the Soviet Union, I could not get a security clearance ; therefore this agency could not offer me a job. I had been considering several possibilities in government, but now that I had learned that I could not get a security clearance, I changed my priorities and decided on an academic career. And in that career, I would avoid contemporary history I could not accept the thought that I would be dealing with subjects where others could well have information inaccessible to me. I turned full time to history, accepting that I would concentrate henceforth on events and developments before the start of World War II. Lithuania had now intervened into my life to give it a decisive course. Tapping my Lithuanian Resources Fortunately, a turning point occurred early. I had to enroll in a research seminar, and I signed up for one on East European history with a Czech émigré professor, Otakar Odložilik. I was, to be sure, baffled when he announced that I had to write a seminar paper. I had no idea what topic I might investigate, and I went to his office for a consultation. Fortunately he knew something about my family, and he asked whether I knew Lithuanian. I declared that I could speak it but had read very little. He suggested that I choose a topic in Lithuanian history in which I could develop my use of the language. I do not remember why, but as my introduction I chose the early history of Lithuanian Social Democracy as my first topic. My major professor, Mosely, declared that he knew little about Lithuania, but he welcomed my initiative. He firmly believed that students should employ whatever special abilities they had to find new paths of research. He would watch over the development of my understanding of the rest of Eastern Europe, especially Russian and Soviet history, and he urged me to turn to my father for pointers in the history of Lithuania. My father declared that he knew little about Lithuanian Social Democracy, and he advised me to write to Pijus Grigaitis, editor of the Chicago Lithuanian socialist newspaper Naujienos. Grigaitis then sent me the address of Steponas Kairys, one of the founders of Lithuanian Social Democracy, who was then living in Brooklyn, New York, under the name of Juozas Kaminskas. I wrote to Kairys in Russian, and he responded immediately, urging me to ask as much as I wanted. My questions were rather primitive because I knew so little about the subject, but I got my first taste of dealing with living primary sources for the study of history. This made the study of Lithuanian history exciting for me. This was my first step into Lithuanian history. I was illiterate when I started; I had to read texts to myself out loud so that I could hear them. The letters on a printed page had no meaning for me until I could finally relate them through their sound to rules of grammar, syntax, and declensions. (I had studied Latin for three years in high school, and that gave me more understanding of grammatical rules than any English

5 class ever had.) With all this, I was also launched into the process of seeking help from émigrés in forming my own views of Lithuanian history. Here I must point out that knowledge of Lithuanian gave me not only entry into what was then in English a very underdeveloped field of study, but it also immediately served as a source of power, even identity, in my existence among the mass of graduate students. The only Lithuanian student I remember from that time was Rimvydas Šilbajoris, known to his American friends as Frank, who specialized in Russian literature. My Lithuanian advantage built on the fact that I had better undergraduate training in Russian than most of my fellow new students had had. Virtually overnight I felt more at ease in the Graduate School environment. My research program however, could develop only slowly. There were no courses and few books on Lithuania at the time. At my father s urging, I went back to the library of the University of Pennsylvania where I found Jurgis Šaulys s archive and book collection almost overwhelmingly rich and instructive. Vincas Maciūnas, the bibliographer, was there to help me. When I found a complete collection of the Lithuanian communist newspaper, Komunistas, I was able to fashion my Master s essay on the character of the Lithuanian, later Litbel, Soviet Republic in Nothing of this sort existed in a western language, and this eventually became my first publication, appearing in a German translation. My doctoral dissertation followed in an easy transition. I discovered the rich collection of Lithuanian diplomatic documents in Šaulys s archive, and I decided to study the formation of the Lithuanian state, , as my doctoral research. The documentation was unbelievable. (The reader must remember this was the United States in 1956.) Mykolas Sleževičius, prime minister in 1919, wrote his instructions to Šaulys by hand, often asking Šaulys to make a copy and send it back for the record. I have never tried to compare the Šaulys documents against what is available in Lithuania. In any case, American historians studying Eastern Europe had few such sources for East European history in those days; I was again blessed by the work of my father and by my knowledge of Lithuanian. To this I could of course add my father s memories of the individuals about whom I was writing. Sometimes, perhaps, this was not altogether successful. I wrote, for example, that Pranas Dovydaitis, briefly prime minister in 1919, had not been up to the job. A reviewer criticized me for that. My source, which I did not mention in the book, was my father to whom Dovydaitis had said, in 1921, I guess I was not up to the job. On the other hand, when I was trying to define the clash between Juozas Gabrys and Antanas Smetona at a Lithuanian gathering in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the summer of 1918, my father had a talk with Kazys Pakštas, another participant in this meeting, and then gave me a written summary. Few graduate students had such a research assistant as I had. In 1956, after I had survived my oral examination for admission to doctoral candidacy, thereby completing my course work, I was ready to throw myself into research in Lithuanian history. (As a sign of my uniqueness in studying Lithuania, I do not believe that Lithuania was even mentioned at my oral examination.) I first of all headed to the Hoover Library at Stanford University in California. When Herbert

6 Hoover headed American relief work in Eastern Europe in 1919, he decided to found a library for the study of war, revolution, and peace, and he instructed relief workers to collect documents and books. They were amazingly efficient in fulfilling this charge, and Hoover then funded the erection of a tower on the campus of Stanford University, his alma mater, to house the collection. All American graduate students studying twentieth century East European history had to arrange time to plumb the holdings of the Hoover Library. The head of the East European collection at the Hoover Library at the time was Witold Sworakowski, a Pole who had a great interest in Lithuania and had worked in the Polish mission in Kaunas in We disagreed on many questions as I familiarized myself with the materials, but Sworakowski later told me that he liked to cite our cooperation as an example of his ability to work with researchers of other convictions. He gave me truly special attention, and he gave me enormous help in finding relevant Polish material for my work. While I was at Stanford in that summer of 1956, there arose another one of those potential turning points that could redirect a career. The Soviet Union was just beginning to open up to foreign visitors, and Mosely was one of the first American scholars to reach Moscow and talk with Soviet leaders. He fully understood how important access to Soviet archives could be for Americans he had written his dissertation a generation earlier using resources in Moscow before the era of High Stalinism and he provisionally arranged with the Soviets for the exchange of one graduate student each between Moscow State University and Columbia. He telephoned me at Stanford to tell me that I might be Columbia s candidate. This project did not work out, but if it had, I would probably not have devoted so much of my life to studying Lithuania. I would have developed a Russian topic; working on a Lithuanian topic in Moscow in 1956 was obviously impossible, The Šaulys archive had such a wealth of source materials that, together with there being a limited volume of relevant secondary materials for my topic, I completed it my dissertation quickly.. At the defense of my dissertation, the professors examining me declared that my dissertation should be published. Taking this cue, I withheld filing the final copy with the university, delaying my being awarded the Ph.D. In the summer of 1957 I traveled to Europe for the first time, finding useful materials in London, Paris, and Warsaw. In London I conferred with Tytus Komarnicki and Adam Żoltowski, and I visited the office of Władysław Anders, the head of the Polish Anders army in the Second World War. In Paris I worked at the Polish Library, and in Warsaw I benefited by the fact that, as a result of Polish October of 1956, books were leaving the restricted specfonds and becoming available at the university library. My trip to Poland in 1957 greatly strengthened the Polish side of my dissertation, but it was during this time that I made my first significant contacts with contemporary Lithuanian culture. The occasion was dekada kultury litewskiej, the first appearance of Lithuanian artists and musicians in Poland since the war. Again, being able to speak Lithuanian opened contacts. In the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol, where I was staying, I heard Lithuanian being spoken at the next table, and I introduced myself. As a result, I met the pianist and composer Balys Dvarionas and entered into a lasting friendship with Antanas and Irena Karužas, Lithuanians then living in Warsaw.

7 This was my first visit to a communist-controlled country, and after my years of academic study, meeting such people was a revelation. I cannot overemphasize the significance of that stay in Poland. I was there for a month, and I developed a certain expertise that could help other visiting Americans. I met a number of American professors who were taking advantage of the new opportunities to travel, and this would serve me well in the future. As for my impression of Poland, I saw the ravages of war, and at the same time I saw a people only now, twelve years after the end of the war, beginning to come to grips with their history, openly discussing real memories of the Second World War. My experiences in Poland also tuned my interest in using interviews for studying history. Antanas and Irena Karužas, for example, led me out into the streets of the old city, stare miasto, in Warsaw and described how they had held this corner for several days in the rising against the Germans in August Another time I wandered through a bombed out church near the New Town Square, Rynek nowego miasta, and when I emerged I saw a old peasant women sitting on a pile of bricks. (I thought to myself, this looks an illustration of a Russian novel.) She asked me, Kiedy nabożenstwo? (When is there a service?) I replied that I was a foreigner and did not know. Suddenly I was surrounded by Poles, telling me how the Germans destroyed the church while the Soviets in 1944 sat on the other side of the Vistula (Wisła) River and did nothing. I thought to myself, I speak German or Russian better than I speak Polish, but here I have to just speak Polish. No books, however, could inform me of Polish history the way that group of people did. A word yet on speaking languages: That first trip to Europe was a revelation for me in the problem of speaking a local language. My French, primitive to start, just withered under the first slashing responses to my efforts in Paris; my Polish, on the other hand, perhaps slightly better than my French thanks to the efforts of Antanas Salys, thrived in Poland. Jak Pan świetno mówi po-polsku! I would hear, and I would bravely go on. In the summer of 1957 I was also scheduled to travel to the Soviet Union. But this effort failed I could only receive a visa thirty days before entering the USSR. And I had set up my trip as Poland-Western Europe-USSR, so as to be able to spend time with my father and my sister Marie in Western Europe. The Soviet embassy in Warsaw could not give me the visa; the Soviet embassy in Paris disclaimed any knowledge of my existence. Therefore I had to postpone my first visit to the USSR for three years but, as the reader will see below, that was not necessarily all bad. The fall of 1957 saw a great change in my personal life. In November 1957, I married LaVonne Ann Young, a chemist and musician whom I had met in New York; she was a research chemist on a heart-lung team. She had no relationship to any East European ancestry, but her progenitors were more mixed than mine. Some had been in the New World for three centuries. She would probably qualify as a Daughter of the English Revolution (17 th century) and of the American and French Revolutions of the 18 th century. Her paternal line was French-Canadian; there was an Irish strain in there, and she is also perhaps 1/8 American Indian. All these lines had come to settle in the American Upper Middle West, and she had been born in Minnesota. We soon had

8 children eventually four, two daughters (Ann and Theresa) and two sons (Eric and Thomas). At the time we married, I was still unemployed, but a job suddenly materialized. An instructor in history at Hunter College in the City of the New York suddenly died in December while grading examinations. Hunter, a women s school, needed a replacement with two basic qualifications: alive and a resident of the area. I qualified on both these counts and began my teaching career in January 1958, lecturing to a class in American history! There was suddenly one dark shadow. I still did not have my doctor s degree in hand; because I had not yet delivered my dissertation to the university. (With the prospect of publication, I did not want to leave an alternative version in libraries.) Hunter demanded that I show them all my graduation certificates; I even had to find my high school diploma from At my request, the director of the Russian Institute at Columbia, now Professor Henry Roberts, wrote to the president of Hunter, George Shuster, saying that my degree had been held up not because of deficiencies but rather because of excellence. President Shuster thereupon ordered that I be put at the pay level of documented doctors. By spring, Columbia University Press had accepted my dissertation for publication, and everything finally seemed legitimate. Columbia formally awarded me the doctor s degree and my teaching career had been launched. In the fall of 1958 I was teaching Russian history at the Newark branch of Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey.

9 6. Observing a Revolution In all, if one adds up my stays in Lithuania, as of the beginning of August 1988 I had spent a total of less than two weeks of my life in Lithuania three/four days in 1960, two days in 1970, a week in By contrast I had spent a total of several months in Poland and over a year in Moscow. My experience in Lithuania was actually very limited. But the influence that Lithuania had exerted on my life was disproportionately large. In 1988 I spent three months in Lithuania, and over the next two and onehalf years, I was able to witness a series of events that amounted to a revolution. In the fall of 1988, to the outside observer, Lithuania seemed to be a firmly encased part of the Soviet Union; in the fall of 1991, the world recognized Lithuania s independence. Accordingly, Lithuania s influence on my life changed and grew. The Sąjūdis Phenomenon When I was making my plans for the time in Lithuania in 1988, I really did not know what to expect. I looked for information and suggestions. I made several trips to Chicago to consult with friends. News of the development of Sąjūdis reached us only with considerable delay. I remember that it was on the evening of July 25, when I was working in my university office, that Liūtas Mockūnas called me from Chicago to tell me that perestroika, persitvarkymas, had reached a new level in Lithuania. There was a new social force in Vilnius, called Lietuvos Persitvarkymo Sąjūdis, in the usual translation of the day Lithuanian Movement for Perestroika. He urged me to try to collect a full complex of its publication Sąjūdžio žinios. I logged Liūtas s thoughts into my mind, but I still faced the problem of planning my own activities. I finally decided on two projects for my stay in Lithuania, neither one of which I followed through on, but both of which bore rich fruit for me. As a library project, I wanted to study the development of Lithuanian national feeling at the beginning of the 20 th century, and as a social project aimed at a better understanding of how the society functioned, I decided to learn more about the living conditions of Soviet Lithuanian intellectuals sources of income, health insurance, and so on. The library project led to my establishing good relations in libraries and archives; the plan to meet intellectuals led me into the meetings of the Sąjūdis Initiative Group. When finally the moment came to travel, the excitement intensified rapidly. When my airplane landed in Stockholm, I read in a German newspaper that one could expect tension in Lithuania. I had arranged a scenic trip, visiting friends in Helsinki, and when I finally reached Leningrad by train, Eidintas met me and escorted me to an overnight train to Vilnius. For most of the night we stood in the corridor talking, as he recounted events and developments in Lithuania, including the visit of Gorbachev s advisor Alexander Yakovlev, which had just ended. I do not want here to repeat the account of my stay that I published as Lithuania Awakening. Rather, I want to picture the background of those events as I perceived them. I know the book emerged as a personal document, but there were

10 many other experiences not recorded in the book that contributed greatly to molding my impressions and reactions. The Academy of Sciences housed me in the Neringa Hotel on Lenino Prospektas, and I found this location perfect. The café on the second floor, where once a Saugumas agent had cadged a cigarette from me, now attracted activists and intellectuals of all sorts. The café offered new opportunities almost every day. I particularly remember sitting at a table one evening discussing the Lithuanian-Latvian basketball game at the European championship in 1939 with three men who had been there: the artist V. K. Jonynas, the journalist Saliamonas Vaintraubas, and Eugenijus Nikolskis, who had had played in the game for the Lithuanian team. I could at least contribute the stories that Frank Lubin (Pranas Lubinas) had told me. I felt myself drawn into Vilnius s agitation from almost my first moments there. Eidintas naturally advised me to be careful, but he assured me that if I somehow got into trouble, the Academy of Sciences would help me Walking through Gediminas Square, now Cathedral Square, on my first night in Vilnius, I saw the beginning of the protest demonstration set up outside the cathedral. Then on my second or third day, Kęstutis Antanėlis, whom I had met in Wisconsin when his play Love and Death in Verona was performed by a local troupe, set up a meeting with a few artists. Once again, I profited by my father s work in Lithuania in the 1920s. Present at the gathering that Antanėlis set up was Arvydas Šaltenis, a member of the Sąjūdis Initiative Group and secretary of the Artists Union. Arvydas s father had told him of this Swiss professor with whom he had studied 60 years earlier, and Arvydas had wanted to meet me. That evening he told us of Sąjūdis s meeting with Eduardas Eismuntas, the chief of the Saugumas (security), and he invited me to come to a meeting of the Initiative Group Sąjūdis was then meeting in the basement of the Artists Union building, which stood next door to the Institute of History. I eagerly accepted this invitation, and I attended almost all the weekly meetings leading up to the Sąjūdis Constituent Convention in October. My three-month stay had been set almost perfectly within the events in Lithuania; I left in mid-november, just after the first session of the newly established Sąjūdžio Seimas. From my first thoughts of writing Lithuania Awakening (Bundanti Lietuva) until the completion of the text, my conception of the book went through a considerable transformation. I was first struck by the passion that Lithuanians were showing for their history. Upon my arrival in Lithuania, the Sąjūdis pins that people were wearing reminded me of the many Solidarność pins I had seen in Poland, but then I quickly began to draw a different point of comparison: my visit to Poland in 1957, when the Poles were beginning to recapture their history and remember the events of as they had in fact experienced them. Several times I heard Lithuanians say: So you are a historian. Have you come to tell us our real history? This concern with history fascinated me, and I thought about trying to describe the struggle to control history. Eventually I dropped my thoughts of writing about interpretations of history in favor of trying to capture the spirit of the events swirling around me. To be sure, I had one moment of publicly discussing history: Eidintas interviewed me on a television program, and we spoke of the history of the Lithuanian

11 Communist Party, which was then preparing to celebrate the 70 th anniversary of its organization. Higher powers decided not to air our television show immediately; instead it was delayed until the beginning of October, a month after we had filmed it. In watching it, I was further impressed by the changes one could feel in the political atmosphere. When we filmed the show, I thought we were a bit daring; when I finally saw it aired, we seemed conservative. Lithuania was changing rapidly, almost on a daily basis. The delay in airing Eidintas s program nevertheless gave me a palpable reward. It aired on a Saturday morning, the day after my sister Marie, her husband Kaye, and my wife LaVonne had arrived in Vilnius as part of a tourist group; they saw the show. (This was Marie s first visit to Lithuania since her departure in January 1931.) That afternoon Eidintas took us to Raudondvaris, and local visitors there recognized me from the show. One of them gave me his guidebook to Raudondvaris as a gift. We also visited my cousin Marytė Lencevičienė, who lived in Kaunas. She was one month younger than I; she had spent half of her teen years in Siberia. While individual, young historians welcomed the developing changes in historical consciousness, the historical establishment moved much more slowly. (There were no historians in the Sąjūdis Initiative Group.) I was invited to a defense of a doctoral dissertation, where I heard the speakers welcome this new exposure of western falsifiers of Lithuanian history. Vaitkevičius was the chairman of the examination, and, with a wry smile, he invited me to speak. I accepted this as a challenge. I noted that the author had vigorously denounced the falsifiers, but since I was the only western author mentioned by name in the text, would the candidate please tell me just where I had falsified Lithuania s history. The candidate protested that he did not consider me a falsifier; he looked upon me as an objectivist. This hardly satisfied me, since, according to my internal elephant s dictionary, an objectivist was a westerner who tried to write history properly but could not understand Marxism-Leninism and accept the current party line. Through these experiences, my conception of my book developed. I wanted to capture the events, chart the changes. Friends and acquaintances undertook to help me, calling me to tell me of interesting meetings that I might want to attend, and also of demonstrations that I had perhaps missed. On occasion even perhaps a document. My idea began to look more like a diary. I could not write that book today; once I knew where things were going, I would write differently. At one point, I jotted a note to myself: I feel like I am living a novel all these various lines of development! But where are they leading me? Sometimes a passage just formed itself: After the Sąjūdis convention, I had to visit the Academy of Sciences library, and a group of workers gathered around me, saying that they had seen me on television and that I should tell them something about the convention. I told of the procession from the Sport Building to Gediminas Square on Saturday night, after the party had announced that it was surrendering the cathedral. Several women cried. I quickly returned to my hotel and typed out the account that I had just recited. I checked it with Eidintas, and then incorporated it in my text, pages in the Lithuanian republication (2002) of Lithuania Awakening.

12 In many ways, the Sąjūdis convention, October 20-22, was the high point in this stay. I have to mention how fortunate I felt I was in simply the scheduling of the convention. The Sąjūdis Initiative Group discussed the question of just when to hold a convention at several successive meetings. There were many other organizational meetings in October; maybe they should hold their convention in November. I sat and listened, thinking to myself, I am leaving in November, make it October. Maybe I have some unknown mental power: I stared at speakers and intensely repeated silently to myself, October! October! October! I cannot say I had an impact, but the convention met in October. The Sąjūdis convention also opened up my brief journalistic career. Various members of the Sąjūdis Initiative Group frequently came to the Neringa café for conversations, and one day I saw a small group in the hall making plans for the convention. I particularly remember that Adolfas Uža and Arvydas Juozaitis were there. I realized they were planning a guest list. I walked up and told them they should invite me as a guest. Juozaitis said no. I was surprised, but he explained, We need journalists. Whom can you represent? Akiračiai, obviously, I replied. Arvydas enthusiastically approved but then had a second thought: How would the editors of Akiračiai react when they learned of my appointment? They would laugh, I responded. When I later asked Mockūnas how they had reacted to the news, he declared, We laughed. So I suddenly became a journalist, accredited by Sąjūdis. Writing in Komjaunimo tiesa, Vidas Rachlevičius called me Akiračių neetatinis ( Akiračiai s irregular ) correspondent. (I must admit: I had no salary, no expense account, and no deadline.) In my youth I had thought that foreign correspondent was a fascinating job, but I realized that life, especially family life, could be difficult. To be sure, I had already sent one news dispatch to Akiračiai. After Sąjūdis had held a large public meeting at the end of September, I wrote an account of the gathering that Violeta Kelertienė carried back to Chicago and Akiračiai published under a pseudonym since I was still in Lithuania. Now I would publicly be a foreign correspondent: Should I buy a trench coat, should I start smoking cigarettes? How do I start? My moment to start came at the opening ceremony when participants gathered outside to watch the flag being raised. As I stood there, the thought crossed my mind, You are a correspondent. Correspond! I looked around. Standing not five meters away from me was Lionginas Šepetys, the ideological secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party. I set off on my maiden voyage, walking up to him and saying, I represent Akiračiai in Chicago. What would you like to say to our readers on this occasion? Šepetys gave me a brief, well-formed answer. I did not have a tape recorder with me poor training for the job so I quickly wrote his comments down. But I realized that that had been very easy, and I began to request a comment from every member of the Sąjūdis Initiative Group that I saw. Only one refused me, and my Lithuanian career as a journalist was launched. My account of the convention appeared in two parts in Akiračiai in the first two issues of My account, to be sure, raised some question with Akiračiai s editors. Mockūnas challenged me on two points: I considered Algirdas Brazauskas a popular figure and on what basis could I speak of the Kaunas delegation to the convention

13 having differences with the Vilnius delegates. In my mind, this offered more evidence of the problems in the United States in keeping up with events in Lithuania. I argued that Brazauskas could be both controversial and popular at the same time and that a member of the Kaunas delegation had informed me of the Kaunas deputies preparations and intentions. Mockūnas finally declared that while he was not completely convinced, the newspaper would publish my account but the editors would not defend me if readers reacted negatively. Criticisms of Sąjūdis in fact came to Chicago quickly, calling it a creation of the CPSU s Central Committee. I was frankly shocked when I first heard this interpretation early in 1989 at a lecture by a former deportee. In the summer of 1988, to be sure, any number of Lithuanian émigrés in the United States looked at Sąjūdis with great reserve, considering the Freedom League, Lietuvos laisvės lyga, as the true representative of the Lithuanian nation. Sąjūdis, moreover, as one prominent American Lithuanian told me in Lithuania, was dominated by intellectuals; it had no workers in its membership. At best, the Vilnius intellectuals, according to such interpretations, were too hesitant in challenging the Soviet order; Sąjūdis allegedly became a true national movement only when the healthy Kaunas forces came to the front. Ironically, when in my book I noted the hesitation of some émigrés to rally immediately to the support of Sąjūdis, I drew some criticism for it from émigrés. I tended to regard this as an echo of earlier criticism: One should not, it seemed, discuss internal differences, arguments, and disputes in Lithuanian affairs in the English language. Of course, émigrés supported Sąjūdis from the start! I was corrupting the image of a united, even monolithic nation. I had received such criticism for my writings in the 1960s, and I would yet receive more for my descriptions of events in Lithuania in 1990 and Recording my impressions of Sąjūdis in 1988 of course marked a major change in my own conceptions of what I could or should do. In discussing my considerations of career in the 1950s, I stated that I had decided not to become involved in contemporary history, as we used to call this interest. I did not believe that I could get close enough to the really moving parts of the history to go beyond noting just the movement something akin to describing the movement of the wheels of a car without knowing anything about the steering mechanism. My feelings about such activity, to be sure, had changed a bit with my interest in sports history and politics. I had developed my belief in interviews with significant figures in studying Lithuanian history of the 1920s; in turning to sports history and politics, I found interviewing gave me significant entry to my subject. As I have noted, I came to know sports executives in Moscow, Vilnius, and the United States. I became engaged in the contemporary history of sports. As I developed my conception of the book I wanted to write about the events around me in Lithuania, I realized that I was now entering the arena contemporary political history. I use the term arena intentionally contemporary political history involves and invites conflict and argument. I actually did not stay in the field long, just until the January events of Sitting in the meetings of the Sąjūdis Initiative Group gave me my start. I could

14 see the interplay of personalities, the evolution of decisions. I found that I could easily approach most members of the group and discuss selected matters in detail. Most even encouraged me. (I am still amused to remember that when I finally approached Vytautas Petkevičius and this in the café on the second floor of the Neringa hotel his first reaction was What took you so long to talk with me? ) I must admit a gap in my first steps into contemporary history in preparing Lithuania Awakening. I did not interview leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party, although of course I paid considerable attention to the ideological statements published in the communist-dominated press. At the time individuals even asked me whether I intended to try to meet Brazauskas. I did think about it, and I decided to concentrate just on depicting the work of Sąjūdis. My rationale for not approaching Brazauskas was that I was not ready to discuss matters with him. Obviously, considering the role of the party in Lithuanian society of the time, I had no problem speaking with ordinary party members. I even knew a few high ranking party officials. In my first days in Vilnius, for example, I kept meeting Česlovas Juršėnas at the television station, in a library, at a meeting and we discussed matters. (Somehow he was everywhere before me.) But I felt I needed to have far more information at my command before I attempted to approach Brazauskas. Another factor generally restraining me in seeking interviews in 1988 was that I felt that I myself did not have enough of an identity. I could not, for example, have walked into my first Sąjūdis meeting on my own. Arvydas Šaltenis invited me because he had heard of my father. Once in the door, my ambitions grew geometrically. Šaltenis introduced me to Virgilijus Čepaitis. I introduced myself to Vytautas Landsbergis, hoping that he knew that I had written a small book about M. K. Čiurlionis. (He already had a copy of the book.) Justinas Marcinkevičius knew of my father. My identity outside of Sąjūdis, I think, began to grow significantly only after people noticed me in the televised broadcasts of the Sąjūdis Constituent Convention. In January 1990, when I returned to Vilnius, I was eager to meet Brazauskas. I felt ready, but he was taken up with his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev. It was impossible. Nevertheless, I had one significant step of success. Reviving my identity as a journalist, I sat in the headquarters of the journalists union where I met two young journalists: Audrius Siaurusevičius and Rimvydas Paleckis. Rimvydas promised me he would put in a word with his father, Justas Vincas Paleckis, and at midnight on a Friday night, Justas Vincas phoned me at my hotel again the Neringa to set up a date on Sunday afternoon, after Gorbachev s departure. We met at Paleckis s office at party headquarters. I have already described this meeting in print, and therefore I will not go into it here. I finally met Brazauskas in the summer of 1990, after the lifting of the Soviet blockade. By this time I felt sure of myself both in self-confidence and in having an identity in his eyes. I gave him a copy of an article that I had published in the American journal Problems of Communism, and he surprised me with his first question: Why did one particular picture caption say Supreme Soviet instead of Supreme Council? The Lithuanians were now obviously paying more attention to how Lithuanian titles were being translated into English. I explained that the publication followed an

15 editorial policy set by the American government. I had several more interviews with Brazauskas during his term as president of Lithuania I have amply cited them in my publications. In the fall of 1988, I left Lithuania on November 15 by an awkward route. A driver took me to Minsk, where I sat alone in the train station through the wee hours of the morning, surrounded by my luggage which was full of Sąjūdis publications (now kept in Special Collections in the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library), not knowing at what time or what track my train would come. This experience is etched in my mind as my personal definition of loneliness. But all went well. I spent a few days in Hamburg, Germany, where I was able to read the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports on Lithuania, and by December I was back in Wisconsin, writing my book. Publishing the book proved to be a bit more complicated than I had expected. When I finished the manuscript, about February or March 1989, I submitted it to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This has a positive result and a negative result. The institution immediately awarded me a fellowship to spend a month there in the summer time; this was a time that veterans of Ronald Reagan s presidency including George Schultz and Edwin Miese were in residence there. On the negative side, once I was at Stanford, the institution rejected the manuscript. The person with the deciding voice told me in no uncertain terms, it did not matter what was happening in Vilnius, the really important events were taking place in Moscow. American Sovietology had a history of focusing on Moscow and ignoring national questions. I did, of course, eventually find a publisher. I was invited to several conferences, and I gave several guest lectures, and finally I find a sympathetic soul: Jan Meijer, a Pole who has aroused considerable discussion on Poland s experiences during the Second World War. The University of California Press undertook to publish the book, but the editors insisted on a new title and also that I make the text as up-todate as possible. My original title had been Yellow, Green, Red. The press insisted that I had to have Lithuania as the first word in the title, and I of course realized that Lithuania had to be doing something. Hence: Lithuania Awakening. Over the next several years, as I further developed my thoughts on Soviet and post-soviet Lithuania, I had misgivings about the title. I do not believe that Lithuania slept under Soviet domination and only awakened in As I discussed this topic one evening with the conductor Saulius Sondeckis, Sondeckis declared, Of course it did not sleep! Just look at Mindaugas! And he pointed to Justinas Marcinkevičius who was also sitting at our table. This, however, is a question I prefer not to consider further here it would entail another book length manuscript. After California had accepted the book, there remained another pressing problem: How and when do I end the book now titled Lithuania Awakening? The press wanted my text as up to date as possible; but we wanted to be done quickly. We were into the beginning of 1990; Lithuanians were demanding independence. As I noted above, I was able to visit Lithuania again in January; I was just incorporating these details when the Lithuanians declared their independence. But I had to find a place to stop. I told the press I would specify in the text the day on which I stopped. I did writing in April 12,

16 1990. On April 13, Gorbachev issued his ultimatum to the Lithuanians. Did I cheat? I did not! I chose April 12 for the most personal reason: It was my birthday. I mailed the text of the book on that day, and I had a printed copy by the beginning of September. I was ready for more adventure.