Standing up for freedom
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Lithuanian mother keeps
a shrine for daughter
felled by Soviet tanks
By Michael Tarm
VILNIUS, Lithuania -- When cannon fire shook her apartment china 10 years ago, Stase Asanaviciene's first sensation was that a small war had broken out.
What she didn't know was that her 23-year-old daughter, Loreta, had been caught in the mayhem at the Vilnius television tower two blocks away -- crushed underneath the treads of a Soviet tank.
Asanaviciene and the whole of Lithuania earlier this year marked the decade anniversary of that pivotal Soviet crackdown that cost the lives of her daughter and 13 others and injured hundreds.
Moscow hoped to halt the disintegration of the Soviet Union by snuffing out the independence drive in Lithuania, the most rebellious of 15 Soviet republics.
But the killings only emboldened the Lithuanians, won them sympathy abroad and, in the end, helped hasten the Soviet collapse.
"It was a last desperate act of an empire," said Algimantas Cekuolis, a commentator at Lithuanian state television. "It illustrated starkly to everyone, including the Kremlin, that this creature was in its death throes."
Confrontation at the TV tower
Soviet troops had already occupied other buildings in Lithuania's capital before January 13, and the TV tower seemed a likely next target.
Loreta Asanaviciute was an avid backer of the movement to restore independence -- lost when Soviet forces occupied Lithuania in 1940.
So when Lithuanians began keeping a vigil at the tower, she enthusiastically joined them. The mood at first was festive, with people singing around bonfires.
Loreta Asanaviciute went to a phone booth to call home.
" 'I'm OK. ... Don't worry,' " Stase Asanaviciene recalled her saying. Those were the last words she heard from her daughter.
Suddenly, just after midnight, tanks rumbled up, flanked by armed soldiers swinging iron rods, remembered Anatanas Sakalauskas, a demonstrator standing near Asanaviciute.
Sakalauskas, now 48, said troops must have been shocked that the unarmed Lithuanians didn't disperse. They only linked arms, chanting, "Freedom for Lithuania!" he said.
Then the tanks started moving right at them. Sakalauskas and Asanaviciute pounded on the armor in vain, hoping the tank drivers might heed their pleas to stop.
One tank lurched forward, and Sakalauskas, Asanaviciute and two others got caught in its treads. Sakalauskas dragged a mobile phone across a spoon to show how the tank hooked their bodies, then dragged them under.
"It was like that nightmare where you know you have to run to save yourself, but you can't move," he said, tugging at a coat button as he described the scene, his hands trembling.
The tank cut across his legs and Asanaviciute's midsection.
"Then it stopped on us for what was probably two minutes. But it seemed like an eternity," he said. "We were screaming with all our might."
When the tank finally drove off, Sakalauskas, his legs mangled, rolled frantically out of the way of other oncoming tanks.
Asanaviciute died hours later, the youngest fatality and the only woman to die that night.
Soviet troops succeeded in taking the tower. But after a failed Kremlin coup in August 1991, Lithuania, along with neighboring Baltic states Estonia and Latvia, regained independence.
"We lost the battle, but we won the war," Sakalauskas said.
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'She stood her ground'
Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuanian president in 1991, has called on then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to be tried for the killings as well as other former Soviet officers who took part and gave the orders.
"But not a single Soviet official has ever even apologized," he said.
Landsbergis said Asanaviciute stood out as a symbol of Soviet cruelty.
"It is something even a child can grasp: If a tank runs over a girl -- that's real evil," he said.
Asked what she'd say to Gorbachev if she ever met him, Asanaviciute's mother paused.
"I'd probably just smack him," she finally said with a short laugh.
Stase Asanaviciene's apartment is now a virtual shrine to her daughter, with posthumous medals crowding the shelves; a painting depicts her daughter as an angel.
Asanaviciene shudders when she recalls seeing Loreta's blood-soaked clothes at the hospital. But she celebrates what she says was her daughter's key role in securing Lithuanian independence.
"It's men who should die in war, not pretty young girls like my daughter," she said, crying into a handkerchief. "But she was brave. She stood her ground, while some others ran. I'm proud of her."
Michael Tarm is the Baltics bureau chief for The Associated Press and editor of City Paper, a Tallinn, Estonia-based publication.
Related site:
City Paper: The Baltic states
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