VILNIUS – Lithuania was not the same place I had visited five months before. Then, wearing a small pin of the old Lithuanian flag would have been grounds for arrest. Now, the flag was flying from the tower of the oldest castle in the capital city of Vilnius. More than 150,000 people had joyously flooded the streets near the castle in early October 1988, when, with governmental consent, the red Soviet flag had been pulled down and the yellow, green, and red Lithuanian flag was raised in its place.
With pride and amazement, my Lithuanian friends told me about their country’s recent ecological uprisings. On September 3, more than 10,000 Lithuanians lined the coast of the Baltic Sea, holding hands and singing to demonstrate their support for a clean, unpolluted Baltic. The action was coordinated with thousands of hand-holding participants in Latvia and Estonia, and smaller numbers of people in Finland and Denmark. On September 17, some 15,000 people held hands and encircled the Ignalinos nuclear power plant in another mass vigil. Both actions were unmolested by police.
Sajudis, the Lithuanian “movement for perestroika” (Le. the movement for independence), has given top priority to ecological and anti-nuclear reforms, revealing that it is far more than simply a revival of anti-Russian resentments. In fact, the ecological movement and the nationalistic movement are at the moment nearly inseparable, and public support for both is truly massive.
On every street corner, it seemed, people were staffing information tables and collecting signatures on a petition against the Ignalinos plant. In the main square of Vilnius, crowds gathered to read
A massive shift in ecological consciousness is underway and will be impossible to reverse
articles posted by Sajudis leaders, while at night people sang Lithuanian national songs and encircled hunger-strikers demanding the release of Lithuanian political prisoners.
On October 20, the old leader of the Lithuanian Communist Party was ousted and a new man sympathetic to Sajudis took his place. The next day marked the opening of a two-day, 2000-delegate national congress of Sajudis members. As his first political act, the new Party leader declared that the Vilnius Cathedral would be returned to the Catholic Ch urch, and he himself carried a candle during an emotional mass re-consecration that night.
Although I havean inherent distrust of nationalism, it was impossible not to be swept up in my Lithuanian friends’ euphoria. But I also feared for them. “Hungary in 1956. Prague in 1968. Poland in 1982. Why,” I asked them, “will this not happen to you?”
Their one-word answer was always the same. “Gorbachev.”
“But what about Armenia?”
“Armenia,” they replied, “is different.
It’s that Caucasian temperament. It led to violence. There won’t be any violence here.” Great March for a Clean World The Lithuanian ecological movement had been building momentum for some time; in 1986, writers and scientists led a successful letter campaign protesting offshore oil drilling near an ecologically sensitive stretch of the Lithuanian coast. But the movement first went big-time in June 1988, when thousands of Lithuanians rode bicycles, sailed boats and walked in a “Great March” across the country to draw attention to the country’s severe water pollution problems.
Raw sewage and industrial wastes are routinely dumped untreated into Lithuanian rivers. The installation of pollution control devices is hampered, according to economist Arunas Brazauskas (a member of the ecological group Zemyna), by a “lack of money, lack of materials, lack of labor, lack of common sense, and a lack of understanding that we are living on an ecological bomb.”
Two units of the gigantic (6000 megawatt) four-unit Ignalinos plant have been shut down since September due to an electrical fire in the plant’s cooling system; the third unit has been built but is now under wraps; and plans for the fourth have been shelved. Members of Zemyna claim the Ignalinos plant was constructed largely without blueprints by inexperienced workmen. By October, Zemyna had collected signatures from 600,000 people – 16 percent of Lithuania’s population – on a petition against reopening the plant.
How long will this “green spring” last? No one knows, least of all the Lithuanians themselves. But in the meantime, a massive shift in ecological consciousness is underway that will be impossible to reverse. However “red” their country mayor may not remain, “green thinking,” manyLithuanians claim, is here to stay.