Word: vilnius
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...attack in Riga came only seven days after army paratroops had seized Lithuania's television center in Vilnius, killing 15 unarmed demonstrators. There too the republican parliament has been turned into a fortress, with a 10-ft.-high concrete wall in front and a deep antitank ditch along one side. Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis has been holed up in the parliament building since the current crisis began in mid-January...
...justification, Gorbachev denied that he gave the order to shoot. "I learned about what happened when they woke me up the next morning," he said. Interior Minister Boris Pugo and Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov shirked responsibility as well. The decision was made, said Yazov, by the army commander in Vilnius, whose assignment was to protect "all members of society...
When the latest protests flared in the Baltics, central television's newscasters aired little but Communist Party disinformation, reading statements from the so-called national salvation committees accusing the local governments of fascism. The controlled press, TV and TASS all recited the propaganda line on Vilnius last week, reporting that the paratroops acted only to restore order after they had been attacked by Lithuanian snipers. One report from commentator Alexander Nevzorov presented the soldiers as heroes besieged by "ethnic hysteria." The 15 dead, he claimed, had turned out to be victims of road accidents and heart attacks...
Some balance nevertheless crept in from more liberal radio stations and newspapers. Komsomolskaya Pravda carried a front-page picture of a body under a tank and the question "Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius, what next?" Under the headline BLOODY SUNDAY, Moscow News published a statement from 30 well-known intellectuals, including two of Gorbachev's most important former economic advisers, labeling events in Lithuania "a crime...
...outrage" about the Baltics and asked the Soviets to "refrain from further violence" or face possible curtailment of economic programs. While there are other reasons to postpone it, the White House said last week that the summit scheduled for Moscow next month is "clearly up in the air" after Vilnius. Says Michael Mandelbaum, director of the Project on East-West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations: "My guess is that the Bush Administration will do as little as it decently can, for geopolitical reasons...