Word: vilnius
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...turning point, in fact, came not in August but in January of1991, when Soviet tanks moved into Vilnius in a bloody but unsuccessful effort to crush the Lithuanian independence movement. There I saw soldiers take over the country's main TV tower, waving to us as they raced to the building. I watched a tank effortlessly flatten a heavy truck that had been pulled across the road to block its path, and stared at the dead bodies of young people who a few hours earlier had been dancing in an improvised disco at the foot of the TV tower. After...
...mood in the Gorbachev camp after Vilnius was bleak. Some wanted to leave him. Others stayed on, trying, as one put it, "to glue back together whatever we can" of perestroika. Life took on a faintly unreal quality. Between then and August, I saw a lot of one man who was, in the official hierarchy, among the top four or five leaders of the Soviet Union. (In fact his powers were more modest, though his access to information was extremely wide). We would sit in his massive office at the Kremlin, often for a couple of hours at a time...
...news radio that the Putin administration has been doing its best to gut this past year, reported during the coup that some of the units moving into Moscow were in a very aggressive mood. As I heard this I was reminded of conversations a few months earlier, after the Vilnius killings. Then hospitable Airborne commanders based in Lithuania had remarked quietly over lunch that they could have "finished the job" - captured the Lithuanian parliament - in less than an hour. And the Lithuanians had been far better prepared than Yeltsin's supporters...
CONVICTED. KAZYS GIM-ZAUSKAS, 93, former member of the Lithuanian security police that cooperated with the Nazis during World War II, of genocide for his role in handing over Jews to German death squads; in Vilnius,Lithuania. Gimzauskas, a former U.S. citizen who was deputy head of the Vilnius police, was not sentenced as he had been tried in absentia due to ill health. His conviction is the first time that a Lithuanian court has confirmed that its own police forces collaborated in the Final Solution, in which 90% of Lithuania's Jewish population died...
Last September, during a trip to Vilna for the200th anniversary of the death of Elijah BenSolomon Zalman, Wisse was struck by the fact thatthe city has changed profoundly from the time whenher grandmother lived there. In Vilnius, theYiddish literature her grandmother nurtured is allthat is left of a once-thriving Jewish community...