Strings attached

National Review, Sept 23, 1991 by Radek Sikorski

EIGHT telephones still stood on the desk in the Vilnius KGB chairman's office. An oil painting of Lenin glowered down from the wall. A shrine to Felix Dzerzhinsky nestled on the shelf. The ashes in the antique stove in the corner of the room contained burnt remains of several sheets of paper. I picked up the red telephone--the one set aside from the rest and with a Soviet coat of arms in place of a dial. There was nobody at the other end any more.

The Vilnius KGB stayed loyal and obedient to the end. In the dungeons, eighty cells had been spruced up to welcome the expected internees. But when Moscow bungled the show and the order was to give up rather than fight, the end was orderly. One thousand pistols and several dozen assault rifles were handed to the Lithuanian police in a matter of hours. The Vilnius station did the center one last favor. The archives, including lists of informers and files on hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, were sent to Moscow in the nick of time.

The Moscow-appointed liquidator of the Vilnius KGB, Major General Ivan Vasilyevich Fedoseyev, is a polite matter-of-fact, smiling fifty-year-old in a badly cut brown suit. If it weren't for his military haircut and his clumsy concealment of his knowledge of English, one could take him for a managing director of a ball-bearing plant. One of his tasks is to persuade the Republican authorities to guarantee the pension rights of former KGB personnel. Those KGB officers whose names were down on the list for an apartment will soon join the regular list with other citizens. Within one week, the most bloodthirsty organization in human history has been turned into a pack of different pensioners.

A sticker on a glass partition in the Vilnius Aeroflot office proclaims: "Lietuvos Arialinijos"--Lithuanian Airlines. The office belongs to the Soviet airline, Aeroflot, as do the ancient Soviet aircraft, the computers, the terminals, the control towers, and the uniforms of the staff. The fares and the destinations are still set in Moscow. But the Lithuanians sincerely believe that they already have their own national airline.

That is how Lithuanian independence was won. You run up a flag and carry on as if you were indeed an independent state. If you can stick it out through harassment and persuade a sufficient number of people that you are serious--you become independent after all. The Baltic case stands Marxist theory of the state on its head. If the state is merely the armed instrument of the economically dominant class, then Lithuanian freedom should have been fought for by the managers of collective farms and state enterprises. In fact, they were the last to acquiesce. Far from the serving anybody's class interests, free Lithuania will still cost its founding fathers a great deal of worry and sacrifice. President Landsbergis--its George Washington--is no planter, banker, or manufacturer. Until three years ago, free Lithuania was merely a gleam in the eye of this music professor.

As is clear to the first tourists, who come to this beautiful country, Lithuania has not done too badly out of the Soviet Union. Independent Lithuania is emerging with increased territory (the Vilnius region, Polish before the war, was handed over to Lithuania in 1940 as a sweetener for accepting Soviet rule), modernized infrastructure, and an educated population. Not since the early seventeenth century has the region enjoyed such prosperity.

While most of the credit has to go to the Lithuanians' enterprise and the patriotism of their Communist rulers, the fact remains that the Lithuanian investment program was possible only inside the crazy economy that was the Soviet Union. Lithuanian collective farms supply Moscow and Leningrad with a sizable proportion of their dairy products and meat. In return, Moscow supplies Vilnius with oil, gas, and raw materials at a tiny fraction of their world price. To economically illiterate Soviet bureaucrats this seems a fair exchange. But one day soon, when both Russia and Lithuania start pricing their goods in real currencies, Moscow will realize that its oil and gas can buy many times the amount of food in world markets.

Lithuania's goods, on the contrary, would not be competitive in the West even if fortress Europe were to open its gates. One giant factory near Vilnius produces oil pumps for Soviet tractors. Will it be easier for Lithuania to find new customers or for Russia to find different suppliers in a different market? In an economy of permanent shortages, Lithuania had the upper hand. In a buyer's market, it is the seller that has to chase after the customer.

Lithuania still reluctantly hosts Soviet troops; Lithuania is sure to be saddled with some of the Soviet Union's $ 60-billion foreign debt, as well as the assets of former all-Union enterprises. The convulsion that is currently shaking Eastern Europe has not gripped it yet because the cure for the cancer of a planned economy has not been applied. The vast economic dislocation that will come in the wake of free prices--recession, unemployment, inflation--is just around the corner. To tackle it, Lithuania needs a finance minister who has at least occasionally read the Wall Street Journal.